Watson, I Want To See You NowWatson, I Want To See You Now

The empowering video conversation is what I want immediately, unscheduled and without advance notice.

A.G. Bell famously said, "Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you," and there's little doubt that today, his words are resonating throughout the industry because seeing is becoming a part of hearing. But all is not what it should be in our newly found and adopted technology.

I've added to what Bell said: "Watson I want to see you now," to highlight today's context in two ways. Now is the imperative and I mean now as in instantly; and secondly when I say I want to see you, I mean just that, so the empowering video conversation is what I want immediately, unscheduled and without disciplinary constraints of office worker etiquette of sending out advance notice that I want to engage in a video conversation.

In my line of work, time is money and I don't get paid without results, and those results are specific deliverables. When our workflow is held up, delayed or interrupted you can be sure that so goes the cash flow. Herein is the problem.

Ken Davison, CMO of Magor, invited me on a conference to discuss workflow in the context of video and right away I thought, "Someone's listening to my needs!" Ken said, "We have to get it [video] into the desktop and onto the phone." While this will be challenging, it also could potentially be game changing for consumers and businesses.

In POV and Removing the Blindfold I wrote about the need to communicate via wearable POV glasses (Yes you will see them soon) and the ability to stream what it is that I am/you are seeing immediately to another person or group of people. Basically, I need on-demand service because without it, my workflow is being disrupted and in many cases halted.

Case in point: Our IT partner calls me and begins to try and describe the conduit system between buildings on a campus. While the information was interesting and even encouraging, it didn't answer many questions, so I still need to go onsite and "see" for myself. Retelling this to Ken from Magor enlisted a response I didn't expect. Ken said, "Matt, videoconferencing is an invite model" and right away he struck into the workflow conversation and of course I mentioned the POV wearable camera.

Unlike traditional video conferencing providers, Magor believes that there should be an alternative to the rigid "meet-on-the-bridge" structure that requires advanced scheduling. The change that visual collaboration is designed to bring is integrating video in natural workflow--without scheduling and codes but instead starting conversations and sharing data on the fly.

This is what I think will be challenging because on-the-fly to me means from any device, anywhere, anytime. This will be a bold undertaking in both consumer and business markets. Then, if SIP and WebRTC come face-to-face (pun intended) then I should be able to slide from a voice call to a video call on my desktop PBX or hosted phone or UC client or any mobile device on demand without any invites, when and where I need the service. Visual communications, as Magor states, must be a natural interaction between two or more parties, as easy to do as it is to make a phone call. Where Magor goes further is that the video quality must be HD and this is the differentiator over free.

Magor offers a software-based "visual collaboration" platform, Aerus, which operates in the cloud and is MCU-less. Users call one another without advanced scheduling, bring people on demand into the conversation and share multiple pieces of data simultaneously, and this is the combination that many solutions lack. Understanding what visual collaboration is or should be is best understood by what Magor illustrates in their "Fluid workflow model," shown here:

Visual collaboration gives meaning to on-demand communications where video is required in order to put into context what's slowing progress or disrupting work flow. In Magor's white paper: "The right formula for driving widespread adoption of video" they write:

Today's worker is on all the time, highly visually oriented and mobile. Not only are they impatient to get work done when they want to, they have high expectations for immediate collaboration driven by a world of Internet gaming, social media, texting and other digital instant media.

From my perspective, video conversation reduces the drag on workflow and I can feel it where it counts whenever it occurs. The Aerus plan seemingly takes voice-only communications into the realm of video conversation.

"Watson I want to see you now" via the click of a button puts perspective into a mostly-audio world that we've become too dependent upon.

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