Binaural Bluetooth headphone or headset, anyone?

OK, am I the only person in the world who wants a Bluetooth stereo headset I can use for phone calls and music listening? Or a simple wired headset with a 2.5mm jack (they were common as pennies two years ago). My current one doesn’t have a mute button.

I searched for six damn hours over the course of two days. Besides Google, my search included two extended field trips. The result: Plantronics Pulsar 590A, available for about three years but apparently no one else has a fielded a similar device. It was priced at $249 on the Plantronics site but I paid $112.24 at Amazon. It is a stereo bluetooth headset and headphone (includes both profiles) that comes with a "universal adapter" (Bluetooth transmitter with a 3.5mm jack). I'm going to attempt to use it with both my desk phone (with a 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapter) and my Blackberry Curve 8330. If it won't pair with the BB, I can always use that universal adapter (the BB has a 3.5mm receptacle).

But the real question is, why isn't there a bunch of similar products on the market? Or if there are, why can’t I find them? I’m pretty good with a Google search.

Best story of all: At Best Buy I had a salesman point me toward a standing display of "Bluetooth" wired headsets. I kid you not. He even put air quotes around the word "Bluetooth" when he told me that you know, these are “Bluetooth,” too, they are just wired. Bluetooth doesn't mean wireless, he told me. I swear.

I had to leave immediately. I don't know what Bluetooth meant to him, and I couldn’t ask. I had to leave immediately because I could feel an entire lecture cum angry rant bubbling up inside me, fighting to get to the surface. Any retail sales guy who could look me in the eye and tell me these wired headsets are Bluetooth ... well. ... he was beyond help.

Here's the weirdest thing from the experience: the 2.5mm jack headsets that were common as pennies two years ago have all but disappeared. Best Buy had none. The first Radioshack I went to had one. And the second (bigger) Radioshack had two or three; but none that covered both ears. Since I tried out Skype last week with a binaural USB headset I don’t want to go back to one-ear headsets; but I can’t use Skype all the time because unless it’s my laptop or my cable provider messing with the traffic, the sound quality was not dependable.

Oh, in terms of full disclosure, I did find one other device that would suit my needs: The Oticon Epoq. It cost $9,000 configured with Bluetooth capability. :)

Of course, the Plantronics 590A has a big fat form factor, so if you want an ultra-lightweight device go with the Epoq for $8,887.76 more. I wasn't worried about the form factor because I was primarily looking for something to use in my home office. But because the Epoq is primarily a hearing aid, it essentially disappears into both ears. It is simultaneously an infinitely adjustable binaural hearing aid and a Bluetooth headset. It popped up first when I searched "binaural Bluetooth headset."

Actually, I could carry my Plantronics around, though. I never go anywhere without my backpack, which doubles as a giant purse.

The other interesting thing I learned from this research is that you can buy every adapter imaginable except for a USB-to-2.5 mm adapter that would let me use my USB headset with my desk phone. One guy made his own, but it looked like so much trouble that I didn't bother to write to him and ask him to make me one. See a picture of it here, along with the explanation for how to make it. (Again, for full disclosure, there does seem to be a discontinued Motorola adapter you can buy for 60 cents at Amazon, but the reviewers said it added buzzing that rendered it useless. That and the discontinued thing suggested to me I should go another route.)

Mutitasking Makes You Stupid

But boy, is Second Life compelling. So I just logged off of a meeting at Dobbs Island in SL, and I happen to be sitting in a hotel ballroom in Chicago at American Business Media's Top Management Meeting. I didn't want to miss either meeting, so I logged in from the meeting room. The meeting in RL probably contained more important content for me at this moment in time, but the meeting in SL commanded more of my attention.

I'm not sure I understand why. About halfway through I realized the RL content was more important, but every time a new line popped into my SL chat window I had to read it. And forget what you think about multitasking, you really can't process two steams of info like these simultaneously.

Now, of course, I am compelled to write this post instead of pay attention to the very end of that RL panel! :-)

Cisco Finds Life in Second Life

Today Cisco Systems is running a virtual job fair in Second Life. When asked why this morning during a panel discussion at Dobbs Island in SL, Christian Renauld, the company's chief architect for networked virtual environments, explained it this way:

"Back in the spring when we had the Channel 2.0 event with VAR Business magazine we were really overwhelmed at the quantity of our channel partners already in SL. So this was a logical fit: they are here, we are here, smart folks are here that are looking for new jobs. Win."

