Over the Christmas holidays I spent 5 days in Las Vegas visiting friends and ring in the new year in the city that never sleeps.  Over the years Las Vegas continues to transform itself to keep itself relevant from the original sin city and gambling capital to the modern convention/vacation destination.

I spent new year’s eve with 320,000 visitors which is an impressive number by any standards, plus  I managed to do some shopping and visiting a few attractions between visiting friends.

I thought I’d share my observations on how Las Vegas continues to delight visitors in a series of blogs and what retailers can learn from it.

Today’s I’d like to focus on the use of video technology for customers in Las Vegas

One of my stops is at the new Cosmopolitan casino and hotel and their use of video walls in the registration lobby

One of the first impression when you walk in is that it doesn’t look like a video screen but backlit wall panels.  Only when the images start moving do you realize it is a video wall.  As you can see from the video Read More »

Tags: Cisco, cosmopolitan casino, digital sign, gaming, las vegas, MGM Grand, Paris Casino, retail, retailing, video, Video Wall

Day 1 at the Social Media Summit: Social Media Best Practices for Communicators conference has been a real learning experience. What’s really intrigued me about this year’s agenda and general buzz among conference attendees, is the amount of focus around mobile strategies. It’s interesting to watch how quickly the social media, the gamification, and the mobile technology landscapes are changing as smartphones continue to rise in popularity.

Today, there are 1.08 billion smartphones. In 2014, mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage (more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device today).*

In my opinion, it’s how we use smartphone and social media technology that will make a difference in the success of marketing in the future. It’s time to embrace mobile as a main vehicle in our social media and traditional marketing strategies. Here is an example of an innovative way to accomplish this initiative and connect more directly with customers, partners, and peers.

Our Global Events organization, with the great technology expertise of DoubleDutch , created a first of its kind hybrid mobile app called Cisco Events mobile app. As different Cisco proprietary and third-party activities take place, they are included in the mobile app. Participants only have to download the free app one time and can use it year-round.

And as part of the larger Cisco marketing communications best practices, the mobile app and social media efforts integrate into the overall program goals, traditional marketing channels, and centralized online websites or communities.

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Tags: Cisco Events, gaming, mobile, mobile app

What do you get when you combine 5000+ gamers, a 100GE uplink to the Internet, a lot of espresso machines, and no parents to tell them to shut down the noise or go to bed early? A whole lot of fun!

The Gathering (“TG”), is Norway’s largest computer party and kicked off today for its 20th time since 1992. It’s grown so large now that it is held at one of the venues used for the 1994 Winter Olympics. TG continues to attract growing interest to the gaming, computer, and entertainment event, both nationally and internationally and is organized by the non-profit organization KANDU (Kreativ Aktiv Norsk DataUngdom/Creative Active Norwegian Computer Youth). This year it’s powered at record speed by a Cisco CRS-3 router connected to The Gathering’s Internet provider, Altibox at 100 Gbps, along with technical support provided by several of Cisco Norway’s engineers, Merete Asak and Bjornar Forthun.

This isn’t the first time the CRS has played a key role in a Scandinavian gaming conference. The Swedes used our 40G technology in 2007 at their Dreamhack event as we discussed (and video here), but now this has raised the performance bar.

Although they probably won’t be playing Cisco’s award winning myPlanNet game, they’ll still enjoy others such as StarCraft, Quake, and Heroes of Newerth. Participants also participate in creative competitions in programming, graphics, and music.

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Tags: 100G, 100GE, Altibox, Bjornar Forthun, carrier routing system, CRS-3, Dreamhack, ethernet, gamer, gaming, KANDU, Merete Asak, myPlanNet, Norway, Service Provider, TG, The Gathering

Who’s counting down to the midnight launch of World of Warcraft (WoW) Cataclysm? Attracting over 12 million players, WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard Entertainment.

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Tags: Blizzard, dual-band router, gaming, Linksys, Linksys E3000, World of Warcraft