with a table, a few chairs, and a whiteboard has never sounded
so…futuristic! But that’s one way to describe the technology behind
meetingRoom, a VR space, where colleagues from around the world can
gather and discuss business as if they were all in the same, plain
ol’ multi-purpose room!
Jonny Cosgrove does a better job of describing it, so take a listen!
Alan: Today’s guest is Jonny
Cosgrove, founder and CEO at meetingRoom.io. Jonny is responsible for
creating a new collaboration platform that allows anybody from
multiple devices to be in one room and collaborate together. Jonny
started his career volunteering and doing activism, before moving
into events, marketing, and technology, operating in Dublin and
Boston. He completed his MBA at Trinity College, Dublin, and began
building the future of work, with a focus on sustainability,
collaboration, and emerging technologies. You can learn more about
Jonny and his team at meetingRoom.io.
Jonny, welcome to the show.
Jonny: Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute
pleasure, Jonny. We’ve known each other quite a long time, through
the VR/AR Association and through great calls like this. We’ve met in
meetingRoom, and I’m really, really excited to share with the world
what you guys are working on, because the work that you guys are
doing is really pioneering how people will meet in the future — in
now, not even in the future, but right now — how people are meeting
and collaborating. And I think, as we move to a world where we start
to really think about travel — not just international travel — but
travel to and from work, having people drive two hours to work, back
and forth every day. It’s really inefficient, and it’s a real time
suck for everybody. Not to mention, creating disastrous effects for
the environment, as well. So let’s dive into this. Explain who you
are, and your company, and what does meetingRoom do?
Jonny: No problem at all. So I
agree. Pollution sucks. Unnecessary commutes absolutely suck. What
we’re trying to do is make sure the collaboration is easier. One
thing we found everyone can agree on is that collaboration is easier
and more effective when teams work together in the same place. So,
meetingRoom is a service that allows people to work with each other,
using familiar meeting room facilities — like whiteboards — in a
virtual environment, from anywhere. We’ve made this accessible from
anywhere. We made it secure, and we’ve made these places in the
spaces persistent. So, when you write in a whiteboard and you return
next week, it’s still there, just like in real life. And what we
found is, that it allows employees to feel a higher level of
immersive engagement with what’s happening in the actual meeting. It
keeps you focused in that time — in that moment — and lets you have
more effective meetings. Even though employees are spread all over
Alan: You mentioned something…
heh heh, I thought it was funny because as you said, “Oh, yeah,
you know, you put all your notes on the whiteboard and just like the
real world, they’re there when you come back.” I was thinking,
no, that’s exactly the opposite of the real world!
Alan: Somebody’s erased all your
notes, and you’re like, “no! I didn’t take a picture of it!”
Jonny: Thank you for helping me
explain it. So, one of the thingsthat
actually happens a lot is that exact issue. That’s one of our own
internal metrics; we’re working to get this through this
point, “how are you using their internal rooms existing today,”
if you’re working in-house, or how do you work remotely as it is
right now? And one of the biggest problems was the work you do in
that time, that space, on that Skype call, on that Zoom — whatever
it might be — it disappears into that time. Unless someone’s been
taking fantastic notes, it doesn’t come out — and that’s something
that we get onto later, but note taking VR is lots of fun.
What we found that worked pretty well
was, being able to add simple things like working this into your
workflow. So, if you work on a whiteboard in meetingRoom, you can
save out that whiteboard for work later. You can copy and paste it
into your Slack notes, you can copy paste into an email; whatever
your existing flow, it’s just there. Or you want to add it to your
G-Remotes? All those little bits and pieces come together so that
it’s much easier to get context around a conversation, but also just
letting people have good, proper conversations and remove that extra
asynchronous conversation. Slack is great, but you’ve got to be
Alan: Yeah, I can imagine. Slack
gets crazy sometimes, you got a bunch of channels and all of a sudden
you go away for a weekend and come back and “you have 50 new
messages.” Sometimes it’s just a couple of people that have gone
With meetingRoom, what are features
that are being used the most? What is it that people are using it
Jonny: One thing – as you were
saying, you broke up slightly, but I caught it, so this call’s
actually a good demonstration – one of the things we do, from a
technical point of view, is we do things very basically. We’re a
low-tech solution, rather than a high-tech solution. I know the
minute you hear “VR,” people think you need 5G. For us, though,
we’ve taken a step back and said, “how can we use today’s
technology really effectively?” And yes, we’ll take on board more
of that as it comes. But that means this works on 3G calls. A
meetingRoom call uses 90 percent less bandwidth than something like
Skype for Business. We’ve done tests against this. We’ve actually
just been published in spring earlier on this year. But in terms of
what we focus on, it’s having a good meeting experience. That’s what
people do in there. They’ve got a table, they’ve got a whiteboard,
they’ve got a collaboration wall with sticky notes, and they’ve got a
reference wall for sticking their agenda up and setting a timer. So
they actually get through these meetings effectively.
