Dan O'Shea, the former Editor-in-Chief of Telephony Magazine, Fierce Telecom editor, and guru of all things electronic did a piece this month for Entrepreneur Magazine: Doing Business with No Walls and covered telepresence and Powwow Virtual, the Human Productivity Lab's business model for a network of publicly available telepresence conferencing centers.  Other commitments have forced me to keep Powwow bubbling on the back-burner but we continue to look for the right investor and/or partner that is looking for a sophisticated public telepresence strategy and the right business model, team, designs, technology roadmap, and global audience to get it off the ground fast! 

Room with a View
By Dan O'Shea, Entrepreneur Magazine, November 2009

Telepresence is as close as it gets to meeting face-to-face

Have you ever tried to shake hands with a business partner sitting directly across from you, even though you know he's in his own office 2,000 miles away? Telepresence makes you want to do just that. It's no hallucinatory drug, though the sensory experience it provdes via ultra-realistic, life-size videoconferencing does make it seem as if someone spiked your java. it's like interacting with a hologram from "Minority Report."

  Telepresence is souped-up videoconferencing , complete with giant high-def screens, powerful codecs, multi-aspect cameras and enriched audio speakers. The gear is offered by companies such as Polycom, Cisco Systems, Tandberg, Lifesize Communications and others. Service packages are available from the likes of AT&T and other business providers that provide videoconferencing.

  While basic videoconferencing has been around for decades, it never really took off due to clunky equipment, glitchy performance, poorly synchronized video and audio. It was nothing like meeting someone in person. Telepresence is as close as it gets.
  The recession makes a pretty good case for telepresence: Companies need to cut travel costs but also need to keep globalizing to reach new partners and customers.

  Telepresence is not new either, and it wasn't widely adopted. "before 2005, probably less than 5,000 people had been in a telepresence room," said Howard Lichtman, founder of Human Productivity Lab, and a telepresence entrepreneur himself.
  The technology is still too expensive for some small businesses. Top systems can cost as much as $ 350,000, and even stripped-down versions hover around $ 75,000 and other innovators are trying to change the economic model with a new concept: public telepresence.

Lichtman co-founded Powwow Virtual, [which is looking to] rent public telepresence rooms on an hourly basis, a model other companies have pursued and for which they charge as much as $500.00 an hour. But, with more funding, Lichtman believes Powwow Virtual, a [subsidiary] of the Human Productivity Lab, could build dozens of public telepresence centers around the world in shopping malls, hotels and similar places, and cut the cost by spreading it around the sites and telepresence rooms of different sizes within one facility. That would make telepresence affordable for almost any small business to use.

  And that may inspire you to skip the long-distance handshake and go right to the high-five -D.O.

[via Entrepreneur Magazine]


HSL's Thoughts and Analysis

As I mentioned in the intro, other commitments have forced me to keep Powwow bubbling on the back-burner but we continue to look for the right investor and/or partner that is looking for a sophisticated public telepresence strategy and the right business model, team, designs, technology roadmap, and global audience to get a network of public telepresence conferencing centers off the ground fast!

Here are some of the benefits of the Powwow Virtual business model that I outlined in an article I wrote entitled: Publicly Available Telepresence Explodes!! Marriott, Starwood, Regus, Tata Taj All Deploy! when Marriott and Starwood joined the party. 

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Powwow Virtual is the Human Productivity Lab's business model and technology roadmap for a global network of publicly available telepresence conferencing centers that double as showrooms/sales centers for corporate telepresence, video conferencing, and prosumer/consumer visual collaboration solutions.  We are seeking $35MM to open 6-7 super centers in high-end retail/business/ mixed use locations such as Tysons Corner Galleria, Grand Central Station  (Pan Am Building/200 Park Avenue) in New York, Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, or the Ferry Building in San Francisco.  The 6-7 initial locations would prove the Reed's Law model I.E. that each additional location drives sales to the other locations in a virtuous cycle that grows geometrically with each additional location and then additional locations (8-50+)  would be added through franchise partners or through another capital raise to open additional company-owned stores.


