the newsletter of tbd consultants - edition 10, 2nd qtr 2008
						Printable PDF version Subscribe to our newsletter In this Edition Preconstruction Services, Part 1 Market Forecast: Variable Photovoltaics Get a Second Life
		Construction Management Specialists 111 Pine Street, Suite 1315 San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 981-9430 www.TBDconsultants.com
		Preconstruction Services, Part 1 Matt Craske What is involved in the Preconstuction Services of a GMP project? In this first part of an on-going series about GMP services we look at preconstruction estimating and scheduling.
		Market Forecast: Variable Oliver Fox What effect is the collapse of the housing market having on construction bids, and how is it affecting different sectors in the construction market? We address these issues in this article.
		Photovoltaics Photovoltaics are probably the most highly visible of the "green" technologies, but how cost effective are they? In this article we look at how developing technologies and changing energy costs are moving the balance in favor of PVs.
		Geoff’s IT Gems Get a Second Life Is video conferencing becoming passé? Instead of sitting in a conference room watching other people on a large monitor screen, why not sit at your computer and have your avatar interact these other people’s avatars? Second Life is an online virtual world where you “become” a virtual person, or avatar, that can wander around, even fly around if you feel like it, and interact with other avatars, just as though you were meeting other people in the street. But this is not just another online game. Companies are starting to make use of Second Life or similar “virtual worlds” to do business in. Cisco Systems (as reported in the Oakland Tribune, Oct 15, 2007) has four islands on Second Life that are used for product demonstrations, training and meetings, and is making virtual workrooms available for its staff. UC Berkeley uses Second Life to make available some lectures and courses. Sun Microsystems has a virtual building, MPK20, to complement its physical campuses, which is a boon for its employees that work remotely, because it provides a way for them to get the interaction that telecommuters often miss out on (which is one of the reasons telecommuting hasn’t taken off the way people expected it to). Virtual meetings are starting to be used by businesses, but it could be a few years before they become mainstream. The technology behind the 3-D Internet (as IBM calls it) is still relatively new, and it places a fairly heaving load on computers, even compared to many other multimedia applications. But the steady, or geometrically increasing, growth in computational power should rapidly reduce that drawback. Getting users comfortable with the concept might be a bigger problem; even though Second Life is a well-known application, it has attracted relatively few visitors compared to many other Web 2.0 applications. Second Life is the best known virtual world, but others are also available, and some are aimed directly at the business community. Unisfair is one that provides virtual conferencing, trade shows, seminars, etc., and which can be used for such things as marketing and recruitment. Now you have to decide what suit your avatar should wear for your virtual job interview. The appeal of virtual worlds goes beyond the “green” reasons for video conferencing (i.e. cutting down on pollution by not traveling) because it adds an element, albeit a virtual one, of person-to-person interaction into the encounter. It is as easy to form separate breakout workgroups as it is in a regular meeting, which is not so easy to do with video conferencing. Virtual worlds can also appear to get you out of the normal office environs: for instance, the virtual workspaces that IBM makes available to its employees might be around a campfire, with a waterfall in the background. Let’s meet on the virtual putting green!
		Design consultant: Katie Levine of Vallance, Inc.