Web-Style Audience Responses in Real-World Meetings

Traditional thinking tends to always favor in-person meetings and training over virtual Web-based replacements. Most people would say that while Web-based meetings and conferences have their place, especially when travel is difficult or too expensive, in most areas they fall behind a face-to-face meeting.

But anyone who has used Web-based conferencing extensively knows that there are certain advantages over real-world meetings and conferences that extend beyond the travel savings. And one of the biggest is the ability to instantly quiz and poll meeting and conference attendees to track their knowledge and grasp of the information being presented. This kind of real-time feedback can be invaluable when it comes to customizing and even changing presentations on the fly.

And it is also much harder to gather in person. In small meetings you can ask for a show of hands, but this doesn't work with complex questions and there's the reality that people will change their vote to match the rest of the group rather than be the only person without a hand up. And when it comes to auditorium-sized conferences and training, shows of hands are pretty much useless.

If you're lucky enough to work in a modern university environment, or have a business with advanced and dedicated training facilities, you may have access to audience response systems built into seats and desks. But these are very expensive to deploy and can't be taken to any conference room or meeting environment.

This problem is why I was interested in trying out Turning Technologies' ResponseCard AnyWhere, part of its TurningPoint Response System.

This Week In Emerging Technology - July 24th

Here are the emerging technologies stories for the week of July 21st.

Put the CPU in the Fridge - An interesting project at Purdue University where researchers are working on a terchnique to use micro components to refrigerate PC processors.

Highly Predictive Security - The folks over at SANS and SRI will be presenting a service that uses detailed analysis methodologies and DShield to improve network blacklisting techniques.

Your Next Gadget CPU - Intel is talking about their next line of system on a chip processors which are destined for the next generation of gadgets.

The Future Rosie the Robot - A French company is offering a humanoid robot at a comparatively low price. Though still very high for essentially a toy.

Optimizing Web Site Search

Nowadays businesses spend a lot of time thinking about search and how it relates to their Web sites and a lot of money trying to come up with ways to improve how their sites relate to search.

But for many businesses this takes the form of an almost exclusive focus on improving their visibility to Google and boosting their site ranking through a variety of search engine optimization techniques. And while SEO can be effective, it is also in many ways a black art, with even the best SEO practitioners feeling that they have little control over the changes and whims in search that Google enacts.

The funny thing is that there is an area of search that these businesses have much greater control over but that they pay much less attention to or even ignore outright. And this is the search capabilities of their own Web sites.

When it comes to how users find information and content on your site, a well-implemented search engine can pay real dividends in helping users find what they are looking for. But, strangely, many proprietors of Web sites seem to ignore their own search capabilities, doing little in the way of internal search optimization.

Video: The Future of Unified Communications

Click here to watch the video

Unified communications has become a very hot topic for enterprise IT operations. The ability to combine and easily manage all forms of voice and digital communications within a company clearly offers huge cost and time savings benefits.

The importance of this field can be seen by the number of major vendors jumping into the Unified Communications arena.

But unified communications has been slow to take off. In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about the future of Unified Communications.

Click here to see the video interview of a look at unified communications

Downloading Flash Movies Made Simple

When it comes to Web-based video, Adobe's Flash format dominates. From YouTube to MySpace to eWEEK video, the majority of video on the Web is Flash.

But while Flash has lots of benefits for developers and content producers, consumers often find it an unfriendly format when it comes to using video outside of the Web.

If a user wants to download Flash video to his or her desktop for use on a mobile device, or for fair use such as in schoolwork or research or for (let's face it) less legal reasons, there are many roadblocks that make this difficult, from sites that make it hard to download Flash files to the lack of support for the Flash format itself on many mobile devices.

There are some free tools and browser plug-ins available that attempt to help users download Flash files, but in my experience these don't always work and can be difficult to use. That's why when the $29.95 GetFLV application crossed my desk I was intrigued enough to give it a try.

