What do the Truman Show, Face Off, and The Terminator have in common? Besides being hit movies, these films portrayed a fantasy for their time that in many ways is now becoming reality. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview between a father and son, two technologists separated by a generation, these men discussed the future of technology and how the wonders of sci-fi may not be far off.

Their comments leave you feeling that the human race is on a precipice of enormous change. They call it the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” in which technology advances exponentially. Think about that. Because of technology, more digital content is being created, consumed, shared, and stored in a single day around the world, than in all of an entire year just several years ago. That may make some of us uncomfortable,  but like so many new advancements, the initial resistance wears down to acceptance, and then finally wide-scale adoption. More...

Did you see the movie The Truman Show? Released in 1998, this movie depicted the televising of the entire life of the lead character every moment of every day. In a sense, it foretold the future we are experiencing today.

Consider Facebook and how parents post picture after picture of their families. Like Truman – who was unaware he was constantly being filmed – the younger children don't realize their images are being shared with the world. Teenagers, on the other hand, happily post photos, including ones that not so many years ago would have been considered shocking. More...

In David Hirschman’s post, “Why Do We Check In?,” he quotes the tweet of a social media professional: “I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” I have been trying to figure that out myself over the past year.

Last fall, I drafted a post about “checking in” that I never published here, as I just couldn't tie it in sufficiently.  But now I have a little better perspective on where the link is between “check-ins” and Unified Communications. Basically, a “check-in” is a piece of  presence information and is clearly part of the UC paradigm (yes, that is my smiling face on the Wikipedia page for “presence”). More...

There may not be any such thing as a free lunch, but there just may be such a thing as free bandwidth.

Sound too good to be true? We can’t blame you for being suspicious, but Marty Parker over at NoJitter makes his case for leveraging Unified Communications to modify your mix of traffic in order to accommodate video with no need to add capacity. More...

We talk a lot here about collaboration, of course, and how Unified Communications technologies make that possible. We’re all pretty much in agreement that collaboration is a good thing.

But it is possible to emphasize collaboration too much, and that’s the point of an interesting column at NoJitter by Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan. Think of it this way: let’s say you love strawberry ice cream, as some of us do. But instead of simply enjoying that delightful post-dinner bowl of sweet, creamy heaven each evening, you decide to have strawberry ice cream at every meal. That wouldn’t work for more reasons than we can begin to list. More...

Videoconferencing on an everyday basis has been something that has been “just around the corner” for close to four decades now, and an interesting piece on why it isn’t more common can be found over at InformationWeek.

Writer Kurt Marko poses the question of “why aren’t we all saying ‘can you see me now?’” and comes up with two answers as to why videoconferencing is still a niche technology. One answer is technological, the other cultural. More...

We’ve all heard it said many times that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. For that reason, even if no other, it pays to know where technology came from and the problems it was designed originally to solve.

But when Network World ran a recent series of posts on the history of Unified Communications and collaboration, we have to admit we were more interested in the series-ending conclusions and perspective on where we are now and where we are going than we were in the evolution. Especially since the author was Larry Hettick, the Current Analysis analyst. More...

The first post I wrote when Seamless Enterprise  began was entitled “I’m Done with Web 2.0.” That wasn’t literal; what I was saying is that I felt like I had finally found the missing pieces to understand the impact of social media as a whole, despite the fact that I had scratched my head trying to understand the value of many of the individual pieces. But now I really am done with Web 2.0, meaning my focus now is on the elusive future-state that I assume someone else has already coined “Web 3.0.” More...

The changing role of video in the enterprise is reflected in a recent white paper that shows how conferencing technology has evolved, and fairly quickly, from an option primarily for travel cost avoidance to a real collaborative tool.

The Aberdeen Group white paper, titled From Niche to Mainstream: The Evolution of Video Collaboration, is available through Webtorials (registration required). It looks at how some companies are taking the lead on leveraging video in a Unified Communications and collaboration environment, as well as how other enterprises stack up against these leaders and the “best practices” standards they are setting. More...

What’s the most widely implemented elements of Unified Communications, and what are the most “popular” applications?

It may not be the definitive word, but there’s an interesting post over at NoJitter that offers some insight into the answers to these questions. The post is based on a modest survey of enterprises that isn’t available publicly, but that blogger Gary Audin took a look at. More...