The first Competitive Edge event launched off this past Friday with two unique special guests and a truly qualified audience made of of many industry analysts, conferencing companies and experts in related fields.

For the first time I had the pleasure of seeing a small but very qualified group of attendees gathering together to find out about the newest and best in online collaboration, conferencing and live presentations.

Participants joined from US, Europe, Asia and Australia with many attendees, as mentioned above, being themselves owners, CEOs or Marketing VPs of some of the most interesting companies in these industries.

Attendees conversion was very high with a over 70% of registrants attending the actual event.

But here is my detailed report:

The Competitive Edge started off with a brief introduction on the original mission and goals for this new Kolabora Live! monthly event. I pointed out my interest and drives in doing this and why I thought this was more than needed at this point in the evolution in this industry. This, in summary what I said:

The level of competence of most development, design and marketing departments in many of the companies operating in these industries is really very low.

Few companies have someone with a "vision" (outside of the usual eye-filling $$$ signs) and fewer have on their boards people that have long researched and worked around making talk, communicate and collaborate more effectively through different media.

Most of the companies that have appeared in the last 24 months, have either tapped an existing technology on top of which they have tried to build a business model with no prior competence in this field, or have tried to design and develop a full system from scratch without taking advantage of the many lesson learned by the many previous entrants in the field.

You can tell how competent the industry is by the amount of real news and blogs these companies are capable of putting out. Hardly any company out there has either the guts, the competence or "vision" to understand that publishing news or a quality blog is the one of the key ways to show your customers competence, credibility, progress, innovation while providing them with useful, unbiased information.

I then introduced my two very special guests: Jay Cross from Internet Time Group and David Woolley of thinkofit who popped up nicely inside their two video windows center stage and with whom I started an interesting and colorful interview lasting over 30 minutes.

My questions to them centered around some few key issues:

a) What are the trends that you see at work in shaping the collaboration and conferencing tools appearing on the market today?

b) Who do you think has a bigger say in how tools are developed by collaboration, conferencing and live presentation companies today? The end users or the companies creating the technologies?

c) Is video an essential component of live conferencing sessions or is it something we can easily do away in serious, formal business meetings?

d) Open standards and interoperability, are they important?

e) What are critical the privacy issues that will surface as soon as these new communication and collaboration technologies become more ubiquitous while starting to replace more traditional means of exchange?

f) What does the future of conferencing, online collaboration and live presentation technologies look like?

Some great answers issued on both from Jay and David and here is a detailed, though somehow edited, transcript of they had to say.

Where are we at?

Question: How does the future of conferencing and collaboration look? What are people doing in elearning that is different than before?

JayCross: The future is here! It is just not evenly distributed.

There are some very advanced things going on but there are also some people still finding elearning brand new.

"Traditional" elearning courses are dead. Those types of courses where you have to do course preparation work in advance, where you have to spend a lot of time to read and study stuff on your own, stuff you may never use, or that you may forget long before it is actually useful to you. Those courses are history.

It used to be that..., all the world is a stage and people used to memorize their roles. Well now people do improvisation. They try out new roles and solutions by simulating "what if" scenarios and sophisticated role-playing.

So if people need to improvise while they are meeting online, we need easy access more than anything else.

Simple, intuitive, stupid-proof access to these technologies.

This is where you need to look if you want to see the future of these technologies as well as the future of learning:
learning and work = same same. No difference.

Learning and working meet and melt into each other, to a point where learning is an integral and ongoing part of work. It is work in fact that will need to be changed the most to be able to accept without unneeded restrain those open-ended collaboration traits so essential to the growth of an effective learning culture. (italics mine)

Who is driving?

Question: Who do you think has a bigger say in how tools are developed by collaboration, conferencing and live presentation companies today? The end users or the companies creating the technologies?

David Woolley: It is always a combination.

The industry here is driven by what people say what they like and what they don't like. They try to respond to these requests, though they may not always be successful at this.

One issue is that most if not all of these companies are strongly driven by the need for immediate financial returns and so this drives in good part their way of reasoning about what to offer and deliver through their services.

If they see that there is some money into it....then they move.

It is also true that if you look at individual vendors, you may find that many of them do not really listen to their customers.

