This is not a political commentary, but I would like to demonstrate how corporate America can use different methods to capture video to document an event in your area. The Republican National Convention was held last week just a few blocks from my office in St. Paul, Minnesota. And with it being so close, I felt compelled to include it in a blog post.

The main message with this post is that you can do really engaging multimedia with the right tools … and very easily. We used three different cameras and explained the pros and cons to each.

Please check out my video blog posting below!

I went to the Wainhouse Research Summit recently. This was a great event focusing on trends and technologies affecting conferencing and
unified communications, including audio, video, IM, and social networks.

The keynote was Andrew Lippman, a professor from MIT’s Media Lab and an expert on digital life and viral communications. He gave a very enlightening talk on surviving in a digital world.

Other topics throughout the show included telepresence, video conferencing at the Federal Reserve Bank, telework, distance education technologies, social networking and how video applications have caused business transformation.

The video clip below shows highlights of some of the exciting technologies at the show.

View Wainhouse Research webcast archive

I went to InfoComm 2008 last week which showcased technology solutions required to build critical AV and information communication systems. This was a huge audio visual tradeshow and took up three halls of the Las Vegas convention center.

The video clip below shows interview highlights of some of the exciting technologies shown on the expo floor.

• * Digital Signage (Wireless Ronin Technologies, C-nario, Litefast, and IDEX USA)
• * Unified Collaboration (Smart Technologies and MediaPOINTE )
• * Video Conferencing (Life Size and Polycom)
• * Large Venue Display (Extron and Sony)
• * Other Innovative Technologies (FogScreen, GlobalMedia, VER and ViewCast)

FogScreen had a really cool walkthrough projection screen which created the illusion of real video floating in mid air. I haven’t seen anything like it before.

This is an interview with Steve VonderHaar, founder and research director of Interactive Media Strategies, a research firm that focuses on the use of multimedia in the corporate environment.

Steve talks about the findings of their annual survey to 1200 corporate executives about their use, deployment and perceptions of a wide range of web communication technologies including online multimedia.

He shares how social multimedia is going to have a significant impact on the perceived effectiveness of online multimedia in business communications, and what he’s seeing as the trends in video usage for business communications.

This is an article by Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media that talks about “how to embed multimedia presentations in your press releases.” He discusses and demonstrates two “easy-to-use tools enabling multimedia presentations to be embedded into your press releases, websites, or email and track who is viewing them.”

One tool is from BrainShark and uses a telephone to narrate PowerPoints.

The second tool is from Netbriefings and is called Proclaim. It uses a webcam and PowerPoints along with rich media clips. Anyone who can post to YouTube can use Proclaim!

Day two highlights from the show floor of Streaming Media East. Interviews with companies discussing innovations in the industry.

Allison Metzler, director of marketing from The Feed Room, talks about The Feed Room corporate end-to-end solutions for corporate online video.

Steve Remondini from NetStairs discusses how the Netstairs middleware platform can convert all media for mobile devices like the iPhone and their new Akamai partnerships.

David Stubenvoll from Wowza talks about their Wowza Media Server a flash streaming server and their new H.264 deployment.

Joel Unickow, publisher of Streaming Media, talks about the success of the last ten years of the show and the organization.

Erik Leonard talks to us from on2 technologies, the predominate provider of encoding technology for Flash applications.

And Mark Robertson talks to us from ReelSEO. a firm focusing on providing valuable tips, information, news, and other resources for video search optimization and search engine marketing of video content.

Live video interviews from the show floor of Streaming Media East 2008 in New York City. We consider it one of the best shows for corporate communication and broadcasting. Today’s interviews are with some of the larger companies in the industry.

Deejee Cooley, Internet TV evangelist at Adobe, talks about their new desktop Adobe Media Player which can be used to find, manage and watch favorite internet tv shows, and the Flash Media Rights Management Server.

Paul from Limelight talks about the four dimensions of object delivery.

Charles Peters from Netbriefings discusses the Proclaim technology.

Ray Hood, CEO at Qumu, talks about ChangeCasting, a new leadership technique for corporate communications.

Jim Thill from Microsoft talks about the new Microsoft Silverlight cross platform cross browser plug-in that lets you create next generation rich media for the web.

Paul RItter talks to us from Interactive Media Strategies, a market research firm that focuses on online multimedia and enterprise communications technologies. It is a leading firm in the industry that businesses turn to for market research, benchmarking data and insight!

Albert Maruggi, president of Provident Partners, talks about the social media phenomenon and the fragmentation of information in the corporate world.