Can the Videoconferencing Boom Last?

It's a familiar story line. Whenever travel becomes too expensive or difficult, there's a deluge of stories about how business travel will become a thing of the past and how everyone will be meeting and doing face-to-face sit-downs via videoconferencing.

Whenever this happens, there's a rush to invest in videoconferencing systems, which see heavy use for a time. And then, as the economy improves or travel once again becomes affordable, these videoconferencing rooms see less and less use, and people once again start doing their meetings in person.

Right now we are clearly once again in a boom phase for videoconferencing. With the high cost of travel and rising energy costs, many businesses are once again taking a very hard look at implementing videoconferencing solutions in the hope of cutting down on travel costs and improving worker productivity.

But the question is, Can this current generation of videoconferencing maintain the momentum of this current cycle and remain a fixture of modern business life or will it once again fade into the background when (or if) travel once again becomes affordable?

Share Your iPod Experience Wirelessly

Summer is one of my favorite times of year. And one of my favorite things to do is take long walks or hang out at the beach while listening to good tunes on my MP3 player.

However, I also like to take walks or hang out at the beach with friends. And unless I want to cut myself off from my friends, that means no MP3 player or shared tunes, unless I want to make like Radio Raheem with the super-loud boom box.

But now I have another option. I can broadcast the tunes from my MP3 player (or any audio device with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack) and my friends can listen to the same tunes on their own headphones.

The i2i Stream, from Aerielle Technologies, is a small device that uses old-school wireless technology to let users broadcast an audio stream up to 30 feet.

Google Wants to Make the Web More Lively

Three-dimensional virtual-reality-based social networking! Just saying it can make you want to cringe. Didn't we already go through this with "Second Life" and its ilk?

We all know the problems. Most of these programs like "Second Life" are big fat applications, essentially video games. They have a high learning curve that discourages casual users. And they don't integrate well with Web sites and other social networking tools.

But what if instead of a big fat application you had a small browser plug-in? And what if it had a relatively low learning curve? And instead of people being forced into a big virtual world in order to connect, customized virtual spaces could be easily dropped into Web sites and collaboration systems? With that you might actually have a 3-D virtual-reality-based social networking system that people and businesses would embrace.

This is the concept behind Lively, which was just released as a beta by Google. Lively runs as a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer and with it sites, businesses and people can quickly get up and running with virtual spaces that enable avatar-based collaboration, chat and social networking.

Adobe Reader Gets Connected

REVIEW: Just about a week after Adobe released version 9 of Acrobat, the latest version of the tool that most people use to read PDF files was also released. For most users, Adobe Reader 9 won't seem like a major departure from the previous versions of the free PDF reading tool.

The interface has been streamlined a bit, making it simpler to view multiple page PDF files. And search can be easily done across multiple PDF files.

However, the majority of the new features for Adobe Reader 9 fit into two camps: increased integration with the Acrobat.com Web site and support for new features introduced in Acrobat 9 (click here to read my review of Acrobat 9).

Acrobat 9: The Web/Desktop Hybrid for Documents

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REVIEW: When it comes to document collaboration and sharing, there can be little argument that most of this activity is moving to the web. But there can also be little argument that the current slate of Web-based tools come up short in features and capabilities when compared to desktop tools.

Perhaps what is needed is a hybrid approach, something that combines the strong feature set of a desktop application with the easy collaboration of a web-based approach. If this is truly the case, then Adobe may be on the right track.

That's because the latest release of their flagship Acrobat document platform is definitely focused on combining Acrobat's strong document editing and creation features with broad web-based collaboration, sharing and conferencing tools.

To do this Acrobat 9, which was released in June, relies heavily on the recently released Acrobat.com to provide web-based collaboration and sharing tools, as well as leveraging other products from the Adobe portfolio to add conferencing and live document reviewing features. And while there are few completely new capabilities in the core Acrobat feature set, many of been overhauled and improved to such a degree that they feel like completely new features.