Many of you know that we’ve done surveys of enterprises for thirty years now, and surveys of network operators for more than twenty. In that time, we’ve seen a disturbing trend, a loss of strategic information readily available to early-stage planners to guide them in adopting new technology paradigms. They used to get this from the media and from vendors, but somehow in this age of information we seem to have lost touch with the task of informing real people about their real problems.
We want to give you advance notice of our launching of a new information service, one designed to supplement our current outreach initiatives like our blogs and our technology journal, Netwatcher. The service is free and will focus on presenting a completely objective view of what’s going on in telecommunications, media, and technology—or TMT as the Wall Street types call it. Our target will be the strategist who wants to adopt, or to present, technology in new ways, to improve worker productivity, personal enjoyment, and overall business revenue and profit.
This service is going to be entirely video-based, and will be based on two interdependent sets of presentations. First, we’ll have YouTube videos that will present tutorial information that benefit from presentation graphics. These will cover topics like tech spending, the cloud, SDNs, etc and they’ll be produced by CIMI Corporation and narrated by me. Second, we’ll be hosting Google+ “Hangouts on the Air”. Google+ Hangouts are video chats among a group of no more than 10 people. The “on the air” part means that they can be broadcast in a public sense. Some of our hangouts will be live, others will be recorded on YouTube, but we hope that the hangout process is the biggest source of content.
Who can hang out? In a viewing sense, anyone. This is all public. In a participatory sense, we’re going to screen those who want to participate. We need a solid identification of the person and their company and position before we let them participate. They need to agree to the rules, which basically means following the format we set and not engaging in commercial or offensive behavior. If somebody breaks the rules, we’ll stop the Hangout and block them from it and all future ones, then resume without them. One strike, one warning, and you’re out. We may try to group participants to create a unity of purpose but we hope to get volunteers and to simply pick people who express interest.
What will the hangout topics be? Some will be based on the tutorial videos, but we also plan to cover vendor announcements, industry developments, regulatory issues, etc. Whatever is interesting and relevant to planners in the TMT world. If you like, you can suggest topics.
We hope to start this off before the end of July and then let nature take its course. If you would like to receive updates, please email us at hangmeout@cimicorp.com and let me know whether you want to simply be notified of an opportunity to view material or if you’d like to actually participate. This would be a good time to suggest topics too. Nobody will be promoted for anything other than for the hangouts or videos if they submit an email, and all you have to do to be removed is to ask.
We’ll update those who respond with the website of the new service and further information, but we’ll also post this on our blog, CIMI’s homepage, and on LinkedIn. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.