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Nearly 30% of survey respondents (19 of 66) said their organization recouped their investment in immersive technologies in less than nine months, once their project(s) launched.

The top motivations for investment in immersive technology in 2008 /1Q 2009 were enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, increased innovation, and cost savings or avoidance.

Early implementers are choosing the simplest use cases first. The most common were learning and training (80%, or 53 of 66 respondents focused on this use case) and meetings (76%, or 50 of 66 respondents). Some intend to take on more complex use cases in 2010 or 2011.

I’ve been using FriendFeed for awhile and if you subscribe to my feed you’ll see just about everything that I do online. My feed includes all the articles I bookmark with delicious. When I write a new blog post it automatically shares it on my feed. Every time I tweet on Twitter and when I update my status on Facebook, they’re included here. When I add a video to my favorites on YouTube it is shared here as well. Currently there are 58 different sites that you can link to your FriendFeed, so it’s like the one stop shopping place for everything online!

FriendFeed also has a search function where someone without even registering on the site, can easily search all FriendFeed updates.

Facebook has been in the news quite a bit this week which they started off with the announcement that they have acquired the social-identity aggregator, FriendFeed.

This is the crux: foreign language ability is not just about converting information from one format to another. It's about human relationships.

A few years ago, while General Abizaid was still CENTCOM commander, I flew a C-17 into Cairo to pick him up after a meeting. While I sat on the parking ramp with my engines running, knocking out checklists for the next takeoff, I looked out the window and saw General Abizaid moving among a circle of grinning Egyptian military officers. He was shaking hands, talking, doing the kinds of things a combatant commander is supposed to do: keeping our alliances strong at a time when the situation in Iraq was critical. Because he is fluent in Arabic, I presume he was doing at least some of this in Arabic. I remember thinking, Wow. This is why language matters.

Language is extremely hard. We need as many language solutions as we can get, and technology certainly can and should help fill the gap. But no matter how good the technology gets, no matter how prevalent English becomes, old-fashioned speaking of a foreign language still matters.