It’s always nice to see conceptual software demos realized with shipping code. Half a year after the Australian software firm nsquared demoed their visionary “seamless computing” concept at Microsoft Teched Australia 2011, they’re now delivering on their vision with a solution that aims to make group collaboration easier.
Their new presenter software allows people in a meeting room to collaboratively create, annotate and deliver presentations. It runs on a combination of Microsoft Surface (1st and 2nd generation), Windows PCs (laptop and slate), OS X and iPads devices for maximum compatibility.
As an example of what it can do, files can be flicked from device to device, presentations can be created by grabbing images, slides and pages from existing documents, and content can appear on any of the assigned projector screens by a simple drag and drop gesture.
What I find comforting about the video of their product above is the ability to browse the filesystem for real documents and files, with an interesting A-Z carousel view. No this isn’t a scripted demo where the right files always magically appear at the right time, this interacts with real pictures and real Office documents, as you would.
Although this isn’t quite feasible for most home users, nsquared says they’ve already received interest from a number of businesses and large enterprises to deploy this in offices around Australia and the US.
I envision a conference table when everyone scrambles to try to put their documents in with their various pads with different incompatibilities, and then the wifi is down, some pages showing up jagged, and only 2 out of 15 of the executives know how to use it, and in the end everyone just crowds around that one guy’s laptop for a plain old PowerPoint.
Maddy, that made me LOL so much. Thank you. It’s so true.
LOL, That’s true.
What if I want to share a 2Gb HD video with the other 15 users in the meeting. The whole thing shuts down, including the $8000 Surface unit, and I end up showing the thing in my $100 Classic iPod.
Did he just present that presentation or was the presentation already presented before?!