Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Traveled to Work from Home”.
Thank you to webex for sponsoring this video. You look way too fancy we’re not usually this fancy. Okay, please listen to our instructions, so this was the first time in almost two years that i’ve gotten on a plane, it’s exciting, to feel a little bit back to normal, a bit nerve-wracking kind of all at the same time and ironically, what finally got me out Of the house on an airplane is the same stuff that was ultimately just going to keep me uh in my house more. I was off to san francisco to check out some of the sort of crazy cisco web x1 innovations and, what’s sort of a hybrid workforce, that sort of seemed like the future. But it’s really the present it’s actually going to be before i get to all the cool stuff that we saw there.
I’Ve been doing this for a while, and i think it’s been a really fun way to say. Thank you for all the years of support. We have a giveaway, it is a 500 american express gift card. It’S gon na be open and available to anybody in the world. Just like the video leave a comment down below about tell me what you would do with this crazy cool, webex tech leave your social handle in the comments and we’ll pick a winner, all the stuff. You need to know how long it lasts and that kind of stuff will be down below so to highlight the trap.
Aside from the tech which i’ll talk about, i was actually seeing some friends again. These are folks that i haven’t seen in years. We’Ve been friends for a really long time. You know i got ta see jenna i got ta see crystal you know people i used to hang out with pretty regularly so that was awesome uh, but the products that i saw there are things i think you’re going to be seeing a lot of in the Very near future – and i guess you could say, sort of webex and cisco – had a long-term vision of the hybrid workspace, what it was going to be and that long-term vision seems like it went from like a five-year plan to like tomorrow, like we need this stuff. Now, as more and more companies are sort of letting people work remotely, including mine, you know it used to be that everybody had to be in the office. We worked nine to five, especially back in techno buffalo days.
Then you know the world changed and realizing. We can get almost everything done, remote come to studio and film when we have to, and everybody goes home and it’s worked and it’s been working for a lot of larger and larger companies. But you need the tech to support that really big paradigm shift and cisco and webex are sort of offering that. So i get how talking about video conferencing might not outwardly be like the most exciting topic. But if you think about how important end-to-end encryption is for your text messages and how much you think about covering your webcam on your laptop or worry that your gps and certain apps are tracking you in your phone, you should give that same thought to your video Conferencing as well, and i hadn’t and cisco and webex, were doing that and sort of brought it to the forefront of my mind.
Hopefully i can do that for you as well so they’re looking to solve some very specific problems and the ones that were like immediately applicable to me, uh working from home is awesome. I have kids and that sort of the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. My kids talk a lot and they’re loud all three of them, so my home will be a nice place to work is not quiet, um, and there is a lot of stuff going on in the background, so they partnered with bang olufsen to make noise cancelling headphones To drown out potential noise that sort of may be going on in your house, and this isn’t like just reverse engineering, the sounds that are going on and piping them the waves and backwards.
This is like borderline magic literally sounded like i was talking in soundproof room aside from that. They also showed something called the webex desk mini, which was pretty great. Basically, it’s a portable system.
It’S got a 4k camera, a 15 inch touchscreen a speaker attached to it. So you could take it anywhere. You want around the house even to meetings you’re using your dedicated computer monitor, which is pretty awesome to have so i think they’re envisioning, putting this thing in your kitchen or maybe if you’ve got a call, you want to move it over to a kitchen table, or Maybe this is how you want to call grandma it’s sort of a way that could sort of move and shift depending on what you want to do, and also you can install any web app.
You want on it. Additionally, so you can watch some youtube or youtube tv on it and then take your phone calls. So there’s a bunch of stuff.
They were showing the next thing they showed and it’s appropriately named uh the webex desk hub. That was a webex desk hub. Essentially, it’s an all-in-one touchscreen monitor speaker, headphones dock and phone dock.
You take your meetings, obviously, but if it got noisy or you know, things are happening in the background. You can just pick up the headphones and automatically the audio was transferred to those headphones or, if you had to step away, you could just pick up your phone and the media automatically sort of shift over to your phone without any interruptions. So the question that, like i had all this stuff sounds great and it looks good but like i can do video calls from my laptop.
I could do it from my ipad from my phone uh. Why do i need new hardware uh? The big answer wasn’t one that i thought and it was end-to-end encryption. You know if you’re concerned about your text messaging being encrypted. This is your face and your voice, which i think has a lot more weight than things that you could have typed uh on your phone, so that was a huge deal. It also knocks off the part of somebody, maybe dropping into your video conference.
Call uninvited plus, you get, you know, really high quality cameras, really high quality displays all in sort of different size packages. So all these things just work, that’s the biggest component. I could give it and they work for smaller companies or even scale up to larger corporations. I think in amazon this week said their whole workforce could essentially work remotely if they wanted to so digital whiteboards are cool digital whiteboards that can kind of go beyond that.
