Henry Hon, CEO, Vyew

MM
Let’s start off with your names and titles, and a brief description of the company.

HH
I’m Henry Hon, CEO of the company. The company’s name right now is actually Simulāt, but we’re using Vyew. So Vyew is the product, and Vyew will actually very soon become the corporate name.

TL
I’m Todd Lane, the marketing communications director at Vyew.

MM
Henry, if you would, give us a corporate history, in terms of where Vyew/Simulāt came from–and where you see it headed.

HH
Simulāt started as a network simulation provider for large companies for education and training. Our customers included Microsoft, Nortel, McAffee and other large companies with complex network products. We simulated their products and then we used it for their product education and training.

Three years ago we started to build and invest in Vyew. We recognized it as a way of expanding education and training with anything digital. We wanted to make it a space where anything digital can be uploaded, and where people can interact, ask questions and get training. That’s the genesis of Vyew.

Since last year, we’ve dropped building simulations and have completely focused our entire team on developing and extending Vyew.

MM
How would you characterize the market category for the Vyew offering?

HH
Vyew is a synchronous and asynchronous web-conferencing and visual-collaboration platform.

MM
So by asynchronous, you mean not in real time.

HH
That’s correct. That means that it’s in a persistent state.

MM
It exists in a storage system, and somebody can get it on-demand.

HH
Exactly. They can access it at any time. Whenever they leave whatever they input or uploaded or interacted with, it will be in that state when someone else comes in.

MM
This gives someone a record of a movie? Or is it just the static state of a previous collaborative session?

HH
You can have a movie. All of the input into our environment is tagged by time, date, user input, name and so on. We have a filter built into the product that lets you filter–again–by timestamp or by name or by project tags or other attributes.

MM
If I understand you right, there are 2 dimensions–or an overlap of 2 pretty well established categories. There’s 1 established market category of Webcast presentations and screen sharing. Right?

HH
Correct.

MM
Then there’s another category of online collaboration, which has various attributes or properties to it. One of which is the ability to draw on objects, and add sticky notes or some sort of annotation to particular areas. As well as perhaps some way of recording a particular collaborative session.

HH
That’s exactly correct.

It’s like a Wiki, a persistent collaborative environment, except that we’ve also made it highly visual and able to incorporate multimedia.

MM
Another way of saying that is, it’s a visual multimedia Wiki.

HH
Exactly. That’s very good.

MM
As you find yourself out in the market, you probably get compared and contrasted to a WebEx or an Adobe Connect. Is that correct?

HH
That is correct on the real-time side. When people think of us as “synchronous,” we’re definitely compared with WebEx and GoToMeeting. But WebEx and GoToMeeting are not in the asynchronous realm. They’re merely synchronous.

When they go to the asynchronous side, there’s less. This is more of an emerging space. People are just now finding out that this is a very good way to collaborate when anything digital can be put into a space and collaborated on. People are still finding out the many use cases that the platform can support.

MM
In the asynchronous or recorded on-demand space, whom do you run into there?

HH
Actually, we have not run into that many companies. There are some new Web 2.0 companies that are popping up, like ConceptShare and Octopz. They very much focus on the creative community. We would be compared to them on the asynchronous side.

MM
Sure. Also on the asynchronous side, you have some of these on-demand Webcast presentation platforms such as BrainShark or On-24. Maybe even OnStream Media or something like that.

HH
But they’re more for Webinar presentations. They don’t really have a persistent state, where you allow people to come in and out and upload more content, or make their comments and annotate on content.

MM
Fair enough.

Henry, one of the things that might be useful as a sidebar or footnote here is to share or do a quick overview in terms of things that you’ve learned about knowledge transfer and knowledge-worker productivity. Lessons learned about those things when you were doing simulations of complex networks.

HH
When we were doing the simulation of the complex networks it was all in virtual space. There was no way to really interact with real people. It was all interacting with a program.

We found in that alone there was some drawback, especially when it was anything complex. You need to interact with a real person at a certain point. That’s why we began developing Vyew.

In fact, we’re finding a number of interactive training companies that are now finding Vyew to be exactly what they want for their training. They have virtual training but at a click they can now interact with real people.

MM
This gets to a fairly interesting little area in cognitive science that’s specifically about how adults learn. One of the findings from a lot of academic and applied research reveals that adults learn best in small peer groups–where there’s not an obvious authority figure dictating how things are supposed to be. Where it’s more informal and playful.

Specifically, where they come together and share some visual or physical objects.

HH
Absolutely.