Simon Dudley, the video evangelist hits the nail on the head once again.
In today’s Washington Business Journal, Dudley wrote a fantastic piece highlighting the shifted cultural paradigm created by the public’s reaction to the intuitive consumer-based ‘smartphone’ technology over the past several years.
Dudley, the video evangelist and representative of LifeSize, highlighted the shift to consumer-centric smartphone technology and the public’s loyalty to such a device as a way to conceptualize a more user-friendly video conferencing technology.
Pretty cool stuff.
Dudley explains:
What makes smartphones so smart? Ultimately, we call them “smartphones” because they improve the user experience across a whole range of functions, so they seem smart to us. When smartphones first arrived on the scene, they instantly eclipsed “feature phones” like the Motorola Razr because they put the emphasis where it should have been all along – on the user experience. What the video conferencing industry needs is that same kind of paradigm shift – a move away from features that are still too hard to launch intuitively. To be fully embraced by businesses and individuals, the industry as a whole has to get to “smart video.”
After being thoroughly intrigued of the concept of ‘smart video’ at first glance , I did a quick Google search and look at what I found from our business partner LifeSize. Mr. Dudley wasn’t joking around when he said, “You heard it hear first” in relation to ‘smart video’. Anyway, I thought it would be fitting to show this brief 70 second video because, besides being a really well produced video LifeSize, I believe, thoroughly captured the essence of Simon Dudley’s concept of ‘Smart Video’.
Dudley continues:
Remember, the thing about smart phones is not that the technology is so sophisticated; it’s that the phones make the sophisticated technology easy to work with and easy to understand. In the end, it creates an atmosphere where you can be your most productive and most creative. It could be the same with video conferencing in business, if instead of thinking only about features, the industry started thinking about how to make those features easy to use. Sophisticated features have to be boiled down until they’re as simple to use as the applications on a smart phone. That’s smart video. When that happens, the result will be a universally user-friendly experience that people will want to use – not be made to use. Most people can’t imagine a day without their smart phones. If the video conferencing industry had that kind of “smart video” connection with their business users, it would revolutionize the technology the same way smart phones did with telephony.