One of the great things about WebRTC is that its completely clientless if you are using Google Chrome or Firefox (nightly releases). This means you do not have to download another version of Java, or Skype, or Microsoft Lync, etc, etc. So today we thought we would show that WebRTC is actually ubiquitous and actually works from anywhere. Even at 32 thousand feet while heading to Palo Alto.

We used Thrupoint Fusion Web Gateway, Fusion Client SDK, and Fusion Media Broker to do this call using the production Google Chrome. Amazing using the VP8 codec currently supported in Google Chrome we had virtually no issues on the planes wifi for voice or audio (although I was quiet since I did not want to annoy passengers next to me).

Thrupoint also posted today they have Cisco Jabber working along side WebRTC for voice, video, instant messaging, and presence allowing for enterprises wanting to keep their legacy IP PBX in place to use the latest web technology to extend their applications outside their 4 walls.

Since first recognizing this I have always kept it in the back of my mind that I wanted to start a Meetup series that would focus on connecting bright technical minds with other bright technical minds as well as connect businesses in the area with the people that can help them with positions that needed filled without having to hire people from out of the region.

So, Feb 21st, from 6 to 8pm at Bauhaus Kaffee here in Farmington I will be launching the Parkland Meetup: Tech/Startup series. We have been fortunate to have several sponsors for the first event and have already exceeded our initial attendance goals to the point where we had to upgrade facilities to be able to handle more people.

The event will have 3 speakers, and 4 “expert” tables. We really are focused on creating an upbeat vibe and make this very much not “more of the same”. By that I mean not a bunch of bullet points on slides and more of the same conversations that people have heard at other events over and over again.

Before I keep on with more words, words, words, here are some links to access info about the event:

Website: ParklandMeetup.com

Facebook Page: Facebook.com/TechStartupMeetup (please “like” us)

Facebook Event: Event Details Here

This is my first time every organizing an event or doing any event promotion, to say the least its been an effort, especially to provide a completely free event that also provides a high level of value. But its exciting. I am very passionate about incubating tech in the community. VERY PASSIONATE about it.

I have lived in this area all of my life but have been fortunate to have worked at some amazing companies during the growth phases of the internet and next generation of communications networks. I had to travel frequently but I never had to move, why? Because I was able to use broadband and technology to access the things I needed. Not all jobs allow for this but many do.

By seeing what technology could enable, it allowed me to have new ideas, to see what was possible. The problem is locally our brightest minds do not always get to do that. One of the big reasons I pushed and supported Big River Broadband to be located in Farmington, MO was because I knew it would allow people that would typically not get to see what was possible to finally maybe have a different vision, to have a new idea, an idea that may blossom into a new company, maybe the next big thing.

My goal with the meetup group is to facilitate these connections, to facilitate the sharing of ideas and connect people with different technical skills together to help them complete the idea they have or spark a new idea.

Our first meetup will have the following speakers:

Bruce Marler (yep thats me) – I will be providing a quick 10 minute presentations of my vision for the group, the inception of the idea, and why it is important for the community.

Mit Landrum – Mit is the Mayor of Farmington and also a long time tech professional with a software company of his own.

Kevin Cantwell – President of Big River Broadband, Kevin is a big believer in connecting people and enabling rural areas to have access to the larger world. I have known Kevin and the team at Big River Telephone for years and they have always stayed consistent with this focus.

Other than speakers, by the way, no speaker will be speaking for more than 15 minutes, this event is not to talk at people, its to connect them, we will also have the concept of “expert” tables.

The expert tables will be there to provide access to people that have had real life experience using technology to better their business or in some cases to create a business. This will allow people to sit down and have a one on one or maybe group discussion with this person to ask questions on how and why they use technology.

