November Meeting-Gordon Thomson, Cisco Systems

[24 November 2008]

72 members and guests were in attendance to hear an entertaining and informative presentation from Gordon Thomson, a director of Cisco Systems.

Gordon spoke about how passionate he is that businesses, and people, take advantage of technology, claiming that by doing so, any business, large or small, can play the global market successfully.

He demonstrated that Scotland and the UK lag behind other countries, citing Singapore as an example where there are fibre optic cables in every home. The average broadband capability in Japan, he said, is 50mb, the USA 40mb, UK 12mb, and Scotland 4mb.

Gordon then discussed how Video Conferencing is being used by more and more companies, cutting the costs of time-consuming travel, accommodation, etc., and informed the Meeting of the latest development in video technology, the introduction of 3D TelePrescence, i.e., the ability to project  a two-dimensional image on to a set of screens.  Meetings could therefore go ahead as if the participants were actually face-to-face. The quality of the image, Gordon said, is like Sky HD and much superior to what is currently available. There is no time-delay, people move in real time and you can see them in real time. It also uses spatial sound so that when you look at a person on the screen, that's where the sound comes from.

This technology has already been discussed with  major companies and Gordon projected that it will be commonplace within 12-18 months.  The official launch of this technology in Scotland is at the Cisco offices at the Eurocentral Business Park on Tuesday 9th December.

Gordon also advised of the strides made in the use of a Personalised Web Service, such as the one used by Nike where one can build and design one's own customised trainers, then have them manufactured and delivered to your door.

Finally, Gordon spoke about the need for collaboration between learning institutions, businesses, and government bodies, to ensure that every aspect of the developing technology is used to the benefit of all of us.

Grateful thanks to Gordon for an illuminating presentation.