Henry Hon, CEO, Vyew

HH
Yes. Through communication and through interaction with that pixillated content.

Here’s where the power of the Internet and the computer actually can improve that: by making it both synchronous and asynchronous. Now you have the freedom to interact with content at any time and any place you want because it’s in a persistent state. But at the same time, you can just call someone and say, “Let’s meet and talk about this.”

Now all the parties are looking at the same thing and interacting on the same content.

MM
Right.

Again, just to summarize–the value is not what’s on the screen, per se. It’s in the richness and the depth of the social interaction of what’s produced and supported by what’s on the screen.

HH
Absolutely. Our job with building Vyew is to make it as easy as possible to upload any type of digital content.

If it’s too limited then it starts to break down–and what’s the point? We have to be able to bring in any type of office documents and any type of pictures.

If it’s MP3 or video or what have you–now you can upload it quickly and allow people to interact with that content in various ways such as with sticky notes or whiteboard or comments. That’s the whole idea behind the tool.

MM
Sure. Just take me through another one or two customer success use cases. Put more of a personality and human reality on it.

HH
Maybe Todd can tell us. In fact, we’re writing a case study right now. This is a very interesting story.

TL
Yes. We’re actively working on case studies with customers. One that’s very interesting that I’ve been working with is called Cellarworks. They specialize in designing architecturally distinguished wine cellars for clients such as celebrities, restaurants and high-end food stores.

For one client–a hotel restaurant–they have to work with many different individuals toward the approval of a design.

For example, they have to work with the restaurant manager and the sommelier–the wine steward - and with other hotel managers on the client side.

Then on the design side, there are designers, architects, and a rendering company they work with. There are also HVAC experts–air-conditioning–to make sure that the wine is at the right temperature.

There are also security experts–because the wine is expensive. They have a biometric security system that they implemented.

Then of course there are the contractors who have to build the wine cellar. All of these parties have to work together and they’re all from separate organizations.

MM
By the way, Todd–just to punctuate what you’ve said–all of our research in these various kinds of workflows and so on–indicate that review and approval–whether it’s conceptual or finished. The review and approval concept remains one of the most difficult, expensive, problem-prone, error-generating activities in most companies.

TL
Yes. You’re right.

They were having that same kind of pain with review and approval, coordinating faxes to the various parties, e-mails with attachments, or overnight delivery. Then they had to make sure that the changes came back from all the parties and that the changes were incorporated. Then they needed to send the next version to whoever needed to see it.

MM
So Todd, in particular, you’re dealing with some media types here that a lot of these conferencing tools aren’t really good with. One would be like CAD drawings. Another would be 3D renders. Another might be navigatable movies. 3D movies. And so on.

TL
Yes.MM
Take us through some of the unusual media types that this particular cellar designer uses–and of course, their collaboration.

TL
Sure. They have architectural drawings probably done in something like AutoCAD that they have to upload. They also have renderings.

They work with a company in China that does the renderings, so they have a time difference and a language barrier. To communicate visually with this approach really helped the interaction with the Chinese company.

They may even have paper drawings–conceptual drawings–that were scanned in. There are also invoices, time sheets and other correspondence. All of these different kinds of files had to be reviewed by various parties at different times.

By switching to Vyew they got rid of all the communication problems that they’d had before–using e-mail, fax, overnight delivery–and then coordinating all the things that came back to make sure they were in the current revision.

With Vyew, they could just put the files in a central repository. Then everyone from anywhere could look at them at their convenience and make annotations. Then they could see who made which annotations, and make sure that they were all incorporated. Then all the parties could view everyone else’s annotations, and make sure that they agreed on the final design or the next revision.

They’ve reported great results from this methodology. Also, their collaborators all love it, because they also don’t have to deal with the e-mail, fax or overnight delivery.

HH
Was this the case where they had one project where they couldn’t get a final after many days or weeks, and then they used Vyew and it all came together immediately?

TL
That’s a different one, a company called Vizwerks. They do retail store and display design.

MM
As a category, Todd, they refer to that as “visual merchandising.”

TL
They were working with one client, emailing or sending designs back and forth. They went through several revisions over a month and a half. It wasn’t supposed to take that long.

When they implemented Vyew, they were able to resolve the issue and get a final design in one call just by being able to collaborate together. They use Vyew regularly with their customers.

MM
So far, we’ve talked about a couple or 3 areas where Vyew has really made a significant contribution in terms of cycle time, cost and probably quality improvement. Visual merchandising. Architectural design and this learning environment. K through 20.

Are there any other major spokes on your hub-and-spoke concept here? Are there any other spokes to your market, where you see really kind of juicy use cases and good results?

HH
Yes. There actually are many.

For example, medical cases. Doctors have to look at X-rays or pictures and show them to other doctors for comment. That is also a big area where collaboration is very helpful.MM
One of the challenges in that medical information–specifically visual medical information–is that oftentimes, these MRI images or X-rays or sonograms or whatever… In many cases, these images are half a gigabyte large. They’re huge files.

Oftentimes, the only part that the doctor or medical specialist really wants is just a 1/1000th slice of it.

HH
Exactly.

MM
How do you facilitate–as opposed to uploading a half a gigabyte file–which is really improbable for everybody except NASA or the DoD–how do you facilitate that?

HH
Very simply. We have a one-click screen capture button. So whatever you see on your desktop that you want to share, you just click it and it jumps into Vyew.

MM
In that case, you’d have this large medical image on your display. This X-ray image. Right?

And you’d zoom-zoom-zoom into it. You’d do a screen shot. And that screenshot basically uploads it to Vyew?

HH
Exactly. Now everybody’s looking at it either in real time or asynchronously.

MM
You know what would be really cool, Henry, but it’s probably not in your product roadmap. It may be in your product roadmap, but probably not in your current thing… To have a dynamic imaging server, so that you could have a little thumbnail in the view, but then you could pan and zoom in it. The contents then being dynamically served from a server. Such as you might find with MediaRich from Equilibrium–or the Scene 7 product–now part of Adobe. Things like that.

HH
What we’d really like to do is to partner with some of these companies.

MM
Exactly.

HH
We don’t want to reinvent the wheel of whatever they’re doing but we have our part that could be very useful to them.

We’d love to see ourselves partnering with digital asset management companies that could seamlessly pull images from their system directly into ours.

Your audience is dealing with a lot of digital information and how to manage it. They need a seamless collaboration site. They could pull from their digital library right into Vyew.

MM
Henry, Todd, thank you.