Abstract
The last decade brought about several virtual communities spread all over the world composed of thousands of people with different ages and social, cultural and physical characteristics. These communities enable users to communicate and share information, often with the aim of achieving a common goal. Due to the vast diversity of users there's often a need,to control the activities that occur inside the virtual environment to avoid inappropriate behaviors. However, this control can cause a feeling of digital surveillance, but an appropriate design of the interface can help minimize its impact, becoming an important success factor for the community. For this purpose we analyzed a selection of virtual environments, conducted a survey on users' preferences and analyzed the corresponding results. From these activities we defined a set of requirements to build a 3D interface for a regulated virtual environment.

Abstract
A Social Networking System was developed for Academic Collaboration across international Projects. The system was implemented using Java Server Pages. This paper discusses the development of this software, lessons learned and it gives suggestions for further work.

Abstract
Writing scientific publications is usually a challenging and complex activity, involving several authors. Despite the different natures of their contributions, this activity is clearly collaborative and the collaboration is usually achieved through face-to-face meetings and using email to exchange the documents. More recently the availability of collaborative editors introduced a further step in the collaboration, but none of the existing solutions contemplate some specific issues like referencing and publishing adequately. This fact motivated us to conduct a study to evaluate the requirements for a platform that integrates in a single solution the three main functionalities required: a text editor, a reference manager and a connector to scientific digital repositories.

Abstract
This paper presents a comparative analysis between a set of virtual worlds in order to facilitate the process of selecting a virtual world to serve as a platform for application development. Based on exhaustive research in the area, we selected a set of criteria, based on the work of Mannien in 2004 and Robbins in 2009. After this identification we applied the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) developed by Squire in 2007 with the aim of assessing quantitatively the platforms under consideration. The results showed that Second Life, OpenSim and Active Worlds are platforms that offer more services and tools for developing applications with quality. © 2011 AISTI.

Abstract
Serious games are playing an increasing role as educational tools and the last decade witnessed a growing number of proposals in this field. One of the major challenges of the current European societies is to foster an entrepreneurial interest in young people, and the European Commission has been promoting projects that pursue this objective. This chapter presents one such project, PLAYER, in which an educational game was implemented in Facebook with the aim of promoting entrepreneurship by guiding young people in the definition of a business proposal. The game encompasses 4 stages that include the basic description of the business idea, the characterization of its strategies, the filling of a funding quiz, the SWOT analysis, and finally the production of a detailed business plan, for those players to be able to reach the final stage of the game. © 2012, IGI Global.

Abstract
Gathering field data from crisis areas requires overcoming a major technical hurdle: infrastructures and terminals for Internet access are non-existent or unreliable. Teams of professionals acting on the field lack a cost-effective, convenient way to provide their data to central management headquarters and the worldwide public in a timely manner. Cell-phone software can be leveraged to bridge this. Using cellphone applications, people living or working in low-tech areas can provide their knowledge worldwide, taking full advantage of georeferenced functionalities. In this paper we present the prototype of a platform based on a wiki+map server backbone for direct information entry, query, and editing, by people on the field using cell-phones, with strong version management. This georeferenced information can then be visualized centrally for tackling development/crisis issues, such as drought problems, outbreaks of diseases, etc. - giving NGOs and governments a better framework upon which to act.