The experts will be:

Tiffany Marler (my wife for full disclosure) – Online marketing as part of a holistic marketing approach

Bruce Marler (yes me again) – Using online/cloud based tools to make your business more efficient

Casey Hartley – KC Photography, Casey is a prime example of how to use social media to grow your business and will talk about how she has used Facebook specifically to make her photography business a success

Mike Howe- General Manager, Big River Broadband – Mike will be available to discuss broadband and telephony and how to more effectively use technologies such as VoIP, LTE, etc

Now, for the good stuff, FOOD, food will be provided for free thanks to our great sponsors. You can see our sponsors on the ParklandMeetup.com website. We will have free BBQ from Branding Iron BBQ and free snacks and coffee from Bauhaus Kaffee, the bar will be open as well, thats for purchase though.

We are already at around 50 people committed to being at the event and we are not done yet, look for more announcements between now and the event around other things we will be doing, and yes we are already planning the second event to happen in April.

As you can imagine this is the type of trend it is good to get ahead of if you invest in domain names. You can already see sites like Twelephone.com coming up with unique brandable names for the new social communication services they are offering. This is just the beginning as more and more companies are beginning to use the technology as it becomes more widespread in browsers (currently it is available in Google Chrome and nightly releases of Firefox).

On Linkedin recently I had someone contact me giving me a thanks for talking about the new technology as they were able to pick up some related domain names and then on Twitter this week the team over at Media Options asked my thoughts on how I thought WebRTC would impact domain names.

As I have been wanting to do some domain blogging lately I thought it a good topic to hit on. I have not posted about domain names as much lately as I honestly feel the market is pretty saturated with blogs and I do not feel like rehashing the same things people Like Morgan Linton and Mike Berkens are already talking about, they do a great job and no reason for me to just wrap new words around it. BTW, just listed a couple of my favorites, there are plenty more.

So all that said, when talking about how WebRTC impacts domaining I see a couple things:

• It proves the domain name is not dead
• Real time domains are key

I am the first one to tell people that mobile usage is driven from the app, we have become an app centric world due to the continued penetration of the smartphone and tablet devices such as the iPad (I officially only use my iPad Mini as my deskphone as of just this past month).

But, even though there are iOS SDKs being built for WebRTC enablement, one of the main drivers of WebRTC is browser to browser communication without a plugin, you can imagine that brandable domain names become very important especially if they can include some relevance to real time communications, and to be clear do not look at communications just as voice. Video, Chat, and Application and Data Sharing will become easier and more pervasive. Look at companies like BlueJeans.com to understand how video conferencing is driving harder than ever and becoming a usable service for businesses.

That means the domain is not dead, although people do find much of what they are looking for through search the browser is not dead and this will keep driving people to the browser and not always to an app.

On the generic side, alot of the key WebRTC domains are already taken, I found one last good product related one today but as this is new trend there will be categories that pop up around it that you will want to be on the watch for. But more importantly I think picking up domain names related to real time and cloud based communications services are key. I have been on the look out and deciding where the most value is here but without a doubt if I had to choose based on the trend its real time, cloud based, communications and more importantly SDKs and APIs. One word: Twilio

So, there you have it, future trend domain investment has paid off for people many times. This is no different, pay attention to the trends and profit.

I really do not give St. Louis its fair shot when it comes to food, I have started to make it a point to start venturing out to more local places when in town rather than hit my typical favorites, Drunken Fish, don’t worry I will will still come visit, but I need to say good bye just for a bit.

I travel a lot, a couple million miles over the past 10 years or so, I tend to hit more trendy, adventurous spots while visiting NYC, Austin, San Francisco, and other cities known for their unique dining experiences. But realized I really was not giving my home town a chance.

This past weekend my wife, Tiffany, and I decided to pick a restaurant that had been getting buzz and seemed *interesting*. We were keeping an open mind, meaning great steak or sushi either one could of won out.

