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title: WWDC2003 Session 706
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2003-706
---

# WWDC2003 Session 706

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en hello I the stress and i am your host for the session i work in the quicktime group and this session is designing a distance learning designing distance learning solutions with QuickTime now that we've gotten the legal junk out of the way I will be short and introduce Steve Bannerman who is the CEO of cash stream and his company has designed what we think is a pretty interesting distance learning solution and he's going to talk about that he's got some other speakers to help them out we'll have questions and answers at the end so if you can hold your questions to that point and when you do have questions line up at the microphones I think you guys know the drill by now to line up at the microphones and we'll take those questions at the end okay thanks so first of all I have to point out that when we turned our slides into Apple it actually said designing a distance learning solution with QuickTime and they changed it is so we can't actually we know our grammar and we can't actually write home but for some reason it didn't show up that way so we have a few speakers for you in this hour and a half session today because I really didn't think that you wanted a marketing guy to get up here and talk a lot about marketing so we're not going to do that but I do want to sort of start off the presentation by giving you a little bit of context to sort of give you a sense for why we are what we are and how we got to where we are right now because you know you don't just sort of wake up one day and decide you're going to build a distance learning solution you know and what the market requirements are going to be and how you're going to implement that but we're going to spend most of our time with Chris kowalick who is our CTO and he's going to talk about the product and the challenges and you know the advantages and all those kinds of things have using Quicktime and then we're going to have a lot of fun because we've invited one of our customers a very distinguished customer dr. Steven early from Cornell University's medical school to give you a sense of how he actually implemented our product in his distance learning application so um we're you know we're going to spend a lot of time in demo land they've got a couple of demos you know one of them is actually live so we get our sacrifice to the demo gods before hand and we'll see how that goes so you know when you look at the e-learning market out there elearning takes place in a few you know areas not the least of which is you know the classic extend the classroom distance learning applications but the e-learning also takes place in corporate America and corporate training applications and also really is extended now into what we consider to be corporate communications where people are actually holding internal meetings using these kinds of products and stuff like that and you can see that this market is actually poised for a tremendous amount of growth so you know when we first started this product it was really born out of a request that I got when I was working on the QuickTime team from a friend of mine at the Mayo Clinic who said you know I've been trying to to put presentations on the internet using this real producer thing and it just doesn't work it's just not reliable is there anything based on quicktime that i can use that's more reliable and cross-platform and unfortunately at the time I said we'll know so what do we do so I decided that we were going to go and I was going to join this company we're going to build this thing and so we built it to the requirements that the Mayo Clinic gave us for how they wanted to implement a solution we decided all right do we productize this thing or do we just treat it as a one-off and when you look at the landscape of this market it became really obvious to us that we wanted to productize it because there were some tremendous opportunities but the opportunities are not just in sort of the growth of the market that the way other people are actually attacking that growth so when you look at the growth of the market in the way this kind of a market is evolved you know people used to compare the you know the sort of cost of ownership advantages of these kinds of products against travel and it's like okay well it's a lot cheaper to do this kind of stuff online than it is to get on a plane well you know that was sort of the first generation of these kind of products and now we're looking at the knee of the curve where there's an opportunity for second generation and third generation products to come in and say well okay you don't really measure this against travel anymore you measure this against the total cost of ownership for first generation products and you realize you're spending almost as much on those products as you were on travel because of the nature of the beast and i'll talk more about that in just a second so really we come in in that sort of second generation where we have an opportunity to take a market it's already been validated where some of our competitors have already gone in and said okay you know people believe now that this is a good idea and how do we take that and make it a cost-effective idea and really drive on the price down and in the functionality up so you know just to sort of prove that this market has been seeded in this market has been validated Forbes magazine just recently like last month named lebbick the fastest growing technology company in all of in all of tech and so you know it's this is a company that throughout the you know the sort of dot-com bust has really been growing very very rapidly and