A Wider Net

This USA Today article predicts a tough year for air travel as astronomical oil prices drive up the cost of jet fuel and, of course, ticket prices. With higher tickets, fewer flights, and a total lack of reasonable customer service from most domestic airlines, we can expect a flood of requests for alternatives and augmentations to face-to-face meetings for a while.

We looked at this sort of thing 7 years ago after 9/11. We were able to quickly offer satellite, webcast, webconference, and distributed media solutions (among others) to those companies unable or unwilling to travel. The principal driver this time isn’t a terrorist event but oil prices. Considering how rare and limited a resource oil is, I’m shocked this hasn’t happened sooner. The good news is that we’re all better equipped to augment or replace face to face meetings than ever before. I will be writing about available solutions and techniques in the weeks to come. I welcome your input. Please send your ideas to awidernet at crameronline.com or comment here.

So far my favorite idea for ways to reduce travel is: Everyone walks or bikes to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, jacks into the web via wifi using their iPhone 3G (the one that doesn’t exist yet but supposedly has a second camera facing forward for video conferencing), and conducts a face-to-face meeting over Grande Iced Mochas. Whipped cream mustaches will be required for admission.

You’re busy on Sunday - we know that. There’s the small matter of legendary sports history on the line in Arizona at Super Bowl XLII. On Saturday, I suggest you seek out your nearest IMAX theater and witness the greatest virtual event ever - U2 3D.

Even if you’re not a big U2 fan, and I’ll admit - I’m only a casual fan - you will find this event, at times, simply breathtaking. They have captured the live U2 experience and delivered it to your nearby IMAX on a massive screen with masssive sound and in 3D. And it’s not just any old U2 experience - this was a massive energy ball of a concert assembled from 100 hours of footage shot in South America from their Vertigo tour. At times you are given the perspective of one of the fans on the floor, crammed in like a massive sardine mosh pit. You see the concert in the distance through a forest of waving hands clutching cell phones and cameras. You can see the shots of the stage on the viewfinders of all those cameras, and you feel you can reach out and snatch one from the sweaty palm of a screaming fan.

Other times they afford you a perspective that you simply can’t get from any concert no matter how much money you have or who you know in the band. We were hovering just above and just in front of The Edge as he ripped through a solo or filled the song with one of his signature rhythms. The neck of the guitar seemed close enough that you almost had to duck to avoid a bonk on the noggin. Sometimes we were given a bird-on-a-cymbal’s view of the drum kit, while the slightly sweetened sound of each drum hit in our faces reinforced the experience.

It wasn’t a perfect experience - some of the early edits were distracting, some of the 3D effects at the end were over the top, and the kick drum mapped to the IMAX butt-kicker subwoofers was a gimmicky replacement for the pounding chest we enjoy when standing in front of a 100,000 watt audio system. Still, this was a shining example of how we can capture a live event and deliver it, with maximum impact, to a remote audience. It shows us what we can do with 3D and a great deal of attention to production value. Start with great content, capture it well, and manipulate it to make maximum use of the capabilities and limitations of the delivery vehicle. The same approach pays dividends for webcasts, second life, and podcasts.

In our part of the marble this show only runs through mid-February. So don’t wait. Tomorrow is good.

More here and here.

Dan Parks, President/Creative Director for Corporate Planners Unlimited, Inc, has created a first-of-its-kind virtual convention center in Second Life. He recently gave me a tour and I will admit - this experiment is an example of extraordinary vision that could only have come from someone who had spend 20 years in the event industry. You owe it to yourself to try this out at your first opportunity. I will try to explain what it is and why I think you need to see it.

By the way - the image above features the exhibit hall on the right, the convention rooms on the left, and two skyscraper towers in the background. The “smoke” is actually low-flying clouds. See the thumbnails at the bottom of this post for the really high-res shots I took.

First, since there are still many people who have no idea what Second Life is, let me expend a paragraph on that topic. Non-Newbies can skip ahead. Second Life is a computer-generated world that you access through a free downloadable application - the Second Life Browser. Using this application, you can create a graphical 3D representation of yourself - an avatar - that you manipulate like a puppet within the second life world. It doesn’t have to look like you (it can be a different gender or even species) but it is what you will look like in this second life. Using this avatar, you walk or fly around this fantasy world, meeting other users, experiencing wild places, chatting, playing games, etc. It’s like a video game except it isn’t nearly as much fun. In fact, there’s very little to do in Second Life that the average working professional would find interesting. Companies like The Gap have spend big bucks setting up virtual stores and virtual hotels in Second Life only to find a lack of participants and a similar lack of real money. Ironically, the company most vocal about not wasting money in Second Life, IBM, is also one of its biggest investors, participants, and technology partners.