In this case we chose neither of those and went with tapas, the restaurant we choice was Sanctuaria, the bar alone would be well worth the visit to say the very least, holy crap the drink menu was much larger than the food menu. And by drinks I am not talking about Gin and Tonic, I am talking some of the most creative mixed drinks you will find, period. I have had the pleasure to enjoy a drink all over this fine country in some pretty bad ass places, but this place was as good as any, period…

A little research shows that the Mixologist on staff, Matt Seiter, has won many an award and has a book coming out explaining some of the drinks, read this page and you will get the method behind the madness in the bar here. For reference Tiffany had the “Kind of Played Out” which is Del Maguey Vida Mezcal, Rehorst Gin, Honey Syrup, Lemon Juice, Blue Curacao, Fresh Lavendar Flowers, and Club soda. She enjoyed to say the least.

But since I was driving I was there for the food. First off, we checked in on Foursquare, there are specials for Sanctuaria on there if you check in with a friend, take advantage of it. My online marketing head loved the fact they were taking advantage of Foursquare.

So what did we order:

MONTEREY JACK AND GUAVA EMPANADAS WITH AJI AMARILLO SAUCE

CHICKEN SKEWERS

FRITA SLIDERS

BLACK BEAN STUFFED PIQUILLOS

TOSTONES

You can see the descriptions of each here on the menu.

Obviously with the title of my post we loved the food, it was great, unique, and the flavors were great. My favorite was the Frita sliders, seriously how bad can Chorizo sliders be. Spicy but not ridiculously so.

But most surprising was the chicken skewers. Tiffany ordered them and I gave her the “Really, chicken skewers???” look but they were phenomenal. I really just expected to get the standard chicken on stick and it be ok. But they managed to give what looked like turkey size tenderloins with an amazing amount of flavor, the flavor from the cuba libre glaze stood out, I can say without a doubt the most flavorful chicken I have had, I did not expect much, and I really do like unique items on a menu, in other words I would of NEVER ordered chicken skewers, ever.. But I will order these again.

All that said, ever item was exceptional.

I am not a food reviewer, but my point with all of this is that you will not be disappointed.

We did have dessert as well, do yourself a favor order the Havana Bread, it takes 20 minutes to bake, BUT heres the trick, order the Carrot Cake Ice Cream with it. It is a perfect combo. Do it!

A little side note, a few days later we were having dinner at our local spot here in Farmington and ran into someone who we were discussing food options with, we started talking about best restaurants we have tried lately, no joke, no exaggeration  we both said Sanctuaria at the exact same time. This is someone that we had never really spoke to before in any detail and this restaurant popped up. It has created a name and I am more than happy that we decided to head out and find some good foodie spots locally. I never thought that there was not good food locally, I just never took the time to go in St. Louis, I did all my foodie eating while traveling. Looks like that will be changing.

Unfortunately to most people that own businesses or those that are in upper management the web is one big intangible mess to them when it comes to marketing. What can be frustrating about that is that it is much more measurable than any other marketing method that these same individuals have dealt with for years. But since a billboard can be touched, or a trade magazine ad can be physically seen those both seem much more “real” to the the decision makers or executives at a large company.

As we in the online industry know, those methods are as intangible as you can get as far as measurement. It can be done at some level, but real measurement comes from numbers. Although I completely understand there is brand identity that can come from putting your logo out at the end of the day people end up wanting people in their door. At some point its about more than your name its about dollars.

What is great is how simple it is to show people the light when it comes to this, in all reality the amount of data that can be given can be overwhelming for the business owner or exec and those of us that spend our time in all this data can try to share way to much when “trying to prove our point”.

If it is an E-Commerce site it could be as simple as orders placed. Although it would be wrong to mention the customers name, I will say we had one customer that was a very well known business in the area last year that previously had spent a considerable amount of money on a nice looking online store for their product. They were known to have a great product but in the past several years had not had more than a few, thats not an exaggeration  no more than a few orders from a site that had cost them 5 figures between development and hosting and various monthly services.

After a site rebuild and optimization around product names and long tail keywords they had more sales in the week after launch than they had in the past 5 years. It was a combination of both proper design to drive people to purchase and proper keyword targeting. In this case as much as we could show targeted search drives purchases with keywords it was even easier to show month over month results, or quarter over quarter.

