My Experience with Cisco TelePresence

I had the opportunity to experience a conference today using Cisco's TelePresence to connect four locations (New York, New Jersey, Seattle, and Silicon Valley) and Cisco's WebEx to connect scores more people on the internet. It was supposed to be five physical locations, but London got ten inches of snow overnight and so they did not join.

The conference ran for five hours and I must say that the high definition video ran flawlessly, and there were only minor glitches in getting people's computers synched up with the projector. The system seamlessly switched amongst the four locations on our three flat panels, based on who was talking, and the sound was crystal clear.

Not bad for $300,000 (for the 3-screen Cisco TelePresence 3000). I'm sure it will get cheaper over time, but I can only imagine that there must be renewed interest with the reduced travel budgets at most companies today.

It is hard to fully explain the experience, but life-size imagery and high-definition with directional audio is a leap ahead of any video conferencing system I've experienced (including Microsoft Office Roundtable). The additional benefits of Microsoft Outlook integration, screen sharing and easy operation would make it a very intriguing purchase for any company with distributed teams.

Additional Links:
On-stage experience
Promotional Video (more details)

What do you think?

@innovate

Get on the Bus to Flexibility

Snow in Seattle today. It will be interesting to see how many of my current clients make it to their office today. I for one am taking the bus and despite it being a bendy bus, it looks like it will manage to make it downtown. It had to go out and around a jack-knifed bus to make it up and over the bridge out of my neighborhood, but it made it.

Forecasters were sure we would get snow Tuesday night, but we didn't, nor did we get snow yesterday despite their predictions all day that we would. Snow didn't come to Seattle until last night. Most schools even announced closures based on these forecasts rather than waking up early to see if it had actually snowed. Forecasters blamed it on a "donut effect" meaning that the mountains to the west and east of Seattle took all the snow.

This Seattle snow fiasco is a good lesson in risk management. Is there really such a thing as 100% probability? While it is important to have a risk management strategy to protect yourself against events of low probability and high impact and every other combination, the key aspect of any such strategy is flexibility.

What if Costco or Nordstrom's had decided to close all of their stores based purely on the weather forecast? What would the unnecessary financial losses have been?

Flexibility is key. Flexibility in everything you do, from human resources to manufacturing to risk management. Without flexibility any strategy, policy, or process is doomed to have some snowless "snow" days.

Look at GM. Underinvestment in flexibility when times were good has left GM on life support and begging for money from the federal goverment because they only are capable of producing cars people don't want at a cost structure they can't sustain.

So when you are building any business or policy or process, look at whether or not you are designing it with the necessary flexibility.

After all nobody wants to get snowed under.

What do you think?

@innovate

A Mobile Dining Innovation

          VS.          

OK, there aren't too many food concepts that I would call innovative, but here is one:

It's a business that is starting up here in Seattle called Skillet Street Food.

It's concept is that it retrofits Airstreams into working, mobile kitchens that serve "evolved cuisine" during breakfast and lunch at locations that change day-to-day. But not day-to-day in the you never know where it will be next sense. They have a calendar and tend to show up at the same spots once per week.

Now I know you may be thinking to yourself, a mobile kitchen, what's new about that?

You may also be thinking to yourself, that sounds strikingly familiar. You might be thinking that sounds just like a taco truck, or roach coach as some would say, well except for the "evolved cuisine" bit.

So what's innovative about that?

Well, it's this:

1. A taco truck has no story. Skillet Street is building its own myth, somewhat consciously, somewhat unconsciously (kind of like the Bacon Salt guys).


2. Like the Bacon Salt guys, they seem to love bacon, having created an eBay store to sell their Bacon Jam along with t-shirts and the like.


3. Whether they realize it or not, the genius in their implementation is that it crams most of the typical once a week customer revenue possible in a catchment area into a single day (times five locations), probably doubling the revenue they would earn from anchoring in a single location. At the same time they reduce burnout at each location - inspiring people instead to schedule the weekly visit in their calendar.

To see if there is there anything in this concept that you could adapt to your business, ask yourself questions like the following:

1. Do you have a compelling and interesting story that would make people like your company?


2. Are your products too available?


3. Do you give your customers something to look forward to?


4. What is your customer surprise and delight strategy?


5. What unorthodox ways can you think of for getting your products/services to customers?


6. Are there different customer "neighborhoods" you could make your products/services available to in order to increase its exposure (coffee by boat anyone)?

Check out the video below:

Innovative or not?

What do you think?

Followup - Why Seattle Needs Double-Decker Buses

I wanted to followup on innovation article #23 of August 20, 2007 where I campaigned for double-decker buses in Seattle as a way to reduce traffic congestion and improve the speed and the trip of public transit riders.

I was surprised to see a double-decker public bus cruising through downtown Seattle the other day. It was a route 417 on its way to Mukilteo and it effortlessly cruised through a yellow light to get the last spot in the bus zone (one a bendy bus wouldn't have fit in).

I don't know if the regional transit bureau serving areas north of Seattle has more than one double-decker bus in their fleet or whether this is a test bus for a future purchase, but it sure looked better cruising through downtown Seattle than a bendy bus bouncing up and down. There is nothing quite like the view from the upper-deck of a double-decker bus as you cruise through a city. I hope this is the sign of more to come. Bendy buses may be a newer concept, but double-decker buses are a better one.

What do you think?

@innovate