Our dream isn’t to have you sitting in
VR all day. It’s to have effective – say, if you’re doing daily
sinkholes or scrums or whatever you call them in your industry —
you’re in there for 15 minutes a day, and it’s the most effective way
of you passing that information together, so that you’re not having
to live on a Friday afternoon in a Slack or an email thread. You’re
getting in, chatting it out, getting everyone on the same page, and
then getting back to work.
Alan: There’s so many tools out
there that extend our workday and really help us collaborate. But at
the same time, as you leave your office, the Slack notifications
never end. And I think one of the things that VR does well is
eliminate distractions. I’ve said this before, when you’re in VR, you
can’t be on your phone, you can’t be doing other things. So, you get
somebody’s 100 percent attention.
Jonny: Yeah. Even building on
that; for us, it links in with our own… everyone has their driving
values, and for us, adding some simple things — aside from the
economical and the ecological points of view — we can save the world
if we’re a bit more effective in how we all met in person. And
remember; AR travel is only beginning. It’s moving into the whole
world, having access to AR travel, and that’s going to grow
exponentially over the next few years, if we don’t actually take on
board. That being said, I’m not saying it’s not that you can’t
travel. It’s much more case of we need to do it more effectively,
especially from a business point of view. But for meeting room, it’s
Alan: The reality is, anybody
who’s travelled for business realizes that business travel is great
Alan: Any more, you’re going,
“okay, I don’t really want to get on an airplane, fly for a
whole day, get to a meeting for a two-hour meeting, get on a plane,
and fly all the way back”.
Alan: Travel for vacation, when
you’re with your family at the beach, or traveling in the world or
something? Awesome. Travel to go to a three-hour meeting? Not so
Jonny: Business travel used to
be a perk; now, it’s a nuisance. If you’re under 30, you get paid to
travel. If you’re over 30, you’re paying to make sure the family get
a bit of extra travel. Then there’s some good metrics there; it’s a
good understanding when you’re talking to someone, trying to say
you’re going to remove air travel from their life. You might be
talking to the wrong person who loves that perk, and it still is a
perk for them. But in terms of for us, the one driving point –
again — a lot of the XR/VR world is very much about, “you’re going
to live in here forever.” You’re not. That will come at some point.
But — [chuckles] — for some people. Personally, I love the real
world, and I would like to augment that, more than take it away.
But for us, you’re always gonna eat the
meat. Sorry, that’s an answer to your question: we’re not getting rid
of physical meetings, overall. That’s not our drive. Our drive is to
replace the physical office as the primary means of business
collaboration over the next decade. And that is something that we
feel is achievable. But it’s also taken into account that you’re
always going to eat the meat. Deals are done in person, and that’s
going to get more brilliant — in the digital sense — over the next
few years. But again, real world collaboration is there for an
important reason. Even from an education point of view. Which isn’t
one of our primary markets, we do deal with a lot of education
institutions. And the point we see is, you’re always going to have
educational institutions; they’ll change in how the distribute
information, but one of the basic building blocks of humans is
they’re social. So for me and our company, we’re not trying to drive
you to stop being social. We’re trying to drive that they’ll actually
get to the more important things and find that balance.
Alan: Yeah, I think really, when
it comes down to it; business travel — deals — are not really ever
Jonny: They’re done before.
Alan: They’re not really done in
a boardroom. They’re in a bar late at night, at the end of a
conference. Or over a nice dinner. On the golf course. Deals are done
when we are socially working together, and we feel comfortable with
the other people. That’s one of the things that VR can’t do, and it
never will do. But being able to get the meat and potatoes of the
meeting — the technical side — and bring them together and say,
“okay, let’s all work through this deal.” Then, because the
deal’s probably already been negotiated from a very high level — on
the golf course, or at a dinner or whatever — it’s like, “okay,
we’re going to do business together. This is what it’s going to look
like that. Now, let’s bring our teams together to figure out how this
Jonny: Yeah. And with that in
mind, I suppose one of the things that we really focus on — from the
business side, as well as with the product — is allowing and
enabling equal participation. Making sure everyone gets to
participate, engage. and facilitate. Everyone can unlock that
productivity. If people aren’t great at doing video calls, or a
face-to-face — they’re both learned skills — this can be an easier
way to get everyone in and breaking down those cultural divides to
say, “right, different opinions drive sustainability of business,”
and making sure that everyone has the ability to actually have an
equal way of saying that. That’s what drives us.
I do think that I would agree
completely; the deal is done before you get there. But it’s making
sure that, by the time you get there, the deal is done. Things can
fall apart if you leave it until you see each other in person. For
anyone listening — I suppose from the C-suite — who’s worrying
about their group trips going away: I think, if anything, it would
improve the return on investment from those trips in the future.
