The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

Update: this is the slideshow version of my riff.

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Here is a 5 minute riff I put together to answer the question “what is the future of communications” for the MicroMedia Meetup taking place online and at in the Crowne Plaza hotel lobby in Palo Alto, California at 10:30 GMT. The meetup was initiated by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang and uberblogger Robert Scoble.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, futureofwork, geoperdis, Octopz, technology

This wonderful image popped up earlier this week in a BoingBoing post about a French collection of illustrations from 1910 depicting the year 2000. The caption (loosely translated from French) reads “communication using a film projector, phonograph and telegraph”.

A more current illustration of teleconferencing or “telepresence”, to use the mot du jour, showed up in a New York Times article back in May. It shows Cisco employees in two different geographic locations meeting virtually using the company’s high-end TelePresence 3000 system, which sells for a hefty $300,000 per installation (you’d need at least two to use it).

But fear not the big price tag. According to a recent announcement by Cisco, the price of such progress is expected to trickle down within two or three years to a more consumer-frendly $1000 for a home version that uses the large high-definition TV that’s already hanging in the living room. I can only begin to imagine the possibilities of running Octopz on such a system.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and collaborate online with some colleagues to sketch out that vision, using the webcam and whiteboard in the current version of Octopz. Technology is great, especially when you don’t have to wait for the next big thing to get some work done here and now.

Technorati Tags: cisco, communication, Octopz, online collaboration, teleconferencing, telepresence

Google wanted to have some fun visualizing how a Gmail email message travels around the world so they asked their users to collaborate with them on a video. Google filmed and released a clip that showed the start of the Gmail journey and asked participants to submit their own video takes of what happens next.

The clip above is the final release of the video based on the user submissions. Individual contributions can be viewed here.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, google, video, youtube