Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is that they appear less ‘real’, you can’t replace people. The upside is substantial in some industries. You can do many things that you can’t do with professional talent. For example support multiple languages and cultures within the same language with one ‘actor’, even try different text to test effectiveness. An area that we are sure will catch on.

The good providers even allow you to use their talent library of people from around the world as well as text to speech or even load your own sound file in WAV format or phone in if you don’t have a microphone use the telephone and pin number to record it.

This will be an interesting area to watch as the ability to tailor appearance such as hair type, eyes, skin tone and clothing merges with other technologies such as the hologram the Prince of Wales used recently to attend an overseas conference and present.

Prince Charles was criticised for his huge air travel carbon footprint recently so he solved it with a video recording that was converted to a hologram. It is only a matter of time before the 3d avatar meets the holgram and allows his to acheive the same result with a simple email. Perhaps with simple markups to recognise emotion.

Y-gen and late X-gen are most likely to be the demographics who will readily accept them. After all they look distictly like the characters you see running around in Second Life and the The Sims.