Dick Tracy phone in London before NYC

Some 60 years after it was imagined by Chester Gould, and more than six months after the product was pre-announced at CES, LG recently released its “GD910” watch phone. Dick Tracy never heard of 3G networks or touch-screen LCDs, but he did sport the world’s first (albeit fictional) wrist-mounted videophone.

Priced at £500, the first 50 phones that went on sale in London sold out in 10 minutes, although more are coming. The phone is also available in Dubai but not the US.

The FT reviewer raved about the phone in this morning’s “How to Spend It” conspicuous consumption supplement. However CNET UK was more restrained.

However, FT reviewer Jonathan Margolis notes the main value delivered by the phone is status:

Will you find it useful? Absolutely not — unless it’s to impress people in offices, bars, airport lounges and everywhere else on the planet. … It’s the Bugatti Veyron of gadgetry: pointless, impractical, sublimely silly but impossibly desirable. Could it be a rebirth for the most unwanted technology in gadget history, the video phone call? Of course not, don’t be silly.

If it’s available for sale without a required data plan, then at $834 actually quite a bit cheaper than the iPhone. Also more exclusive — a few hundred vs. 30 million — even if it’s not nearly as useful.

Repositioning the videoconference

Last month I went to Cisco to see a demo of its high-end videoconferencing system, introduced to the world last October. I saw a demo of both the Cisco TelePresence 3000 — with three 65" HDTV screens and a list price of $299K — and the Cisco TelePresence 1000, with only one screen at a mere $79K. As advertised, it was a lifelike experience, and my colleagues and I agreed that it was a great way to run a meeting if you could afford the capital cost and the bandwidth.

Part of Cisco’s effort to justify the $300K (and the 6-9 Mbps to run the three screens) is avoid using the term “videoconference,” which covers everything from PC-based solutions to other high-end solutions. Its two major HighDef rivals take a different tack. HP takes the V-word head-on, proclaiming “HP Halo: Light years beyond video conferencing.” Only Polycom — the longtime leader in low-end solutions and overall unit sales — refers to its HD products as “Professional - High Definition Video Conferencing.”

Of course, “videoconference” is part of the lexicon and “TelePresence” is not. Imagine my surprise last week when I was watching an episode of 24, and presidential chief of staff “Tom Lennox” (former childstar Peter MacNicol) comes on screen and announces to VP Noah Daniels (Powers Booth):

The Russian president is calling for you in the TelePresence suite. He’s insisting on a face to face.

How about that? With two sentences, we have

1. an introduction to the buzzword;
2. the implication that this is something important for the heads of state of major powers to use for their most important meetings; and
3. the suggestion that a foreign president considers using the Cisco videoconferencing product as equivalent to a “face to face.”

Other than dropping the brand name — and the lingering Cisco logo on the TV screen — the product placement seemed natural and very effective. Looking at the Russian official arrayed on the screen (and over the shoulder of the US team) both made for a dramatic confrontation and showed the technology’s potential.

Cisco has a Flash clip of the sequence on their website, which also shows clips from an October promo of TelePresence 3000 on the Fox TV show Vanished (whatever that is) as well as placement of other Cisco products on 24. (For hardcore 24 fans, the distinctive ringing of the telephones at CTU Los Angeles is recognizably that of a Cisco VoIP phone). The level of product placement in 24 has drawn complaints from fans, but the use of a TelePresence suite seems more plausible than the claim that CTU network is impervious to attack.

Still, I wonder about the efficiency of using a consumer TV show as a way to sell a high-end business product. Of course, early in the product cycle, the goal is brand (and even category) awareness rather than closing a specific sale. And it could be relatively cheap: one guess is that the placement costs $150K — less than one TelePresence 3000.

Photo credits: all pictures taken from ”24 (Season 6): 1:00 a.m.-2.00 a.m.”

Technorati Tags: Cisco, videoconferencing

WebEx 2D vs. 3D

This morning’s paper brought the news of Cisco’s $3.2 billion purchase of WebEx. John Fontanna of Network World sees it as a direct confrontation with Microsoft, while Tom Keating thinks Cisco overpaid. With Cisco paying $57/share, clearly it would have been cheaper in January 2006 (at $20) or four years ago (at $8).

It’s impossible to drive in Silicon Valley without seeing the WebEx sign, but I must be the only techie in town that never had a need for their service. Part of it is that (while they have a Macintosh-friendly management team) they ignored the Mac until 2003. A textbook publisher has been dunning me for years to attend their WebEx-hosted webinars and this year WebEx themselves started spamming me (at a .edu?) to sign up for their service. I certainly have done a large amount of virtual work in the past 15 years, including three years of teleconferences as an HP supplier. But today, Skype or iChat handles my basic teleconference or videocall needs well enough — it’s hard to justify paying more than free.

But now there’s a 3D challenger to WebEx with Palo Alto-based Qwaq, although I’m hardly a neutral observer. More than 15 years ago, I met its founder, David Smith,, when we were peddling our respective (award-winning) Mac CAD packages — he with Virtus Walkthrough and me with PLOTTERgeist. After publishing Tom Clancy-licensed videogames, for the last five year David has been working with Alan Kay and others to develop the Smalltalk-based, open source 3D platform called Croquet. With an active university research community behind it, Croquet has solved a number of difficult problems, including distributed asynchronous computing, being able to patch a running system, and virtual privacy issues.

A year ago, David & I reconnected on a panel discussion at UC Berkeley and he spoke to my MBA technology strategy class about his ideas of making a commercial product layered on Croquet. Last month I met Qwaq CEO Greg Nuyens, who explained the informal tagline is “WebEx meets Second Life.” This week, Qwaq came out of stealth mode.

Qwaq has a ways to go to catch either WebEx or Second Life, but they have some key opportunities. Versus Second Life, they bring a business-oriented, “behind the firewall” enterprise offering. Versus WebEx, they offer a compelling virtual presence. The key feature that I (and others) think is a winner is persistence, e.g. having a virtual war room where you can resume a meeting with all the documents on the wall where you left them. Blogger Steve Borsch thinks such asynchronous collaboration is essential for virtual distributed work. (Borsch claims to have grokked Adobe’s Carousel back in 1991, when I wondered what they were smoking).

Several of the bloggers remark on the benefit to users of having Qwaq Forums built upon an open source (and thus open API) base. Is this merely a theoretical advantage (like the idea of switching from Red Hat Linux) or will competitors or customers actually use these APIs? This is a persistent issue in open IT strategies, but I don’t understand this “space” well enough to know the answer.

Technorati Tags: virtual reality, videoconferencing