When it all works, the world does get flatter

I gave a talk to a consortium of universities in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. We connected from an IP-based video conferencing unit in my office to a gateway in Australia, and from there they redistributed the talk in real-time to 25 directly connected sites and others via a webstream. We had a clean 1-megabit+ video and audio stream, with smooth video. It actually all worked, and the technology mostly stayed out of the way so the audience could concentrate on the content.

It was a little difficult to try to get feedback from the group as I spoke versus face to face. But of course, this was a lecture that never would have happened face to face. It was really gratifying both to experience an audience in multiple distant countries that was interested in what I had to say, and also to see the technology work so flawlessly.

Here's a link to the web stream. Oh yeah, the topic was Identity and Access Management, if you care!