Jaffe Juice

I'm so proud to share that we were featured in the Wall Street Journal today in a piece titled, Avatars at the Office.

Yes, you need a subscription, but I've pasted a few paragraphs below:

New-media marketing firm crayon has its primary office on a Second Life island called crayonville. Avatars of the company's nine employees -- which were created to resemble their real-life forms -- sit around a table in a brick-walled meeting room in the virtual office, complete with an agenda screen. At the same time, employees sit in front of their computers in their real-world offices, located around the U.S. and in England, talking to each other using Skype Internet-calling technology. The conference call allows employees to have voice as well as text communications with one another.

Any avatar that visits crayonville island in Second Life is free to visit crayon's meeting room, but the meetings are closed if employees are discussing private client matters. The company also has started to rendezvous with clients in Second Life but is still figuring out whether or not a get-together in the virtual world takes double as much time. "That is part of our experimentation," says Neville Hobson, crayon's vice president for new marketing. "How does it actually work? How comfortable are we?"

There are also a couple of photographs of a crayon status meeting and a Jaffe v Jaffe comparison.

For those who have a copy of the article, it's interesting to see the different agencies' reactions/commentary on SL...for example, Avenue A:

"For an agency, it is really more of a showcase, a bit of self-indulgence, a way to promote yourself to marketers that might be on Second Life," says Jeff Lanctot, vice president and general manager Avenue A/Razorfish.

Wonder if he's a resident or not...