Each Powwow Virtual location would have multiple publicly available telepresence and videoconferencing systems from leading telepresence providers such as Cisco, Digital Video Enterprises, LifeSize, Polycom, TANDBERG, Telepresence Tech, Teliris, and Vidyo.  Each super center location would feature best-of-breed telepresence environments from 1 seat to 28 seats that would be capable of communicating at the highest possible quality natively with other Powwow locations, corporate telepresence and videoconferencing systems on a variety of carrier networks, publicly available telepresence systems in Starwood, Marriott, Tata, and Regus locations globally, and the world's 5,000+  publicly available traditional videoconferencing rooms.

 While the illustrative floor plan above is for a super center in an international gateway city, each featured telepresence/videoconferencing system would be its own "module" that could be deployed individually or be combined with any other module for smaller locations in mixed use office buildings, convention centers, hotels, coffee shops, etc. while sharing common branding, reservation system, information security procedures, and collaborative tools, etc.

Each Corporate solution will be completely compatible with the public telepresence network and will feature a shared directory with sophisticated reservation/meeting governance and 24x7 operator support.

We believe our business model has numerous advantages over locating publicly available telepresence in hotels:

• A wider variety of systems of varying capacities and capabilities at superior price points
• Better locations in the major international gateway cities with respect to consumer awareness and visibility
• Overflow capacity for peak meeting times vs. onesie/twosie deployments
• Ability to strongly brand the experience
• Strong focus on the customer and the customer's ability to connect with the greatest number of telepresence and videoconferencing end points at the greatest possible quality vs. a single platform approach
• Superior economics per site:

• The ability to spread the cost of the network connection/managed service fees/labor over multiple end-points vs. 1-2 end-points
• Price supported by sales of enterprise telepresence solutions
• Price supported by retail sales
  

• More food and beverage choices at better prices than world class hotels
• Better visibility and brand/service awareness in each market than hotels can provide
• Retail concept in the front of the house to drive traffic into the store & ability cross sell to virtual meeting participants on their way out
• The ability to sell corporate telepresence solutions in a customer-focused environment which allows for a head-to-head comparison of price/performance
• Human Productivity Lab Secret Sauce and Future-Proof Business Strategy
  

Powwow Virtual has:

• A world-class technology team at arm's length
• The right technology roadmap for success
• The designs for the facilities and unique telepresence environments/solutions
• Unique HPL pro-modifications to existing telepresence solutions
• Relationships with the leading telepresence hardware vendors, telepresence managed service providers, carriers, and inter-networking providers in the world
• A proven track record of success in predicting how the telepresence industry would develop and which telepresence technologies/systems would succeed
• The largest audience in the world interested in telepresence
  

 
Our business model perfectly complements the publicly available telepresence efforts of AT&T, Cisco, F2F Biz Cafe, Marriott, MEETnHD, Polycom, Regus, and Tata

•   Powwow Virtual locations would be completely compatible with these efforts from Day 1
•   Powwow Virtual locations would offer overflow capacity to each of these locations and vice versa
•   Powwow Virtual locations would drive traffic to other publicly available telepresence networks and vice versa
  

Finally, we believe that Powwow offers a number of non-intuitive advantages for serious investors interested in telepresence opportunities:

• International and Emerging Market Business Opportunity - Worried about the actuarially unsound US Dollar?  Interested in putting some chips on the BRIC countries, Switzerland, or emerging markets?  Powwow offers a unique ability to invest in these markets while maintaining your ability to manage your investment from any country in the world with a telepresence end-point. 
  

• Reduced Technology Risk - The Powwow business model has a more limited technology risk vs. other models.  Powwow Virtual is the "Big Screen TV Store" of telepresence.  We are pulling for everyone to be successful and are happy to help any of the vendors improve their offerings but if "Panasonic" is outselling "Magnovox" then we take out "Maganavox" and replace it with "Panasonic". If Company Y develops a new telepresence technology that revolutionizes the market then we replace what isn't selling with the latest and greatest.  The customer is King at Powwow Virtual and the investment risk of betting on a failed technology is reduced. 

Serious inquiries to HSL@HumanProductivityLab.com