Christian Renaud's Time for a Change

Christian Renaud announced June 27, 2008 that he was leaving his position as Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center. Host Robert Bloomfield explored Renaud's experience in the heart of Cisco's incubator for emerging virtual technologies. Find out why Renaud believes that "Second Life and its walled/closed ilk will fade into the sunset in the next 24-36 months."

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Cisco was an early adopter of virtual worlds, and Christian Renaud has been the heart and soul of that effort. While Cisco has used Second Life space for what many consider to be the cornerstone virtual world value for big businesses -- meetings to span real world geography -- Renaud also mapped out paths to explore the potential for other unique benefits of the metaverse. He created virtual world systems for customer training, customer feedback, and focus groups.

He set up mixed reality events that brought Cisco employees and customers into contact. He used the platform to test product launches. In each of these areas, Renaud ventured far beyond the obvious business model for the emerging technology, and his use of virtual worlds for customer social networking may eventually prove to be more valuable than traditional business uses of these spaces.

As might be expected from such an idea man, Renaud has become quite a prognosticator. In his blog article The Future will be Better Tomorrow he makes eight predictions about where the metaverse is headed, including the likelihood of social networks like Facebook and MySpace exploiting 3D spaces, and the slow demise of worlds like Second Life as more permeable platforms become increasingly tenable.

Background Reading and Video

Summary of Renaud's keynote at Virtual Worlds Conference 2007
Renee Hopkins Callahan's Summary of Renaud's Keynote Address
Liveblogging Metaverse U A Conversation with Christian Renaud, Reuben Steiger, and Byron Reeves about Work
Information Week: Using Second Life As A Business-To-Business Tool by Mitch Wagner
Mass Extinctions and the New Math from Renaud's blog.
Cybergrrl Oh's 5 Questions for Christian.

Guest Biographies

For the past several years, Christian Renaud has been Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center. According to Cisco, the "Technology Center acts as intrapreneurs for the efforts of Cisco's Corporate Development organization, providing business rationale and market insight for determining future Cisco emerging technologies. The Technology Center is Cisco's corporate incubator chartered with identifying emerging markets and technologies and developing them into new revenue streams for the company."

Friday, June 27th was Renaud's last day at Cisco. He will be starting his own company, and is working with other start-ups to design technology strategies.

Christian's insightful blog can be read at xianrenaud.typepad.com.