Alan: It really will, honestly,
because a lot of times, we’ll spend money flying people to a meeting
around the world… and they really don’t have to be there. And
that’s something that I’ve noticed; fly a technical person around to
a sales meeting to present to the sales team. And it’s like, okay,
that technical person presented for an hour, and you’ve just spent X
amount to: fly them there, to house them for the three days or four
days of the meeting. And really, they were only there for a one-hour
Jonny: You have no idea how many
times I’ve been on the end of the call, especially the last few
months as we’ve been releasing our more open version — we just
released our open beta — so finally getting used to be able say,
“our product’s ready, it’s out there!” But in terms of saying,
“oh, no, we don’t need to hop on a flight and get to you. Let’s
just get in the room. That’s the best way of testing this out. I
don’t need to talk to you about the product; let’s get in there and
talk in there.” And the results from that are — from a user
testing point of view — so much fun, in a short sentence. But in
terms of from a proof point, it’s a great way of seeing, are people
ready for this or not? I think we’ve moved beyond the early, early
innovators. I think we’re into the fast follower stage, where a lot
of people are seeing all good work done. Remember, this isn’t just
work from the last three-to-five years, which I think people tend to
forget. There was so much activity in the oughties. There was so much
activity in the 90s. And the tech has been around since the 60s,
which we all know well and good. But in terms of picking up on use
cases that were just maybe a little bit early, and picking how we can
go forward? Our philosophy is, every company has a meetings universe,
and all we’re trying to do is take up a certain part of that. You’re
not trying to take over the whole lot. You’re just trying to come in
and say, “we can fix this problem now for you really, really well.”
Alan: What are some of the use
cases? I’ve talked to other collaboration platforms that are out
there. There’s The Wild, there’s Spatial. They all have their
different spin on it. What are the use cases that you guys feel that
meetingRoom is uniquely positioned to take advantage of? I know one
of the things you mentioned earlier was smaller groups.
Jonny: We haven’t got our
virtual pizza in there to do the test just yet, but letting [in]
enough people who could share a pizza. And going from that old rule,
which is keeping small groups and small sessions.
Right now, up to 12 people can join a
room from our standard offering. We can go a little bit higher when
people request it. But right now, if you go to the website, that’s
how many you can get in there on the standard plan. And what we focus
on is internal meetings. We’re not trying to come in on the sales
front and that. People do hack our own system for doing different
things. “Yeah, we’d love to use this for sales and customer calls.”
Yeah, sure, use your room for whatever you want. Our business model
is probably close to something like WeWork or Regus, in terms of the
space you’re going for. And when it comes down to what they’re using
it for; it’s daily meetings, it’s weekly scheduled meetings, it’s
regular meetings, and it’s very much at that decision-maker level.
There’s great tools out there for doing
screen sharing. There’s great tools out there for doing lectures.
There’s great tools for training specific things, and also on those
bespoke training end other things. But for us, if you’re just looking
to come in and work through an agenda, and set a timer to make sure
you all get in there in time, and pass that information, that’s where
we fit in. And also, I think the big thing is that we work on every
platform. We work the same on your iOS device as you do in your
Oculus Quest. Obviously, inputs are a little different in your head’s
in a VR headset, but for us, it’s having the same ability across all
the platforms. So, having a table, having a whiteboard, having a
collaboration wall with sticky notes, and having that agenda and
timer, so that you can just get to work.
Alan: Now, are companies able to
change the look at the room? Or do you have different templates?
Different looks and feels? Can they brand the room, so that it feels
more to their corporate branding?
Jonny: Yes. We do a lot of that
with the older enterprise clients at the moment. We are going to be
bringing some fun releases coming over the next few months, to let
more users do that. But for now, the way we usually have people brand
their room is, they set up a sticky board in the way that suits their
business. They set up their whiteboard with the templates they want,
or with their own agenda items. And they use a PDF wall for bringing
in presentations or whatever they’re doing. That’s where it starts
off. I’ve seen a lot of logos that are about 10 feet tall in there;
Alan: They’re all pixelated.
Jonny: [laughs] Well, what we
really try to do actually, I suppose, is… it’s very much like a
coworking space. We’re there to help people get through there, as
much as just use the software. So making sure that there’s guidelines
on how to get the best use, as it is today. Because what we see an
awful lot of is people acting like the world’s changed already. And
you and I both know from all of our conversations and — one of the
funny ones, actually, is that I remember my old beta room, which I
had to retire for this new release. And it’s weird saying goodbye to
the room you built your company in, but it comes down to bringing
people through in a realistic way and saying, “look, let’s get you
started in the right way. Let’s map out the process to get to
deployment.” And again, a lot of the time it comes back to, “oh,
here’s our tech, it’s great.” For us, we know that for the clients
we work with, it’s bringing it through and bringing this throughout
the organization, as opposed to just expecting it all to work, out
Alan: One of the other podcasts
I recently did, we were talking about [how] this is no longer a
technology problem; it’s an adoption problem.
Jonny: It’s funny you say that.
So, everyone talks about the mom test. If you can sell it your mom,
that great. But you’ve got to sell it to clients. For us, we’re
looking at, it’s a case of going, “it’s the adoption test.” It’s
“will you bring this thing home for the next 18 months?”
Because that’s the one way you’re going in to make sure this thing —
like any system, like, look at how Slack and Microsoft Teams have
been pushing that the last three or four years — it takes time for
these things to get through.
