Normal day today. Just a photo of my workspace. I had a business idea on the way home. I’m too lazy to do anything about it, or even search the internet to see if someone has done it already. Just in case it is original, I wanted to document what I thought of so I can at least say, “I had that idea back in 2008!”
The idea is to web-ify trade conferences. I was listening to TWIT today, and they started doing a live stream while recording the show. As far as I know, they don’t offer the video for download later (Like Revision3), which is besides the point. While they film the show, he mentioned about 3000+ people were watching the stream. They also have the ability to distribute links to the listeners as they are talking, as well as monitor a chat room to asnwer questions as they come up (and are at least moderatly interesting) The technology to do this seems to have fallen enough that this is actually affordable to do even with a large audience. The market for the technical conference is shrinking. Maybe for trade conferences in general, but I’m only familiar with the technical ones. Comdex used to be the largest, but they are discontinued now. These conferences are extremely expensive, and these companies are getting less and less “bang for the buck” so they just stopped going. Apple recently said they are trying to reduce the amount of conferences they attend because they are getting their message out other ways.
The idea is to have a scheduled online event. Each “booth” section would have a streaming camera, product specialists, chat room, rss feeds, twitter feeds, all the other social buzz words. The idea is to have the same level of interactivity that you get from actually going to a trade conference in person. The audience can pre-subscribe to the different feeds they’d be interested in. They can log in to the chat room to ask about the battery life for whatever.
For each “booth”, you can send out a streaming kit, which involves a camera, laptop, software, and all the stuff to get up and running, or just send specifications and a software CD, and the presenter can have their own setup. You’d have your keynote’s and all the other stuff, but would be so cheap compared to the old way, they wouldn’t even need an approval on their expense report!
Anyway, I thought it was a good idea. We’ll see if we see it someday soon!