VoiceCon 2008: Day Three

Wednesday kicked off with the much anticipated Cisco keynote session.  Using TelePresence, Al Gore and John Chambers joined Sue Bostrom on the VoiceCon stage for an interactive panel discussion.  Al Gore was located in Nashville while John Chambers joined from the Cisco headquarters in San Jose.  Sue Bostrom was on the VoiceCon stage in Orlando.  The panel moderator was a noted media representative from the UK; he joined live from London along with a studio audience.

The panel discussion was focused on the critical role that innovation and technology can play in mitigating climate change.  Although the dialog was lively and entertaining, the highlight for me was seeing everyone come together through the magic of TelePresence.  It’s truly amazing to watch.  Unlike traditional video conferencing, it is remarkably lifelike.  The video is high def, and there’s virtually no delay.  Even when the images were enlarged on the huge overhead screens, the quality was perfect.  It was just as good as the live TV feed.  You have to see it to believe it!

Pictures are courtesy of VoiceCon (these are much better than my camera phone pics).

Afterwards, I grabbed a quick lunch and joined the CIO panel, which was insightful.  I then headed down to the booth for my last shift of booth duty.  The traffic was much slower today.  You can always tell when it’s the last day of exhibits.  The traffic dies off towards the end of the evening. 

Booth duty ended at 6 pm.  There were a few of us who were catching late flights, so we shared a ride to the airport and grabbed dinner at Macaroni Grill while waiting for our flight. 

On the plane, the gate bridge connected to the economy section side entrance instead of the front entrance by the cockpit.  Usually, that’s not a big deal, but tonight my seat was right in front of that door.  So, as hundreds of passengers were trying to enter the plane, me and my neighbor were in their way.  We decided to stand in the aisle between first class and economy while they were boarding.  We had a friendly flight attendant who joked to us that we could just do her job and welcome everyone onto the plane.  So, we decided to have fun with it and did just that.  We were giving them the standard reminders about putting one bag in the overhead and the other bag below and moving out of the aisle so others could pass. 

My neighbor in crime was in a surprisingly good mood considering his flight in Tampa had been cancelled three times, and he had to drive to Orlando to catch this flight.  He was having a good time.  I guess he was just happy to be on the plane.

Finally, everyone boarded, and we got our seats back.  The rest of the flight was the way I like it — uneventful and quiet. 

I made it back to DFW around 11:15 pm and got home at 12:30 am.  It was late, but I was glad to be there.

Here are my parting pictures of the day:

-more pics of the booth (courtesy of VoiceCon)

-the ship at the Gaylord Seafood restaurant where I ate on Sunday