WALL STREET JOURNAL — When American soldiers and police officers from across the U.S. want to learn how to operate Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Cutlass bomb disposal robot, they go to the military contractor's secure Space Park installation. But they don't have to jump in a car or hop on a plane to get there. That's because Space Park exists only in cyberspace, or more specifically, in the computer-generated world called Second Life. Virtual reality "is not a fly-by-night technology. It's not a passing fad," says Matt Furman, a Northrop Grumman software developer who helped build Space Park, where customers can spend hours training...

ZDNET — EMC can best be described as an entity. Not only in the Fortune 500, the infrastructure information provider was recognized by Fortune as one of the 10 most admired companies for product and service quality. This success didn’t come easy to the giant, which needed to significantly rebuild its business after the 2001/2002 recesssion. Part of that rebuild included acquiring more than 40 companies over a handful of years. The other critical part of the rebuild included attracting top talent to help drive a more successful business. To achieve the latter, EMC turned to social media for its recruiting efforts. The below interview with Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy at EMC, details how the company acquired talented employees through social media, how career fairs via Second Life can actually work, and how the company measures success...

READWRITEWEB — Despite the hype, only 11% of enterprises are adopting virtual worlds to augment their work, says a new report by Forrester. Virtual worlds have been around since about 1995, but it took business half a decade to realize the potential value within the enterprise. But the research released this week isn't just an outline of the market: it's a how to guide to for doing business in a computer-generated universe. Vendors may have not done a very good job of marketing themselves to the enterprise to date. But there's still huge opportunity for your company to get virtual, if you know how...

Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million. More on that later...

When Santiago Martinez wants to give his friends birthday presents, he buys a cake or flowers or sometimes a teddy bear. But the 41-year-old, who lives on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, doesn't spend pesos or dollars. He buys the gifts with an online-only currency called hi5 Coins. He also doesn't deliver the gifts in the physical world. They appear digitally on his friends' online profiles on a site called hi5, which is a social network like Facebook or MySpace. "They can't eat the cake. It is an image -- the thing that it represents," said Martinez, an accountant with a wife and two kids. "You can send the feeling of that [cake] that you want to send." In any given month, he spends the equivalent of $40 in this manner. But Martinez is hardly alone...