So that leads me to the next one and the most important, when dealing with a business that is not taking orders online (the majority of most websites BTW), showing the number and quality of visitors to the companies website can be done most effectively if they have had prior analytics tools on their website. The most common being Google Analytics.

In this case the easiest way is to do year over year (YoY) or month over month (MoM) reports for visitors, bounce rate, and specific keywords. If targeted search was the reason the business was working with you in the first place I find it best to show reports that show the specific growth around their key terms rather than traffic growth, although in most cases they go hand in hand.

This all may seem obvious to us, but keep in mind most of these small businesses have not had anyway to track their marketing efforts other than their sales person from the billboard or newspaper coming in to tell them that X amount of people viewed their paper or billboard location in Y demographic and then try to tell the customer that is measurable and actionable data for that business. Now with MoM or YoY keyword reports that can literally show exactly how many people searched for the business and landed on specific pages on the businesses site and then took specific actions (download a brochure, bought an item, etc) the business owner will start to understand that web marketing is VERY tangible in relation to the very intangible marketing they have become accustomed too.

Recently there was a project that we were able to show that the business had zero, yes ZERO results around their focused keywords the last full month before the SEO effort had been put in place. The next month the report showed over 40 different keyword combinations around that ONE keyword now bringing traffic, this does not include other keywords that had been focused on, this was just one specific one. That is how you can show data that seems “tangible” to the business owner. That is something that makes sense. Once data like this is shown it will now cause that business owner to think twice before buying that billboard or newspaper ad.

So, before speaking to your customers, or if you are a decision maker at a business, do not fall for the farce that the web is intangible, realize that the most measurable data you can find is through your web and social analytics. Data you could never find with your offline marketing methods are just a few clicks away with online marketing.

Obviously based on my WebRTC tutorial post I have an affinity for the new technology and really see this conference as a maturity point for the rapidly approaching standard. As was recently announced by Google, Chrome now has support built into the production browser and right behind that Firefox announced enhanced support. This means that a good portion of web browsers now have support for this real time communications technology on their desktop this moment.

Thrupoint has multiple spots during the conference, our Chief Innovation Officer (and an old boss of mine), David Jodoin is a keynote speaker and Sajeel Hussain, our VP of Product Marketing and Management is on a panel discussing WebRTC to SIP.

If any of my blog readers are in the San Francisco area and would like to get together shoot me a message.

Of particular interest to me next week is the Tuesday session lead by Justin Uberti of Google. Its a workshop showing how to implement WebRTC applications and outlining the open source code base being presented right from the creators themselves. Doesn’t get much better than that. You can read the complete conference agenda here.

The sponsor list has continued to grow for the conference with some of the leading names in web applications on the list. Need more info on WebRTC, ask in the comments below.

Also, started a little project keeping track of the various WebRTC Demos out there, I plan to post updates frequently with links and thoughts on the various demos I run across at WebRTCdemo.com

But before I started just posting a re-hash of what was already there in the slides to see I started thinking of just how clunky the web is today. I think back to 8 track tapes, or even cassette tapes and realize how clunky they are compared to how we listen to music today. I see the web much like that. Do we really think that the way we interface with websites today, or communicate with others, is the most effective way to do so. I could not help to think about how hard Facebook tries to organize our social interactions or how hard Google tries to organize the information that is produced online and then realize that the way we interact with that is in its infancy.

I was looking at how pictures scrolled through my Facebook feed and just how much the interface seems, well, boring. Now by no means is that Facebooks fault, the technology behind Facebook is undoubtedly amazing and something that we should all be impressed with. But what we are still missing in todays internet is a complete shift in user interface design.

I think we are really starting to see the pre-alpha versions of what we should expect to see in the mid to long term future. Microsoft Surface, Apple Siri, the iPad: all these are early iterations of what will evolve into completely new ways to interact with devices.

Developers and hackers are already creating unique ways to use things like Microsoft Kinect to make interfacing with technology easier. Touchless, wireless, interface design will get here. Visual representations will get more “Minority Report” like and less, well, 8 track like.

