As many rural areas of the country continue to overbuild low end business incubators and pin their employment hopes on just one more call center, opportunities to step away from the me-too crowd and do something bold and different continue to slip by.
This BusinessWeek article (hat tip to From On High) describes the Halo Center, which is the next generation of business videoconferencing. This technology has been driving business location decisions for several years, but still continues to stay off the radar of many economic development organizations.
In a global Knowledge Economy, a business can't afford to send someone on a plane to every meeting. There are too many of them, in too many places too far away. So videoconferencing has already become a staple of the global economy. The Halo Collaboration Studio is an immersive, next generation videoconference environment, not just a camera stuck on top of a PC. The goal of the Halo Center was to create a virtual business meeting that felt as much as possible like a real meeting.
Designed and sold by HP, the system works extremely well. Multiple large screen HD monitors, professional quality cameras, and high end audio provide a high quality meeting experience.
Yes, it's currently expensive--too expensive for most companies. But if a region is trying to distinguish its economic development efforts from other areas of the country (and the world), why not invest in a shared facility like this? Few businesses need or want this as a full time operational cost, but what if a business could lease this by the hour locally? All of a sudden, running a business in a rural community comes with opportunities you can't get anywhere else.
This parallels a suggestion I made almost two years ago along the same lines--use inexpensive supercomputer clusters as an economic development tool. Low end business incubators, with no distinguishing business tools attractive to aggressive Knowledge Economy businesses, stuck out in the woods far from downtowns are not going to make a region competitive. Economic developers need to be investing in the next big thing, not the last big thing. The very life and future of their communities is at stake.
But wait....there's just one more thing. Guess what Halo Centers need to work?
That's right--high performance, affordable broadband, not just to the building, but across the entire region so that you have a big pipe all the way back to a major Internet connect point. High performance regional networks are now as important to business as sewer, water, and highways were forty years ago. What is your region doing to make sure you have what you need?