A Map to Unified Communications and Collaboration

Thanks to Level 3 Communications for this informative infographic



Today’s knowledge work and drive for increased employee productivity are enabled with new tools such as web conferencing, screen sharing, presence and teleconferencing. Do you feel like you are missing out on this competitive advantage? Get more information about the latest in Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions from Level 3 Communications and other top tier network service providers.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

Hosted SharePoint For Content and Collaboration

Microsoft SharePoint is popular with large corporations for content management, document management and collaboration. Could small and medium size companies benefit from the productivity improvements possible with office productivity systems like SharePoint? You bet they could, if only there was a way to use these advanced automation tools without having to invest in a major IT infrastructure expansion...

You’re in luck! Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is now available as a hosted solution through Integra Telecom. This is cloud computing scaled appropriately so that it also works for small and mid-size companies. Using Integra as your cloud service provider for SharePoint has a double advantage. You have access to their robust data center and computing platform and you also have dedicated high performance connectivity through the Integra fiber optic network. They offer everything from T1 lines through SONET OC48, Ethernet fiber optic services, and MPLS & VPLS network connections to serve multiple business locations.

Don’t discount the value of the connection network. Some companies are finding to their dismay that moving their IT operations to the cloud has a hidden “gotcha.” They failed to consider the effect of moving the majority of their traffic from the LAN to the WAN and wound up with a reliable but slow and unresponsive system. By having a single provider for your cloud services and connectivity, you have a single point contact to ensure that MAN, WAN and cloud are compatible.

Hosted SharePoint, itself, is a real-time application, call it SaaS or Software as a Service, that boosts employee productivity through ease of document management and collaboration. It consists of six integrated functions or capabilities. These include Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites.

Sites refers to web sites. With SharePoint 2010, you can create web sites quickly and easily without having to become an accomplished designer. These can be either internal or external web sites, with multiple sites managed from a single location. Share your documents with colleagues, publish information to customers and manage projects with partners.

Communities are groups formed around teams, projects, clients, locations, departments, and so on. They are based on collaboration within the group through social media features.

Content is your central library. There is where files, documents and general information is located. SharePoint makes it easy to find and manage all this information with a massive, smart search engine. You can access and modify content with a web browser, client application like Microsoft Office or a smartphone.

The Search capability can be tailored depending on who is doing the searching. Some content is reserved for internal use. Other content is available for clients. Still more is intended for the general public.

Insights is your business intelligence function. It integrates data and generates reports that give you, well, insights on how your business is running and where the trouble spots and opportunities lie.

Composites is for extending and customizing SharePoint. If you have a need or desire to go beyond what’s offered off-the-shelf, then you can use SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Visual Studio to create your own business solutions customized to your particular environment.

You can expand the capabilities of SharePoint with hosted Microsoft Exchange to store documents online, protect files, run blogs and wikis, and manage projects. Running everything in the cloud means you can scale resources to meet your needs without capital investment or lengthy approval and procurement cycles.

Do you have that nagging feeling that your business would benefit from the automation and productivity boosts offered by SharePoint and like the idea of paying as you go versus making a large capital outlay, then check out pricing and options for Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and high performance connectivity from cloud service and networking providers like Integra Telecom.

Free 6-Way Desktop and Mobile Video Calls

We’ve all been on conference calls at one time or another. They’re a good way to have a discussion when the people you want in the conference can’t all come to the same place at the same time. This is audio conferencing using telephones. These days, it’s pretty much old school.

What’s better? How about video conferencing? OK, I know that when you hear video conferencing you think of big corporate meeting rooms with formal presentations. That’s how video conferencing got started, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The big impediment to date for anything more informal has been the high cost of video equipment and connections. No more. Now that most desktop computers, smartphones, laptops and tablets have video cameras built-in, there’s no reason you can’t have video conferences anytime you want them and on the cheap.

How cheap? How’s free sound? You say that you already do that with one on one video calls using Skype or Apple’s iChat? Oh, but can you set up a group video chat with up to 6 people on any combination of PCs, Macs, iPhones, Android smartphones and various tablets? You can now.

