Nortel Buzzboard

Last week I traveled up to Nortel’s Ottawa campus to host a tour of Nortel’s latest R&D innovations with a few “bloggers.”  I describe them as bloggers, but blogging is just one of the many hats these guys wear. 

Rich Tehrani is the founder of TMCnet, John Arnold heads up an analyst firm that bears his name and formerly was an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.  David Greenfield has his own consulting biz and formerly editor for Network Computing. Vito Pilieci is also the tech guru for the Ottawa Citizen and has articles across many pubs.  All-in-all we had some smart guys in the room — guys that have likely heard just about every angle to every technology story ever dreamed up.

So it was good to hear their positive comments on both the day and the R&D demos that we showed them.   The clear “cool technology” of the day was a sneak peek at Nortel’s virtual-reality conferencing solution.  Also several people commented on the lack of any comment by Nortel on PBXs or softswitches during the day.  But don’t let me tell you about it, read their blogs posts yourself:

• David Greenfield writes about the virtual-reality conferencing demo and how it distinguishes itself from other virtual world concepts.
• Jon Arnold has this post detailing many of the demos for the day, including a lot of detail on the telepresence demo.  Jon’s post also includes a good number of pics from the day.
• Rich Tehrani was live blogging from the event, and has several posts from his visit, including one on the virtual-reality conferencing demo, the telepresence demo, the unified communications demo, and a wrap-up of his thoughts from the day.