Videoconferencing: "Good enough" is good enough

I'm watching seminars put on by Stanford University's MediaX program. The first seminar, on the impact and use of new mobile video technology for news gathering, was technically a little shaky, but informative. The second seminar, on the value of new video technologies in business and education, seems to be more a sales pitch for Cisco's telepresence technology and similar offerings than a real discussion of the value of video. (If you haven't seen Cisco's commercials, their telepresence model uses big screens that allow you to see the participants in both sides of a teleconference in near life-size. Cisco's even bigger telepresence systems, which haven't been featured in television ads, use specially-built rooms and wall-size displays to give the illusion that the participants are all in the same room.)

Cisco-style solutions are very expensive; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per site, with major bandwidth requirements. To vendors of these systems, Skype and similar services will never be a good substitute, because you can't see and hear every nuance of every participant. Sometimes the picture freezes. It's not immersive.

The problem with these arguments is that time and time again, high-end, high-quality offerings are rejected in favor of "good enough" solutions. CDs are being replaced by MP3 files that don't have the same sound quality but are far more flexible and less expensive to buy. Consumers eagerly watch video on their computers (or their phones, for that matter) that isn't the equal of what they can see on a HDTV, because they can watch what they want, how, when and where they want.

Teleconferencing works the same way. If I can use Skype or Apple's iChat to pull together an ad hoc videoconference with existing equipment and at little or no cost, do I really need to see if someone in the 23rd row is picking his nose? Just as consumers gravitate toward "good enough", smart businesses and educators will do the same thing.

Helping startups get started

I moved to the far northwest suburbs of Chicago a year ago from Silicon Valley, but I've stayed interested in and involved with new ventures, having founded or co-founded three companies myself. One of the things that surprised me was how much more difficult it seems to be to start new businesses here than it is in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of universities to provide technology and motivate students, including the University of Chicago, Northwestern, IIT and the University of Illinois. The Chicago area also has Argonne National Labs and Fermilab, two of the top scientific research facilities in the country. 37Signals and Threadless thrive here, and I know of a number of startups that are under the radar. Nevertheless, for those startups that do get traction, there's overwhelming pressure to move, usually to Silicon Valley or New York.

I recently signed up for The Founders' Institute, a program of lectures and team assignments designed to help aspiring founders to gain the skills and make the connections that they need for success. I was accepted but had to decline when I learned that I couldn't participate remotely and would have had to fly back to Silicon Valley for all of the sessions, or attend sessions in one of their other cities, none of which is even remotely convenient for me. There are other groups that do similar things, from Y Combinator (the best-known of the group) on down. The problem is that all of these groups depend on getting members and lecturers together in one place over a period of months. It won't work if there aren't a lot of qualified lecturers and interested participants in a city.

Given the success that for-profit educational instutitions such as University of Phoenix and DeVry University are having with remote learning, I'm convinced that a similar approach will work for training and encouraging new business founders, no matter where they're located. We use the Web for collaboration, messaging, teleconferencing and entertainment all the time--why can't we use it to help people learn how to launch their new businesses, wherever they are?

Let's be realistic--there are millions of jobs in old-line manufacturing industries that are gone in this recession and will never return. We have to encourage new ventures across the U.S and create jobs where the people are. Let's use the tools that have so dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for technology companies to lower the barriers to entry for teaching and encouraging entrepreneurs, across the country and around the world.