so the whole category is really starting to grow but we think the explosive growth is going to come from these next generation products because if you look at sort of you know what's going on right now there really is a kind of perfect storm or a confluence of events that are really creating a need for these kind of things you know the economy has been bad for a while now and we all know that when we get that one but you know the Terrorism thing is definitely keeping people off the planes and and you know dr. erty we'll talk a lot more about that because that was one of the significant things that motivated his implementation of the product and of course we also had things like SARS you know where we're even if people did get you know travelmate they would slide a silicon valley from Taiwan and China and you know these companies would make them stay in their hotel room and have conference calls even though they were right down the street they weren't going to let them in the building these kinds of things all sort of move around and sort of create this wonderful perfect storm for us in that it really drives market adoption for these kind of products but when you look at the first generation product there's some significant flaws in how they were implemented all of them were primary primarily asp type products which means that you have what i call it success penalty you know the more that you use this product the more you pay so the more you know the more uses you find for the product the more it costs you and you look around and all of a sudden you figure out that you spend a hundred thousand dollars on this kind of subscription-based service last year so people basically start to find ways to not use the product cuz they're afraid they're going to blow their budget it's also been a very windows dominated world there are very very few options for cross-platform technologies and you know that's created this kind of inwardly facing focus for these kinds of products because no one really wants to talk to their customers because they don't want to have to worry about what kind of computer their customers have even if you know even though only three percent of your customers have mass you don't wanna leave any of your customers behind so you had a tendency to use these products internally unfocused and also there was no rich media you know it was pretty much the experience has been a whole group of people huddled around a telephone conference call with static PowerPoint slides staring at you to see which one blinked first and you know in an attention based economy like this you know you find that if you don't give people something interesting to look at and something to interact with they're going to start checking their email they're not going to pay attention to what you have to say and so this really left the door open for products like ours to come in and solve these types of problems so when you look at cash dream we are very much a product instead of an ASP you can buy our software one time you can install it on your own interest lecture and you can use it as many times as you want without any without any recurring usage fees so your total cost of ownership can go way down you can buy the product with one budget cycle which is very important in markets like education for instance you know it's really hard in education to go get money at all going to get money twice it's almost impossible and so the opportunity to buy something in one budget cycle and implemented is extremely important to those kinds of customers which again is one of the reasons why you don't see products like WebEx in place where in education and of course when you can install something on your own infrastructure behind your own firewall then your security options go up you know one of our customers is adobe systems and they decided once Microsoft bought place where they weren't going to copy their presentations up to a Microsoft server anymore so they turned cash stream instead cash stream is extremely cross platform as Chris will talk a few minutes cast room is actually a suite of applications and every application in the suite including the server runs on both mac and windows with full feature parity between the two platforms which not only gives you an opportunity to not have to worry about what kind of computer you have but you can now do outwardly facing presentations because you can start including your customers and of course leveraging quick time we get an opportunity to deliver a really rich media experience and Chris will talk a lot about that and that will actually demo that for you so people actually stay connected to these kinds of broadcasts longer and they actually remember the content longer so if you're using this kind of stuff for you know anything from again extending the classroom in education to reseller authorization programs and businesses you get an opportunity for people to walk away remembering more of what they've seen all right so cash stream enterprise is the name of our product and I'm finished now with the marketing stuff I'm sure you're all glad to hear that and so at this point what I'd like to do is bring Chris kowalick RCT you up and have him sort of go in depth into how our product works in what it does so thank you very much [Applause] hello everybody I hope you're enjoying the show so fine oh I have msg said my name is Chris kowalick I am the CTO of cash stream and I'm going to talk to you today about the challenges of designing a distance learning solution and how cool time can help you meet a lot of those challenges what we're going to talk about primarily is the basic goals for distance learning projects this will apply to any sort of distance learning solution that you may be designing or involved in and how quick time can help