About: Erica Driver is a co-founder and principal at ThinkBalm. She is a leading industry analyst with 14 years of experience in IT. Erica is often quoted in mainstream and industry trade press like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CIO, and Computerworld. Prior to co-founding ThinkBalm, Erica was a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where she launched the company’s Web3D coverage as part of her enterprise collaboration research. She was also the co-conspirator behind Forrester’s Information Workplace concepts and research.

While at Forrester Erica served as a strategic advisor to a wide range of clients including Alcoa, Bell Canada, Dominion Resources, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Marriott, Microsoft, Raytheon, Roche, the United Nations, and the U.S. General Services Administration. Prior to her tenure at Forrester, she was a Director at Giga Information Group (now part of Forrester) and an analyst at Hurwitz Group (now Hurwitz & Associates). She began her career in IT as a system administrator and Lotus Notes developer. Erica is a graduate of Harvard University and is a member of The eLearning Guild and the Association of Virtual Worlds.

Erica’s take on the Immersive Internet is that it’s a perfectly natural extension of the way people already teach and learn, rehearse business activities, network and meet, collaborate and communicate, innovate, and manage real-world systems - and that using the Immersive Internet to get our work done will be mainstream for information workers within the next 5 years. You can read more of Erica’s perspectives on the Immersive Internet at www.thinkbalm.com.