IBM, Second Life, and v-business

Futurismic reports that IBM is heavily involved in Second Life. According to Reuters (itself a big player in Second Life), IBM has the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. The CEO, Sam Palmisano, even has his own avatar there:

The company's move into virtual worlds is due in large part to the efforts of its "multiverse evangelists," Ian Hughes (Epredator Potato) and Roo Reynolds (Algernon Spackler in-world), who said last month that IBM wanted to make "v-business" a priority just as it championed "e-business" during the dot-com boom.

"We always ask the question, 'if you knew 20 years ago what you know about the Web today, what would you do differently?'" Sandy Kearney, IBM's director of emerging 3-D Internet and virtual business, told Reuters in a Second Life interview. "The Web took decades. This will likely take half that time."

V-business? It's a term presumably indicating business done in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. Wikipedia has a brief entry on virtual business, which gives an old-school definition, bascially non-bricks 'n' mortar e-business: "a business which operates without a corresponding physical identity."

But no entry for v-business.

I get the distinct feeling that this will change in the near future, as the term picks up steam.

P.S. Looks like this blog post is the first with the Technorati tag v-business.

Tags: Second Life IBM v-business multiverse virtual world