February 10, 2008

Reliving the Glory Days w/Online Video

A friend sent me a link to a video on YouTube yesterday. It was of one of my all time favoriate musicians Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco. He was telling a story about a strange twist of events that found him vacationing in Mexico next to his old bandmate Jay Farrar, a person for various reasons he hasn't spoken to for over ten years. The clip was from a show at the Vic Theater in Chicago from January 2008. It was a funny story that lasted all of 3min.

But it got me searching for old archival footage of Jeff's previous band, Uncle Tupelo. 99% of you probably have no clue who Uncle Tupelo was or who Wilco and Son Volt are. They were/are not mainstream bands that receive lots of airplay on the radio. But Uncle Tupelo was a very signficant band to my friends and I while growing up in the midwest. They blended the twang of americana with the anger of punk. They were one of the few bands that we would pay attention to and get tickets to their shows when they came through Chicago. Sidebar...Jeff Tweedy eventually married a woman that owned a club right near my apartment in Chicago. I got to meet him one night while he sat on the curb waiting for the show to start. 12 years later and it is still my coolest "celebrity" run-in. The purpose of my post is not to go on and on about a band that I used to love that broke up for the usual reasons. My point is that I can go back and experience archived shows and interviews of one of my favoriate bands that had an impact during my formative adult years. How cool is it that I can go back and find the last song ever performed by Uncle Tupelo before they broke up in 1992.

This is one of the key benefits of visual networking. The ability for a friend to forward me a video. The ability for that video to be associated with other related videos and the ability for that video to be streamed to me over my PC, TV or mobile phone. I ended up spending a good chunk of my Sunday evening checking out old music videos and user generated video from Uncle Tupelo shows as far back as 1987. I also forwarded a bunch of them to old friends so they could breathe in the nostalgia of one of our favorite bands.

Posted by Mike Kisch at 09:41 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 08, 2008

Visual Networking: Bringing Families Together

Pundits often focus on the negative side of our ever growing fascination with technology. Arguments are made that technology is creating distance between families and enabling anti-social behavior among our children. This may be true, but a recent experience has me optimistic about the ability of video technologies to bridge physical and emotional distance and bring a family closer together.

My wife and I are new parents. We waited a bit later than the normal couple to have children and this created a level of pent-up demand amongst our parents. In particular, my mom and dad had to wait 36 years for their first grandchild. This was especially hard as they watched all of their siblings become grandparents. Since the birth of my daughter, Ava 6 months ago we have seen my parents four times and my in-laws 3 times. Before the baby, we saw our parents at most 2 times per year. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how excited they were about the new addition to the family. It may also tell me something about how interesting they find my wife and I after 36 years.

Since I got married we have rotated who we spend every holiday season with. This year it was my parents turn, but because they had visited us at Thanksgiving and were in the middle of a major remodel they stayed on the east coast and we on the west. I felt bad that we couldn’t travel to see them because at this age Ava changes on a weekly basis. As an example of this, I was just out of town for three days and by the time I got back my daughter had rolled over for the first time and was sticking her toes in her mouth. This may not seem like much to most people, but to a new father it meant that I missed a series of firsts.

I really wanted my parents to be able to experience part of the holiday with Ava. The problem was that at her age she can’t talk, can’t write an email and a photo while being worth a thousand words lacks the nuance of live interaction. As I thought about this I receive a corporate-wide email announcing a program called “Home for the Holidays”. Apparently some charitable soul at Cisco sold senior management on the idea of allowing employees to use our Telepresence systems to reach out to our friends and families during the holidays. Cisco has over 100+ Telepresence facilities across the world and one of them happened to be near where my parents live in New Hampshire. I quickly set up the session and arranged for my parents to be let into the Cisco office in Boxborough. As the day approached I tried to explain to my parents what Telepresence was. They didn’t seem to get it and eventually I gave up and told them they would understand once they experienced it.

The day after Christmas my wife, daughter and I entered my building on the Cisco campus in San Jose. At the same time my parents were getting situated in a room in Boxborough, MA 3,000 miles away. As the Telepresence system came to life I watched with amusement as the eyes lit up on every member of my family including my 6-month old daughter. We talked for almost an hour. We discussed how Xmas day went, what gifts Ava received, what we had for dinner and how we planned to spend the rest of our holidays. We put Ava on the desk facing my parents. They were able to make her smile by talking to her and making exaggerated facial expressions. They commented on how her eye color was changing, her hair was growing out and the little scratch on her nose she had given herself during her nap the day before. For a moment it felt like they were in the room with her. The only thing missing was the ability to hold her and change a dirty diaper. It was an emotional moment made possible by a revolution in the use of video to bridge distances that audio and text alone have been unable to do.

In a discussion with a group of analysts the other day, they asked me if I thought visual networking experiences like Telepresence would ever be of interest to mainstream consumers. I said that I didn’t know but as our world becomes flatter and people are separated by greater distances, as the younger generation continues to develop different ways to communicate, the combination of social networking and digital video has the potential to make the world feel more personal than it has in a long time.

Posted by Mike Kisch at 02:16 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)