But if you look at the industry as a whole I think the industry is responding to what people want and that is why we are now seeing the introduction of some very easy to use tools like Glance, a one-click screen sharing solution, or Sightspeed for informal desktop videoconferencing. Both are responding to a precise need that was not being met before.

There are a few companies, like Microsoft, that sort of have the ability to ram things down our throat. They can only go so far, but since they are close to a monopoly in some areas, they don't have to listen to customers like most companies do.

Jay Cross: Well, in overall terms the workers have a bigger say in what they are going to use and what tools get developed.

Collaboration is the upterm.

We had a history and tradition that has accustomed us to listen to an instructor who is often not even a practitioner. A person who is trying to explain things as if people are missing something rather than taking this coming-together as a unique opportunity to solve issues and problems and to share knowledge.

I think that there is indeed a giant paradigm shift happening at this very moment.

The collaborative software that puts you on a stage podium place is being replaced by virtual offices and meeting rooms where we can share knowledge, ideas, documents and tools.

The companies that don't listen will be toast because there are going to be so many options out there that it will be very easy nobody is going to go with a vendor that doesn't keep up with what customers really want.

Organizational changes and acceptance of new tools

Question: How are these tools changing the way in which organizations operate?

Jay Cross: As I was saying before, we are really in the midst of a powerful paradigm shift.

If you look at instant messaging you can see that it has gradually snugged its way into the mainstream nonetheless in the corporate world they were not paying attention to its benefits and potential for a long time.

I remember I had been telling Cisco five years ago "look IM is going to be part of learning because it is easy, is informal, it's immediate, it's kind-of-fun and it does allow instant communication between people." It was disbelief!
Now Cisco and many others are large adopters of these technologies and they leverage much of their potential to their own benefit.

If someone comes up in the IM arena with something free or low-cost that encourages more of the legitimate stuff, you will see that it will be rapidly taken up.

I deal with a company which is one of the leaders in global communications and I talk to them using Skype.

Organizational challenges

Question: How do academic organizations and commercial companies meet the challenges created by collaboration tools who disrupt the barriers of command and control and strict hierarchical line of command that exist in most such institutions?

Jay Cross: I have been following lately the corporate sector a lot more than the academics these days, part of the reason for that is being that academics are slow to change. And even slower and less open to change when it comes to change their own professional roles.

We have all heard the griping of faculty members about being bothered by students! Often that is ironic... the students still want to learn something by openly adopting these new technologies but when the faculty needs to learn something new then they prefer to go back to research or to some other safer activity.

As a matter of fact I must say that except for some leading edge institutions the use of collaboration technologies has not been directed so much at actual collaboration activities so much as to replicate the lectures and workshops of the past.

David Woolley: Inside large organizations there is always that fear. But, look well, that fear is not new. It was already there with asynchronous technologies as well. It upsets hierarchies. Low level people can talk to high level people.

So you may say that this process has been an ongoing adaptation and it is certainly still happening in most places.

New Applications

Question: How are organizations adapting these new technologies to improve their traditional means of communication?

Jay Cross: The coupling of the power of information system with the communication channels is where the real potential really sits.

If I call somebody at IBM and I want to get referred to someone else they tap into something called Blue Notes and they can search for the expertise I need, and in a matter of seconds they can connect automatically to the right people (further knowing through presence awareness if these people they are looking for are actually there). And then you can setup a meeting immediately
instead of going there and trying to get everybody together for a week!

It is these technology combinations that will drive a lot of the future change.

By the way, I am also working on an overall model of workflow in the enterprise that kicks off from the "oh its time for you to talk to so and so..." and the collaborative tools is a little bit piece of that overall new emergent workflow.

Privacy?

What are critical the privacy issues that will surface as soon as these new communication and collaboration technologies become more ubiquitous?

Jay Cross: Well there are going to be clear examples of how globalization is not as smooth as it should really be.

Here in the US if you give me a business card I can give you call or send you an
email without much trouble, but if I try that in other parts of the world I am breaking their law on their privacy.

How do I know how we are coming together to solve this when we have so different views of privacy in our cultures.

David Woolley: We are already dealing with this issue here in America.

Americans have shown their own proclivities as to which communication tools they like to use.