What’s an ooVoo? It’s a cross-platform instant messaging client that supports voice and video chat with HD or regular quality video and desktop sharing. Non-ooVoo users can be invited into the call through Web video chat. Video messages up to a minute long can be recorded and sent to other users or shared on YouTube. Large files up to 5 MB can be shared securely. Go ahead and set up a web chat room for free.

Free? Yes, the basic ooVoo service is free to download and use to your heart’s content. It’s ad supported to keep the company in business. If you want to get rid of those ads and get access to more features, there are paid versions available for both personal and business users.

What sort of extra features? On the paid plan, video calls go from 6 way to 12 way. You can send larger files up to 25 MB, record and save your video calls, record and save audio conferencing calls, store and protect recorded video calls, share your desktop and add phone participants to your video calls. Phone minutes are included with the paid plan, but not with the free version. You also get security settings and live support with the paid service.

How about ooVoo for business? Licenses are available for 1 to 10 users and above, with cost getting lower as volume goes up. There are no ads, of course, and you can include both video and audio participants. As an integrated collaboration solution, ooVoo offers a combination of instant messaging, video calls, phone calls, desktop sharing and file sharing in one application.

Smoothstone Offers Awareness In the Cloud

The notion of the business telephone as the big black clunky thing that sits on your desk and tethers you with a curly cord is fast fading into history. Today’s business communications is often mobile and multidimensional, including chatting, instant messaging, file transfers, Web based applications and collaboration as well as conferencing. Is the venerable corporate PBX system still up to the task?

When the old phone system becomes a limitation to productivity, many companies now look to the clouds for answers. A major innovator in moving business communications to the cloud is Smoothstone IP Communications. Their VoiceMaxx cloud-based PBX platform goes beyond fixed mobile convergence to unify all types of communication, including text and voice. Now they’re making that system cloud aware.

The Smoothstone Awareness, Messaging and Presence (AMP) ties co-workers together through a cloud-based communications platform that knows the status of everyone in the system. No more guessing if one of your team members is available or not. Remember phone tag? That’s yesterday’s problem. AMP will instantly show you if someone is “free to chat”, “online” or “away.” It also knows if you are “on the phone” or have set your status to “do not disturb.”

Sounds a little like some of the instant messaging and social networking tools that you are already familiar with, doesn’t it? The problem with the popular public apps is that they were designed for the public and don’t contain the rigorous controls needed for corporate security and governance. Smoothstone establishes a private version of these popular apps within the VoiceMaxx cloud. AMP has the directory integration, encryption, chat logging and virus protection you need for corporate-wide deployment.

Consider today’s smartphone. It’s as much a mobile computing terminal as a telephone. If all you are concerned about is that you can call back to the office and get your voicemail messages, you are missing out on a lot of the productivity advantage of this tool. The ideal situation is that you have an integrated voice and data environment and that it stays with you no matter where you go.

Up until recently, the best that can be achieved is to carry both a cell phone and a laptop (now notebook or netbook) computer. That way you had access to both your computing environment and your business phone. BlackBerry was first to integrate voice and messaging into one device. Now iPhone and Android have taken over this function with much more emphasis on applications, especially cloud applications, as a way to integrate mobile and fixed office tools.

We’re crossing a threshold now, from a collection of ad-hoc solutions to a truly seamless system that incorporates everything you need into one unified system. The advantage is that all these things work together by design rather than by kludge and workaround. It’s natural that the integrated environment be powered from the cloud, since we rarely stay in one spot for long. Smoothstone’s VoiceMaxx is a big step forward in that direction and a look at how we’ll communicate in the future.

Have you outgrown your once adequate but now primitive PBX telephone system? Before rushing out and spending a small fortune to upgrade to a bigger and better box, take a close look at cloud communication solutions to see if they are a better fit and lower cost option.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

Job Posting Tool Offers Free Trial

It’s time to think about hiring again. Perhaps you are already in need of qualified candidates, but are none too anxious to wade into the snowstorm of resumes and phone messages that result when you run a job ad. Then there’s the cost of advertising and the dedication of staff time to screen applicants. The improving economy can seem like a mixed blessing unless you have a way to make the hiring process more efficient and less painful. Here’s one you should consider.