Two significant things have changed within Second Life that have changed my perception of it’s value for marketing and event professionals. First, a Massachusetts company called Vivox has introduced a voice chat technology that enables Second Life users to converse with other users by simply talking through a standard computer microphone or headset. It’s a free call anywhere in the world. You can talk privately person to person or talk openly in crowds. This is a surprisingly cool ability. As you walk near other people in Second Life you can join their voice conversations. This means that, in a business meeting, you can introduce yourself and network with other attendees. It is the most face-to-face experience I have ever seen online.

The second significant change within Second Life is the construction of Virtualis by Dan Parks and his team of hired guns - architects, landscapers, and designers. They have built a monumental convention center and meeting facility within Second Life and it will soon be open for business. It would take far more text than a mere blog post would stomach in order to fully explain all there is to see and do at Virtualis, so I will stick to the bullet points and get to why this is important. First, Virtualis has a massive virtual exhibit floor, complete with large 3D exhibits. You will be able to watch streaming videos, examine product information, and talk “face to face” with booth attendees. They have even come up with the ability to webcast live from the real world, using any standard webcam, into these exhibits for the purpose of product launches, product demos, and presentations. No other virtual trade show comes close to this level of functionality, attendee mingling, and user experience.

Virtualis also has a large ballroom and many smaller meeting rooms, all found within a beautiful glass building lined with waterfalls and other interesting visual elements. In the ballroom, Parks has provided a variety of meeting support services including a dance floor, a follow spot, podium, and presentation areas. Two nearby skyscrapers are loaded with meeting rooms and areas dedicated to the press. In fact, an outdoor ampitheater is equipped with multiple live virtual video cameras that can actually webcast a press conference out of second life to the real world.

Other features include a massive yacht full of meeting rooms (that may be private - I’m not sure), an outdoor learning facility with all sorts of special effects and presentation capabilities, and a koi pond.

Because you can participate in group activities, network and speak to other visitors, give and receive video and slide presentations, and browse exhibit halls, this is a fairly complete meeting experience. You just have to remember to find food in the real world while your avatar sits in a hot tub on the yacht.

It isn’t perfect, however. As I mentioned in previous posts, Second Life is an unstable and rapidly growing platform. It is not ready for you to abandon your sales meeting in Fiji to save money by having it at Virtualis. This is an experiment. You can book 100 people or so to attend an experimental summit or exercise here. Some will have trouble connecting, and some will have trouble navigating. It is a very new and very demanding technology. It is, first and foremost, a vision of what can and probably will be done with the next generation of Second Life or a competing platform. If the underlying technology were bullet-proof, and if the user interface were more intuitive, and if everyone had the necessary computer horsepower and bandwidth - then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this as a real meeting solution. All the pieces are there. For now, I recommend seeing it, experiencing it, and keeping a close eye on it. Book a meeting there with nothing but your most adventurous audience and enjoy it with your virtual guests - but expect the few problems I mentioned. And when this technology is robust and real, you can say you’ve been “with it” since the beginning.

Highres pics:

Sue Pelllitier brought this up in her Face 2 Face post last month. Corporate Planners Unlimited, Inc are launching Virtualis - a massive virtual convention center in Second Life. See this press release.

I have yet to tour Virtualis, but this sounds very interesting. While any company has the ability to create a meeting space of their own in Second Life, there’s something to be said for booking space in a well-established and well-equipped meeting space (sound like the real world much?)

Combining this meeting facility with the voice chat capabilities enabled by Vivox, Inc, where you can “talk” through your computer to other people in Second Life simply by “walking” up to them and talking into your microphone, you have a unique virtual meeting space with great potential. I’m still very skeptical that it’s ready for prime time, however, due to ongoing infrastructure problems with Linden Labs that make access to Second Life with a large group of people a hit-or-miss proposition, insane firewall requirements to enable voice, and a rather undefined set of support technologies for webcasting, archiving, measurement, and content sharing. Second Life simply wasn’t built for this purpose.

My hope is that enough people find this convention center appealing that it inspires other companies, maybe even the existing virtual event companies like Unisfair, to offer a new solution for virtual events featuring proximity-sensitive voice, 3D environments with real-time avatars, integrated live presentation support including live flash streaming, and better navigation. I would like to see someone focus on a purpose-built solution for business that learns from Second Life’s hits and misses.

In the meantime, I look forward eagerly to Virtualis and will report what I find.

The effects of Second Life on individual websites and desktop applications is starting to show in dramatic ways. Here are three examples:

First, retailer Brookstone has announced that they plan to launch a 3D Second-Life-like store using technology from Marlboro, MA-based Kinset. According to a ComputerWorld article, Brookstone plans to be the first to deploy the new technology, followed soon by Tweeter. It appears, however, that you may not be able to see or interact with other customers which would be a real shame since that’s much of the 2nd life appeal.