you meet those goals one of the in-stream things about caching is that we rely very very heavily on quick time and I call quick time sort of an off-the-shelf technology because it's such a rich sweet there it has such a rich ability to do many different things that you can implement it very very easily in your application and get lots of functionality with not a ton of work on your part so in our case we're using QuickTime for both the audio video playback within our distance learning solution the still image playback of course for the slides and we're also using QuickTime data handlers which I think people aren't really using that often these days but were using the QuickTime data handlers to actually download the slide media and we'll talk some more about that later on specifically how we're doing that so there's several design goals that you need to be conscious of when you're designing a distance learning solution the most important thing is you need to synchronize audio and video with the slides now this doesn't seem like it's that big of deal but it actually is because any sort of live internet broadcasting there's some sort of inherent delay nothing you can really do about it all the systems involve some sort of buffering to deal with latency that may come up in that sort of thing and it really is a big deal when you're doing a presentation when the slides appear it's slightly the wrong time you know if they appear a couple seconds before the video stream is talking about that slide it really throws off the presentation of ruins the cohesiveness of everything so it's very important that you can synchronize your audio and video with the slides in a very very tight manner that's something you absolutely have to accomplish with a distance learning solution one of the things that we really wanted to accomplish with the ability to display rich media slides which include things like macromedia flash progressive QuickTime movies quicktime BR those sorts of things in addition to just your standard still keynote or PowerPoint slide sort of thing you need to be able to do both real-time and on-demand video it's fantastic to be able to have a live tool so that people can meet and watch the presentation but a lot of times I mean our global economy in our global world it's not convenient for people in other countries to view the presentation in real time so it's really nice to be able to archive that presentation that really opens up your audience so that many more people can experience it when otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to obviously it has to be easy to use and it's very important for the system to not be an inhibitor for the people that are trying to use it because a lot of times these people don't care about the technology they just want to give their presentations they want to disseminate this information and they don't want the tool to get in their way so they're used to working in kino they're used to working in PowerPoint and they don't want the actual broadcast of that stuff to become something that's terribly a time soaked for them really because it takes them away from their core competency which is designing the media and designing the presentation has to be cross-platform of course Mac OS 10 mac OS 9 and the last few versions of Windows is very helpful for all the different markets that you have to be in for distance learning solutions so on the multiple markets thing the multiple what each market has sort of its own requirements that you need to be adaptable to so for instance the k-12 market has lower equipment budgets and access to much lower bandwidth generally so your system needs to be able to scale down to handle that that's where you're supporting things like mac OS 9 and older versions of windows and things like that that's where it becomes very very important also becomes very very important to be able to have very low bandwidth slides by using things like flash which is a vector-based thing so you don't have these gigantic QuickTime movies I mean you'd have the flexibility to be able to still be a compelling solution with very low bandwidth availability now in higher education you do have great bandwidth and you tend to have newer equipment so there's less restrictions there it's a really fun market to work in so your system also needs to be able to scale up you need to be able to take advantage of that higher bandwidth so that you're not giving these people who have access to you know huge pipes I'm giving them presentations that they feel beginning on a 56k modem corporate training is an interesting market they generally have good bandwidth for corporate training but one of the most important things that corporate trainers need is the ability to share their screen to be able to do real-time training and that's something that you need to adhere to or at least come up with some sort of solution for for the people in that market and for corporate communications you have varying bandwidth and firewall to deal with and the main reason is is that what you're doing corporate communications you have no idea where any of the people are going to be who are watching the presentation they could be on the corporate land they could be at home they could be in a hotel room somewhere so all these sorts of things lead to vastly different firewall configurations and vastly different bandwidth availability so you need to be scalable you need to be scalable within the context of a single broadcast that's really important so that you have multiple ways to view the broadcast for people who might have multiple or different amounts of bandwidth available to them some other requirements people obviously need some way to communicate whether that communication is back to the presenter or amongst themselves and we'll talk