http://www.thinkbalm.com/
As stated on the website, the mission is:
"ThinkBalm offers independent IT industry analysis and strategy consulting services."
And specifically this is in the area of "work-related use of the Immersive Internet." This means that they are doing research and analysis and consulting in 3-D web technologies like virtual worlds and other like technologies. There's also a LinkedIn group, which is where I found out about them in the first place whilst browsing the profile of someone else who works at IBM. The group is a community for discussion and brainstorming around the aforementioned ideas.
http://www.thinkbalm.com/community/
Tonite I visited their island in Second Life, the ThinkBalm Data Garden.
They display some nifty 3-D data visualization examples, specifically around data regarding virtual world adoption in business. There's a neat activity regarding barriers to adoption that I can agree with, specifically in getting users interested in the technology and the problem of inadequate hardware.
I think the data visualization is what draws me in here. I've seen a few different data-viz technologies in Second Life. Being a programmer and having written a few intermediately complex scripts myself, I'm extremely curious at what the technologies and programming aspects are of the mechanisms. It's also really really cool to see a set of data represented in 3-D. It's not a new idea, of course, but the technologies are new enough that there are lots of companies doing research and development in this area. But it's really cool to see a company say, here's data on the research we did, in a 3D representation, which is totally appropriate for a virtual world company.
I found a report that they just published:
http://www.thinkbalm.com/2009/05/26/thinkbalm-publishes-business-value-study/
Check it out if you have time. There is an event coming in October for people new to the LinkedIn group to get to know each other. If I'm not on a real-work meeting at the time, I will attend and blog about it then!
