Audio links for original podcast:

· Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

· Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

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Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an independent consultant and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, Jon. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Watch This Space. Great to talk to you again, as always. How are you doing? What's new?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, doing well. You know, business as usual, busy as usual - except that I'm not traveling at all during the month of April because I had some minor foot surgery, which has kept me sidelined and I had five different events actually I could have gone to in April, but I've been home working and being busy that way. So I got nothing this month, Chris, for events as I usually do, but there'll be plenty of new stuff coming up in May and June - and we have something else we're going to talk about today. But as a lead-in, you got to go to an interesting event during April. So maybe we'll start off on that front and see what you had to bring from what you saw there.

Chris Fine

Sure. I want to be sure I give you your time to talk about what you want to talk about. So, I went to a conference called ISC West, which is one of the signature trade shows for the security business, not so much cybersecurity, more physical security, which as you know, is an interest of mine. And I've spent time in my career working in that field. And I view that as being very adjacent to other stuff that we talk about, like, you know, smart buildings and IoT in the workplace.

And I have to tell you, this was a huge show. It seemed to be more crowded than ever, bigger than ever. And I'm really seeing a lot more. It's like when we go to the communications trade shows where you talk about them, where you're seeing more and more AI. And this is an area where there's just such low-hanging fruit to get more modern and to merge with other sources of building data and to help measure the occupancy and analytics on a workplace, but also to use AI for things like what is called in the field anomaly detection, which is basically what's not right at this moment.

Because if you think about, there's a lot of security where it's like forensic sort of stuff, right? Where you go back and you look at video footage or you do stuff like that. And there's definitely a role for that. But what you always want to do is try to get situational awareness of what's going on through various inputs that you have, whether it be access control, whether it be video or whatever it is. And you're starting to see products now that are much more advanced in doing that, because the way you had to do that in the past was you really had to create essentially a huge number of individual integrations to all these non-standard technologies. And then you had to put that into a huge sort of if this, then that logic engine to figure out where the anomalies might be.

Now you can use AI to automate a lot of that. And that's a big breakthrough. The other thing that's happening in that business is just more and more of the emergence of standards in areas like identity. You know, there are companies where they're starting to make identity that just flows across everything. Everything from getting in the building to logging onto a computer to doing everything else. And that's like a huge thing in terms of the user experience and the overall level of security. So it was a pretty fascinating show. I hadn't been in a few years. I was supposed to go last year, but I ended up getting sick. But it was good to be there. And it's just an area that we don't talk about all the time.

Jon Arnold

You know, Chris, I wish I could have gone. I love the idea of going to events in spaces that are not as, current with the technologies as the world we live in, which we just take it for granted. Everybody has, cloud and AI and 5G and everything. And, it's like, well, what do you mean you don't have it? But you get out in the real world, and of course, the vendors, the Ciscos, the Avayas, the Microsofts of the world, the reality is they'll tell you that a lot of the world, is still premise-based. They're still using hardware. You know, it hasn't gone away entirely.

So if you're a millennial or a Gen Z who only knows digital, you haven't taken over the world just yet. And you know, I think that kind of is a nice bit of an extension from what we talked about last month, if you remember, Chris, kind of us coming out of the analog physical world where now everything seems to be virtual and online and can't see it, can't touch it. And things like, you know, just the term, right, physical security, you know, it's like bolts on doors, right? It's bank vaults and banks. I mean, things that are reminders of a time when everything was brick and mortar and you got to keep the goods safe. You got to keep the building safe. And those spaces have every benefit to gain from new technology as the things in the native digital world, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, I agree with you, Jon. And when you think about what is traditionally known as physical security, it's a multi-tens of billion-dollar business. It's huge business. And they're going through a lot of change right now like everyone else because For a long time, it tended to have certain underlying assumptions, like so many other of the spaces you and I talk about of hard physical perimeters, this company has this lease in this part of the building.

And then the second is that everybody comes in every day. And that's where most of the work is done, that if you're out of the office, you're traveling, you're going to a trade show or something, you're not just like working on a regular basis outside the office. So when you have a whole technology that's designed around securing the perimeter, it gets to be more complicated when the perimeters aren't as hard as they used to be. But it's still a challenge. You still want to keep, you know, if you're going to have an employee or any other person in a facility, even if it's part time, you still need to find a way to secure it and to make it safe and to respond to events that happen.