Some people use only email.
Some people only use IM to communicate.
Some people use the phone.
Some people use different media depending on who they talk to as it is easier to get at some people through their own preferred medium.

Where To Use Them?

Question (from event attendee): Where should be these real-time collaboration technologies be used? Pre or post an event? Do you know of any examples of companies that have benefited by the adoption of these?

Jay Cross: There are thousands of them!

Here is a philosophical point from Jay:
I made up the word elearning because I wanted to highlight learning, but I don't think learning is at the head of the train.

It is performance that is at the head of the train and only a fool would expect to get results just only from the technology.

It is the technology in support of key organizational goals that is key, and that involves incentives, leadership, innovation as free to core...and it's all mixed in together.

As a matter of fact I'd be somewhat sceptical of any company that would highlight the intense use of their of their collaboration technologies while missing to say "what is important to us is to serve our customers and this is our proprietary way to go about it".

Video

Question: What do you think of the use of video in collaboration and conferencing technologies? Is this a critical component or is this something that in most business and training sessions we can do away with?

Jay Cross: It all depends on context.

Yes, sometimes there is something that you don't want everyone to see but the addition of video to a collaboration session is nearly always a positive and useful addition. Video adds a visual sense that can be quite important in many meeting events.

There was a famous study at Stanford about a dozen years ago that ended up in a book called "The Media Equation". In this study researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass found that people treat computers like other people, not like inanimate objects.

We are not wired to deal with devices so we treat them like other people.

To me this is an indication that for video you don't need high fidelity, full color full screen, full motion to get a benefit out of it. Often a black and white caricature will be just enough to enhance the quality level of a conversation and to provide body language feedback which is so essential in direct interpersonal communications.

Video, has certainly a role to play.

Plus, let me add if I don't have video, how could I, who enjoy much showing objects during my lectures/presentations, show you something live rather than having to describe it?

It is so much easier to show things instead of having to talk about them.

David Woolley: In complete frankness, I have been always been telling people that video is much less important than other things in a Web conferencing session.

Usually the focus is more on documents. Whether this is a PPT presentation, an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document.

In the late 90's a lot of the Fortune 500 companies built this big videoconferencing rooms though these were not very cost effective. Yes, you could see all of these talking heads but no-one could show any of their presentations to the others.

Web conferencing as we know it now has taken good care of that and the use of video in conjunction with Web conferencing is just beginning to happen now.

It is not because people don't want video but it is because the technology has not been very good until now that the adoption and emergence of good tools for videoconferencing has been rather slow.

The cost-benefit ratio has not been really that great for video so far.

As the technology matures and bandwidth improves, eventually video will be seen as a standard in any collaboration, conferencing or live presentation technology.

Jay Cross: One week ago the Emergent Learning Forum met in South San Francisco where we had at least 50 people in our meeting room.

At that time we were using Macromedia Breeze to run some live presentations as well as some simulations.

But at all times we displayed a postage stamp view of the actual speaker on one corner of the screen. At one point for example we had the local speaker switch to a presenter sitting in from Philadelphia, and unless we had this little video reference, it would have been confusing to tell, who was speaking then.

And this was just a simple and easy video add-on, that showcases the usefulness under different circumstances of video in conferencing and collaboration events.

Open standards, interoperability. How important are they?

Jay Cross: I have been working with a global communication company in Canada, which I may define as a collaboration company offering mentoring on steroids.

Well, their goal is to have their collaboration software be aware of the device, connection speed and whatever else is needed to allow the end user to access the information he or she needs. The user is shielded from having to know which tools, setup, requirements need to be met to access learning/knowledge information that is needed "just-in-time". She goes after it and the system takes care of finding out which is the best way to do that given the tools, technologies, and Internet connection characteristics available at that moment to the user. Their technology is all based on interoperability, open standards and user-centered design.

Oh yes, I like open source and open standards but before those one major thing is truly missing here: We do not have standards for human interactions.

If I call you to give you on the phone because your sister died that is a lot different than calling a help desk to get instructions on some item I have just purchased.

We really need to do some work that is parallel to what is being done to the communication protocols and to Web standards efforts, and as of now, on this front, we are really just at the beginning.

David Woolley: Interoperability is something we absolutely need.