I used my old man as an example; he’s
brilliant with his iPad. I bought him an iPhone for the last 10 years
for Christmas. And they’re expensive bricks, because Apple didn’t
train him how to use his iPhone; they trained him to use the iPad.
He’s brilliant with his iPad. The same thing comes in with this kind
of thing. Part of why we would have — not just because my old man,
because Apple is such a great job to train people how to use
technology — iPads are a useful part of the day. For us, one of our
first engagements is usually me and Eddie coming in from a quest, and
meeting a C-suite executive in a blue chip company, on the device
they use every day. So, making sure that it’s a simple and easy for
anybody getting in, not just your engineers. Not just your software
developers. They’re some of my favorite people to get in a room with,
because my user testing with that group, versus with a C-suite
audience, is completely different. We make sure we just…keep
focused around making sure people can work more effectively. Back to
our own values of participation, and making sure everyone has the
equal opportunity — from any device.
Alan: So, explain to me the
typical onboarding. A customer says, “okay, I want to start
using this; I want to run my weekly sales scrum meeting in
meetingRoom.io. What’s my path to getting up and running?”
Jonny: I’ll call it a sign up to
a “ping-pong” meeting. A ping-pong meeting is, every company has
their first meeting in any of these tools, whether it’s Skype, Zoom,
or meetingRoom; you’ll play around, and you’ll try and push your
limits. That’s a great first meeting to have, especially in a room
like ours, because you’ve got a whiteboard to play with. And you’ve
got different things you can do, which are great fun. Getting
started, you go to our website. You sign up, just there on the front
page. What will happen then is,ou get access straight away into the
open beta. You can invite your team. That’s the first thing I’ll tell
you to do. And then you enter into, I suppose, our onboarding
process. Our process is talking to myself along the way to try and
understand — and my team, obviously; I do my best to actually get in
what every client comes through at some point in the early part of
the journey — and making sure that we fit a program around it. Just
getting that first team meeting in there is key. It’s absolutely key
to make sure everyone is in there and has their first meeting as a
group. Because obviously, we’re a group conversation app. It’s not
for you, one-on-one, to go in and while the day away; it’s for you to
be able to have effective meetings.
What we’ve done with that is we’ve
actually built up a number of little resources — I’ll call them
“presents” for now — but you get stuff like a “how to
copy and paste this in and get this going for your whole team,”
from an agenda point of view. We also get different items, like an
agenda that works really well with the room, and how to set up
different parts of it along the way. That’s if you’re coming in as
one small team, to try this out and see what’s going on. And then we
work to see how can we get into a wider part of the organization.
In particular, I love talking with IT
and risk departments, because we’ve built for that requirement; we’re
built for the enterprise. We’re not a social app suddenly jumping
into the enterprise space. We spent a bit longer getting our product
together than others might have who jumped in this, because we wanted
to make sure it hit all the compliance — from your GDPR, to
different bits and pieces of brand regulation — and making sure that
it’s easy to get through your process, because that’s one of the
biggest problems, back to your adoption item. It’s easy to want
something. It’s hard to make sure it stays with you.
Alan: This has come up on the
podcast, where you have adoption — you have buy-in from the C-suite
— and they’re like, “okay, we’re going to execute on this.”
Walmart’s a prime example; they rolled out 17,000 headsets without a
Alan: I’m sure they’ve figured
it out now. I interviewed PWC’s Jeremy Dalton and they built a
presentation to 275 people in VR simultaneously — and I actually
happened to be there, because it was in Toronto. After the event, all
the executives went out for coffee or whatever, and then there was a
team of 15 people collecting all the VR headsets and then putting
them in a room, and there was literally a pile — five feet high —
of headsets. Just, they piled them onto a pile, and then one-by-one,
they had to go through and put them in the right boxes. It was a
substantial amount of work and just the device management alone on
rolling it out on that scale. I think there are still some challenges
Jonny: Well, that’s it. I mean,
like, look; we’ve had requests to roll this out to 300,000 people,
and we’ve said no, because there’s a lot of parts to that. Now, this
is a bit earlier in our days, but this is a point where all this is
becoming an awful lot simpler. And the suppliers are doing a great
job of getting enterprise ready, and pushing that from a device
management point of view. From getting failure-proof devices, and the
likes of any of the standalone devices are getting very — when I say
point of failure, I come from a hardware background as well, which I
don’t talk about as much as I should — where if it was still
connected to a PC? It was a great prototype. There’s some awesome
stuff happening, say, in the automotive space. But as soon as that
goes into stuff like the Quest and the Focus being able to handle
that at scale, people will move to that. We’ve seen huge jumps around
that already. It has to be, “how easy can you get this out there?
