This is undeniably cool. It is not like most of us haven’t experienced a web conference on some level… but not something on this scale. According to their website announcement:
“Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world. Singularity is over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities. Singularity is three days of talks over multiple tracks. In 2008, Singularity will define Web ‘08.”
There are a couple of things I like about that. First, the conference itself is green… That is hundreds of people who DON’T have to fly across the world so they can all get online together and talk content. They are just going to skip the flight, checkin, and all that nonesense and go online. How novel. What I like more is the web ‘8. Maybe that will catch on and we can finally dispense with the abused web 2.0 term.
Now having some design interest, I am perhaps more interested in the Rich Internet Application (think Flash) context of the event than most readers of this site. So lets take the web conference aspect to look at.
Intense development in desktop sharing, web conferencing and just plain remote access solutions in general have created some impressive reductions in the cost and growths in the capabilities of these tools. I can easily envision some broader ramifications, including ones that extend into real estate. Certainly it would be fun to be able to tell the boss that you are going to a conference and then sit in your pajamas for three days at home. But what about online auctioning and open houses?
Let’s say you want to hold an open house without the fuss of the visitors. I am not talking about a virtual tour, but rather a real tour. Go to the house. Take your webcam enabled laptop with a edge/data card and your digital camera with 2gb eye-fi memory card.
Now you can setup a webcast from your laptop - this is your ‘office view’ seat so choose something appropriate. From here you can introduce yourself to visitors through the webcam at decent resolution. Once introduced, you can walk them through the house using the wifi card… seconds after snapping the shot, thumbnail images start to appear on the webcast site. Your ‘visitors,’ sitting in the comfort of their own home, can then click the pics they want to view, and provide you with near real time feedback. They can tell you to go back to a spot and shoot closer. Or take video with your digital camera of a particular spot. In essence, you and your camera(s) become the eyes to your home. You can capture the leads digitally through the webcast site by requesting email address for certain services that require you to be able to uniquely identify them.
At this point you have very slickly marketed your listing in a new way, to a potentially much vaster audience, and generated as many leads as you can drive to the website at roughly $1 per click with a targeted adwords campaign. Pretty slick.
If anyone out there is doing this please let me know, I am interested to hear more. If not, why aren’t you?
Is the idea cool? Yes of course it is. And one day I expect to see it happen more often than not.
The problem is when you are at the open house you don’t always know when you have a visitor so lets fix this problem.
1. Setup a special page for the Virtual Open House.
2. Use a service like Live Person. When you run the client software on your PC it pops up on your screen alerting you to a visitor on the page.
3. when you get the alert then start talking and then instruct the visitor if they want to see more to type in the chat box what they would like to see.
Hmmm…. The wheels are turning in my head now
Loren, thanks so much for the feedback. I like your additions, so I will take you one step further. Add a business plan to hire competent college age tech friendly types and turn it into a service that you can market and franchise nationally. Of course, having the sales associate there is part of the lead generation process, so perhaps just selling a hardware package and tips and tricks guide to brokerages would be a way to productize this.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
2 Comments