WCIT, Holograms and Communication…
3 June 2008 by oliverI meant to talk a little about this last week, but got wrapped up in a customer event in Korea for a few days.
Two weeks ago the World Congress on Information Technology was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was a huge event bringing together technology and policy folks from all around the world to discuss the future of the industry that we work in and share good practices from around the world, I’m told that around 20,000 people turned up in total.
Two interesting stories that I enjoyed from the WCIT event.
The first was an appearance by Bill Gates, not in person but as a hologram. This is the first time Bill has appeared this way at any event, and it was fun to do it here in the region. Rendering work for the hologram was done by a Malaysian company called Fat Boy Records, and it came out really well.
My colleague Stephannie Chin has a video of it over on her blog, the hologram itself was near life size but looks a little smaller in the video!
For PR reasons we were not supposed to speak for the company but now that it’s almost a month over, I can now tell you that Bill did make his appearance in WCIT but only virtually.
Maybe in this increasingly green world this is a far better way for executives to present at events rather than burning jet fuel. Hop on over and have a look for yourself.
The second story to share was an MoU signing with another Malaysian company called QubeConnect, they provide an open source based IP telephony platform that is garnering more and more attention here in the region.
The MoU provides for an agreement between Microsoft and QubeConnect to work together and share protocol information that will allow integration of their telephony platform with Microsoft OCS.
Edwin Yapp at ZDNet Asia carried the story;
Dinesh Nair, co-founder and CTO of QubeConnect, said Wednesday Microsoft OCS runs on the Windows platform and as such, its reach is limited to users and organizations on the same platform.
“Using our solution, users on either open source or other proprietary communications platforms will be able to communicate with Microsoft’s OCS seamlessly,” Nair said, during the deal-signing on the sidelines of the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) held in Malaysia this week.
Interoperability comes in many ways, while the world is very focused on the big announcements that come from Microsoft (for example, ODF support in Office), personally I find the smaller relationships like the one with QubeConnect a lot more exciting, there are an increasing number of those underway - especially here in Asia.