ZipRecruiter is in the business of improving the job posting and candidate review process. They have created an online-based system that takes a lot of the burden off you and your staff. If you like it enough to give it a test drive, you can try the system free for four days. Keep all the candidates you acquire during that trial period. If you want to continue with the product, pricing is very attractive.

What does ZipRecruiter do that’s easier than doing it all yourself? The leverage the power of automation to improve productivity. Sure, you can post to all the job boards online, one by one. ZipRecruiter will do that posting for you to the most highly trafficked free job boards on the internet. We’re talking a collection of resources that draws tens of millions of job seekers every month. You click once. your job gets posted to multiple boards.

Now brace yourself for the response. With the job market just recovering, there is a lot of excellent talent out there. There are also a lot of desperate, but unsuitable, candidates to vie for your attention. Don’t let the perfect matches get lost in the shuffle. One way to reduce resume spam is to ask your candidates real-world questions about your business. ZipRecruiter lets you set up an optional online interview so you can review candidate response along with the resumes they submit.

You’ll probably want collaboration with your colleagues before you commit to the time and expense involved with bringing someone in for a face to face interview. With the ZipRecruiter tool you can rate the candidates and share notes all in one place. There’s a tab to view the resume and another to quickly view the candidate's answers to your interview questions.

You know that social media is the way to connect these days. This tool has social networking capability built-in. It takes just a couple of clicks to spread the word about your job openings on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Buzz.

This is a customizable job posting tool with a hosted company job page that promotes all of your job openings in one place. You can simply link to this page from your company website instead of having to build and maintain a completely separate job listing resource.

Want to manage your candidate data offline as well as online? No problem. ZipRecruiter makes it easy to export your candidate to an Excel spreadsheet.

Does this sound a lot easier than doing it all manually or coming up with your own proprietary tools? You bet it is. But why not decide for yourself by getting a free trial of ZipRecruiter right now? See how fast and easy it works for you. You probably won’t go back to the “old” way of posting jobs and evaluating candidates.

Browser Based Video Conferencing and Webinars

Video conferencing, once limited to the corporate environment, is now available to anyone with a broadband connection and web browser. MegaMeeting has a new suite of products available for PCs, MACs and Linux computers that don’t require the usual downloads and installations. If you can browse a website, you can participate in a video conference or webinar.

MegaMeeting’s web-based video conferencing system takes advantage of the Flash Player 9 plug-in that is already installed in most Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. If your computer has 256 MB of RAM and a 1.2 GHz or faster processor, it should work fine. You’ll also need an Internet connection with 240 Kbps bandwidth. That’s pretty much anything that dares to call itself broadband. In actuality, though, you’ll only be using 70 Kbps per video feed. Pretty easy requirements to meet, don’t you think?

A video camera isn’t required to be a participant, but if you have one, or can get a cheap one, you can be one of the 16 simultaneous video screens streaming in the conference. It’s just like one of those discussion shows on TV, but with a lot more screens. Unlike many competing services, MegaMeeting includes free Voice Over IP, so you get audio along with your video. No separate telephone calls are needed.

MegaMeeting’s product also scales from personal and small business use with 10 participants or fewer, on up to private branded enterprise solutions with the maximum number of attendees determines only by your available bandwidth and the number of seats purchased in your account. All of their plans offer unlimited video conferencing worldwide 24/7. Professional solutions support screen, application and desktop sharing plus PowerPoint presentations and computer sharing.

How much does all of this cost? Personal accounts start at under $50 a month. Professional accounts start at $15 a seat with a 3 seat minimum and get cheaper from there. Enterprise level solutions hosted on your own servers are appropriately priced, but considerably cheaper than alternative solutions.

Rural Broadband Stimulus Hopes To One-Up Dial-up

Just before the 4th of July holiday, the long-anticipated rural broadband stimulus funding was launched with release of the official government "Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) and solicitation of applications."

If you want to get in on the action, you best get a move on. Applications are only being accepted between July 14 and August 14 of this year, 2009.

