23rd
Video Conferencing in the real world
I have been watching the video conference market for a while as it seems to be one that will get interesting. A few years ago at Nobel we had a Sony system between our San Diego and Bucharest offices. It worked pretty well and video conferencing definitely was a better way to communicate then just voice with the team. Recently the market has heated up with Cisco’s purchase of Tandberg for over $3 billion.
One of our favorite breakfast places in LA is John O’Groats. It has been around since the 1980’s working out of one location in Century City (just at the bottom corner of Beverly Hills). Part of the attraction and long term success of John O’Groats is the family that runs it, they know most of the customers and have created a very close bond. They literally are always there behind the counter.
So when they recently added their second location they decided to set up a live video conference between the two restaurants so that people from the old location could say hello to the staff that moved over to the new location.
We had breakfast at the new location this weekend and it was amazing watching as people continually would be waving to each other through the system (you can see it in the background of the picture). Also as you can imagine, kids loved it. It made me think as to how something so cheap could do so much. Additionally it helped to make sense out of Cisco’s Tandberg purchase, as bandwidth and equipment prices continue to drop there is no reason why video conferencing will should just explode.
