Cisco Collaboration Summit - Quick Thoughts, Pix and a Wayback Video clip

Just have a window here with some quick thoughts, photos and a short clip I think you'll enjoy. As all of us who were there knows, most of the content is under NDA, so I can't say much anyhow. I do plan to share some high level analysis of my takeaways, and need to get some clearance first, so stay tuned.

The 2014 edition of Cisco's Collaboration Summit was very good as always, and worth the trip to LA. Actually, I missed some of the best parts as a variety of delays caused my flight to be 4.5 hours late. This means I didn't get to see the opening talks from John Chambers and Rowan Trollope. At least I can get a replay of Rowan's session, and will watch that once I'm back.

In short, the big news was Project Squared, a mobile collaboration platform. If this sounds like Circuit, you'd be right, but that's all I can say for now. Overall, Cisco has a lot happening in their collaboration business, and don't let the recent dip in sales numbers fool you. They have a laser focus on this space, and are all about innovation, the cloud, mobility, video and being user-centric. There are a lot of moving parts here, and the time was well spent getting updated on where all this is going. Sorry to sound so careful, but... I have to be careful. Hang on, and next week I'll have something more interesting to say. Until then...

Rowan Trollope during the locknote

Author Steven Johnson with some great insights about the real nature of innovation

One example - "the slow hunch" - talking about how great ideas often take a long time to properly germinate. This is a cool photo of a slide he put up from the earliest days of the Internet. It's the sticker hand-written by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN exclaiming that this server should not be powered down. Why? Back then, this was where the entire Internet resided and the whole thing would grind to a halt if some nitwit did that. I think you'd need to do a bit more now to get that result, huh?

Demo of the new and improved IX5000 telepresence. Very nice and still an impressive experience. Still very costly, but much less maintenance cost, power consumption and more manageable to install. What you can't see here is the open space around us, with a lot of natural light and ambient sound. You'd never know from the quality we experienced, so kudos are due for how well engineered this system is.

With that taste of today's telepresence, how about TP circa 2006? Here's a 2 minute video clip I made of the demo I got at Cisco Canada's HO when it first came out. Back then, this was a very cool experience, and I thought you'd enjoy comparing how it looks to the above picture. Notice how much bigger the camera was back then, and how you launched a call via an IP phone. I don't make video clips much any more, but this is by far the most widely-watched clip of mine. If you like like music, you might want to spend some time on my YouTube site, and we can talk more about that later.