Cisco seeks a Gartner of the virtual worlds

Cisco's chief virtual avatar is expected to launch a virtual worlds tracking organization that will help businesses measure how successful their virtual worlds are.

In his blog earlier this week, Christian Renaud, chief architect of Network Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center, called for a market index that captures and analyzes the key metrics of the virtual worlds - a Gartner for the virtual world.

Later, TechCrunch reported that Renaud is expected to launch the Metaverse Market Index (MMI) at Virtual Worlds Fall next week.

MMI is expected to help provide comparable data about user engagement and economic activity in virtual words.

Acording to TechCrunch:

MMI is founded by Nick Wilson of Metaversed.com and Robert Bloomfield of Cornell University, and will team with advisors and sponsors from industry and academia to construct a database of statistics on each platform’s user activity, economy, and technology. MMI is hoping that their work will foster informed investment in online worlds, “while also allowing developers to identify opportunities for rapid convergence toward common technologies that will allow portability across platforms.”

MMI first step is to incorporate and work with advisors towards identifying key statistics. January 2008 will see tools development based on the initial key statistical areas, followed later by publication of the standards and data gathering.

Would the availability of such metrics help convince your company to leap into the virtual worlds? 

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