Presentation to Minälv Marketing Association and my experience with Kitely

In preparation for a presentation on virtual worlds from a business perspective to Minälv Marketing Association in Norra Älvsborg, Sweden, I needed to update myself with all the recent developments during the past few months. I must say it is hard to stay abreast of everything that is happening these days with virtual worlds. A year ago I found it quite easy, but now it seems there is some new exciting development occurring almost daily!

One of the things I wanted to learn more about was Kitely. So last night in my hotel room in Trollhättan with a lovely view of the river, I sat down with my Mac air to try out Kitely. Things went well in the beginning. I created my account and installed the plugin and created a world in a matter of a few minutes. However, when I tried to enter the new world, I got an error message from Phoenix and nothing happened. After trying a few things, I gave up and went to the support page on Kitely. This took me to Getsatisfaction.com where I searched the threads to see what the problem might be. It turns out that I needed to change the default viewer from Phoenix (which does not support Kitely) to Imprudence, which was already installed on my computer. The threads said that I needed to “run regedit” in order to change the default viewer to Second Life or Imprudence viewer, but I could not figure out how to do this on a mac despite my googling. So, I posted a question to Getsatisfaction and within a matter of minutes I received a reply from Ilan Tochner, Co-founder and CEO of Kitley, on how to solve the problem. He suggested that the quickest non technical way was to uninstall Imprudence and then reinstall it. This took a little longer than expected since I had to remove my second life viewer, which for some reason always crashes on my mac, as well as the phoenix viewer.  Then when I entered my Kitely world the first time after, it sent me to Imprudence and asked for my name and password and what grid to go to on the Imprudence login screen. There was no Kitely world to visit in the potential grids so I was a bit confused. I played around for a few more minutes and still I could not figure out what to do. My next step was to close everything down and log in and out again through Kitely, and lo and behold it finally worked!  When I click on Enter World in Kitely it automatically launches Imprudence and I do not have to enter anything. Everything works smoothly now. A big thank you to Ilan!!

So, this morning I was able to do live demos of several sites in Second Life including our island and of Kitely to the group of more than 80 marketing professionals from a wide variety of companies and organizations in both the public and private sectors. As mentioned above, I presented about virtual worlds from a business perspective in general. Everything went very smoothly! There was a lot of excited discussion in the room, and many were very inspired to look into the possibilities that virtual worlds have to offer. They also very much liked Kitely, and the ease of use it provides. This was a great group to present to because virtual worlds really do offer lots of opportunities to regional areas, such as the Norra Älvsborg area, since they continuously struggle with “braindrain” as talent tends to leave for the big cities.

However, what I found frustrating during my presentation was that since I like to use Phoenix for Second Life and I have to use Imprudence for Kitely (since my SL viewer jams all the time), I could not move back and forth between the worlds easily. I had to enter both worlds through Imprudence. And now my Phoenix viewer is in the trash and I have to reinstall that. So, I look very much forward to when I will be able to choose which viewer the Kitely plugin will use, which will be independent from the viewer you configure for SL. Ilan mentioned in his reply to me that this should be done within the next 2-3 weeks. I look forward to this!

Thanks again to Ilan for helping me out here!

And a big thanks to Jonas Bergqvist på Minälv for inviting me to present in Trollhättan and to Karolin Olsson at entré AIL at Högskolan Väst for letting me borrow an office after my presentation where I could write this blogpost.

/Robin

About Robin Teigland

Robin Teigland is an Associate Professor at the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), as well as the caretaker of SSE’s island in Second Life. Robin’s research interests revolve around the creation and diffusion of knowledge in social networks and the impact on a firm’s competitive advantage. The focus of her current research is on investigating how virtual worlds and social media are enabling firms to create value outside the boundaries of the firm. She has published numerous articles in international books and academic journals, and in 2008 she received the “Researcher of the Year” award at the Stockholm School of Economics. In addition, she is a reviewer for the US National Science Foundation as well as a globally sought after speaker. Robin really enjoys teaching students at the Stockholm School of Economics and lecturing for executives. In March 2010, she started the NVWN a pan-Nordic project financed by the Nordic Innovation Center investigating innovation and entrepreneurship in virtual worlds.

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