VoIP & Gadget News – ProtoSphere 3D Virtual World Combines Microsoft Lync, VoIP, Collaboration, & Social Media

ProtonMedia’s ProtoSphere combines Microsoft Lync, VoIP, collaboration, & social media features to bring a 3D virtual world to life, enabling the enterprise to more easily interact and collaborate. One of their competitors is Avaya’s (formerly Nortel’s) Web Alive, which I wrote about back in 2008. Both products feature a 3D virtual world targeting the enterprise. Think Second Life virtual world meets business world.

I interviewed Ron Burns, CEO of ProtonMedia to learn more about their fascinating solution.

Tom: Talk a bit about what your solution does.

Ron: In our 3D environment you’re in the room and you’re moving the data around with other people. We’ve worked really hard on tying SharePoint data to each avatar. So we don’t just think that collaboration is about documents. It’s also about what individual people bring to the table. So you can right-click on any avatar and see their SharePoint profile, blog, and Wiki. You can search and teleport to an avatar’s location based on the social relevant match. So we think we’ve come up with a pretty dynamic way to tie together SharePoint and Lync and create the social effect and collaborative effect on the enterprise side.

Tom: Obviously, Microsoft Lync just recently launched, so how long has this been on the market?

Ron: We’ve been shipping for a couple of years. We made the fortuitous choice of building on DirectX and SQL, but we had our own Voice over IP that we built and we had our own social networking system that we built. As we sold this to the enterprise we kept running into Microsoft OCS and SharePoint. As the founder of the business, I came to the conclusion that those two platforms are so well established at his point, they are sort of like an operating system for the enterprise that we’re going to have to build on top of. So that’s what we did.

Tom: Explain the concept of these meeting rooms.

Ron: If you think of a virtual world as a series of spaces connected together. Now in our Lync version, every time you move from space to space, you’re literally walking into an ongoing conference call. So instead of meetings looked at as time bound events, it’s visual conferencing. You’re now bouncing between streams of thought. In a lot of ways it’s very much the Cisco position in the market – “the human (powered) network”, which describes what we’re doing, but from a technological perspective we built it all on Microsoft stuff because they actually let ISVs do that. Where Cisco is running a very closed system.

Tom: And the collaboration features? Can you zoom in on a PowerPoint on a wall?

Continue reading ProtoSphere 3D Virtual World Combines Microsoft Lync, VoIP, Collaboration, & Social Media…

Tags: 3d, citrix, Collaboration, gotomeeting, lync, microsoft, protonmedia, protosphere, RasMol, ron burns, Unified communications, virtual world
Related tags: virtual world, collaboration social, social media, combines microsoft, world, microsoft