So 3M corporation is one of those odd companies that has over the years produced some amazing technology, but has somehow had lots of problems marketing these inventions. My all time favorite is the Volition duplex fiber optic system (we used this for years on the Interop show) that is amazingly inexpensive, durable (we found a knot in the fiber pulled tight and it still worked), but most importantly fast and easy to terminate. Simple enough that I’ve taught PTA mom’s how to terminate the fiber on a school project, and with 75% of the connector being reusable, the training is cheap too. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about in this article, in this case I’m going to let the cat out of the bag on those super cool touch sensitive glass computer displays you’re started to see at museums and such. Apparently this is also a 3M product line that no one has heard about.

Vikuiti is the product line that contains the magic and this is what 3M has to say about the name: The brand name is a portmanteau of the words visual and acuity, and is pronounced (vie CUE ah tee).

This product line is currently being integrated into several netbooks, desktop and laptop computers since one of their films has a prismatic layer that helps focus the light to make the displays brighter and clearer. The portion of this product line that really makes my eyes pop is their back projection film and their touch films. Combine the two and we have the makings of a display that just has to remind you of Minority Report when Tom Cruise was sweeping his fingers over the big glass display. (I did a video report on this type of display tech last January)

So let’s start building this display:

These are some pics that I grabbed off the 3M website that show how you can cut this film into different shapes to give you some startling new ways of catching the eye with your displays. I should point out that the material is also available in a laminated plastic material that can be shaped using standard wood working tools. (just keep the bit cool so that it won’t melt) You could even combine them with the 3M Vikuiti short throw projection system. Shown below that’s the projector mounted above the display area on a short arm. This way your shadow doesn’t interfere with the display.

The next step is to make this display interactive and to do that you add in a film on the outside that makes the glass touch sensitive.

So now what you have is now a touch screen display on a chunk of glass…but it will all be for naught if you can’t get things to work with the system and that’s what development kits are for.

3M has a multitouch capable development system that gives you access to the technology combined into a 19″ LCD display and from there you can start developing your application.

All I ask is that you put in an easter egg like the McAfee folks did…if you hit a magic combination of spots on the screen, it would bring up missile command on their glass display. Now that’s super cool.

Brian Chee is the founder and manager of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL) at the University of Hawai’i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). He is also a Senior Contributing Editor with InfoWorld Magazine.

Now that follow-up calls have been made and information shared from Interop Las Vegas, it’s time to start thinking about Interop New York. As part of the planning process, I’ll be looking back at what I learned in Las Vegas — and asking others to share what they learned, as well.

One of the key things I figured out is that I need a better ultra-portable platform for getting quick work done. Toward that end, I just upgraded my smart phone to an iPhone — the $99 special that AT&T and Apple are running on the 3G model was good enough to appeal to my inner cheapskate. So far, I’m thrilled with the platform and its apps, and have already begun doing some blogging from the tiny little keyboard.

One of the other things I figured out is that I need to be just a shade more organized in my schedule than I was in Las Vegas. I’ve gone from one extreme to the other over the years, but have found that there is an optimum level of organization that accounts for much of my time while leaving, say, 20% of the available hours open for exploration and chance meetings.

Do you have any conference wisdom to share? Let me know — maybe we can use “the wisdom of crowds” to make Interop New York a most productive experience for everyone.

Tags: Conference, Expo, Interop, New York 2009

The academic world has a concept for scientific events called a “poster day” where grad students and post-docs get to setup a single poster that represents their research. The booths in startup city seem to be a similar idea where you have a VERY limited space in which to convey your message. The knee jerk reaction is to cram as much information as you can onto that poster board and you end up with an eye crossing mish mash of tiny fonts and headache creating stuff.

So let’s turn this model inside out and put the art back into booth art. What I’m proposing is to have your poster info be simpler and then embed digital picture frames into the poster board. Imagine this, a simple posterboard with your logo and pertinent KEY product information, but someplace on that board you embed a large digital picture frame (like those 22″ jobs now available) and that can be cycling through powerpoints. Then you sprinkle a few cheaper 7″ digital picture frames that might be cycling through specialized features.

Got the idea? Very simple, easy to transport, cheap and still eye candy. We’ve used them for scientific symposia, retirement parties, window displays, signs in hallways and even made three sided columns with digital picture frames in them to help direct people from place to place.

Here are the gotchas that we’ve found over the years:

1. Try to stay with a single brand of digital picture frame so that the power supplies are interchangeable and label those power supplies.
2. You don’t always need an AC outlet, one of those emergency car starter/power supplies and a small inverter will run a pair of digital picture frames for a couple of days straight.
3. Look at the back of the digital picture frame, sloping sides means they’re hard to mount. Piximodo has a superb straight sided electronics box that makes mounting simple. They have a wonderful speaker outlet and AV outlet but they refuse to add in a video looping feature. So the video will only play once and then go back to the main menu.
4. NOT ALL digital pictures frames can play video clips, and almost none of them will loop around after it plays the last clip. So far the only one I’ve found that will play a collection of video clips and then loop around and keep playing is from HP and that doesn’t have an external speaker plug so you have to drill it and solder in a speaker outlet.
5. Don’t block the vents, or your display will slowly turn black and die
6. Tape over the SD/flash card slot to avoid grabby fingers

Why did I go through all the hassles for something so simple….easy, PC rental costs a king’s ransom and ordering extra power adds up VERY quickly. Not only that, transporting a whole bunch of PC’s gets expensive and at a heavily unionized convention center like the Javits in New York, you’re not supposed to carry in your own gear. So that adds up too. However, a small benson box (shipping container made of corrugated plastic and super cheap) can easily be created to carry a half dozen of these displays in a single box smaller than a case of paper.

Well I think you folks get the idea….not something I’m going to put into a million dollar booth, but the moving images on the poster might just be that little bit of extra eye candy that drags a potential customer into your booth. Good luck to everyone in startup city.

/brian chee

At a large event like Interop Las Vegas, we see a lot of exhibitors pull out the stops with their pre-show marketing in an effort to drive booth traffic, build awareness around their products/services, get visibility for execs that might be speaking, etc. We on the Interop team are seeing a lot more marketing videos being produced by exhibitors to help with this.

Here’s one we just got our hands on from Dynamic Network Services, which takes a different approach - it’s a wrap up video. Since we’re still wrapping up the show ourselves it seemed appropriate to post, and I thought it might inspire others to do their own vids. If you have a post-ILV09 vid, let me know. I’ll try to post them here.

Tags: booth traffic, dyn inc., dynamic network services, interop las vegas, marketing, video

If you attended Interop Las Vegas and didn’t get a chance to see all of the conference sessions you intended to, we just launched a new site that lets you view them. The site, video.interop.com, presents the speaker’s Powerpoint as they appeared in the breakout sessions, accompanied by audio from the speaker(s).

The site is currently only available to people who had a conference pass (sorry expo pass holders!) at Interop Las Vegas. The same login and password you were provided to access the speaker presentations will get you into the Interop Video site. (That info was distributed to conference pass holders in their tote bag and shown on slides inside conference rooms.)

We plan to continue the capture of conference sessions at future US-based Interop events — next up is Interop New York in November. In fact, our tentative plan for Interop New York is to capture video of the speakers as well, and display the speaker using a picture-in-picture format.

If you’re curious what the format of synchronized Powerpoint and audio looks like, here’s a sample session from Interop Las Vegas, titled “The Hows and Whys of Intrusion Detection Event Correlation”, delivered by Gene Schultz, CTO, Emagined Security.

We’d love to get feedback about this new format - contact me at adunne@techweb.com if you have any ideas, constructive critiques, etc.

Continue Reading »

If you are looking for keynote videos from Interop Las Vegas 2009, we have finished archiving them and present them here for your viewing pleasure. (These were already available  in our LiveStream player, but not easily findable in the video-on-demand portion of the player.)

We’re also in the process of posting videos from all conference presentations — a video feed of the Powerpoint deck sync’d to the speaker’s audio.  Conference attendees will get free access to these videos, and we’ll be selling access to these videos as well.  They’ll be ready by the end of June.

Here are the keynotes:

Continue Reading »

Tags: Interop

It was great seeing so many of you last week. Thanks to everyone who made it out to Las Vegas to join us. In these tough times, it was great to come together as a community and see that innovation is tremendously strong and our industry is healthy and vibrant.

Since many of you are back in the office summarizing your Interop experience, I thought I’d take a stab at it, too.

I’ll start where I left off above: I suggested in the opening keynote that the biggest takeaway of the week would be that we’d see that our market is on strong footing and that we will help lead the way out of the recession. I don’t think I went too far out on the limb here. I knew how strong our program was in the big growth areas such as virtualization, cloud computing, unified communications and data center. I’d also talked to many of our exhibitors coming into the show who were saying business was relatively good considering the overall economy. I also knew that while overall attendance would be down from last year, our pre-show survey indicated this year’s attendees were coming with deep pockets and long shopping lists. So when you put together enthusiastic buyers, strong exhibitors and surging innovation, you get the magic that you can only experience at a big event like Interop: We came together and showed ourselves - and many others outside the convention center via Interop TV, Twitter, vendor blogs and media converage - that our market has tremendous momentum right now.

Cloud Computing: Drilling down into show highlights, you have to start with Cloud Computing. We had blanket coverage, from the Enterprise Cloud Summit to Cloud Camp and the Cloud Zone on the show floor. Going in we were a little bit in danger of adding to the hype around Cloud. But I also wanted to be sure gave everyone the right toehold into the Cloud scene. Attendance was strong at all our Cloud programs, so interest is certainly high. Clearly, though, the Cloud story is a complex one that will require IT leaders not only to keep tabs on emerging technology solutions, but perhaps more importantly, on on understanding where, when and how Cloud services can be applied to one’s own IT challenges. To learn more about the Cloud, check out some of our videos from last week, including our keynotes from SAP CTO Vital Sikkah and IBM VP Rick Telford, as well as a fireside chat with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels during the Enterprise Cloud Summit

Data Center: Undoubtedly, though, Cloud Computing, along with virtualization,  is fueling tremendous interest in speed and flexibility inside the data center. The old Sun adage of the “network is the platform,” is becoming a reality in the data center: As servers and storage are virtualized, the network becomes the master cylinder. And no surprise, this platform is the next battleground for networking companies, with everyone gunnng for Cisco, of course. Watch our keynote panel on Reinventing the Data Center and read the analysis of my co-moderator, Art Wittman, who is concerned about data center management and standards.

I think we’ll remember this year’s show as the start of a long battle for data center supremacy among the leading networking companies.  Cisco a few months ago raised the ante by adding server capabilities to its deep set of offerings via its Unified Computing System. By doing so, however, it punched a hole through a competitive firewall by turning its guns against erstwhile server partners HP and IBM. Cisco’s move also opens up the field for competitors such as Brocade, Juniper, Force 10 and 3Com, via its new H3C division, as well as the start-up Arista. Cisco isn’t, of course, giving up ground easily: UCS, after all, won a Best of Interop award. I also noticed sitting through a few Cisco presentations in the Interop Conference that Cisco’s pitches constantly reflected the depth and interconnectedness of their product lines. Cisco is well prepared for battle against re-energized competitors. That said, it’s just going to be plain fun watching HP take off the gloves and come right at Cisco. From the opening keynote where it announced a big UC partnership with Microsoft to its slick, front-door booth, HP pretty much owned the show.

Wireless: Speaking of gloves, Xirrus had the most talked about booth featuring a full-sized boxing ring. Xirrus put WiFi in the spotlight, along with Aruba, which also snagged a Best of Interop award with a branch office solution featuring remote management capabilities.

Virtualization is the current turbine for change and innovation in the IT market. I expected full rooms when we discussed emerging topics such as virtualization management and security. What I wasn’t prepared for was the crowds that gathered any time there was a discussion of desktop virtualization. Without a doubt, this is going to the next “big thing” for many IT organizations. Gartner, in fact, recently suggested desktop virtualization will experience massive growth.

No trip to Interop is complete without a tour of the InteropNet. Built by a couple of dozen sponsors including Enterasys and Qwest and host of volunteers, the network once again performed flawlessly. If you missed the tour onsite, check out our virtual version here.

Thanks again to all who made last week possible. And if you couldn’t make it to Vegas, we hope to see you at Interop New York in November. That is, unless you can join us in Tokyo in June or at our new event in Mumbai in October.

If you missed one of the three daily InteropNET tours, you can still get a video tour led by Geoff Horne the InteropNET’s lead engineer.

Keep tuned…once I recover from the LONG nights working on the InteropNET (we just finished tearing out the show yesterday) I hope to cut together a bunch of the b-roll that I shot and put together a complete tour. This video is strictly the gear in the NOC…but I’ve also got some video of the stuff on the show floor and off show floor in the classrooms and such.

Get your tickets here for the Video InteropNET Tour.

/brian chee

It’s Booth Crawl time, that magic mixture of technology and beer that seems to make conversations flow a bit more freely and attendees wander a bit more happily through the show floor. I’ve been wandering around watching the conversations, and it seems, well, a very happy sort of expo floor. There’s a lot of conversation happening around the cloud vendors (even those who aren’t under the big cloud computing banner hanging over one section of the expo floor), a bunch of interest in the wireless and mobility exhibitors (especially, it seems, those who let you do anything from anywhere), and, as always, keen interest in the offerings of the various security vendors.

It’s interesting to see the crowd walking around with all sorts of bottles, cans, and glasses in hand. Someone is providing glasses with the little blinky-light ice cubes inside, so a host of folks are walking around with drinks that look like they’re counting down to something truly cataclysmic. For others, the bottles of beer (domestic and imported) provide exhibitors with a great way of putting all those neoprene bottle coozies to work.

It sounds like I’m being a bit snide about this, but that’s wrong — the booth crawl really brings one of the main functions of a conference or trade show into focus: Each will let you spend time with other people and form a relationship based on more than just email. I love blogs, email, Twitter, and all the other social networking applications, but they’re primarily ways for me to keep in touch with folks between times when we’re face-to-face. Here at Interop 2009, I’ve spent time with old friends, touched base with business contacts, and made new acquaintances that will, I’m sure, be far better business relations than if I’d just responded to an emailed press release.

If you want to extend the experience a bit, remember that you can go to the Interop BackChannel to follow tweets from other conference attendees in real time. It’s all about the relationships — and keeping them going beyond the show’s closing announcement.

Tags: Expo, Interop

Interop is all about the technology and business of networking (and application deliver), but there’s much more to Interop attendees and exhibitors than just pushing bits around. This year, there’s a chance to help bring the next generation of science-savvy people along by donating to Science Buddies, a great program for budding scientists and serious students.

TechWeb and Interop are supporting Science Buddies through activities at Interop Las Vegas 2009, and you can support this worthwhile cause, too. Check out the Science Buddies Interop web page to learn more and make a contribution. It’s a very good thing…

Tags: Interop