As a potential user rather than a provider of broadband services, you'll have to wait awhile longer before you can expect a nearby on-ramp to drive your buggy onto the information superhighway. Yes, buggy not sports car. If you've been eagerly anticipating FTTF (Fiber to the Farmstead), you may find the definition of broadband a bit disheartening. The bar has been set at a breathtaking speed of 768 Kbps download and 200 Kbps upload to meet the criteria of "broadband" Internet service.

Why such a poky broadband standard when AT&T and Verizon are slugging it out to see who can deliver 50 & 100 Mbps to the most residential users where their U-verse and FiOS services, respectively, are in a feverish construction phase? Simply because some people way-out-there are lucky to get 56 Kbps dial-up modem service on their telephone line. The idea is to get universal digital service in the same way that we've finally gotten universal telephone service and rural electrification.

The one difference is that electricity and telephone service standards are the same everywhere. There isn't one set of standards for city dwellers and another for those in the boonies. But broadband is a different animal. It's always been tiered service, with those who live in denser populated areas and willing to pay more getting to go first class.

Perhaps this is the natural difference between mandated universal service and the workings of the competitive marketplace. I've argued before that broadband should be treated like a utility. Even more than that, it should be considered a strategic infrastructure for the country. Broadband is a lot more than the amusement value of YouTube and Twitter. It's about the commercial value of online shopping, working remotely, and creating value with new Web services. It's about the educational importance of having an immense library at your fingertips that would have stunned Andrew Carnegie, as valuable as the bricks and mortar libraries he donated were to earlier generations. It's about the democracy of collaboration to advocate for a cause or support a political candidate on the other side of the state or the country.

The commercial marketplace will never be all-inclusive. It's profit driven. Where the numbers look good, the infrastructure will be built and the head-to-head competition will be brutal. Areas where the population is too thin to recover capital costs in a timely manner are simply passed over. You can see this today even with cellular phone service. In the city there may be a carrier branded cell phone store on nearly every corner. But drive out where the highway turns into a cow path and you'll find gaping holes in the service footprint. No bars in these places unless they're country taverns.

The opportunity that may be missed here is the chance to lift the entire population to a new plateau. That may sound a bit fanciful, but consider the downward slope we've been on as a society from our post-WWII productivity and world dominance high. The national debt is through the roof. The auto industry nearly died this summer. The banking system had to be brought back from death's door this spring. Anyone looking to "upgrade" their house or job this year? Hanging-on is the new moving up.

We've been told repeatedly by industry and government officials that we're competing in a new world marketplace. Just what tools do we have to compete with? If this is the long anticipated information age, many of us are going to miss it. We going to miss the knowledge jobs. We're going to miss the massive productivity multiplier that instantaneous collaboration offers. We're going to miss the opportunity to live where it's beautiful and still participate in the 21st century economy. We're going to miss the next leg up in technological progress that will be based on video instead of text. We're going to miss it because 768 Kbps is a pittance, not a stimulus.

Hopefully, the minimum will not become the standard and the builders of the rural broadband initiative will exceed expectations, giving us something of real value for our $7.2 billion. Perhaps your company will be one of those that wins a grant to trench fiber or put up a WiMAX tower. If so, I hope you'll think big and set the performance standard high. As a society on the edge, we truly need the best you can possibly do.

GoToMeeting Really is Like Being There

GoToMeeting is touted as a business solution that can replace in-person business presentations. The concept is compelling. Add up the cost of travel plus the value of the time lost getting to and from the designated meeting spot times the number of participants and the cost of even a small get-together can be staggering. Once you discover the true cost, you really can't justify calling business meetings anymore unless they are absolutely essential. Certainly not if there is an electronic solution that can strip away all the inefficiency and leave you only with the incremental cost of the meeting itself. But is there really?

I had a chance to experience GoToMeeting for myself a few days ago. The subject was a presentation from a telecommunications vendor to a group of marketing agents. The presentation itself had the mission of introducing the company's product line, providing enough information so that agents were equipped to sell the products, and generating enough interest that sales efforts would begin almost immediately. A combination audio conference call with GoToMeeting visuals was selected as the best way to simultaneously reach this geographically diverse group of agents.