And can you actually get us through a program of work getting this
installed in an organization, not just in one team?” And that’s
something we pride ourselves on doing.
standpoint in a company, having a VIVE or a Rift, and then having a
computer system — however small, you get them pretty small now —
but being able to set that up, install Steam or install the Oculus
Store, and then every time you go to use it, there’s enough
Jonny: If it takes as long a
sentence for either of us to get people going on a PCVR, it’s got to
be a bloody good use case, and really valuable. I’m at least 90+ days
using a Quest every day, and using it for both work and play. And —
as you well know — I’m a fanboy of PCVR, because I’m a gamer. But in
terms of everyday life? Yeah, I use my Quest every day, because it’s
easy to get in and out of. And it has all those things that I want it
to do, including meetingRoom, so that it fulfills my need. And that’s
what you’re trying to do with a device: provide a more convenient
solution to what’s already there, as opposed to trying to force it
Alan: Agreed. So, meetingRoom
Jonny: Yes! So, we’re having
lots of fun. We’ve announced it will be releasing later in the fall,
with the enterprise and other things.It’s a dream. [laughs]
And people can get started right away
with our beta version. They just need to take out a form on the
website where you sign up, and we can get started there. I thought
the last important point, which is kind of an exciting time; one of
the big differences is we also have a web application — not WebXR,
but an actual web application — to manage how you do everything.
Right now, it’s really basic. For our beta, you can do invite teams,
you can upload your documents you need in there. What we’re doing
right now is engaging our community in a big way; building our next
iteration of the dashboard. So, really looking forward to over the
next two-three months, having that. Essentially anyone who gets in
touch now can have a big impact on that because again, that’s
customer-led as opposed to… we had to build our first room and get
the infrastructure together. Now we’re making it easier for people to
manage all these meetings. I know personally, I’m in a lot of rooms.
So first-hand, I get to see what happens when suddenly, “oh, I’m
in 30 or 40 different rooms on this account. Right.” [laughs]
Same way you’re talking about the poor person in Walmart who have to
maybe individually update 17,000 different headsets — which, as I
said, it gives me coils.
But again, for us, it’s making sure all
that is nice and simple. It’s making sure it’s wrapped together in
more. So again, say we treat enterprise clients a certain way. We
have startups who are going through our own journey, which is
building a business in the cloud. Forget your garages, your
hackathons — I built businesses in both, and they’re great fun. But
for me, any business going forward, I get to actually build in the
cloud. Obviously, building in meetingRoom is great fun. But for us,
what we didn’t have at the beginning was the tool we have today. So
we had a lot of gaps, we had to kind of realize, “oh, we haven’t
built that thing on the whiteboard yet. Oh, that’s really difficult
to do.” That’s been ironed out. As I was saying earlier on, we had
to retire our original room. We’ve just brought in the designers to
upgrade the room. It was very odd saying goodbye to it. At least on a
daily basis. It’s like, “oh, I’m in the wrong room.”
Jonny: [laughs] At some point
there’ll be a retrofit, I’m sure. I want it back. I liked it.
But again, this is our first room of many. We’re really
core-focused, and we do have a lot of different custom builds, like
people making digital twins of existing services and doing a lot of
really interesting stuff. So again, we built a platform. The first
part of that is our meetingRoom, and letting people actually get in
the plan every day.
But as you know, everyone is trying to
get their heads around what they’re going to do next in VR and what
can they do in XR to either be the first in something, not just for
gimmick’s sake, but actually, hey, “we can make a fundamental
change to our business. We can make ourselves more sustainable over
the next 20 years, forget the next two or three.” It’s actually
making sure that we can do stuff today and we can amplify that over
time. And 2019 is going to be… everyone’s called 2019 the big year
— every year’s a big year for VR and XR. And that’s fine and dandy.
For me, I see this as the first year of true deployments into
everyday use cases, beyond the very bespoke things. We’re talking
about where every kid’s gonna want Beat Saber for Christmas. That’s
fine. But at the same time, from a C-suite point of view, it’s now at
that point where it actually makes sense. You’re not having to lug
around a PC and connect three cables worth of gear, along with all
those different updates to come along. Now it’s simple plug and play.
Alan: Absolutely. It’s easy to
deploy. I think the Quest was a game changer. The Focus, again; being
able to come in at a 10X cheaper device with no computer, no wires,
no nothing, being able to put it on. Look, everything that I’ve seen
is like, “yeah, we can stand up,” or, “we can wave our hands
around or we can do all these things.” The real practical use cases
where people are going to really dig in to using VR on a daily basis,
they’re going to be sitting at their desk. They’re not be standing
up, waving their hands around like idiots. They’ll be sitting at the
desk, going into a meeting — maybe they’re on a beach, maybe they
want to see their giant screens in front of them, whatever it is —
but it’s going to be them sitting down, doing what they typically do,
because how many times are you in a meeting where you’re all standing
Jonny: [laughs] It’s funny.
Like, even we sometimes do find ourselves standing up more because
we’re using these things. But for me, what that actually means in
real life — and this is also linked with using stuff like Rec Room
and other bits and pieces every other day — but I’ve dropped like 30
kilos since I began the business. I was too big then — I’m still too
big now — but without actually trying, I’ve been able to be a little
bit healthier. That is not a direct reason just because of VR. But it
gets you thinking about how you approach your day, about how you do
everything.
