Corporate tea room XBox 360's

Using information technology to hold together the community of workers will undoubtedly become integral to the way companies work as we move into a less office block centralised world.  For many years video conferencing has been seen as a way to join remote offices and be productive without travelling.  From systems sat on the top of old CRT televisions to the modern high definition telepresence rooms videoconferencing has held the promise of Star Trek style visual communications for all.

Over the entire length of my IT experience though I have yet to see video conferencing that delivers on this promise.  A lot of techies think they do, but as teasing the units into making a connection inevitably requires a techie to be present they often don’t realise that most business people struggle to make these work.  Even with a technologist present it inevitably takes the first ten or fifteen minutes of a meeting to actually achieve a connection to the other party.  I suspect that if investment is made in these systems they would work better, but alas in many companies they are caught in an investment loop because upper management does not want to invest because “video conferencing is useless”.

This all looks to be changing in the consumer world with a number of developments threatening to turn out TV’s into videoconferencing units.  Last year’s Google TV introduced a set top box that could be equipped with a camera and plugged into your TV to deliver Internet television and other services.  One of the potential services here would be videoconferencing delivered using service that are already in place such as Skype etc.  In the last week however Google announced their Google Plus social networking product and this contains a component called Hangouts.  This essentially a video chat room that promises to make connecting and sharing video connections much more interesting.  

Internet TV will inevitably come and form a part of the future however there is another potentially more immediate solution to the videoconferencing television.  Throughout the world over 50 million televisions are equipped with a Microsoft XBox 360 and of  these  a quarter are equipped with a Microsoft Kinnect.  This device is a motion sensitive controller for playing games but it is also equipped with a camera and microphones meaning that there is a network of millions of televisions all waiting to share the Internet.  Add to this Microsofts’ recent $8 billion deal with Skype, the popular consumer based voice and video connectivity service, and you have the seeds of an easy to use global video conferencing network available to all.

Many corporates will look at this and assume this does not matter to them as this sits in the consumer world, however if you can connect your home workers via this network then virtual tea rooms and meeting rooms become practical.  Better still this would be done using a mechanism that people are ordinarily using to stay in touch with family around the world.  It may well be that, initially at least, the price for this will be corporate XBox 360’s in meeting rooms.  Would you be willing to pay that price or would you insist that this games technology remains in teenagers bedrooms where it belongs?