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Drop in at the TiECon 2001...virtually

Nirshan Perera

It may be over, but if you have a decent Internet connection and a few hours to spare, it's not too late to drop in at this year's conference of The IndUS Entrepreneurs.

The complete webcast of TiECon 2001 is now up and running on the group's homepage -- www.tiecon.org/webcast/index.html.

The broadcast, or TieCast as the deal-making junkies call it, includes all the keynote speeches from the 3-day event, wall-to-wall coverage of the main learning tracks, and numerous company showcase interviews -- totalling over 50 hours of continuous content.

The improved e-component of the conference represents a major overhaul of its timid debut last year, said Mohan Trikha, the TiE charter member who steered the project.

"We looked at last year's webcast as a test really," he said. "It was a last-minute idea and didn't have the marketing to really push it. But we learned important lessons about what is important to make this work and we focused on them this year."

The number one lesson TiE learned, not surprisingly, was that quality is crucial.

"There are lots of technical improvements in this year's TiECast," Trikha noted. "We used the latest streaming technology, the streams are well-encoded and we trained our people on how to shoot videos for the Web, which is very different because the screen size is drastically smaller."

The organisation and editing of the webcast has also been vastly upgraded to hypnotise the most flighty attention span.

"We want to keep the people interested and enable them to easily draw out the salient facts," Trikha said. To this end, TiE also got Carmine Gallo, the familiar face of TechTV, to work pro-bono as the webcast host.

"He's like an analyst sitting at CNN, giving his comments on the day's happenings and drawing it all together," said Trikha. "We also selected session attendees to provide summaries for the viewing audience: What are the few golden nuggets here, we wanted to know."

A team of 20 people spent over 6 months planning and putting together the on-demand broadcast, Trikha said. Without the gracious subsidies of corporate sponsors, the bill for the whole undertaking could have easily topped $1 million.

But, in the end, a price tag can't be put on this important dimension of TiECon.

"TiE must practice the cutting-edge methodology that it preaches," Trikha observed. "Through a live webcast, the people who can't make it to the conference can enjoy it just the same. Even the people who were at the conference, but couldn't make it to all the sessions or were simply caught out in the congested halls, can experience everything at their leisure."

According to Trikha, during the June 23-25 event, the amount of people watching the live webcast overshadowed the number of actual attendees. Over 3,000 remote conference-goers logged in from around the world.

Most of the traffic originated from the US, and after that, India. Other regions with a strong showing were Australia, Singapore, Canada and Europe, although, Trikha noted, "We also had people from Poland, Sweden and South America."

"I looked at the log and was surprised. Someone even logged in from Bosnia."

"I wouldn't have thought they even knew about the existence of TiE, let alone the TiECast!" he laughed.

Next year's webcast will be even bigger and better, Trikha promised.

"We need to bring more circumstantial real-live things to the TieCast. For instance, audience participation and the feel of what it's like down on the congested floor," he said. "It needs to be more than just speeches."

When the bandwidth is increased, TiE hopes to make the webcast almost a TV-like experience. "We hope to add the new special interest group sessions, broaden the TieCast and make it available for longer," Trikha said.

"Eventually we really want to see this as a strong educational component of TiE," he continued. "That's my vision: to make this distance-learning. If you're attending the conference on the Web, the only difference will be that you can't rub shoulders with anyone."

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