Next, Doppleganger has created vSide, a social network for music lovers that has a 3D nightclub front-end. Users can buy credits and use them to buy outfits, just like in Second Life, but the goal of this site is to bring music fans together, help them discover new music, and click through to the iTunes store to buy. Additional neighborhoods are being built for “after parties”.

Last, here is an email application that produces three different intricate and clever 3D visual metaphors - your 3D Mailbox. First, you can elect the “airport” metaphor where your email is depicted as airlines flying in and out of a massive airport. Email with attachments always fly in on a carrier like Fedex or UPS. It has sophisticated spam and junk handlers, too. In the second example, a beach scene, your email is shown as bathing-suit-clad beach-goers. If they don’t pass the spam filter, they literally get thrown into the virtual water to be eaten by virtual sharks. That just feels right. I may download it just for that experience alone.

I’m sure there are others and many more to come. Some analysts feel this is just the tip of the iceberg - that sites will all go 3D over time. It sounds crazy, but so did the WWW with all it’s heavy graphics and dependency on a visual “browser” to those of us who remember the days of Arpanet and Bitnet. And Peter Gabriel. And Vinyl Records.

Found Doppleganger’s vSide via Wired.

I have been working on, in, and around webcasts for seven or eight years now, and I can say with some certainty that webcasts are boring. That’s really saying something, since I actively suggest webcasts as one potential part of a marketing or communications strategy. But to be fair, they’re usually boring. They’re not all boring, and they don’t have to be boring - they just usually are.

The sad thing is, webcasts have long been sold as the answer to boring conference calls. And there are still millions of meetings carried out huddled around a Polycom starfish or some other conference phone. I’ve even conducted conference calls with five people huddled around my cell phone with the speaker turned on. Now THAT’S engaging.

WHY ARE WEBCASTS BORING?

1. PowerPoint. The focal point of most webcasts, webinars, and webconferences is a slide window built in, most likely, PowerPoint. And the vast majority of those presentations suffer from the same ills I discussed in this post. Where PowerPoint can dull the fun in a live meeting, it’s absolutely lethal in a webcast.
2. The Presenter(s). A webcast is a public speaking event. Just because your audience isn’t in the room with you doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you wouldn’t put your presenters in front of a large crowd at a face-to-face event, then don’t put them in a webcast.
3. Looooongggggg. Look to YouTube for the answer to your question about how long your webcast should be. YouTube has stated that the optimal length for their videos is 2 minutes. I’ve seen webcasts range from 5 minutes to 5 hours and without question, the most well-received were under 30 minutes. These days shorter is better. Going back to watch a long webcast using chapters seems to be giving way to shorter presentations and more of them.
4. The Experience. Your audience is at their desk. Your webcast is competing for attention against piles of unfinished work, the phone, coworker interruptions, incoming email and rss feeds, and widget alerts. Asking them to focus on their computer screens can be asking quite a lot. I’ve always thought it would be fun to email the attendees a PDF of a sign that says “Don’t Bother Me- I’m Watching a Webcast!” to hang on the back of their chair or office door, if they are so equipped.
5. Bad Video or Audio. YouTube has lowered the bar for video production standards, but serious webcasts still benefit from real production values - clear, intelligible audio and video that uses multiple cameras, decent lighting, etc.
6. Interactivity. One of the coolest aspects of webcasts and webconferences is interactivity - yet very few webcasts use the interactivity at their disposal. Q&A is only one part - you can push polls and surveys, provide content to explore, and allow users to network with each other. Frankly, it’s amazing that so few webcasts offer any kind of audience networking, discussions, or group opinions.
7. Fun(less). Webcasts are a natural platform for using games to reinforce content and create engaging fun, but they almost never incorporate them. You can push trivia games, bingo, and all kinds of simple flash games - and they can be competitive with the rest of the audience, with a prize reward. Add a game, make it fun - make it memorable.

WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?

Handle more questions: Many long webcasts get long because they handle questions one at a time. With an audience of 500 people asking 1000 questions, a typical webcast gets to 10-20 of them. Instead, you may consider having a team of people answering questions via text that the audience can browse right within the webcast player, at their leisure. That way more people get their questions answered faster.

Get a Moderator: A good moderator can spruce up a webcast better than a coat of paint on an old house. By setting the pace, keeping things moving, and using their talents to keep the energy level up, a professional moderator can make or break a webcast.

“You”: The man of the year, “you”, wants to be involved. Let the audience drive. Q&A and user-driven chapters and interactivity is just part of it. Support Social Media. Companies like Operator11 are building webcast platforms using Adobe Flash that allow any audience member to insert their own videos, live or pre-recorded, into the overall broadcast (under the control of the webcast producer, of course.) Support Social Networking. A webcast audience usually has a lot in common. Let them meet each other and communicate about the topic at hand. Before the webcast, let them tell you what they want to discuss.