But, I suppose in terms of the future
of XR/VR, as it pertains to the business end of things, I do think
it’s the future of business and social. I do think that it’s going to
change how we do everything over the next 10 years — not just driven
by climate change, not just driven by cost controls– but by
preference. We did a paper — our first week in business, we went out
and tried to kill the business — we got to client to pay us to
compare Skype for Business versus VR. Really, really simple. We said
going in, video communications versus VR. This the question we are
going to get asked, and we always get asked, and we will always get
asked about it.
It came down to some really simple bits
and pieces; like engagements, like excitement, and again, focused.
Linked in with those lovely bits and pieces — remember, this was
also our prototype day zero (and we’re always in day zero) — but
this was the proper first version. In a study of a hundred people,
which got published in spring early on this year, we beat out Skype
for Business. It was actually one of the suppliers who pointed out to
us, “guys, that’s bloody amazing. You put 20 quid into this product
in comparison to, say, $20-billion into Skype,” which is now, from
a business point of view, moulding back into Teams. So it was very
interesting, even on that first Pepsi-Cola test, to see it coming
through.
What I’m most excited about within that
is it pulling us out of that Wild West. We’ve had digital twins since
my first Facebook or Bebo account. That was my first digital twin. I
know Metaverse is close to your own heart, and we’ve had a Metaverse
since the Internet turned on. What we’re doing right now is
visualizing and virtualizing all that, which is awesome. But we know
how that can go if we go too much into living in there. I think South
Park covered it [laughs]. But in terms of actually getting us there
right now, it’s about balance and keeping everyone nice and on the
same page. And that’s what my hope is for the future of all this.
Alan: Well, you talked about web
apps and being able to upload documents. What is the document that
you can upload natively? Can I grab my team’s stuff? Or can I grab
PDFs? Or can you grab PowerPoint or Google slides?
Jonny: Because this is open beta
— and we know we’re actually rebuilding all of this currently — we
decided to start with something really basic and go with PDFs,
because that what we’ve found — with users in over 50 countries —
was the obvious most common document that’s used for these kind of
meetings. And what we said was, we’re going to bring in our different
sources over the next few months because, again, when it comes to
enterprise, you don’t have to get people to sign up to get all of our
stuff through the risk and requirements. They’ve already done that
with a lot of their services. We built the infrastructure. So imagine
you’re coming to me and I worked in Regus, and you want to build the
perfect room in physical life; that no one ever removes your sticky
notes from the wall — that issue that, we actually have a few
clients, that answers the issue for them. It’s kind of funny — and
they can leave it there for all time, if they want. The point is,
that you can come in and you can get to work right away with it.
Alan: You can import PDFs. What
Jonny: So right now you can
import PDFs, and we have a number of custom builds running stuff like
bringing in 360 site imaging. We have stuff like bringing in
different 3D models, but our focus is always on doing in a
low-bandwidth way. So we very much work with clients who might have
places working from one distant part of the world, down into a
Central European office. And you’ve got to make it nice and simple
for everyone to be able to partake in that conversation the same way.
So bringing in a 360 site means they can make impact from abroad. But
for now, what you can do from the basic — if you sign up on the
website today — you can bring in PDFs. If you want to go beyond
that, just drop us a line and we’ll get in a room, we’ll go through
it with you. But that’s going to be a big part of the next step. Got
a big release in about three months time and that’s going to be…
I’m pretty excited about that. [laughs]
Alan: Fantastic. Yeah, because I
can see people, once they get the ability to import PDFs and get
that, they’re going to go, “okay, well, I want to import
PowerPoint slides,” because people love their PowerPoint. I
Jonny: Not going anywhere.
Alan: Being able to, like you
said, import a 360 image. So saying, “I’m in the middle of my
PowerPoint, I’m in my next slide, I click it and then all of a sudden
I’m no longer in a meeting room. I’m in a 360 image,” because let’s
be honest, 360 photography is not being leveraged nearly as much as
it could be in all sorts of different ways. The 360 photo gives you
so much information about a space. If you’re talking about
manufacturing, you could literally have somebody in the manufacturing
stick a 360 camera on a stand, take a picture. The photos
are not very large anymore. You can upload that right in there.
Everybody across the organization can stand where that camera was,
look around and say, “okay, you see how this information is coming
off of this machine or whatever,” and you can discuss that in a
realistic environment. It transports them.
Jonny: And a key part of that is
making sure that you can bring it out of there afterwards, so it’s
not all just lost in that one moment. I’ll put it this way: I love
writing in 3D. For me, because I can go to the angle I know I need to
be at to see what’s going on there. But when it comes down to it, we
found sticky notes actually work an awful lot better. And our sticky
notes are actually 2D first, so you type in something at the moment.
We are adding in VR support for that in a while. But because so many
users come in from different platforms, we made this for our users
first. Our users are teams in blue chips, SME, start-ups. We have a
lovely wide berth of people with very specific use cases, but in
terms of actually getting it in there, it’s got to be something you
can bring out into the real world, because otherwise it gets lost in
workflows. If it can’t fit into your audit trail, it’s not gonna
happen in the enterprise.
Alan: You mentioned audit trail.
