Skip to main content

Meeting Room in a box....Conference 2.0

I've reached that point in my life/career where I feel the need to attend the occasional conference. There are a couple that interested me here in Bangkok, Thailand Telco Forum, and the other is the Revenue Assurance Summit 2006.

However the costs of both are too high for me to justify at this point. Although I have to say that I did receive a phone call from IQPC to see if there was anything that could be done to help with the price which as nice follow up on the CS front.

Still what are the benefits of conferences:
  • Networking - shaking hands and exchanging details
  • Workshops - facilitated discussion with presentations
  • Coffee or Watercooler chats - sidebar discussion with peers
  • Presentations and case studies - slideware and demos
Now given the advances in technology and delivery options do we need to spend many thousands of US$ to get these today?

Paul and myself conceptualized the idea of a meeting room in a box when we worked in the same company.

In essence it was all of the equipment plus branding material that could be delivered to the client site and installed very easily in a room on their premises. The theory being that in the large region with many customers in many countries in different timezones the differentiator for the company would be the ease with which the client could connect and discuss real issues in real time without the need to get lots of people on planes.

So what would that kit look like today? there would be a lot of Web 2.o tools in there and some tried and tested favourites:
  • Writely - collaborative word processing
  • Google Spreadsheets - say no more but with collaboration
  • Thumbstacks - online presentations
  • Skype 2.5 - Telephone Conferencing VoIP -> VoIP and/or VoIP -> PSTN vice versa plus Web Cam suport
  • LearnLinc - demo and training software
  • Blog - a real time (as close as we can) blog feed with back channel (but you already knew as you've got this far already)
  • Podcast
  • LinkedIn
Conference 2.0 would use this toolkit to enable participants to be "at" the conference at a fraction of the cost and with the convenience of being at home to help with the Work-Life balance.

The first three become my presentations.
Skype becomes the eyes and ears of the participant(s) and can go a long way to being the facilitation layer for the workshops.
LearnLinc is the workshop room where I can also hold my presentation or my demo.
Blog is the minutes of the meeting and my takeaway for future reference
Podcast is the multilingual voice presentation, Q&A, welcome and closing speeches and I can keep them for later.
LinkedIn is my networking and meet and greet tool that allows me to easily approve and contact people in the future.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PC over IP - The Teradici Effect

Teradici are hoping to blur the lines between PC and Data Centre. Their solution allows a use to view multiple screens and control the blade PC over IP. This is kind of like the dumb terminals with a new edgy deployment. The intention is that all of the computing power is performed offsite in a centralized area, the Data Centre, and this will save on power and maintenance costs as the engineers are co-located with the hardware and therefore don't have to go out to the client site for basic maintenance. The Teradici Company Article found in the Wall Street Journal
Post a Comment
Read more

e-Olympics

This year's Olympics should be the best ever for coverage. Fring are looking for onsite commentators and as a means to encourage people are offering a 3.5G phone as your reporters tool. I hope that this will be the games of the micro blog. The potential for services like Twitter or Jaiku to open up access to the games in a way never seen before is encouraging. Essentially there are three dimensions to the games: Nation Event Athlete Typically broadcast of the games ha content defined by the nation. The USA channels closely follow the USA squad, the same for UK, NZ Australia etc. This is targeted at the national pride. For those people who are actively engaged in an event themselves, marathon, it's the event that is king. There will still be an element of "my country" but this is equally balanced by "my sport". The final element is the followers of a specific athlete. Friends, family and fans may elect to follow all of the events surrounding a person. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cashless Society? Micropayments up for disruption

New Zealand, although small, is a long way ahead in many aspects compared to the UK. Some of their new schemes are being adopted by the UK government. What I remember from my first trip here 6 years ago was the impact of the EFTPOS system. Long before the UK was using Chip and PIN New Zealand was moving towards a cashless society with the ubiquitous EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer Point of Sale) cards and terminals. The system is good and robust. But the one place you can't find it for some of those micropayments is on the public transport system. Buses would benefit from some form of electronic payment system. There is one drawback of the system in it's implementation today, the time taking to pay. For small payments, say a Moro (think Mars) Bar at the local dairy (corner shop) is the time taken for the system to recognise the card and for the user to select the account (Cheque, Savings or Card) and input their PIN. This would certainly slow down the boarding process...
Post a Comment
Read more