Why Does Cisco Blog on Virtual Worlds?

Cisco has added a new blog to their growing list of corporate blogs - the Virtual World Blog. Reason? As Christian Renaud says in the inaugural post:
"We believe that these environments offer an excellent new tool in our collaboration toolbox, alongside established technologies like IP Telephony, Web Collaboration, and Telepresence. They also offer a number of new opportunities to collaborate in ways we haven't had before, which is intuitively obvious to those who use them regularly, but we'll work on enumerating in future blogposts." Christian is Chief Architect of the Networked Virtual Environments team at Cisco, and he and members of his team will be contributing to the blog, according to Christian's post. As a nice touch, they are also maintaining a del.icio.us page that will contain all the links they reference in their blog posts. Christian is an active SL avatar so we know he and his team will be speaking with great authority. More importantly, Cisco has made both big and public commitments to virtual worlds, from their multiple-island SL campus to actively experimenting with internal 3D collaborative spaces - and then back again with in-world b2b meetings and mixed reality public events. And, they aren't overlooking infrastructure, as they are also working on technology to support 3D environments, and tools to facilitate our virtual work and entertainment lives.
Christian will also be keynoting at the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in October. Click on over to the Virtual World Blog, say hello and chat up a team that is contributing to the next generation of business and of virtual worlds.
http://freshtakes.typepad.com/sl_communicators/2007/08/cisco-launches-.html