Why businesses should never underestimate the power of place. Today's business leaders are so obsessed with all things global and virtual that they risk neglecting the critical impact of physical place. It's a paradox of the Internet age: now that it's possible for businesses to be everywhere at once, they need to focus on what it means to be one specific place at a time. The best global brands, from IBM to McDonald's, are by design also the leading local brands. For instance, your decision to patronize Starbucks will depend on whether it's the best local coffee shop in your neighborhood, not on how many thousands of global locations it has. Marketing experts John Quelch and Katherine Jocz offer a new way to think about place in every strategic decision-from how to leverage consumer associations with locations to where to position products on the shelf. They explore case studies such as Nike and The Apple Store, which use place in creative ways. Drawing on a blend of hard data and engaging anecdotes, this book will help any business-from global mega-brands to boutique, small town stores- influence customers more effectively.

On virtual management

From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs. In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete? With more than ten million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects. “Illuminating. . . . Castronova’s analysis of the economics of fun is intriguing. Virtual-world economies are designed to make the resulting game interesting and enjoyable for their inhabitants. Many games follow a rags-to-riches storyline, for example. But how can all the players end up in the top 10%? Simple: the upwardly mobile human players need only be a subset of the world's population. An underclass of computer-controlled 'bot' citizens, meanwhile, stays poor forever. Mr. Castronova explains all this with clarity, wit, and a merciful lack of academic jargon.”—The Economist “Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations.”—Tim Harford, Chronicle of Higher Education

"This book presents various opinions, judgments, and ideas on how the use of digitally created worlds is changing the face of e-commerce and extending the use of Internet technologies to create a more immersive experience for customers"--Provided by publisher.

If you are one of the many who have read about and heard about virtual worlds but do not really understand what a virtual world is, or even how to use appropriate terminology when discussing them, then this is the book for you."--Jacket.

A Washington Post Bestseller Your manual for remote and virtual work. Communicating virtually is cool, useful, and now even more ubiquitous and necessary than ever. But we're often reminded that the quality of human connection we experience in many forms of virtual communication is awful. We've all felt disconnected in a video conference, frustrated that we're not getting through on the phone, upset when our email is badly misinterpreted, or anxious that we're being misunderstood. How can we fix this? In this powerful, practical book, communication expert Nick Morgan outlines five big problems with communication in the virtual world--lack of feedback, lack of empathy, lack of control, lack of emotion, and lack of connection and commitment--and shows how to overcome them as we shift to working remotely more and more. Morgan argues that while virtual communication will never be as rich or intuitive as a face-to-face meeting, recent research suggests that we need to learn is to consciously deliver a whole set of cues, both verbal and nonverbal, that we used to deliver unconsciously in the pre-virtual era. He guides us through this important process, providing rules for virtual feedback, an empathy assessment and virtual temperature check, tips for creating trust in a virtual context, and advice for specific digital channels such as email and text, the conference call, Skype, and more. Whether you're an entrepreneur, an independent professional, or a manager in an organization that has more than one office or customers who aren't nearby, Can You Hear Me? is your essential communications manual for twenty-first-century work.

This volume provides the latest outcomes of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) research conducted in various industries. It reveals how AR and VR are currently changing the business landscape, and how new innovations provide opportunities for businesses to offer their customers unique services and experiences. Collecting the proceedings of the International AR & VR Conference held in Manchester, UK, in February 2017, the book advances the state of the art in AR and VR technologies and their applications in various industries such as tourism, hospitality, events, fashion, entertainment, retail, education and the gaming industry. The papers presented here cover the most significant topics within the field of AR and VR for both researchers and practitioners, approaching them from a business and management perspective.

Virtual Worlds are being increasingly used in business and education. With each day more people are venturing into computer generated online persistent worlds such as Second Life for increasingly diverse reasons such as commerce, education, research, and entertainment. This book explores the emerging ethical issues associated with these novel environments for human interaction and cutting-edge approaches to these new ethical problems. This volume’s goal is to put forward a number of these virtual world ethical issues of which research is only commencing. The developing literature specifically regarding virtual world ethics is a recent phenomenon. Research based on the phenomenon of virtual world life has only been developing in the past four years. This volume introduces pathbreaking work in a field which is only just beginning to take shape. It is ideal as both as a library reference and a supplementary text in upper-division courses focused on the issues of applied ethics and new media. It is unique in being one of the first volumes specifically addressed to ethical problems of the “metaverse”. This volume includes articles from authors from around the world exploring topics such as: employing rationalist and casuistic approaches to the controversial topic of “virtual rape” yield an increased understanding of how virtual worlds ought to be designed, the relationship between the ethical and legal dimensions of virtual world users’ participation in “paratexts”, utilitarian consideration of harm and freedom in the case of virtual pedophilia, norms of research ethics in virtual worlds, the ethical implications of employing virtual worlds as tools for medical education and experimenting with healthcare services, the ethics of the collective action of virtual world communities, consideration of the virtue and potential of cosmopolitanism in virtual worlds, Deleuzian ethical approaches to the experience of the disabled in virtual worlds, the ethics of virtual world design, and the ethical implications of the “illusion of reality” presented by virtual worlds.

The first book to explore virtual reality strictly for businesspeople, Virtual Reality Systems for Business provides essential information not only on theory and the scientific underpinnings of this new technology, but also on its methods, purposes, and day-to-day applications. Readers will learn how virtual reality applies to retailing, marketing, design, manufacturing, accounting, finance, training, human resource management, and other functions critical to the operations of any organization, public or private. They will learn the types of hardware and software currently available to develop the "virtual worlds" they need in their specific organizations, and how to procure them from vendors. Also covered are the methodologies by which computer professionals can develop their own virtual reality systems, and the relationship between virtual reality systems and computer databases and data communications. Explained too is the basic framework underlying business-oriented virtual reality systems and how these systems tie in with nonbusiness-oriented systems.

Malaby shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion.