Publication
Date: July 18, 1997
Turning the
Desktop Into a Conference Hall
By
Ken Shulman
Picture
attending a convention where your
"travel arrangements" are a
desktop computer and an Internet
connection. Where you and thousands of
colleagues across the globe can follow
the same presentation, express your
opinions, pose questions to the speakers,
and discuss the answers with your virtual
neighbors, all in real time. It’s
possible, through a technology known as
"eventware."
"Eventware
will offer a broad range of opportunity
for businesses, and will probably create
a wide market for itself," says Mark
Hardie, senior analyst for entertainment
and technology strategies at The
Forrester Group in Boston, Mass.
"The fact that a person can
participate in some form of event and
never leave his office has serious
ramifications for large organizations.
Given the amount of money your typical
Fortune 100 company spends on travel,
this technology and these events are
immediately attractive. In addition, if
this environment is set up properly, it
can be even more effective than a real
convention."
Part audio
conferencing and part classroom,
eventware is an architecture that allows
for real-time collaboration over the
Internet. Unlike other collaborative
tools, it is specifically designed for
large groups. Its only significant
shortcoming is its inability to render
video effectively. But unlike video
conferencing, which requires a
substantial investment in hardware and
can be costly to run, eventware requires
only a modem and Internet connection.
Multiplatform, eventware uses a standard
Internet interface, making it exceedingly
easy to navigate. All the user needs to
do is access a certain Internet address
at the predetermined time.
"Eventware
came into being as we began to understand
that the Web was an underlying
infrastructure that allows people to
deploy collaborative technology at a very
low cost. We also began to understand
that this infrastructure could also allow
users large-scale simultaneous
connections," says Richard Bruce,
president of PlaceWare Inc. in Mountain
View, Calif. PlaceWare’s Auditorium,
a Java-based product, is among the
best-known eventware applications on the
market.
"Unlike
traditional telecommunication, which
requires the user to hang up and dial
another number each time he wants to
contact a new party, you can just click
into a different place on the event site
with eventware," says Bruce.
"The technology provides you with a
seamless way to communicate and share
applications on the Web. What this
technology does is take all the people
who are on a specific Web page and make
them aware of each other. In a very real
sense, what we do is populate the
Web."
PlaceWare
Inc. was founded in 1996 by Bruce and
five colleagues, all of whom came from
the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The
company’s core business is a
platform that allows clients to build
shared Java applications. The company was
founded with the objective of adapting
existing interactive virtual environments
to a business operations context.
Using an
auditorium as a metaphor, PlaceWare
developed its headline Auditorium product
as a virtual environment where single or
multiple presenters could communicate
with audiences whose numbers could run
into the thousands. Each person who
accesses the event through his desktop is
assigned a virtual "seat" and
is given a series of tools with which he
can communicate with the event presenters
and with those people "seated"
around him. What the attendee sees on the
computer screen is a large auditorium
with a space in the middle for slides
that can contain text, images or both.
"Auditorium
is a way to create communication between
large groups of people who don’t
know each others’ phone
numbers," says Bruce. "From a
business standpoint, the most obvious
uses are in field sales and customer
service. It can also be used in online
customer demonstrations for software. And
it allows the audience to comment on and
in some way control the pace and tone of
the presentation through the feedback the
audience sends to the presenter."
Auditorium
costs $150 per seat per simultaneous
user. Introduced to the market in March
1997, the platform has been adapted by
several companies for in-house
applications.
At
Hewlett-Packard, engineers have built an
application on top of PlaceWare's
platform to create an environment for
intra-corporate collaboration. Known as
the HP Desktop Classroom, the
Hewlett-Packard environment allows groups
of engineers, customer service
representatives and other specialists to
collaborate in problem-solving sessions
across the corporate intranet. Unlike
products that allow for sporadic meetings
or brainstorming sessions on the
Internet, the Desktop Classroom is
designed to promote a continual dialogue
in which larger, long-range issues can be
addressed.
"A
meeting of the minds through a
traditional phone conference is a rather
stilted event," says Garry Orsolini,
engineer/scientist at Hewlett-Packard's
Roseville, Calif., site. "We’re
trying to head in a direction that will
bring all the senses to bear in a virtual
conference, including video, creating an
environment that will support the same
kind of spontaneity as a person-to-person
meeting. We’re not there yet. But
that is our Holy Grail."
Ken
Shulman writes from Cambridge, Mass.
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