We had a very interesting day with a number of journalists, all heavy bloggers, who visited us at the Nortel R&D worldwide headquarters in Ottawa.

The focus of the day was demos of some of our pre-product innovative/incubation R&D in areas such as virtual reality conferencing, embedding communications into business apps, and Web 2.0 and beyond.

What became obvious to the group was that Nortel competencies in real-time communications, scalability and reliability, had high value in turning virtual reality technologies into potentially much more user friendly and more powerful business tools.

A recurring theme was that "There is no I, there's only we", in Andy Lippman's words, who joined us for a good part of the day. He's mid-way through his sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Nortel from MIT. "Second Life doesn't solve business problem, this does" quipped one of our guests.

Solving business problems is the theme of a white paper I recently wrote on Hyperconnectivity and enterprise transformation.

The first posting resulting from this visit came from Rich Tehrani of TMCnet fame.