I’ll start off here by stating the obvious – yesterday was a bad day for Nortel.  Moreover, in this article, there’s some discussion about a few poor attempts at innovation, summarized by the notion that ”Web 2.0 products just didn’t seem to fit for Nortel”.  One such innovation attempt has been Project Chainsaw, which created the recently-launched Web.Alive program.

Web.alive is a three-dimensional program that looks and feels similar to Second Life.  Companies can purchase the program and use the virtual environment for training, collaboration, hosting conferences, and most notably, sales and marketing.

The program is, if nothing else, intriguing.  This blogger speculated (albeit skeptically) about the benefits for using this “Second Life meets business world” technology for business communication.  He was impressed by Nortel’s licensing of the Unreal Gaming Engine to create an aesthetically appealing platform.  For a visual explanation, here’s a youtube link of Chief Architect Arn Hyndman talking about web.alive.

One company that clearly believes in this technology is Lenovo, the world’s 4th largest PC manufacturer.  Lenovo is the first business to make use of web.alive, and launched the Lenovo eLounge late last week.  The Lenovo eLounge is, at the moment, basically being used as a sales venue, where customers can view the products and speak to each other (and salespeople) in real time, through their avatars.

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