The internet is just starting, I can remember in 1996 when someone I respected very much in the group I worked in at AT&T stated that the internet was just a fad like the CB radio and we should all be planning on life after the internet. I think we can all agree this very smart person totally missed the boat on that one. The internet is the core of transport for communications and much of what we do everyday, even those people that are not active users of the web (i.e. browsing, mobile apps, etc) still use the internet probably daily, with their long distance phone calls and other such “applications” that use the internet for transport.

We will continue to evolve the uses of the internet, our clunky interfaces of today will evolve to more advanced UX and UI design (User Experience and User Interface).

I for one look forward to seeing us move from the 8 track world to the future designs.

For a bit more on a technology that will change how we communicate over the next couple years read about WebRTC here.

Today Google announced that WebRTC is officially in their Google Chrome version 23, you can see a nice write up of this on Forbes. Google is the driver behind WebRTC, they previously acquired Global IP Solutions and then open sourced the technology which is used to enable IP based voice and video.

Until today WebRTC required either running beta/alpha versions of browsers, or required special flags to be set in your Google Chrome installation to run. Now it is on by default.

What does this mean? It means that now building real time applications that run in a browser require only Javascript knowledge rather than a complete network or protocol level understanding of the telecommunications world. It also means that web developers and entrepreneurs can start to deploy innovative applications that no longer require complete Java downloads, Flash installs, and intense programming. This is a big step in making the web the fabric of not only how we get information but communicate through a browser.

Look for companies to make big announcements as this technology continues to move forward.

You can read more about my thoughts on WebRTC to SIP on the Thrupoint blog.

NOTE: All these are real examples we have either talked to people about or witnessed ourselves just recently.

1) If your sign says there is an A: drive floppy error you may need to upgrade your signage

2) You still have a rotary phone on your desk (you know who you are)

3) You still use a yellow legal pad for your accounting and as your CRM system (this is honestly my favorite…)

4) Your office secretary still is required to use an At A Glance paper calendar to handle office scheduling for an office of 10

5) Your website was hand written in HTML in notepad and still auto-plays music

6) You still use MySpace and you are in marketing

7) Your BUSINESS email still ends in @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, @msn.com, or @anything that is not the domain name of your business

8) You still worry about a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death)

9) You have to find your copy of Frontpage 98 to update your website (ok this actually may be my favorite)

10) And finally… You still have a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitor that weighs more than you do

Feel free to post your own in the comments below.

In the past couple weeks I have witnessed no less than 4 friends who have either posted on Facebook that they spent a day on the weekend and put together a new website or witnessed a restaurant that posted they have a new website and you visit it and its a hacked together free site on GoDaddy that will frustrate the visitors from the time they enter the site.

I completely understand that businesses have limited budgets, I have their backs on that more often than not. Every dollar out of these businesses cash register is a dollar that can go towards making their mortgage payment when its a family owned business, which it is in many cases.

But in virtually every case I have witnessed lately these same businesses are spending money on billboards, newspaper ads, or other legacy marketing methods that would more than cover the cost of a well designed and search friendly website that they can maintain and use to benefit their business.

The problem is most businesses think about their website as an afterthought, or as an “I guess I should have one” item when in reality in todays world it is the first place people are going to look for any information about the business.

I do not mean to pick on GoDaddy, I am a GoDaddy customer for domain registrations, but if you are trying to effectively market your business you cannot put up a free website with no professional input and expect real results. Which is what causes my major concern, as much as we would like their business, in all reality I have a passion about getting people online, I really CARE about them doing well online because I KNOW it is possible. But when they build a website like this with no consultation or understanding and then get a bad taste in their mouth because of improper techniques it taints their next interaction with someone that may be genuinely trying to provide them a service.

So, local business owners, please understand that there is a difference between truly doing something great for your business online and just building a website as an afterthought. Its a great start to show the interest in building something online, but make let someone help you make the right steps so you do not lose those customers once they get there.