The first session after the morning break is Marthin De Beer of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology group, speaking about how video and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing the enterprise. Like many of the speakers that preceded him, a lot of his material is pretty introductory, like explaining how social networking is being used, and what a mashup is. He talks a bit about the social phenomenon of the blending of social and business personas and functions, which I find to be an interesting topic: many young people start out using goofy pseudonyms on the first social networks that they use, but gradually move to having a public persona that includes both personal and business aspects of their life.
Unsurprisingly, he sees user content creation as transforming the very nature of content creation, and is being driven by consumer/home access to products and technologies including highspeed internet access, high-resolution video capture and peer-to-peer sharing. Whether it’s a consumer, business or service provider doing the content creation, it’s like to include some combination of social networking, collaboration and entertainment.
Yikes, more video clips with technical problems, although this one was really just a few-second clip. Ironically, the audio was clipped off at the end, removing the word “all” from the tagline “video shows it all”.
Well, I guess we have to allow him a bit of video, since the main focus of his talk is getting around discussing the role of video in the future of the web in terms of user-created content, but also for tele-presence and surveillance. He sees a place for consumer, prosumer and professional video content; given that almost 100 people have viewed the 9-second YouTube video showing my boyfriend making a Riedel wineglass chime by tapping it against his forehead, I truly believe that there’s room for all types of content out there.
Cisco is in the tele-presence business, and De Beer sees tele-presence as a powerful tool for collaboration, especially when it can be embedded in some of the lower-level networking layers for performance and scalability. Now that we’ve all mastered online collaboration in a text-based manner, video is the next step up.