So, I want to unlock a couple of things here. What are some of the
data metrics/analytics that you are capturing or are able to capture
from this, that would be able to be used maybe for training, or for
Jonny: Yes. So we go with
privacy first. These are encrypted rooms. We do basic things with
collecting obvious usage data to make sure it’s better. But tracking,
all that kind of thing, we’re doing our best to leave that with the
user. So we do also some on-premise deployments in that. Obviously,
we work with companies where security matters, and we make sure we’re
GDPR compliant. We make sure that we hit with the regulatory
requirements for each industry we go in with, and we very much go
through that nearly at the beginning of the project, because that’s a
key thing for people to understand. As we said, the whole industry
has come forward leaps and bounds, but, say, two years ago? You
couldn’t do all of the things you need to do, because the enterprise
deployment wasn’t there. And for us, it’s very much a handholding
experience to get people through that and to make sure that you’re
not getting a senior management team brought in to have the risk or
IT team come back and say, “okay, guys, that’s not feasible.”
We make sure that we lead them back to
their encrypted rooms first and foremost, because – again — this
is business conversation. It’s not even like your social apps, where
you’re living on Facebook, or you’re living on one of these different
things, where it’s expected that these things are part of doing
business. But when it comes to, “I’m paying for a secure space
to come in to have a private conversation, and we might be a
boardroom of a Fortune 500 company,” that’s information they don’t
want going outside of the room, in the same way as they do in real
life. So we follow the premise of “do it how you do it in real
life” and keep it secure.
Alan: Now, is there any metrics
that — let’s say, for example — the executive team would have
access to? Maybe it’s as simple as–
Jonny: Oh, of course! Sorry.
From an internal. I’m talking about from the external, apologies.
From the internal point of view, what we’re doing is building up some
very good reporting system. And again, that’s part of what I will be
excited about in the next while. But making sure that you can see
simple things as “Alan and Jonny are working on this project for
three months,” “Alan and Jonny talk for the first two months, and
then they stop talking.” We don’t know exactly what they’re talking
about, word-for-word, but we know that they stop talking and suddenly
the project went off-rails. That’s the kind of performance and impact
I want people to get from this kind of stuff over time, and make sure
that people can actually take action.
Originally, I would have studied around
behavioral economics — I was a history and politics dropout —
originally went over to Harvard for summer school and fell in love
with arguing about behavioral economics. And one of the biggest
things that happened over — I used to have trouble with my MBA, I
used to be terrible — in terms of giving out about — this is all
qualitative versus quantitative data — if you’re talking about
biases and heuristics, and obviously those are huge talking points in
today’s age, and what has frustrated me over time is a lot of this is
still qualitative. You might have a thousand people looking at one
meeting happening and figuring all the different movements, but it’s
not data-led. So, trying to build a better understanding of how
meetings work and how they can be more effective? In a future
meetingRoom, I might get a notification saying, “all right,
finish the meeting early.” Why? “Because everyone’s head’s
tipping. They’re tired. It’s Friday and it’s ten to five. Give
everyone 10 minutes of freedom.” [laughs] They’re the parts that I
want to hear back from people over time. But as it starts right now,
I’m already getting lovely things like, “you got rid of my Friday
afternoon email thread. Thank you.” [laughs] Small little things
like that are the parts… I know it sounds geeky, but that’s what
Alan: It’s so small, but it is a
Jonny: I’ll definitely link you
on as well; there was a great piece in The New Yorker recently about
asynchronous versus synchronous conversations. And I live in Ireland.
We live in a place where we got to do 2 percent to 6 percent GDP. We
don’t do a nice & neat 4 percent; it’s out on the night out or
hung over. But in terms of how people want to approach things, it’s
nice and consistent. That’s what’s going to come from this stuff
going for all asynchronous and all synchronous. It’s a good healthy
mesh. And this lets you — as you’re saying at the beginning — it
lets you do all those technical things in between. And what VR as a
whole — I mean, every experience I hear about is “we can do
what we can’t do in real life together.” And there’s so many things
that come from us. But for us, it’s about staying focused, giving
that solution that lets you have what you need in real life and doing
those things. Really, really simple stuff. But it’s making sure you
can do with the device that exists today, rather than what exists
reiterate that this is still early days in this technology, but we’re
rounding that corner where the devices are easy to use. The platforms
are now up and ready. You got meetingRoom.io that you can just sign
up, you can have it multi-device. And I think this is key. You guys
have realized this as well, that some people are going to enter from
an iPad. Some people are going to enter from web. Some people are
going to put on a VR headset. Some people in the future will put on
an AR headset. Being able to have that consistency of quality of
meeting regardless of the device is essential. And I think you guys
are really on your way to do that.
What are some of the best business use
cases of this technology that you’ve seen that people are using it
for? What parts of a company are using this most now?
Jonny: That’s a good way to put
it, actually. I’ll address the last point, because I think that’s the
one that you can really answer at the moment. It’s gone beyond the
test case. There’s not one thing in particular that’s driving this
forward. It’s everything’s come together. It’s communities like what
you’re doing and coming together and actually pushing the agenda;
both online, but also getting into companies and talking this
through. And it’s the ecosystem I’m seeing building, is driving it
forward.
