Over the past year, more than 1 million unique visitors came to AMD's Virtual Experience. This web site mimics a virtual tradeshow with virtual booths, presentations, videos and collaterals. For this 2.0 version, AMD added more interactivity, with one-on-one chat, and more booths/partners. The new partners are: Dell, Lenovo, VMware, Egenera, Rackable, Cray, Verari and Appro. HP dropped out from the virtual tradeshow for now. One of the big improvement, for AMD at least, is that the partners are now paying for their virtual booth a big change from a year ago, where AMD absorbed most of the cost.

"The side toolbar is new and provide users with personal interest preferences, allows more customisation, better content searching [...] Also new is the ADB queue, an embedded video playback software that allows to use keywords to search for points during a video keynote/webinar and jump directly to it [...] And the virtual storefront where partners can talk about the availability and more of their products", explained Reg Herde, Sr. marketing manager at AMD's server/workstation division (pictured).

Here's a quick factsheet on AMD's Virtual Experience site so far:

- Over a million unique clicks (unique IP addresses clicking on the site);
- 600,000+ pieces of collateral downloaded;
- 200,000+ video views;
- 16,000+ registrations.

Finally, comparing AMD's Virtual Experience with Second Life, Herde thinks that the latter is "just too broad".

You can access the edited audio interview here.