It's a whole new world of having to do that without hard perimeters and where not every big tenant is investing in a completely replicative security system, where it's more shared services and things like that, like we talk about all this other stuff. So it's just another multi-billion-dollar business that's on the cusp of a lot of change, you know?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it just makes you rethink almost everything, you know? the more things become virtualized and software-based and application-based and cloud-based, there's probably going to be in a way kind of less things to actually steal physical things, right? I'm wondering, does that change the need for certain types of physical security? you think like, digital generation, they don't, they don't, they don't buy records, they don't buy books, they don't, they don't have, they don't collect things.

So it's, like bad for business for, break and enter people, right? There's nothing to steal if they go to these people's condos. In our homes, there's lots to steal because we accumulated things in our generation. It's just a very, it's just another kind of way of looking at how technology is really reshaping everything and what's the value anymore? And how do you protect your possessions or curate what you have? We never went to school to learn about stuff like this. It's just the way the world is evolving.

Chris Fine

Well, you could argue that in commercial facilities, like an office building, theft is really only a very minor part of physical security, right? It's also, it's mostly about not letting unauthorized people in and then safety and only letting people go where they're really authorized to go and then keeping an eye on everything with surveillance and a few other things as well. And, tracking certain kinds of building events that are security threats like fire.

But I'm telling you that even like if you look at businesses that have sprung up that didn't exist, when before, 10 years ago, before the whole wave started, digital lockers, right? Digital locks on doors, which is now a multi-billion-dollar business, right? Where you just have a locker and you come in, you use that unified ID. So in the three days you're in the office, you just put your stuff in there. You don't have to keep a key. We know where you put your stuff if we need to, if we're security, right? And there's all kinds of other stuff you can do with this combined with IoT that makes things safer because people do bring valuable things like laptops in. And if not everybody's in and you don't have guards around as much, you need to protect it even better.

So it's like you think of it and you think, well, there's fewer tangible assets around - people are around less. But if you set up a home office, that's usually, even in your own residence, that's a few $1000 worth of stuff. Very often, if you really think about it with the computer, somebody's paying it, whether it's your employee or you, and you don't want that stuff taken. And you want to be safe when you're at home working. Forget about taking anything - you just don't want any intruders. You want cyber safety. You don't want somebody breaking in there and logging into your computer and causing and extracting information. So there's just a whole lot of dimensions to this that were simpler at least when it was just all workplace, when it was all office buildings, but it's a fascinating area.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, sure is. Makes me think of when you talk about digital locks as opposed to using, you know, keys or even combination to get in, you get into biometrics and all the other forms of authentication to unlock things. Just very briefly, this reminds me of my buddy Dave Michels, who I think you know. He's in New Jersey, by the way, for now. Anyways, he's an early buyer of Fisker, which is a model of an electrical car, electric vehicle, an EV, that has run into some issues financially. They're not sure the company's going to make it, but he's in this small cohort of first-generation buyers and he had an issue. He loves the car, but the company is, you know, that's another story.

But the issue he had is the car was sitting in his garage because he also lives part-time outside of the US. It sat in his car so long and his garage so long that the battery died, and he was not able to even open the door because everything is connected. So if you don't have connectivity or battery life, your devices are useless. He had no way to enter the vehicle. He had no way to start the vehicle, to charge it or anything. Eventually he had to get a guy from Fisker to come out and do a software update and get it going again. But that's also the, there's upsides and downsides to going from that analog model that we know so well to the digital world where it's the only way of doing things.

Anyway, this kind of takes us into what I want to also talk about today. Yes, of course. It isn't an event, but it builds on what you've been saying, Chris, and what you saw at ISC about physical space. So we're going to shift gears, folks, and we have to use our imaginations now for the next 10 minutes or so. I did a briefing recently with a company called Welo. which is W-E-L-O, and it's a bit like Second Life for business meetings. So it's not quite immersive, it's not metaverse, but it's kind of a couple of steps away from that, where it's a 2D environment, and they really call it 2 1/2 D, because it's a little more than just a flat screen, where they have done these physical recreations in a virtual environment of an office space. So it's a way to visualize, to bring the visual element into virtual working and virtual collaboration.

So the screenshot that I have that I will include in my newsletter, which is a companion to the podcast when it comes out in the beginning of the month to see this. And if you really want to know, folks, just drop us a line. I can get you the screenshot. Anyways, I took that during my briefing with his name is Chance Myers from this company called Welo. And they've been working in this space for many years. And it's kind of coming to life now a little bit more.

