29 Apr 02 75984514
Technology Spending at Near Record Lows
Forrester group director Ted Schadler says corporate appetite for new technology is at a near-record low right now. Enterprises instead have focused on getting increased value from applications purchased last year, he said.
Tags: User Experience
27 Apr 02 75896259
Web-based Program Offers Bird’s-eye Views of Planet Earth
For anyone who has ever dreamed of flying like a hawk over buildings, streets and trees, a Web-based program offers bird’s-eye views of the planet. EarthViewer 3D, from Keyhole, lets users navigate through aerial photographs wrapped around a 3-D representation of the globe. As a user dives toward Earth, the program redraws to the screen at a video-game-like 60 frames a second.
Tags: User Experience
15 Apr 02 75419520
The International Journal of Design Computing Special Issue on Designing Virtual Worlds is now online.
This issue is available only online for the next few months, and then will also be available on CD. The online version will continue to be available, and you can order the CD version from the journal web site.
The International Journal of Design Computing is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, published on the World Wide Web and archived by the University of Sydney Library. The objective of the journal is to promote research and technology transfer in design computing through the publication of interactive, multimedia journal articles within the general topic of design computing. This special issue looks more specifically at the issues in designing and developing virtual worlds and how researchers and practitioners are addressing these issues with the technology available in 2002. The articles in the Speical Issue consider the following topics:
1. how people make sense of spatiality in 3D virtual worlds,
2. how 3D virtual worlds provide a new way of understanding architecture and archaelogical restoration,
3. new paradigms for designing virtual worlds such as a user-centric dynamic representation of place,
4. how to make virtual cities dynamic through the use of automatically generated VRML files,
5. how user interfaces for virtual environments can evolve and respond dynamically to the user,
6. how people are able to understand and navigate using current tools for 3D virtual worlds, and
7. how games engines are influencing and providing a basis for understanding architectural designs.
Tags: User Experience
10 Apr 02 85444476
Going the Extra Mile Toward Building Customer Relationships
When the Hague, Netherlands-based Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies committed to an open discussion with the world’s citizenry, and they meant it. The result is a site that blazes a trail for companies that want to take their customers seriously as world citizens and not just as potential revenue sources.
So here’s how it works. A company opens a forum. People post messages of every sort, from the supportive to the stupid to the righteously indignant. Employees respond in their own voices. Readers of the forum see in the answers not just words but a real sense that the employees care and that the company is confident enough in what it stands for to allow employees to say what they want. As a result, the company’s social commitment avoids sounding like every other company’s trendy mouthings. Shell’s lack of control over the forum is precisely equivalent to the depth of its real commitment. It’s that simple.
Tags: User Experience
10 Apr 02 85419222
Going the Extra Mile Toward Building Customer Relationships
When the Hague, Netherlands-based Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies committed to an open discussion with the world’s citizenry, and they meant it. The result is a site that blazes a trail for companies that want to take their customers seriously as world citizens and not just as potential revenue sources.
So here’s how it works. A company opens a forum. People post messages of every sort, from the supportive to the stupid to the righteously indignant. Employees respond in their own voices. Readers of the forum see in the answers not just words but a real sense that the employees care and that the company is confident enough in what it stands for to allow employees to say what they want. As a result, the company’s social commitment avoids sounding like every other company’s trendy mouthings. Shell’s lack of control over the forum is precisely equivalent to the depth of its real commitment. It’s that simple.
Tags: User Experience
08 Apr 02 75184765
Deploying CRM in a Slow Economy
In its report What Works: Ten Significant CRM Implementations of 2001, Boston-based Aberdeen Group found that rather than attempting to implement large-scale, enterprise-wide deployments that integrate marketing, sales and support, organizations are more interested in solving specific point problems. The desire for an integrated CRM architecture still exists with CIOs, but in the short-term, bottom-line impact is more important.
Tags: User Experience
