know | Future

Videoconferencing has never taken off in our industry, mostly because of the quality. A creative only has to see his beautiful roughcut butchered over a stuttering video link to walk away from the technology forever. Yesterday I had the opportunity to finally take a live look at the LifeSize high definition videoconferencing system. In short, the system delivers a 16:9 widescreen 1280×720 pixel image (720p in broadcast parlance) at 30 frames per second with very little artifacts. By comparison, traditional video conferencing uses CIF resolution which is 352×240. Thanks to Videré, a specialist on video conferencing systems based in Quincy, MA, I was able to see it side by side with a traditional videoconferencing rig, and there is no comparison…

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If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.
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This morning we have two interesting announcements from some important players in the creative Digital Asset Management front:

NAPC partners with Aprimo - This partnership between NAPC, probably the largest integrator in the DAM/Creative space and Aprimo, who just bought the old Doubleclick marketing workflow software, promises integration of DAM from Xinet with Aprimo’s workflow software. NAPC has been positioning itself as more of a developer and has expanded its own proprietary integration solutions such as overlays to make Xinet’s Webnative more powerful and accessible via an enhanced GUI. You can read the press release here…

Artesia announces integration with creative apps - Artesia’s Enterprise Content Management System is one of those DAMs that have until recently been a cumbersome fit with ad agencies and other creative shops. With their new version 6.5 though, they are adding tight integration with the Mac platform, Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. For the press release go here…

Red Herring is reporting that Chicago-based Tantus Networks, who currently provides WiFi services for hotels is plannig on offering an advertising supported WiFi service in Chicago. Local businesses would provide the WiFi locations in trade for advertising for them and up to five other businesses of the hosts choosing. The CEO also refferred vaguely to the possibility of providing location aware searches and targeted advertising, but it sounds like vaporware right now.

I had previously commented on Google’s and Eartlink’s efforts in this business here…

Palo Alto neighbors and fellow Stanford “graduates” Google and Sun Microsystem have announced an alliance that will allow users to run spreadsheets and word processing right from the Google toolbar. There seems to be a sharp division of opinion between old school stalwarts like Forbes who are pooh poo’ing it as a non event and others perhaps a bit better informed like InfoWorld that see it as having far reaching implications. I cast my lot with the latter.

Picture this: you are working on a spreadsheet and you type 401k in a cell and the sidebar ad, in the spreadsheet software provided by Google and driven off AdWords, changes to a pitch for Fidelity custodial accounts offering a free on-line 401k calculator spreadsheet. You can also strain your imagination out to a Google appliance, powered by Linux and Open Office, connected to WiFi broadband supplied by, you guessed it, Google. The question is, will we advertise on anything but Google in the future?

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