Crazy business idea: videoconferencing event/party spaces =)

Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Sacha Chua

Yes, videoconferencing should be the kind of thing anyone can get working at home, but technical glitches often come up.

I think there’s a market for at least one company that can set up an event space with a good screen, a computer, a reliable network connection, and a sound system. It beats having lots of people clustered around one laptop and spending most of the time struggling with technical issues. Market: business meetings during the day, globally dispersed families / friends at night and on weekends.

Anyone with that kind of business in Manila, please contact my mom. =)

More posts about: idea // 8 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/5405

Dennis Groves

Hi Sacha,

It is such a great idea that somebody has done exactly this already:
they are known as Apple Computer. :-)
- http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua
  
  The laptop my mom was having all these problems on? A MacBook.
  
  No matter how pretty or easy-to-use a computer is, it’s no match for forgotten passwords, flaky Wifi connections, and high stress. And while it’s fine to have maybe four or so people gathered around a computer and speaking into the webcam or the built-in microphone, if you want twenty people to enjoy the experience, you could use a better sound system. =)
http://blog.melchua.com Mel

This might make a nice companion/add-on to existing internet cafes in the Philippines. In the US, I’ve seen office rental companies that specialize in short-term “office/executive space” (we used a space like this for ILXO last summer) and you can rent, by the hour, meeting rooms with the functionalities you described. I’ve never heard of families using them to talk with relatives, though; that’s a neat use case.
http://fairhaven.typepad.com rjh

The first killer is decent audio to match the video. I spend spend 15-20 hours a week in various forms of teleconferencing. It’s amazing how many ways the audio bridging can screw up. Then you mix in the VOIP systems that share the cable with video and go into static bursts whenever the video is changing a lot. Then you have the horrific problems of mixing a bunch of people in a single room with various others on headphones and speakerphones.

The family video conferences are a lot easier. Once we worked through various setup issues, it works great. (I’ve got family at three corners of North America, spanning four time zones. The video conferencing is very effective, even over the mediocre links to Alaska.)
Dennis Groves

I agree with rjh,

I always have a good conference 1:1 with my son, sister, mother, father & friends. It is when I have to conference at work where things break down really fast. 5 people – Voip and video, speakers phones and globally distributed – then it is a giant pain, with various problems.

Sacha, what was/is the problem – my Mac is my fail-safe system; although I am running emacs on it. :)

Dennis
Steph Sy

try this?

http://www.entrepconnect.com
ebargados

i believe this is what you are looking for:

http://www.lifesize.com

High Definition Enterprise Class Video Conferencing. All you need is a good LCD or Plasma and a decent internet connection.

Let me know if you need more info. I sell, install and support a wide variety of video conferencing solutions from LifeSize and Polycom.
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

It’s not about the tech, it’s about people’s access to the tech. =)

On This Day...

2012: Poach my assistants, they’re awesome — Most companies try to be hush-hush about good people. That makes sense. You don’t want to train people and then [...]
2011: Geek tidbits: Postfix configuration for development and testing — From November: We got the mail information for our Rails site, so I reconfigured the mail server. We’re doing a lot [...]
2010: Taho — From Sunday: When I was growing up, we often had taho for breakfast. Manila had many magtataho who roamed the streets [...]
2009: Lotus Connections Communities topics+replies feeds to OPML — Keeping track of discussions in Lotus Connections Communities can be difficult, so I thought I’d use a feed reader to [...]
2009: Behind the scenes: Livin’ la Vida Emacs — In October 2006, I gave a short presentation on Livin’ la Vida Emacs (or the Emacs editor as a way [...]
2008: Library shortcuts — Matt Price e-mailed me about this wonderful piece of wizardry he added to YubNub (which is kinda like a command [...]
2008: Weekly review: Week ending Dec 7 — Last week: Work: Totally rocked with Drupal and Linux. =) Work: Set up next two conference calls for Web 2.0 [...]
2008: The benefits of writing — Jeff Muzzerall sent me this paper on the Benefits of Writing: Health and Productivity. The paper summarizes other research showing, [...]
2008: Let’s talk about passion — Of all the small-talk questions people usually ask, the one I avoid asking is “What do you do?” I’m not [...]
2006: Movies That Motivate — Kevin McIntosh just linked me up with an interesting motivational speaker named Emmanuel Lopez who’s starting a movie / networking series [...]
2005: The Power of the Human Spirit — Irine Yu pointed me to the speech delivered by Intel Excellence in Teaching awardee Dr. Josette Biyo: When your job becomes [...]
2005: December 6: Ecole Polytechnique massacre — Sixteen years ago, 14 women were massacred by a man who hated feminists. Most were engineering students who had the [...]
2005: Ateneo team to compete in ACM ICPC World Finals! — From Didith’s blog: The top Atenean team will compete in the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition World Finals! Way cool. =) Inggit! ;)
2004: On being an assembly-line programmer — It’s recruitment time in the Philippines again, and companies in search of fresh programming talent are hitting the colleges to chat [...]
2003: Two-minute mysteries — http://www.sd22.bc.ca/silverstar/writing/mysteries/mysteries.html an archive of the sort of thing you’re looking for, http://www.qesn.meq.gouv.qc.ca/schools/olp/2mmclub/solve.htm “The 2-minute mystery writing club” I didn’t browse through the [...]
2003: enable1.txt — http://www.puzzlers.org/wordlists/dictinfo.php E-Mail from Pedro Graca
2003: Tutorial: Writing a new Emacs mode — http://two-wugs.net/emacs/mode-tutorial.html
2003: Went out with Diane =) — Hot chocolate at Seattle’s Best – excellent chocolate, much better than Starbucks. Watched fireworks, too. Perfect date, ‘cept (a) she’s my girl [...]
2003: Testing 1 2 3 — 4 5 6 7 8 9 PlannerMode
2003: Applying learning style theory to college education — http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/Secondtier.html TeachingIdeas
2003: Bluepoint road tour — Last Friday (December 5, 2003), I joined the Bluepoint Road Tour to talk about Linux in the academe (SXI). I shared my experiences [...]
2003: Testing the hopefully fixed restrictions — I was having problems with planner-update-task messing around with my restrictions. Phooey. PlannerMode
2003: Note guids — Notes should probably have GUIDs so that I can do update-notes as well. However, note updating does not really make sense [...]
2003: Testing remember.el — I seem to have broken something recently.
2003: Numbering on a per-page level — I wonder if setting planner-reverse-chronological-notes as a file-local variable makes sense. I can’t think of a reason to use it, though… PlannerMode
2003: Gerald Generoso’s comment on ComputerScienceEducationResearch — good karma —

sacha chua living an awesome life