I think are extra useful, so you’ve got a digital whiteboard, plus video conferencing like you’d, expect, and i think one of the neatest uses of that is actually with cisco’s dna spaces, so imagine being in a big office and you’re uncomfortable going with a lot of people And you want to see in real time how many people are there, how many people are in a conference room and then you can gauge if you want to go in that’s what this lets. You do with sort of cameras and sensors that you can actually get like super granular and go through and sort of see where people are. You can pinch and zoom instead of see like okay, there’s one or two people here. I feel comfortable going to the fifth floor or i want to jump around. You can kind of do all of those things and then you can swipe home and get access to pretty much whatever web app. You want. You want to watch youtube on here.
You can do that on a beautiful screen. Of course, you’ve got pen support, so you can annotate draw and do sort of, i guess regular uh digital whiteboard, stuff, hi mary. My name is john, hey, john hello, oh cool, so having a digital whiteboard is awesome but being able to collaborate with scheduled whiteboard with somebody who is not near. You takes advantage of what the digital stuff uh can do so mary’s, actually a real live person. Who is not like a demo? She exists somewhere, mary.
Where are you i’m in fairfax, virginia, okay, so she’s in virginia and i’m in san francisco so clearly different parts of the world? And we could draw together so let’s say we’re doing a real intensive business meeting and we’re talking about business and there’s a lot of business to be done and there’s business to be had and we need to collaborate to get the best out of our business mary. I’M gon na do a drawing, but i’m unsure how to finish it. Could you perhaps finish this drawing for me, so we can better off.
Do our business there we go and it shows see there’s mary in fairfax virginia. She looks like she may be in washington dc at that point drying it out. We need some hair and we’re done, and this type of business can do more than just stick figures.
I mean for collaboration for teams for multiple people, no matter where you are be able to collaborate and draw in real time. It’S pretty awesome to actually see while being able to actually see the person so mary, thank you for doing business with me. You’Re very welcome. I did get a chance to talk to one elite engineers.
There um his name was kevin and he mentioned that he’d been watching the channel for years, so kevin uh shout out to you and to get a chance to sort of hear what the idea was years ago. It’S what the execution ended up being now was pretty cool to make something that is secure and easy to use for the consumer. I think it’s something that everybody could get behind. People are really hyper focused on making sure their webcams are covered on their computer and worrying about being tracked and who’s watching you, but oftentimes. There’S no thought given to the cameras that are on your phones, the gps chip that is in your phone and sort of talking on video chatting applications, of which there are many. What you are saying, essentially what cisco and webex trying to do? What kevin explained to me was sort of take the ease of use. People are used to with these video chatting, but just make them more secure. I think that was something that i could get behind. So there’s a ton more. They had from advanced networking to control center to tablets their webex desk pro.
That was a really nice size. 27 inch, 4k touch screen, monitor and speaker, something called room kit mini that you could add to any tv for easy video conferencing. At the event they showed, you can also add snapchat filters too, and these people you can see here were real people that were sitting at their desks for the entire six to seven hours, uh that this was going on. So for me they were the real mvps.
So, okay, so give this video a thumbs up for this poor guy who had a deal with a cat on his head for, like literally half a day, so these products weren’t just showcase with like slides in a keynote. They were actually set up in these rooms and sets which was pretty cool to see and also get a better sense of how webex is envisioning. These products working into the hybrid work life. So this is where i spent most of my time getting a tour of these different sort of experiences they had and there were five of them all set up.
They walked us through how everything worked and how each product is best suited for places like kitchen cafe home office corporate office. You know wherever so. I think what stood out most during the tour was the webex ui and the apps and how everything just integrated together. Um, it’s doing some pretty impressive stuff. I got to watch a live video conference of somebody sort of speaking spanish.
That would translate to english text and then vice versa. So you could have a conversation with people in almost any language, and that seemed a little bit like the future, stop collaborations on whiteboards people who are on the other side of the country happening in real time. They were sitting next to me and also here they’re.
Taking security seriously with end-to-end encryption, all just built in sort of within the ui, so ultimately that’s what it’s about right, the ui and making it easy for everyone to be included, participate in these meetings. If you’re, a large company has hundreds of people in these things. At one time and sort of being included is a difficult task to accomplish in all these scenarios, but i walked away from these demos feeling, like webex cracked, the code on how to do just that. Well, it was weird to get on the plane again uh.
It was awesome to see friends and also – and it’s always good to know about security and things that are happening in the world of tech and also things that are generally going to make my life easier. Instead of seeing these hybrid work environment scenarios and seeing these different sets built and how this tech can be used makes sense, and i think that this tech, while seemingly new and different, now, is going to seem very commonplace in a few years. This is going to be integrated into our lives into our kitchens into our coffee shops, into our boardrooms and everywhere else, as sort of we start working from different places and cisco and webex for years have been at the forefront of that, and that’s just continuing now With the new suite of tech newspaper products with security and end-to-end encryption at the forefront and ease of use built in throughout, if you want to check out the hybrid work experience center, which is where we filmed and also where they made webex one to learn more About the webex feeder products and software we’ll link to it all down below .