Eric Mack On-Line

Hosted by David Coleman... What technologies will be the next big thing? David Coleman walks us through three examples of 2.0 tech from the bleeding edge of tech...

Brightcom
BrightCom showing their view of future generation Conferencing systems.
Rendered environments
Next Gen telepresence - so each party sees the office as if it was their own.
Wall-size screens using OLED.
Avatars for video Conferencing - drops bandwidth requirements.
Real-time gaze correction for immersive worlds.

Demo of second life with virtual avatar from a video conf. Chad just took his real-life video inside of second-life.
Amazing, This would solve many challenges of live Conferencing.  They posit and I agree that immersive Conferencing hold great promise for future of Conferencing.

IBM Collaboration Labs
Irene Greif showed how visualization tools can be used to see knowledge differently. Visual tools cause people to get sucked in to analyzing information. How might this apply to business? That's what IBM's trying to answer. Generalizing from baby name wizard to Many Eyes. Social data analysis is finding its way into many IBM products (e.g. dogear, etc.) This represents and opportunity to revisit knowledge management. People are already uploading lots of data. OK, network just went down. So much for real-time presentation. Too bad. She was showing neat stuff. Go look at Many Eyes web site and create your own visualization.

SAP
Denis Browne, VP of emerging solutions imagineering. Web2.0 is penetrating enterprise. Blogs 45%, RSS 43% , Wikis %35% mashups coming in from fringes. IT orgs reacting. Security is a big concern.
Three ways to enterprise-class web 2.0:

Extend existing applications
Build new applications
Facilitate enterprise mashups

Trying to solve the problem of Gen Y workforce coming in and being disgusted by the poor tools available (my words, not his)

Goal to give end user tools to do the above. SAP sees smart and secure widgets as the solution. (Think policy- based widgets with an ACL)

Think about Amazon-type referrals for knowloedge in the enter[prise (KEY - outstanding example)

Demo: (so far, nothing to type. Your basic portal with lightweight access to back0-end systems, in this case a CRM.

Q&A