From the Inside Out

Wednesday kicked off with the much anticipated Cisco keynote session.  Using TelePresence, Al Gore and John Chambers joined Sue Bostrom on the VoiceCon stage for an interactive panel discussion.  Al Gore was located in Nashville while John Chambers joined from the Cisco headquarters in San Jose.  Sue Bostrom was on the VoiceCon stage in Orlando.  The panel moderator was a noted media representative from the UK; he joined live from London along with a studio audience.

The panel discussion was focused on the critical role that innovation and technology can play in mitigating climate change.  Although the dialog was lively and entertaining, the highlight for me was seeing everyone come together through the magic of TelePresence.  It’s truly amazing to watch.  Unlike traditional video conferencing, it is remarkably lifelike.  The video is high def, and there’s virtually no delay.  Even when the images were enlarged on the huge overhead screens, the quality was perfect.  It was just as good as the live TV feed.  You have to see it to believe it!

Pictures are courtesy of VoiceCon (these are much better than my camera phone pics).

Afterwards, I grabbed a quick lunch and joined the CIO panel, which was insightful.  I then headed down to the booth for my last shift of booth duty.  The traffic was much slower today.  You can always tell when it’s the last day of exhibits.  The traffic dies off towards the end of the evening. 

Booth duty ended at 6 pm.  There were a few of us who were catching late flights, so we shared a ride to the airport and grabbed dinner at Macaroni Grill while waiting for our flight. 

On the plane, the gate bridge connected to the economy section side entrance instead of the front entrance by the cockpit.  Usually, that’s not a big deal, but tonight my seat was right in front of that door.  So, as hundreds of passengers were trying to enter the plane, me and my neighbor were in their way.  We decided to stand in the aisle between first class and economy while they were boarding.  We had a friendly flight attendant who joked to us that we could just do her job and welcome everyone onto the plane.  So, we decided to have fun with it and did just that.  We were giving them the standard reminders about putting one bag in the overhead and the other bag below and moving out of the aisle so others could pass. 

My neighbor in crime was in a surprisingly good mood considering his flight in Tampa had been cancelled three times, and he had to drive to Orlando to catch this flight.  He was having a good time.  I guess he was just happy to be on the plane.

Finally, everyone boarded, and we got our seats back.  The rest of the flight was the way I like it — uneventful and quiet. 

I made it back to DFW around 11:15 pm and got home at 12:30 am.  It was late, but I was glad to be there.

Here are my parting pictures of the day:

-more pics of the booth (courtesy of VoiceCon)

-the ship at the Gaylord Seafood restaurant where I ate on Sunday

For me, today kicked off with a series of meetings and the Microsoft keynote speech.  As expected, Microsoft attempted to take some jabs at Cisco, but it was a pathetic effort at best. 

After the keynote, I stopped by “Villa de Flora” (an Italian Food restaurant at the Gaylord) for lunch with one of the new executives on my team.  The Villa de Flora is a buffet style restaurant.  The food is decent, but not great.

The rest of the day was filled with meetings and booth duty (late shift again).  Here are some pics of the booth.

Here’s a cloudy view of a live TelePresence session.  I’m taking pictures from my camera phone through thick anti-glare glass, so the quality is poor.  However, you can still get a feel of what a TelePresence experience is like.

My last day at VoiceCon is tomorrow.  I’m catching the last flight to DFW which should put me home around mid-night (or shortly thereafter). 

VoiceCon kicked off today in sunny Orlando, Florida.  The workshops began in the morning, and the exhibit hall opened at 3 pm.  Even though I was scheduled to work the late shift, I dropped by the booth about 30 minutes before it was supposed to open.  I wanted to check out the demo and conduct a dry run — pretty standard stuff.  My plan was to do a quick “run thru” and then walk around the floor to visit the other vendors’ booths.  I’d come back later when it was my time to be on the floor.

I was unprepared for what I found when I showed up.  The demo was haphazardly set-up, some of the equipment we needed wasn’t there, and several parts of the demo weren’t working.  And, to make matters worse, it was only 30 minutes before start time…ugh!  It was going to be one of those days.

Now, anyone who has ever worked a trade show before knows that it’s rare for your demos to work perfectly during a show.  It’s just the curse of working booth duty and having a “live” demo.  You have to learn how to work around it and skillfully distract people from the features that aren’t working at that moment in time.

But this was worse than normal.  Frantically, we began to work with the demo team to correct the problems.  About an 90 minutes later (and with customers already on the booth), we finally had an adequate demo.  It wasn’t perfect.  There were features that still didn’t work, but it was much better than what we had originally.  Trade shows are so much fun…NOT!

Anyway, I finally walked around the exhibit floor.  The great thing about VoiceCon is that everyone in the industry is here, so in addition to checking out the latest technology, it’s sort of like going to a reunion.  You see all of the friendly faces from your past and get caught up on each others’ lives.  It’s one of the things I like most about coming to this conference year after year.

I started my shift at 5:30 pm.  Booth traffic was steady, but never overwhelming.   I’m actually hoping it will be a little busier tomorrow. 

The show floor officially closed at 7 pm, but my company was hosting a private reception on the booth for analysts and consultants.  Everyone stayed late to provide demonstrations for the VIPs.  By the time we got them out of the booth, it was about 9 pm and time for dinner.

Below are a couple of pics from day one.  I’ll try to get better shots tomorrow if it’s not too busy.