One of the Seesmic developers asked how Seesmic might be used for business. They were scratching their heads a bit but then the company is very much focused in the media/consumer space. Marketers see opportunity but I prefer ideas that have immediate or short term payback. Marketing cannot do that with any degree of certainty.
I came up with a clutch of ideas around emergency style services:
- Car crash - upload video showing the extent of the damage, identifying the other driver, showing the location and any skid marks etc. Upload direct to insurance company for claims purposes. Shozu, the server that provides Seesmic with its location independent ability to upload video can attach geo-location data. That can be used to corroborate the incident and add an element of completeness.
- Service issue at airport - upload video showing troublesome maintenance part and requesting immediate assistance
- Proof of wrong delivery at customer site - wrong parts supplied, upload video showing the problem and request immediate courier to deliver parts required
- Proof of harassment in work environment for later evidence in tribunal or arbitration case.
The conversation has moved on and Chris Brogan has chipped in with ideas around medical in the comments. All good stuff.
The question for SAP people: How might mobile video services of this kind be integrated to say Duet and on out to business processes among industries like insurance, medical and so on? What about compliance in Chinese factories?
Could services like this be used in mashup mode
My sense is that video services of this kind could act as genuine time and cost savers that feed ideas into how KPIs are developed and moved forward across a broad range of metrics. I'll acknowledge right now that my thining is far from advanced so really this is more about putting a question out there and seeing who bites.
Having said that, I have a number of Seesmic invites for anyone interested. Ping a response and I'll make them available on a first come, first served basis.
Note: Seesmic is still under feature development and testing for scale. The service will go down from time to time. It is important to see beyond the chatter. People like myself are experimenting to find ways of making it more than a video 'chat box.' As you might gather - I'm a fan.