You know, there's been a lot of shift towards these virtual environments, of course, from pandemic. And the social network kind of vibe to this hasn't quite caught on yet. You hear about these legless avatars, right? And these kind of virtual meeting room spaces, but they're only like, these are the ones that exist in the markets today are largely specific to what you're doing in the moment. So it's a meeting room and that's where the group meets.

What Welo is showing here, there's a lot of variations on this, but it's more like the whole office environment. So you can see in one shot all the spaces, the layouts, and then when meetings are happening for those who are registered. So when your organization members are all on this, you can see where everybody is and you can see where the meetings are happening and who's with who. And there's ways to join meetings, to leave meetings. Each person has an avatar that you can move around and say, okay, I'm done with this meeting. I'm going to go to this next meeting. So you can take your avatar, and you can do a virtual knock on the door, and they'll let you in and then you join their group. And then, while this is all going on, you can view multiple, you know, simultaneous sessions going on, but you only hear what your session is.

So we're having like we're talking now, we hear each other, but say there's a meeting happening next door. We don't hear what they're doing. But if we go into their meeting and join it, then of course we're part of the audio and video stream. So it's very much collaboration based. When you're using this platform, you can bring in the collab tools, whether it's Teams or WebEx, and have all the apps with you. So it's just adding a visual dimension to what you're already doing when you're collaborating. But it really helps, especially the younger generation that's kind of already very video savvy, this is a natural extension of just adding the visual element to how we work, where you can not just see what's going on in your group, but you can see everything else that's going on in the organization, the physical space itself.

For example, Chris, if you were in an office tower and you had multiple floors, you could have visual representations of each floor. And you can have this in a generic way, or you can customize it to show what your actual space looks like, right? You can virtualize that into this environment. So it looks and feels very much like you're in the office, as if you were at your place of employment.

So there's a lot of possibilities here to kind of make it feel more engaging for people who aren't physically in the space, right, to make that virtual work experiences a little more real, a little more relatable to everything around you. And of course, you can add all the warm and fuzzy stuff, you know, the plants and the furniture and, you know, in the outside spaces, you know, you can see some green space and sunlight and stuff like that. It's trying to check a lot a lot of boxes here and I don't really know where this is going. It's a bit of an open book concept right now, but it is definitely starting to find an audience. So I'm going to stop and give this over to you, Chris, because you're looking at the same visual, I am for ideas.

Chris Fine

Well, Jon, I would say it's super interesting. I mean, it would be nice to try to get a link or something to put in the comments on the podcast or something to be able so people could see this, but let me just try to describe it a little bit, for our listeners. So it looks a little bit like what we call in architecture a dollhouse view, right? It's like looking down into a dollhouse, but it's very advanced in terms of showing the layout of the space. And it's a very comfortable view. And the participants, the people who are active in the space are not, as Jon said, they're more like tiles or icons. They're not fake figures. So it doesn't look hokey. It's more like a really friendly map of the space.

I could see as being super useful is in several areas. One is to replicate the physical space that you have. And not only does that allow people to feel that they're in the space with the other people who might physically be present, but also that allows I think it's an incentive for them to look at some cool space and say, hey, maybe I'd like to be there the two days that they want me to be in there. It doesn't substitute for it, but kind of makes it pretty enticing.

The other thing is it's going to allow you to play with new arrangements of space or just create a virtual conferencing center or collaboration floor. And this is actually super useful to an enterprise because It allows the facilities and real estate and their architects that they work with and everything else to start to get how people feel about different kinds of space without necessarily making all the physical investment in it up front because it's very expensive to reconfigure space. So I think, I mean, my positive reaction to it, I'm usually not that keen on virtual environments, but my positive reaction to this is it seems like a happy medium between nothing and full-on cartoons, I think.

Jon Arnold

That's a good way to kind of sum it up, right? Because if it looks too cartoonish, like it's been built by a gamer, it's like it's not relatable to people who want to have a serious workspace or maybe have more of an enterprise mindset as opposed to a startup mindset. But yeah, the whole configuration of the physical space, I think is really important. And this is a good way to also see, well, what spaces are people using? and how are they configuring maybe the setup of the room and what peripherals are they using in the space? And it also, yes, it could borderline on surveillance, of course, right? You can see, well, why, you know, hey, Chris, you're supposed to be in this meeting now, but you're over here at your desk. So it could be a little bit intrusive that way or you're giving away a little too much information that might not reflect well on your work habits or whatever, that's possible.