Participation was simplicity in itself. An email message invited each of us to participate by dialing a phone number and entering a conference code to connect to the audio portion of the program. I did that on my trusty Uniden speakerphone that sits on my computer table. Also in the invite was a link to click to join the visual portion of the program. Clicking that link took me to the GoToMeeting site where the system downloaded a small piece of client software to my computer. It was all automatic and took less than a couple of minutes. There were instructions to follow if something got stuck in a firewall or didn't load properly. No need. GoToMeeting fired up without a hitch.

What I saw on my 19 inch monitor was two windows. One was a blank presentation screen. The other was a control panel. GoToMeeting had asked me to enter my name and email to participate in this meeting. When the control panel appeared, there was my name in the list along with names of the presenter and other participants. A lower window in the control panel offered real-time chat messaging. In this case the message was from one of the meeting organizers who listed the phone number and access code for anyone who hadn't dialed-in yet. Other messages appeared as the presentation went on. I could have entered something to say to the group if I had wanted to.

Once the presentation got underway, the blank screen became a display of the presentation slides. With a click, I expanded this window to full screen and collapsed the control panel. Every once in a while a thought bubble message appeared on the panel announcing that a new participant had joined the meeting.

With the big screen display of the meeting slides a foot from my nose and the presenter's voice on the speakerphone, I was quickly having flashbacks to the last few times I sat in a darkened conference room listening to a similar presentation with no better view of the slide screen or ability to hear the presenter. This was better and more comfortable, as I relaxed in attire too informal for even casual Fridays in corporate America. Plus, this call was in the evening. Sure glad I didn't have to go out in the freezing air and drive ten miles just to sit in somebody else's paneled room. They probably would have provided a plate of coffee and donuts as a favor. But I was glad to sit in my warm office and munch my own cookies.

In my case, I got the full value of an hour's meeting while avoiding an extra hour's round trip through town just for transportation. That's assuming an in-house presentation. If the meeting was at a remote office or plant site, there would be a bus ride, plane trip, rental car and perhaps an overnight in a hotel just to get the same information from the same source with the same fellow participants. Now, I ask you. In this economic environment which makes more sense: Going to a meeting or GoToMeeting?

I Heard What You Wrote Last Summer

Have you ever been in a class or a meeting where you were feverishly taking notes, only to later wonder if you really got it down correctly? One solution is to buy a pocket digital recorder and record what's being said as well as taking notes. But then you have the nightmare of matching up the audio with the text. it sure would be nice if you could automatically synchronize your audio and text. Even nicer if there was one device that would do that. You're in luck. There is.

The Livescribe Pulse(tm) smartpen records as you write. That's right. You write. It records. It's a pen, albeit a good size pen. It's about the size of a larger fountain pen or one of those fat rubbery ballpoint pens. But this is no low-tech ink squirter. The smartpen has a 96x18 OLED display, 2 microphones, an embedded speaker, a high speed infrared camera, 1 GB or 2 GB of memory, a rechargeable lithium battery, and a 32 bit, 150 MHz processor. That makes the smartpen smarter than some PCs still in use.

Here's how it works. The tip of this pen has the usual black, blue or red ink in a replaceable cartridge. But it also has a infrared camera that watches what you write. Now here's the trick. The smartpen needs a special LiveScribe Dot Paper to do its magic. This paper comes in lined notebooks popular with students and more professional looking journals. As you write on the dot paper, the camera tracks and records what it sees. You can later upload your pages and see them just as you wrote. You're not limited to entering special characters like a PDA expects. You can write, draw, scribble or whatever and the smartpen will capture it.

The second part of this one-two punch is that there is a stereo recorder running along as you write. It will record up to 100 or 200 hours worth of audio pickup, depending on how much memory your pen contains. I don't know about you, but if I wrote for 200 hours my arm would fall off. In fact, after 8 hours of meetings in one day I'm tiring of writing and listening. In fact, after 8 hours I'm not sure who said what, when. Ah, the smartpen doesn't get bored or confused. You tap it on the text you wrote and it plays back what it heard at the time.

Pretty clever, right? This pen is great for collaboration. You can post your writings and audio online for your colleagues. You can email your notes to a friend. You can even run searches for keywords to quickly find the exact content in your notes that you are looking for.

