Inside Digital Media: communication/collabortion/content presentation/interview

Inside Digital Media: communication/collabortion/content presentation/interview This is a market overview/interview recorded yesterday with Phil Leigh -- I presented my perspective on communication/collaboration/content market trends etc. You'll need to download the WebEx player to view it. Thanks to Phil Leigh for the opportunity.

(The link is to the main Inside Digital Media page; look for the July 20, 2005 link to directly launch into WebEx).

Phil's summary of the interview:
"Summary: If you are interested to learn how future workers are likely to collaborate on projects with their PCs over networks, this interview is for you.

Although this is a lengthy interview, the content and material covered is fascinating. Our guest is a Senior Analyst with The Burton Group who specializes in Communications and Collaboration. He has been in the business for 20 years. Earlier he worked for Lotus (on Lotus Notes) and with Ray Ozzie’s Groove Networks.

Essentially our guest today believes that Communications and Collaboration will become merely feature extensions of data-base management systems. Instead of assembling a “best of breed” package of collaborative tools, in the future IT managers will seek data-base management systems that provide a full suite of collaborative features.

Basically, the PC is evolving. Instead of being primarily a document creation device it is also becoming a universal communications and collaboration appliance. Moreover, cell phones are mutating into small form factor PCs.

Our guest believes that one manifestation of this trend is the emergence, and eventually dominance, of virtual telephony. To older guys, like me, Skype appears to be a software client that I can use in place of a telephone. But to younger people it is merely another computer application. To them it is a natural extension of e-mail and Instant Messaging. In the years ahead, youngsters today who are growing up with IM and Skype will consider it odd that people once used a separate device to make a telephone call. Consider the following scenario:

You are sitting at a Starbucks with WiFi access. Next, you get a phone call via Skype at your laptop. That is merely the first step in an escalating collaboration session. Joe from your office has called. He wants to share some documents with you. You and Joe launch a WebEx session and share the documents. During the conversation, Joe discusses a product from company XYZ that you don’t understand. He uses WebEx to “take” you to XYZ’s website. Together the two of you study the product literature and perhaps view some animation at XYZ that explains how their product is used.

In the preceding example, the Skype virtual telephone call is merely the first step in a full collaborative session. The conventional telephone is a dumb terminal with no evolutionary future. Some day we will all kind of wonder why we used it when virtual phone calls were so easily accessible.

Subject: Today’s guest on Inside Digital Media is Peter O’Kelly who is a Senior Analyst with The Burton Group. Peter specializes in market research in the field of Communications and Collaboration.

Length: This Slide Show presentation is covered in about 70 minutes."