A White Paper Explaining SL and its immediate Value Proposition for B2B Media Companies

Second Life is a new communications medium in which people meet inside a computer simulation of a 3D physical space. The simulated space can range from something whimsical, like the Greenies' "home world," to a relatively accurate representation of the real world, like the Second Life homes of Pontiac, IBM, Cisco, and Dr. Dobbs Journal (pictured at right). People appear in SL as "avatars" that they create. Avatars also range from whimsical to realistic. Second Life is in some ways just one of 50 or more virtual worlds, all of which share a common heritage evolving out of the world of video games and multiplayer online games.

But Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, had the brilliantly insightful idea to put out into the world what amounts to a multiplayer video game platform with no game!

(That's cybercelebrity Callie Cline below, handing out signed copies of her Pontiac Solstice. She was hired by Pontiac as the world's first spokesavatar, and named No. 95 on Maxim magazine's list of the world's 100 hottest women. I kid you not.)

And so thousands of developers have set up residency in SL, inventing everything from real estate development businesses to avatar creation businesses to sex shops (every new technology has its share of sex shops). All of this is made possible by two elements of the Second Life platform (in addition to the open, unfettered nature of the platform itself):

• Linden Labs created an "inworld" currency, the Linden dollar (L$), which is tied to the U.S. dollar at an exchange rate of roughly L$268 to $1. The L$ has evolved into a neat micropayment system.
• Second Life residents are granted property rights to anything they create. Therefore, SL residents can sell their creations and earn real money.

Why does this matter to business media professionals? Remember my opening statement: Second Life is a new communications medium. Just as with the last big new medium to come along, the Internet, it is still too early to predict all the possibilities this new medium represents. But one possibility is already apparent to those of us who have spent real time in SL: It is a potent forum for business meetings and even medium-sized conferences. I like to tell people that, if you can imagine the value of attending a teleconference on one end of a spectrum, with the value of attending an in-person conference at the other end, then attending a meeting in Second Life gets you about 80% of the way there. And in some ways, meetings in Second Life are better than in-person meetings. Video conferencing experiences pale by comparison. Best of all, anyone can attend an SL meeting from anywhere on the globe, without leaving their desk. And as SL grows, its meeting-hosting prowess will improve.

People who have never experienced SL (especially if they are of the baby boomer generation) scoff at the idea that a cartoon world can be used for a serious business purpose. The explanation for why it works has to do with arcane details of brain function that I don't pretend to understand, but which I distill to this: because you know that sitting behind each avatar in the meeting is an actual person who is (at least mostly) paying attention, your brain imbues the setting with an appropriate seriousness of purpose. To distill this to essence: You actually sense the presence of others in an SL meeting. It's like magic.

THE SECOND LIFE LAND RUSH
The combination of fun, games, opportunity, and serious business intent creates so many different motivations to enter Second Life that there has been a land rush, captured by the press in the form of hype. But here are some actual adoption statistics that may come as a surprise. These stats are as of Oct. 28 end-of-day (midnight Second Life Time [SLT], where SLT = Pacific time):

• There were 31,387 new signups during the previous 24-hour period, bringing SL to 10,490,916 total signups.
• There was peak concurrency (i.e., the number of residents logged in simultaneously) of 56,181 at 2:25PM SLT (a new record!), and a minimum concurrency of 29,033 at 11:50PM. Median concurrency for the day was 43,077.
• In the last 60 days, 1,412,534 residents logged into SL at least once.

The number of SL residents has spiked a bit in recent weeks due to two television events: CBS's CSI: New York did an episode on Oct. 24 titled "Down The Rabbit Hole" in which the CSI team chases an assassin into Second Life; and the following evening NBC's The Office did an episode involving Second Life. The CSI folks have concocted an elaborate plan to lure viewers into SL, detailed at their Web site.

Closer to the home of business media, Jeff Barr is a Web Services Evangelist for Amazon whose job is to go around the world speaking at conferences and to corporations about Amazon's Web infrastructure services. He's discovered that the profile of SL residents closely matches his target customer. Jeff told me he is trying like hell to curtail his travel and do more speaking in SL, so he can spend more time with his family. His coworkers laugh at him because they think he's playing games, but he is an effective evangelist, reaching customers all over the world, without having to leave his desk. There are many Jeff Barrs in SL, and more arriving every day.

HOW CAN SL MEETINGS POSSIBLY BE BETTER THAN REAL LIFE?
The image below was captured during an SL panel session when IBM and Linden Labs discussed their joint effort to create portability and interoperability standards among the different virtual worlds. The session was conducted entirely in text chat (other sessions have been done in voice, voice with slides, or video). Regardless of whether the panelists/presenters use voice, video, or text, audience members are free to contribute thoughts and questions in the text window at any time during the session. Panelists see these comments in real time and can choose to respond or ignore them; they can effectively incorporate these thoughts and questions into an integrated whole with the rest of their content. The characteristics of SL support this kind of interaction because, in SL, it is non-intrusive; but the real-world equivalent (shouting a question from the audience) would not be tolerated during an in-person event.
In addition, note the tabs along the bottom of the text chat window. Each tab opens onto a different conversation. Although you can't make out the blurred text, there is the main tab housing the public discussion in this space; then comes a tab wherein I was IM'ing questions to Ziggy Figaro, the panel moderator (another accepted form of interaction); in another I was asking technical advice of the island's operations manager and hostess, Rissa Maidstone; in another, having a personal discussion with a colleague; and finally, the last tab is for a group to which I belong, members of which were in attendance and having a private group-wide side conversation.