As you well know lack of interoperability has been a big problem in the IM (instant messaging) world where the big players have been wanting to keep their IM platforms proprietary and not interoperable.

But that has got to change soon.

I think that is going to be everybody's benefit when we are going to have some standards to which conferencing and collaboration companies can adhere to.

Future trends

David Woolley: I think that we are at a very interesting point in the evolution of these conferencing, collaboration and live presentation technologies.

Each and everyone one of these technologies originates in an industry that was separate and independent from the others until now. Web conferencing, phone conferencing, video conferencing were all quite separate industries until recently.

Nobody would have ever thought that these industries were operating or competing in the same space as the emerging IM (instant messaging) industry.

Now, not only you can see that the borderline between these industries is rapidly blurring, but it is quite evident that these different technologies are rapidly converging into offering something you may call rich-media conferencing solutions.

While it is still true that videoconferencing vendors don't do great Web conferencing tools, the opposite also holds valid. But things are rapidly changing.

As I said, it is particularly interesting and valuable to me to underline and pay attention to this simultaneous convergence and divergence of communication technologies as they merge in many ways while differentiating themselves for different users and applications.

There is this great convergence of previously separate industries while at the same time there is a divergence intended as a fast diversification and personalization of these communication technologies.

Using one tool that pretends to fit everyone's need is not a good approach.

If you look at the market carefully you can see that some vendors are beginning to offer a suite of conferencing tools that uses the same underlying technology while differentiating their products for different market segments and vertical uses. Each tool is optimized for a specific purpose. So, in these suites these companies will have one tool for small meetings, one for large events and maybe a one-on-one tool for customer support.

I think this pattern is going to happen in a big way.

And then you have the specialized tools like Glance and SightSpeed
that make collaboration and communication something very easy to do.

There is also a tremendous number of vertical markets that are wide open for specialized tools and that is where we are going to see a great number of new technologies and developments in the coming two years.

One other important aspect that companies should consider is that not many real-time conferencing tools are yet amenable to customization.

This is another area that is wide open for somebody to put together the basic tools so that the customer can assemble its collaboration toolkit in a way that suits his/her own specific needs. if you look close enough, you can see that the need for flexibility is always a good driver of marketing opportunities.

Jay Cross: The divergence that David has been referring to is just a sign that there are many opportunities in this field and that there are ample spaces for experimentation.

This collaboration market is ready to be approached in a multitude of ways and the truly important things that are going to be critical to those who operate in these spaces and industries is the fact that "we live in an unpredictable world".

Since we are here in a more intimate setting than large conferences usually offer let me give you a definition what "complexity science" means:
"shit happens!"

There are going to be a lot of unpredictable things happening in the near future and organizations need to be flexible and strict hierarchies are not going to work well under these circumstances.

For such times we need flexible tools, interoperability, universal access.

In my view we may end up with a half dozen big players who will become the experts in the use of collaboration technologies.

This what I see.

***************

Having deeply thanked both of them for their truly valuable contribution, I released Jay Cross and David Woolley from their video podiums and jumped into the last section of this Competitive Edge premiere event.

In this part I delivered a short presentation covering key trends, tools, features, interface design and marketing best practices that I have identified during my own ongoing research and testing.

Thanks to Voxwire this Competitive Edge presentation is available online for you to view and listen directly online.

Communicast provided the full conferencing platform through which the event was delivered. Communicast specializes in hosting and facilitating large live events integrating presentations, Web touring, screen sharing, video and audio over IP, interactive slides and polls and more.

A list of the companies mentioned in the event is here:

Glance
Groove
Skype
SightSpeed
Convoq ASAP
Yahoo Messenger
PresenterNet
VoiceCafe
Ensemble Collaboration
Linktivity WebDemo
Macromedia Breeze

Summary Report Presentation by Robin Good

The Competitive Edge summary report presentation (audio + slides) given live by Robin Good is now accessible online through this page. (32 mins. SWF-Flash streaming 7 MB)

The next Competitive Edge event is set for Thursday May 27th at 12 noon EDT.

I strongly invite you to sign-up now.

Sign-up page: http://tinyurl.com/2jcxk

http://www.Communicast.com/

Thinkofit
Conferencing on the Web:
A comprehensive, independent guide
to products and services

http://www.ConferZone.com/