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VC Cliché of the Week
I am getting ready for a board call this morning. I hate board calls. I want face time not air time.
It's just too tempting to do other things when you are on a call, like talking to colleagues when the call is on mute, email, web surfing, even blogging. I doubt I get even half of the value of a meeting when its done over the phone.
I realize that there are times when you have to do a meeting over the phone and I am doing it today, but it just sucks.
Face time is what I want.
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Posted April 5, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Videoconferencing? Is that an option?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing
Future Vision - Vodafone
http://www.vodafone.com/section_article/0,3035,CATEGORY_ID%253D1600%2526LANGUAGE_ID%253D0%2526CONTENT_ID%253D216753,00.html
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Apr 5, 2006 11:33:02 AM
This is so true. On a slightly related note, telephonic interviews are becoming common but are yielding more and more unsuccessful candidates.
Posted by: Danesh | Apr 5, 2006 1:02:23 PM
In the first year or two that Microsoft had wireless networking pervasively available, the meeting-happy culture devolved into rooms full of networked laptops with one or two people driving the conversation and the rest of the distracted participants constantly checking and replying to email or IM questions from outside the room.
Sometimes presence isn't everything... but you can rein in focus in person when it matters; it's harder to notice when people on the phone are distracted unless you ask them direct questions.
Posted by: Jason Truesdell | Apr 5, 2006 1:59:17 PM
Turn off your monitor, pick up the phone and walk round the room. In my case, I walk around the house. Keeps me from getting distracted by the computer.
Posted by: Derek Scruggs | Apr 5, 2006 2:58:42 PM
Also, usually 60% to 70% of person to person communication takes place non-verbal. I could not really believe this at first but you really notice when you are talking on the phone compared to in person that there are a lot more misunderstandings or need for clarification.
Posted by: Jürgen Bonne | Apr 5, 2006 4:11:20 PM
>usually 60% to 70% of person to person >communication takes place non-verbal
this is why speech recognition (my field: or more widely, phone-based self-service) is really going explode when/if video phones become pervasive. As well as speech recognition engines being able to "recognize" what a caller utters on the phone, movement capture technology will also "recognize" the body language (lip movements first...). Combining the two recognition results will deliver much higher rates of accuracy than can be achieved from today’s speech-only recognizers. That will deliver better customer experience, lower “self-service drop-out” rates (“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that, let me pass you to an expensive person”), faster ROI, and general world peace.
Posted by: tobias | Apr 6, 2006 9:33:04 AM
Jurgen:
In conferences where I actually need to pay attention, I usually need access to documents on my computer, need to be able to type/write comments, and need to be able to get additional information.
Otherwise, just pay attention until your subject comes up or something affecting your group/area is mentioned.
One of the major problems with phone conferences is that so many non-essential people are dragooned into them/too many things are on the agenda. Large group is on it for possible input and to cover very many subjects, but most people are only interested/useful to a subset of the topics and are included solely to make for a shorter conference for a few senior/highly interconnected people.
Posted by: annextraitor | Apr 6, 2006 6:18:54 PM
"Face time" is overated Fred. Just ask a blind person.
Posted by: Steven Kempton | Apr 11, 2006 10:29:14 PM
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