I love the concept of remote collaboration, but let's face it. When I'm part of a WebEx or a Microsoft LiveMeeting and connect to a meeting room, the folks a the corporate office always use the white board. Then they try desparately to describe when they're drawing on the board...my knee jerk reaction is to then mute my phone and go to sleep. I know others are in the same boat when I got exactly the same reaction from some Microsoft engineers in my lab the other week. So let's just face up to reality, a picture is worth a million words, so how about sharing that picture with the rest of us...

Virtual Ink (now owned by Rubbermaid Newell) has been around for quite a while, but for some reason hasn't been able to break out of the education market. This portable device is even better than sliced bread, and is now one of my travel companions at Interop. Here at HotStage, the engineers tend to redesign at the drop of a hat, and even with most of us in a single location, it's still not easy to stay on the same page. However, now when we hide in the conference room, I drag along my laptop and my wireless Mimio Xi so that every stroke on the white board is saved and then distributed to everyone in the meeting.

So while this may look like chicken scratches in the dirt, it's diagrams like this that go into the building of the InteropNET. Our fearless leader (Glenn Evans) scribbles his way across the board, while the rest of us roll our eyes back in our heads when we realize just how much work this means.

Well the reality is that it could be more if we didn't have the same notes. Just keep in mind the if you ask 10 people to tell you about a bank robbery, you'll get 10 different versions. Not something you can afford in a network expected to deliver 100% uptime for the class rooms, meeting rooms, exhibit floor, wireless, Voice over IP Telephone System, etc, etc... So while this may sound like a gimmick, just think of this product the next time you're on a conference call and someone starts in on a white board you can't see.

Check the Mimio website for compatibility statements for your remote collaboration system, and if you're looking at using for a conference room in your office, you may also want to check out Wall Talker. A wall covering that doubles as both a dry erase marker surface and a projection surface that's a perfect match for the Mimio stick. Just keep in mind that the maximum size the Mimio can support is 4 feet by 8 feet. With Mimio studio and a projector, you could project a world map on the board, markup it up and save both as a single image.

Here's a scanned brochure that I snagged from a Hawaii design firm for www.walltalkers.com

Posted by Brian Chee on April 23, 2007 02:47 PM