On the enterprise end, I’m seeing a lot
more interest in our specific area, not just meetingRoom. But people
are coming in and saying, “look, we’re going beyond tire kicking.
We’re looking for an active solution to implement,” as opposed to
what I would have seen for the first timer company — which we fully
expected, as we were still connected to PCs — where it hit for
automotive really well. And now I think other things like that —
industry-led things — the same stuff that kept the VR dream alive
for the last two decades. Same with energy.
But again, back to where I’m seeing
current trends. Everyone needs to plan out what they’re doing next.
And it generally starts with a whiteboard. So our system is
well-suited, obviously, but that’s where I see people trying to get
in, trying to understand, “how can I use this for training beyond
bespoke service?” Obviously, in our world, a PDF is a PowerPoint
and it works very well right now; you don’t need to do any bespoke
work. You can do your first trial with all the resources you have
today. And that’s the number one tool which I see coming through.
People realizing we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We already have
a training process. We already have a way that we do regular
meetings. So again, where I throw my hands up to go “we’re a
really great fit for that.” But it’s not a case of — we always try
and divert both ourselves and clients away from it — don’t try and
make something brand new. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. No one
wants to be first, but sometimes you’ve got to be in the first few.
And it’s just a case of putting something small and manageable
together, and getting some good internal case studies going together.
And again, we’ve got a team based in academia where we transfer that
into industry with saying, “let’s get some proof points around
this.” And they’re the trends that are driving this most forward:
people want real use cases. They don’t want flashy gimmicks.
Alan: Right. Couldn’t agree
Jonny: And as makers in this
space, no one wants to work with gimmicks; that can kill your
company. And any other startups who are working in this space, or
getting into the space: take advantage of what was different when we
started off. The ecosystem even from a development point of view is
totally different. But you got to build your moat up. What is
different about you if you said your name outloud? What is different
about you versus other people? So if you replaced your own name with
a competitive name, is it understandable that you make different
things? Because there’s a lot of people building Word out there.
There’s a lot of people building Notepad. There’s a lot of people
building Excel. Knowing what you want to be when you grow up is a
Alan: So, with that, I’m going
to ask you my final question. What problem in the world do you want
to see solved with XR technologies?
Jonny: [laughs] Ok, I’m biased,
but transport and mobility. As I said earlier on, not that we’re
going to replace everything. It’s just that we can use our resources
in such a more effective way. And I think that genuinely. This is why
I worked in blockchain before with Freeman as an engineer. I worked
in it when it was technology, and people were using it to use that
technology… whatever it’s turned into now at the moment. You don’t
want to be looking for a solution. You want to actually have
something that fits that problem. And that’s what I feel; XR goes
right now for mobility. I think the 5G is a fantastic use case to
show where this all can go. I know yourself and Julie do some awesome
work with showing “here’s how not to do a 5G experience,”
which I think is a great one. In terms of showing what is here today
and showing what can be, we have that here on our tippy tongues.
We’ve already started that, with what we see in the current trends
around remote work. Everyone, once you go beyond one office building,
is working remotely to a certain point, and linking that in with
knowing what infrastructure we have now — the movements over in the
US and all over Europe — around reclaiming rural to a certain point.
I live in Ireland, so homelessness and
house prices are always on the tip of our tongues, unfortunately. And
it’s something that we have a great international community coming
into Ireland, and we have a better way of doing things to actually
push this forward. And I think, again, XR/VR; all these things
actually help alleviate these issues, where cities are a technology
as well. And right now we’re building 20 New Yorks a year. That’s
fine. But it’s hard to replicate London. It’s hard to replicate all
these things working. And I think that what we can do is reclaim our
rural with a lot of what XR is going to do. It’s not something
everyone in XR would talk about so much. But in my world, where
collaboration is king, I live in a country where everyone already
wants to work in Ireland and it’s fantastic. We have some of the best
countries in the world who are coming in, thanks to the likes of EI
and the IDA — that’s Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. And it’s just a
really simple case to go, people want to work here, and we want make
sure it’s really easy to live here as well.
That’s where these things unlock — not
just for Ireland, but for every location. Canada — by the way,
“cross-province” has become part of my vernacular because
we work with so many people in Canada now — and I think it’s also
seeing how cultures align so well. You know, again, short answer:
mobility gets changed by this. It gets flipped on its head. We’re
seeing that with drones. We’re seeing that with air travel. We’re
seeing all these things happening across the board, in terms of how
people are moving differently and how people are taking the boat
instead of taking a plane. I think that’s awesome to hear. That we’re
looking at how we can actually not just push one type of technology,
but the whole mix.
I do think that XR is a catalyst to
help us rethink sitting in an airplane. Will I be in my Quest not
just for a photo on Twitter, but actually handling one or two of my
meetings that way, because it’s better use of my time? Or is it just
somewhere I’m collecting my notes on a whiteboard for when I see the
client the next time I see them? All these things come together that,
again: mobility is about to change. I think it’s an exciting time to
be part of something so interesting.
