adoption curve dot net

I’ve used video-conferencing for a number of years, with more-or-less degrees of success. I first came across it when I was working with a team based in Hong Kong – we used a conference-room system for project meetings which worked reasonably well, but could be temperamental to set up and wasn’t much for quick ad-hoc meetings.

Desktop video conferencing is a way of getting around some of the costs and hassle, but hasn’t exactly had a reputation for user-friendliness. And there are other, human and social, issues which makes VC an imperfect replacement for a face-to-face encounter.

Flash Meeting is an interesting attempt from the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute to work around some of these issues, and do it in a way which doesn’t involve expensive hardware and complex software. It’s a demonstration / proof-of-concept at the moment, but there are a lot of interesting features which combine instant messaging and conferencing into one interface, as well as a queuing system which uses a hand-raising metaphor to manage the problem of several participants attempting to speak simultaneously. There’s also a ‘meeting timeline’ which would be very useful when reviewing recorded conferences – rather than scrolling randomly through a recording looking for a particular segment, the software provides a ‘gantt chart’ view of the participants inputs.

It remains to be seen if it will ever become a commercial product, but if the preview is indicative of the end-product, it would good to see it become a viable product or service.

Here’s an interesting idea: a service that monitors RSS feeds for keywords, then captures the items that feature them.

Technically, it’s not difficult to do, but there are a couple of caveats. It’s not clear which RSS feeds are being monitored, and the results are delivered by email, which seems a bit of an oversight. Surely delivery through an RSS feed would make more sense?

Here’s a question from Seth Godin:

What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

As he goes on to explain, the answer is probably not what it should be. Being British, I’m genetically predisposed to finding reasons to moan (it’s the British national sport, after all), but as Seth points out, hard times are relative. Particularly his point about interest rates – which was something that came to mind when I came across some reactions to a Bank of England rate decision a few months ago.

You’d have needed to have spent the last two days under rock in order to have missed this, but Apple are recalling batteries for the 15″ PowerBook G4. Apparently they can overheat, “causing a potential fire hazard” according to Apple. Although I’m not sure how you’d tell the difference between a normal PB and one that was about to catch fire…

While we’re on a ‘why you need a blog’ theme, here’s 10 excellent reasons why your salesforce could make good use of blogs, courtesy of Radiant Digital:

1. Information at your fingertips – With multiple authors contributing content, you soon have a information-rich environment of client information, competitive intelligence, and other sales artifacts
2. You become the de facto destination for information – What could be better than having your customer access a privatized portion of your blog filled with project and proposal content?
3. Better distribution of your content – Your RSS feed is a personalized channel piping straight to your customer
4. Instant collaboration – Password-protect a part of your Blog and Voila!, instant extranet.
5. Branding – Your blog is a billboard. Personalize as you please.
6. Online Proposals – The web is your platform to create your proposal. Wouldn’t your client prefer to login and view your proposal rather than thumbing through pages?
7. Cross-selling opportunities – Invariably, your client will ask, “How did you create this?”.
8. Humanizing your company – Big or small, every company can use another channel to communicate with their customers.
9. So when you’re “Googled”, you’re found
10. Because your competitor is already using Blogs

Don’t you just love joined-up government? Not content with foisting a broken-before-it’s-started ID card on us, our representatives have now cooked up a scheme where we’ll all need three cards to obtain health care:

Guardian: NHS patients will need three cards

Which is par for the course. Apparently the reason that the British driving license comes in two parts – a credit-card sized plastic card and a football-pitch-sized piece of paper – is that when designing the plastic version, some genius in the Department of Transport forgot that there would be no way of recording convictions on a plastic card. So now instead of one inconveniently-sized paper license, we have two bits, neither of which is valid without the other.

And then we wonder why Government IT projects have a lousy success rate…</rant>

In case you’ve been wondering what practical use a blog could be put to in your situation, here’s a list of 10 examples that could have used blogs to could effect, courtesy of Marketing Profs:

Ten Companies That Missed Great Blog Opportunities

While the examples might not apply to every situation – after all, the opportunity to supply shoes for elephants isn’t something that comes to all of us very often – there are some clear examples of missed opportunities here. Perhaps something to spark some ideas?