The same factors that make SL a great meetings forum also make SL a great place to foster community. But don't make the mistake of viewing SL as a "3D Web"; while the Web is all about human interaction with automated systems (think eBay, Amazon, Google), Second Life is all about human interaction with other humans. Second Life represents the emergence of a brand new communications paradigm. But what's new and important about Second Life is its synchronous communications directly among live human beings, not the asynchronous communications of email or the automated human-machine interaction of Amazon and Google.


WHAT SHOULD A BUSINESS MEDIA COMPANY DO?
The answer to this question will vary by market segment, as follows: the more technically savvy your audience, the more quickly you must move to develop a place in Second Life for that audience to form a community around your brand. Otherwise, as history has shown through the rise of the Internet, someone else will do it for you. Many companies were blindsided by the sudden rise of the Internet. Don't let it happen again. I don’t refer only to audiences for technical subjects, but rather an audience for any subject that happens to be comfortable with the use of computer technology and networking. This includes most any audience under 35.


FURTHER READING:

• Killer Apps and Virtual Worlds: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/16876


• Playing Tricks on the Mind: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/19373


• The Second Life Insider: http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/


• SunCorp GM Says SL Trumps Video Conferencing: http://www.searchcio.com.au/topics/article.asp?DocID=6100929&SiteID=19


• Callie Cline's SL Fashion Notes: http://slfashionnotices.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/callie-c-cline/


• Neuromancer, by William Gibson (the original, and the great granddaddy, of cyber novels)


• Idoru, by William Gibson (the most thoughtful and esoteric of virtual reality novels


• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson


• Second Life Sign Up Tutorial (By me, available by contacting me at mike@azzara.com)
  
  (Click this for a pdf of this white paper. It's prettier!)

Direct Brain Control of Second Life Avatars!!!

This blew me away. It's a small step for a man, if you see what I mean.

This first link goes to the best blog post I found (from a site called Pink Tentacle) describing details of research that was conducted at a Japanese university, and published previously in Japanese. This second link goes to the Japanese-language page on which the university published its research. I don't read Japanese, but the two links (labeled Windows and Macintosh in English) above the photo on the page take you to a video demonstration of a guy controlling an avatar in SL with electrodes strapped to his head and his hands in his lap.

Assuming the video isn't rigged, it's a fascinating portent of possibilities to come! How rapidly can research like this become useful from a product/production point of view?

Phoning a Second Life avatar is a call to Germany!

OK, the last entry in my Vodaphone InsideOut trilogy is that I learned that while calling OUT from Second Life to the real world is free (for now), calling INSIDE is the same as a call to Germany, and is going to be charged that way by your U.S. cellular provider.

The reason is that Vodaphone assigns a virtual number to your handset inside SL, in order to protect your identity, they say. They chose a block of numbers from Germany (+49) to use as the virtual numbers. So if you dial up an avatar in SL, you get charged (by your provider, not Vodaphone) for making a call to Germany. (Here's a link to the page where they explain these costs.)

Vodaphone says it may charge L$300 (300 Linden dollars) per minute for calls made from inside SL out to an RL phone, once the free beta trial ends on Nov. 30. I guess they haven't made up their minds for sure yet.

Calls from Second Life to Real Life not working in USA

I was so taken by the concept of Vodaphone InsideOut that I raced to their island, got the free HUD, and began the set up. But text messaging isn't working to the USA (or China), and that means that anyone with a USA (or Chinese) cell phone cannot activate their service, either. This is because the activation process sends a text (SMS) message to your mobile phone and you have to reply to that message to confirm and establish your service. It's a darn shame.

I tried to activate anyway, but so far have received no text message from Vodaphone. The company's web site says their working to resolve the problem. Here's the Web home page for Vodaphone InsideOut. And here's the SLURL to take you directly to Vodaphone InsideOut island (use only if you already have an SL account).

You can't see the activation page, which carries the message about the USA and China having technical difficulties, until you link to it from your HUD from within SL. That's because each activation page is, of course, unique to each user; the SL HUD tells the service your SL name. HUD, in case you don't know, stands for heads-up display; it's jargon that SL inherited from RL.