New Web Conferencing Platform! Vidquik Alpha Launches!

My recent side project, Vidquik, is in alpha. So we need to work out the kinks and polish it up before our wider beta launch. We're going to launch an easy-to-use WebEx / GoToMeeting (no download, no registration necessarily) next month, but for now it's just the video chat. Would appreciate everyone's help in testing it out, reporting bugs and telling us what sucks about it. Thanks! More from my blog post over at Vidquik:

Our alpha went live today! For those of you that might not know what an “alpha” is, it’s the stage of software development when live testing begins. It’s typically before a product’s full features are complete. After alpha is the beta stage, where a product’s primary features are completed and ready to be tested by a greater audience than in the alpha stage.

For Vidquik’s alpha, we are only providing our video conferencing (not a full web conferencing platform) to the public and we appreciate any help that we can get in terms of your feedback, insights, complaints, or bug reports. Just a few minutes after our alpha was released we received several notices that our email confirmation link was broken. FAIL. Of course the matter was quickly resolved. We appreciate all of your notifications, comments and suggestions, so please keep them coming!

About a month from today, our beta launch will present Vidquik’s full platform, which is a video and presentation sharing platform. Think WebEx or Citrix (GoToMeeting), but stripped down to their core essentials. AND we made it extremely easy to use. There are no downloads involved, no registration is required, and no login is ever necessary. A simple to use GoToMeeting with zero hassles. Best of all, for one-to-one meetings we will provide it for free. If you use WebEx or GoToMeeting, you’re paying $49 per month. With Vidquik, it will be zero.

Asia's Very Smart Cities: Songdo, Korea and Meixi Lake, China

This month's Forbes magazine has an article entitled "Asia's Smart Metropolis: South Korea's Songdo and China's Meixi Lake are spending billions on intelligent networks with an eco-vibe" where companies such as Cisco and 3M are highlighted.

What's missing in this discussion is smaller technology company I'm an advisor to called Innotive. It's led by my two close friends, Jimmy and Peter, who I did my first two startups with. Innotive is an integrated platform that allows for the convergence of rich media content through an interactive, zooming interface. It powers interactive displays at retail stores, such as BMW and Nike, and provides a control room solution to manage CCTV camera monitoring efficiently through one workstation. The latter product is called InnoWatch which will be integrated into the Songdo City project with over 1,000 touch-screen displays installed.


Songdo is a huge development project that spans over 1,500 acres, 150 buildings and will cost over $35 billion. It is not only a "smart" city but a green city that will be the largest private LEED development in the world since the whole city will be based on LEED building standards.

Below is an example of Innotive's InnoWatch solution:

A longer, detailed version of the Forbes' article was published online, "Very Smart Cities," which you can read here.