PICTURES: This table-sized tablet brings social to the board room and beyond

Follow Me

March 14, 2013 4:17 PM

At the recent CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany I had the opportunity to sit down with the Frank Sonder, CEO at Foresee, a company that has produced a full-scale social hardware and software solution that scales from table to tablet.

You have to see the table hardware component to truly understand how big it is. Notice it's built into the table these folks are sitting at.

Credit: Ron Miller

You sit at the foresee table and use the touch interface to interact with the IBM social software components.

Sonder explained the challenge for the company was how to support collaboration, usability, and user experience in a hardware and software combination. Foresee was in the IBM pavilion as a partner company because it uses IBM's Sametime and Connections social software.

Facebook and Twitter Rule The Enterprise, Too
FINAL WEEK to register for CITE! Don’t miss the Sunday interactive workshops.

He told me that the idea was to have users socialize using whatever devices they choose from wherever they happen to be -- whether they are in the room or not.

The hardware component also has a dual video screen that hangs on the wall. You can see one of the screens here with the video camera attached.

Credit: Ron Miller

The hardware also includes a video conferencing component.

Before a meeting, the person in charge of the meeting uploads relevant files and then opens them on the table and can work with them:

Credit: Ron Miller

Open floor plan file on forsee table

As the file is worked on, someone on an iPad in another location can follow along:

Credit: Ron Miller

You can work with the file in the meeting room on the table

A person working offsite on an iPad could see the file as you work on it in real time:

Credit: Ron Miller

The person on the iPad sees the changes.

Sonder explained while it was possible to run the software from mobile devices, the table itself runs 40,000 euro ($51,916). So it's not for small startups, but for the right corporation spread out across the world it could be a worthwhile investment. So far they have a reference client, Continental Tire, running in 3 locations: Moscow, Madrid and Hannover.