So cool, and not all that expensive. The smartpen is less than a couple of hundred bucks and may well replace a bulky notebook computer for many meeting situations. Is it right for you? Watch the informational videos and learn more about the Livescribe Pulse(tm) smartpen.

Cisco's Virtual Teleportation Replaces Airports

Aficionados of Star Trek have long anticipated the day when we could simply beam instantly to wherever we want to go. Well, the technology just isn't there yet. There have been some interesting experiments in quantum physics that suggest physical teleportation may indeed be possible. But it's probably going to have to wait for another century. We we have now, thanks to Cisco, is virtual teleportation.

What can the virtual form of teleportation do for you? How about take you instantly to a business meeting in Hong Kong or Germany or New York? You walk into the conference room and find your colleagues seated around the meeting table. But only some of them are where you are. Others are somewhere else in the world. They look the same, they sound the same. But they are on the other side of a table that you can't reach across.

Cisco calls this technology TelePresence. It's a major improvement in the last big advance in collaboration, video conferencing. The low resolution, small screen size and muddy audio typical of many video conferencing systems has been replaced by large flat screen displays, high definition full motion video, high fidelity audio, and a virtual conference table.

The table is the final touch of magic that makes the TelePresence experience seem real. Each TelePresence room is outfitted with a half table pushed up against a wall. When you turn on the system, the other half of the table appears through the video displays on the wall making it look like there is a single large table. Your local team sits on the physical side. Other participants sit on the virtual side. Except to them they are sitting on the physical side and you are sitting on the virtual side.

Cisco has deployed about 1,000 of these TelePresence systems to about 200 enterprise customers worldwide. They also have a fleet of their own TelePresence meeting rooms in 129 cities of 40 countries. I say fleet, because what Cisco has really created here is a replacement for airlines and airports.

Consider a typical business meeting. You go to an airport, board a plane, land at another airport, and then go to a more or less standard business meeting room at your destination. They're pretty much all the same. You have a large wooden desk with arm chairs in a windowless room containing acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights. There's an overhead projector with screen, a computer to upload your PowerPoint presentations, and a roll-around cart with coffee dispensers. The conference rooms are standardized, as are the airports and planes. So why not just get rid of the airports and planes?

Since all you really need are the conference rooms, just go ahead and hook them together. A TelePresence system and a high bandwidth connection allow you to remove the wall between the conference rooms and simply join them. It's just like opening the partition between two physical rooms in one building. Except that those rooms can be anywhere on Earth that you can get the needed bandwidth. That's pretty much any metropolitan area these days.

Cisco is now renting out their own TelePresence rooms starting at $299 an hour. Expensive room rent? Not really. You'll have a hard time spending less than that to transport one participant via air. If you need to send several people with perhaps overnight stays, Cisco's offer starts to look downright cheap. If your company does a lot of meetings, the cost of a dedicated in-house TelePresence conference center may well be justified. So it may cost up to several hundred thousand dollars for a deluxe setup? So what? How much does that private jet cost to operate and maintain?

Cisco's promoting their TelePresence service as an alternative to the inconvenience of travel. But the benefits go beyond cost savings and the avoided travel stresses. With TelePresence you have the ability to arrange same day meetings with international participation. Teams may just move into one of these rooms to collaborate on their projects. Imagine the productivity improvement when everyone is at the same table continuously. Communications delays become a thing of the past.

Cisco's order of magnitude improvement to video conferencing has created a "realness" to virtual meetings that could become so comfortable that physical meetings may seem ridiculous. Yeah, but, you can't all go out to lunch or dinner, can you? Why not? With the same catering at each end, why can't you dine virtually? There may even be a way to play those silly team bonding games with props and facilitators at each end. Anyone want to hang climbing ropes from the ceilings?

All this virtual collaboration may seem a bit awkward now, but I've got a feeling that it could catch on and become the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't that long ago that exchanging documents was done by overnight mail rather than instantaneous email or even FAX. Who wants to wait for the Post Office anymore? Could the day be far away that people will say, "who wants to wait for a plane anymore?"