Hartford Business Journal

21 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | April 11, 2022 Movers & Shakers East Hartford-based IT and telecommunications company Total Communications Inc. has named Shawn Silver chief operating officer. In his new role, Silver provides companywide oversight and team management and will help implement market-expansion strategies. Previously, Silver oversaw business development efforts and played an instrumental role in implementing the company's new go- to-market strategy. Law firm Pullman & Comley LLC has hired three new associates. Matthew D. Glennon, an associate in the business organizations and finance practice, assists clients in complex business matters. Bianca LoGiurato, an associate in the firm's litigation practice, has experience working in municipal and transportation litigation and insurance defense. Tobe Umeugo, an associate in the firm's business organizations and finance and healthcare practices, has earned degrees as both an attorney and registered nurse. Naugatuck community bank Ion Financial has added Kathy Taylor to its board of directors. Taylor has served as a corporator at Ion Bank since 2017 and is a professor of legal studies at Naugatuck Valley Community College, entering her 14th year at the school. Glastonbury communications firm CashmanKatz has hired three new employees. Jonathan Abel has joined as senior art director. He is a designer, storyteller, animator and writer with expertise in digital production and 3D illustration. Shannon Bies has been named media director, joining the firm from Mascola Group, where she served as media director. Andrew Falce was hired as social media manager, where he will oversee all social media efforts for the agency and its clients. Farmington-based consulting firm Corbin Advisors announced Kristen Phillips has joined the firm as vice president of nonprofit advisory, responsible for helping the firm grow its nonprofit practice, Corbin for Nonprofits. Prior to joining Corbin, Phillips served as senior vice president of corporate marketing, communications and strategy at Lincoln Financial Group. Kelly Even has been named marketing and sponsorship director of Westfarms mall in Farmington. Even will oversee Westfarms corporate accounts and advertising. She brings nearly 10 years of professional marketing experience to her new position. Most recently, she served as the senior marketing sales and events manager with Parkville Market in Hartford. Orthopedic Associates of Hartford (OAH) announced that its board of directors has appointed Dr. Pietro Memmo as president. Memmo is an interventional physiatrist, one of the few in the state of Connecticut who is board certified in physical medicine, rehabilitation and pain management. He joined OAH in 2003 and currently serves as the assistant director of the Orthopedic Associates Surgery Center in Rocky Hill. Andrew Falce Jonathan Abel Shannon Bies Kelly Even Kristen Phillips Kathy Taylor Bianca LoGiurato Matt Glennon Tobe Umeugo Pietro Memmo tools, as workers became remote and consumers increased online activities, including record-setting e-commerce. According to Statista, more than 70 percent of survey respondents said they increased their VR use in 2020 and only 5 percent used it less. A 2020 PwC report predicted that nearly 23.5 million jobs worldwide would be using AR and VR by 2030 for training, work meetings and customer service. "We're [in the process] of taking all the stuff we do on a personal computer today in two dimensions and through mixed reality making that a three-dimensional experience that [people] can interact with better," said Ted Dinsmore, president of New Haven- based software development and consulting company SphereGen. SphereGen helps clients maximize virtual, augmented and mixed reality to address business needs across the healthcare, manufacturing, education, construction and financial sectors. Dinsmore said the metaverse goes beyond immersive headsets and virtual worlds. "We're talking about extended reality that is augmented or mixed reality, which overlays onto the real world," he said. He points as an example to virtual headsets that one of his healthcare clients is using to view and guide surgeries in Uganda in real time. "It's helped train surgeons in Uganda who might see a particular [surgery] case once in a lifetime that [our client] sees in New York three times a week," he said. And metaverse technology is becoming a bigger component of educational systems as well, Dinsmore said. In 2020, Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine trained all its first- year students using the Microsoft Hololens and its mixed reality app, HoloAnatomy, which features a suite of 3D organs, vessels and systems that comprise human anatomy. Initial studies showed similar exam performance compared to medical students who learned using traditional anatomy methods. Big metaverse communities like Fortnight and Roblox are also driving advertising focus and dollars particularly targeting Gen Z and Millennial consumers, who each spend around 7 hours a week, on average, in virtual gaming, according to NewZoo survey data. Vans, the skateboarding brand, launched a virtual skate park in Roblox that lets players earn points to redeem in their virtual store to customize their avatar; the online park has seen more than 48 million visitors to date. The value of virtual viewers has also placed a premium on virtual real estate, which has seen its value spike. Virtual real estate sales topped $500 million in 2021 in the top four metaverse platforms, according to MetaMetric Solutions. Sales surged in October when Facebook rebranded as Meta to focus on the metaverse. "Theoretically, there's an infinite amount of real estate [in the metaverse]," said Future Today Institute's Subin. "But somebody has to write the code and stand up the site and develop that virtual environment. I don't think many businesses will be developing their own virtual environments but will depend on virtual worlds already built." Privacy issues But it's not virtual real estate prices that concern Yale Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, who studies the production of technology and how it's used to build new worlds through research and innovation. "I think about the metaverse as a broad imaginary [environment] that includes any number of futures in which our physical and digital worlds are increasingly woven together…to create convenience," she said. "But it requires an extraordinary amount of data to deliver this convenience and [I think] that the metaverse might further entrench us into a surveillance society, where we are obligated to give up personal and identifying information for something as benign as getting directions." Privacy controls have major implications to both metaverse platforms and businesses advertising on them. In February, Meta suffered the largest one-day drop in its stock price – losing $230 billion in market cap – driven in part by privacy changes by Apple, which limited Facebook's ad targeting and measurement, a move expected to cost Meta nearly $10 billion in revenue this year. But as Meta develops its own metaverse ecosystem accessed by Meta-owned hardware like Oculus, which Facebook acquired in 2014, those same restrictions may not apply. Doukas said the company is committed to transparency in protecting data security. But that may vary across platforms — like Sandbox and Decentraland — and will likely increasingly include much more detailed information that can be tracked, including biometric data measured via wearable devices. Ted Dinsmore Lisa Messeri

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