So there's elements there that you have to be, I guess, a little more mindful of and also, of course, to make everyone in the workplace know what the boundaries are for how this is going to be used and privacy concerns, that kind of thing. But it's definitely getting, they're finding use cases where they weren't expecting it. So they're finding, for example, community centers. Not an enterprise per se, but more like in, cities and towns as ways for people to, for the public, for citizens to kind of maybe join a public hearing or something like that, where they could be invited into the space like that. I think it could be very good for distributed workforces over a large geographies, right, where you can just physically, I'm sorry, virtually have your presence in the space regardless of where you're physically located.

And it's not that we don't have these tools, but I like the approach that they're taking here to it, that it's a very modular setup, right? You can reconfigure it very easily. For listeners who are interested in learning a little more, and I realize we're just talking and you're not seeing anything, so the company is Welo, W-E-L-O. So if you want to check out the website to see what they have on tap. They are also, by the way, in the Zoom marketplace. So that's one place where they have got partnership in the collaboration space, right? So if you look in there, you'll find them as a way to add that visual dimension to what, you know, to what Zoom customers are already doing.

So a lot of this is trial and error for sure, seeing what's going to stick. But I think they're on to something here. And there's really, no boundaries here for what you can do with this or kind of the experiences you can create. And I just like this idea that you can combine this visual, even though it is virtual, but the visual element to the collaboration that we're already doing. We’re already using text, we're already using voice, right? These are all real-time modes. And I think this just helps to make it feel more, personalized than just, talking to people on a Zoom call is okay, like we're seeing each other, nothing wrong with that. But this is, I think you'll agree, Chris, it's a more kind of holistic experience.

Chris Fine

I agree, Jon. And I think we probably need to add a little disclaimer that this isn't an ad. We're mentioning this because we think it's representative of an approach that we think we're going to see more of, which is different ways of visualizing remote participants along with physical participants in space. And we think that that's generally a positive trend. I think we're a little bit skeptical about being in a cartoon world. But this is essentially placing people onto a sophisticated visualization of a floor plan, and then providing several capabilities.

And as far as security goes, I'm sure there's several levels you could think about this, right? You could just not be able to see people outside of your gathering, depending on how they set the settings. You could block a room off, you know, put a mask on an area if it's being used, and you just don't necessarily see everybody who's in it. Exactly. But I do believe that we need to look at all approaches that allow remote and local participants to have equity in participation and feeling involved.

This is also a way that's kind of light that doesn't require VR glasses or anything like that, but it gives you a way to visualize where everybody is. So it's kind of subtle, but I think it's an interesting approach. I don't think they're the only ones who are going to do it. There are other companies who could if they had the vision, but it's an interesting approach. I think it's definitely a watch this space, don't you?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, well said. And I'm glad you brought up the inclusive element to this that, you know, if you required goggles, forget it, right? It's just, that's a luxury a lot of people can't afford, don't want to use, aren't interested. So this way, as I mentioned, this 2.5 D experience dimensional is a little better, as you say, in the cartoons, but it's not the metaverse. We don't need that for this, right? And you don't need a ton of computing power to do this.

So I think it works on a lot of levels. And yes, I'm glad you mentioned that this is not an ad for Welo by any stretch. We're just saying this is a pretty cool example of where we see things going and how collaboration is a future of work theme of how the workplace is evolving. And yes, you just have to take our word for it to visualize what we've been talking about. But you'll find all this stuff when you do get the next episode.

And if you get my newsletter, you'll have this image as well to look at. with that, we are on time, Chris, so we're going to leave it at that for today. So thank you all for listening. This is basically the end of our May edition, and we hope you enjoyed it and will continue with us as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes at www.watchthisspace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like it, leave us a review or rating suggestions for future topics. We're always interested to hear your thoughts. And with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Jon, great to talk to you as always. Whoever's listening, thank you. And we appreciate your listenership. And as Jon said, we're always happy to hear from you. And we do act on suggestions and comments that we get. So with that, we'll say goodbye till next month. Stay tuned for another edition of Watch This Space and have a good month. We'll see you again soon.

Companies mentioned:

Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Welo, Zoom