Our sister company Virtual Greats and its work with partners Gaia Online, Snoop Dogg and Elvis Presley Enterprises were surveyed in depth by the New York Times’ Stefanie Olsen today.
Our friends at Virtual Worlds Management have made this video available in case you missed Reuben speaking earlier this month at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles.
BusinessWeek’s Kenji Hall recently sought Reuben’s input on Joi Ito’s still-relatively-new role as head of Creative Commons. Reuben has known Joi personally and professionally for some time, and we’re especially happy to participate in conversations about online IP given the July launch of our IP-protected celebrity virtual goods business, Virtual Greats.
Bart Cheever, our VP of Production also happens to be Bart Blackstone the DJ. I beamed him into my virtual studio the other day and we talked about his Kill Bill mashups (download Hanzo Steel Vol. 1), The Postmarks, Yo Gabba Gabba and more.
Several current MoU employees and alumni had the good fortune to study under Randy Pausch at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Pausch has become widely known over the last year for his “final lecture” delivered on Sept. 18, 2007. This was a very affecting - to say the least - presentation in which he urged his students to treasure and protect their sense of childlike wonder. He also spoke of his love for his wife and kids and the curiosity that essentially drove him forward in life. Dr. Pausch gave the presentation because he had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died this past Friday.
We became familiar with Randy before there was a book or a segment on Oprah. A couple of our colleagues, former students both, had heard of his final lecture through the CMU community and encouraged us to watch it streamed live from Pittsburgh. We had no idea it would become such a sensation - credited with helping people move on from divorce, choose life over suicide, or escape from abusive relationships - but it’s hardly surprising.
It so happens that Randy was one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on what The New York Times called in his obituary “computer worlds that students could use to create games. [His students] were learning sophisticated computer skills. His annual virtual reality contest was highly anticipated, and work on virtual reality by some of his students won them the chance to experience weightlessness on an aircraft. They then used virtual reality techniques to mimic weightlessness.”
The technical and creative skills that Randy taught are at the heart of our virtual worlds industry. What a pleasure it is to work in a business defined by thinkers motivated by wonder, curiosity, whimsy, and imagination. I personally treasure my sense of childlike wonder and think that losing it to cynicism, emotional exhaustion, “sophistication,” or anything along those lines would almost be worse than death itself.
But let’s not take ourselves too seriously, because life is short. After learning that his lecture was being compared to “Tuesdays with Morrie,” a popular book about wisdom its author gleaned from a dying college professor, Randy told USA Today he “didn’t know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.”
Eric Caoili over at Worlds in Motion was among those picking up today’s big MoU staffing announcement: adland veteran Brian Dunbar, most recently with Goodby, Silverstein in SF, joins us as EVP for Client Services. Read all about it here.