Any other ideas on how to improve webcasts are most welcome - especially if anyone has a way to broadcast chocolate.

no… that picture is not of me.

DEMO, the mighty showcase of startup companies and products, places videos of the product demonstrations on their website. The fact that they do this, fearless of the possibility that it may somehow cannibalize the size or quality of their onsite audience, tells me that they “get it”. These videos make their event even more appealing. You can see firsthand, through the well-produced videos, that the Googles of tomorrow will be first seen by most people at Demo today.

Capturing video of your event used to be a daunting task. Now, it should be as second-nature as booking the hotel. Delivering the video has never been easier, either. DEMO chose to work with Brightcove, the video delivery platform from former Macromedia mastermind Jeremy Allaire. Not only is the Brightcove player a well-engineered feature-rich video player, but they make it easy to syndicate the content and repurpose the content across multiple websites. Like this:

I will admit, however, that it seems a shame that a show that is clearly dedicated to showcasing the cutting edge in technology, has not adopted a more progressive social media approach to their video assets. Specifically, why can’t we rate the videos, or comment on the demos? I would think the stream of comments would be extremely valuable to the companies that worked so hard to produce the demos. Also, I’m very surprised to see that they still make us look through every demo to see what we’re watching - there is no description on the page of what the company makes. So if you’re interested in new social networking pieces, you have to watch ALL of them to find what you’re looking for.

Regardless, there are a TON of exciting demos to see. I’ll try to highlight a few for you, although you can get complete textual descriptions be skimming the headlines over at Mashable - they managed to write about each company just before their product demos went live on the site.

Be sure to read on - beyond my snarky remarks are some cool stuff (really).

Remember that telepresence event I mentioned a little while ago? It’s happening now. And it’s being covered with… a blog. Actually, two blogs. Yep - the world leaders in telepresence, the technology and techniques of allowing people to have face to face meetings without traveling, have actually travelled to an event to talk about it, and to my knowledge, there isn’t even a scrap of video on the web about it. There are photos of people… at a meeting… talking about how they have the technology to deliver great video experiences over the web, and avoid traveling to meetings.

I need to pick on a one more thing, then I’ll get back to some serious comments.

Here’s a photo from their blog, featuring the CEO of Polycom:

This is nit-picky, but note how the A/V company used an old round-corner rear-projection screen, which has three noticeable effects:

1. It crops the logo in the top left.
2. It makes the set look dated
3. It makes the show, which is a supposed to be about bleeding-edge technology, seem not-so-bleeding-edge.

Here’s a photo that seems to indicate they are demonstrating a remote video connection, since there’s no one on stage:

Reading through their coverage reminds me that this is seriously cool stuff and it’s ready for prime time. If the jarringly blatant Cisco Telepresence product placement in the recent season of 24 didn’t already convince you, then perhaps this event will. Telepresence corrects a lot of video conferencing sins (eye contact being the most obvious), and it opens up all sorts of opportunities for events and meetings.

The most impressive so far:

The DVE Tele-Immersion room, which superimposes a floating image on the video screen, creating the illusion of a floating hologram over the table. Look closely - that room only has four people in it - the other two are in another room somewhere else. Slick.

Images are from the event site and their coverage partner, Technology Evangelist.

Techcrunch covers Zoho Meeting, a web conferencing application with lots of great features that Webex is missing (like, hopefully, a reasonable price). I like the fact that it’s compatible with a very wide array of platforms, and I love the fact that you can record the sessions.
I must add a disclaimer, however- if you’re thinking of using this as a sales tool to a bunch of people, please reconsider. In fact, please reconsider using a web conference at all. If I get one more invite to a boring impersonal audio-only web conference sales pitch I may need a webexorcism.

You might be asking - if this is a videoconferencing unit, wouldn’t the person holding it be unable to participate in the conference? Yes - and don’t you have that person in mind, right now?
The Tandberg FieldView looks like a large digital camera, but it’s actually a wireless (WiFi) portable videoconferencing rig that I can’t wait to try. It weighs only 1.5 pounds, has a 10x optical zoom, and can capture 720×480 resolution video (good quality) at 30 frames per second (smooth motion). It records and stores videos on an SD card. It even has a built in LED light for dark areas.
The touch screen viewfinder on the back allows you to annotate the video for the remote viewer.

Things you can do with it:

1. Conduct site surveys where one person goes and everyone else watches and asks questions of the site host.

2. Share your facility with a client by literally walking them around the place while you conference.

3. Conduct a quality video conference from almost anywhere, including Starbucks.

4. Demonstrate a trade show booth location to an exhibitor prospect, while the show is going on.

5. Show your boss the amazing widget you just found on the trade show floor, and ask if he wants buy one million of them, or two.