a little bit more about how we handle it in cash dream later and polling is a very very important thing being able to assess your audience get a sense of where they are or if you're doing a learning thing you can actually test them get that information back and use it in some sort of constructive way it's very very important to be able to achieve those goals as well so of these things I just talked about we have a couple of boxes here we have the stuff that QuickTime can help you with box and the stuff the QuickTime can't really help you that much with box there's a lot of stuff and the stuff that QuickTime can help you with box which is pretty cool quicktime can help you display your audio and video quicktime can help you display your rich media and i should also have ads in there that you can use quicktime display you're still media as well JPEGs gifts bitmaps all those sorts of things quicktime has a great system for handling live and on-demand content quicktime is of course cross-platform and very very good in both cases on mac and the pc and quicktime has this media download capability through the QuickTime data handlers that that I mentioned earlier so the few other things that you do need to achieve kind of on your own or QuickTime is a really helpful synchronization that's something that quicktime does really well internally in terms of synchronizing audio and video but you do need to come up with some sort of system for synchronizing the slides to that audio video stream chat and pulling or both things that you probably need to implement on your own I've seen some pretty clever wired sprite movies that can do this sort of stuff but generally it seems to be better handle that kind of that kind of thing on the application level instead of at the quicktime level so here's cash dream here's the cash dream you I as you can see our our fearless leader steve is in the video window there so what if we had the design cash stream without quicktime what would we be left with a kind of interesting question well first of all here's the cash room you I as it stands today first off we've of course lose the video window that's the most important thing that we're using QuickTime for its handling the live streaming and Andy on-demand streaming so that would be gone as you might expect but we also lose our slide window because a slide window is also handled by quicktime this is where we display our JPEGs or gifts or bitmaps are progressive QuickTime movies or QuickTime VR movies all those things are handled through quicktime in that slide window and the last thing that you might have expected is our banner area is also handled by quick time so we're using utilizing QuickTime there as well to be able to support any number of media types that you might want to put into the banner area generally people tend to put animated gifts they're sort of like a web banner kind of thing but but you have the flexibility to use flash or or whatever you want in that banner area all those things are handled by quick time fortunately we do have quicktime so we have a UI that looks a little better than on the last slide so why do we choose to use quicktime well as I'm sure everybody here knows quicktime is a very high performance video architecture if you have a machine that's playing back video and you're playing it back with a quick time you can be guaranteed that it's playing back as good as it can on that machine quicktime has the ability to do scaling on the fly very very well which is really important in a distance learning solution because the types of media that you end up with that you want to broadcast to people aren't necessarily designed for the press tation you could be pulling a quicktime movie from here and a flash thing from here and slides from here and you need to be able to scale those things in real time so that you get a cohesive experience on the player side and QuickTime does an excellent job of doing that quicktime supports a wide variety of media types as we all know just all kinds of things of course flash and your JPEG GIF all the things I've been talking about over and over again it's well supported and marketed by Apple which is a fantastic thing for instance a lot of times Apple will do revisions to quicktime that don't necessarily require changes in our app for us to utilize those changes obviously whenever a new version quicktime comes out you have to do some sort of QA to make sure that everything is working properly but a lot of times you just get stuff for free and it's a really really exciting thing to be able to to base your product on of course QuickTime is completely cross-platform works fantastic on the pc and fantastic on the mac and data handlers for media download that was a no-brainer for us to be able to use the same code to do downloading file downloading on both the mac and the pc why wouldn't you want to use quicktime well basically the biggest concern we get is that some windows users will need to do an install and this is not such a huge thing most Windows users are used to doing some sort of installation for any sort of product as opposed to on the Mac most people are more accustomed to the dragon cells but so as part of the pc install you can easily throw up a dialog and tell people they need to talk with time and run the quicktime installer it's not a huge issue but there are some people who do complain about that every once in a while and it is unfortunately the cost of being able utilizes fantastic architecture so I'm going to talk one by one about the various portions of the cash stream you I first we're going to talk about the video area so what can you just play in the video area well you can display any movie that's accessible via a URL so this includes all the standard media types i've been talking about JPEGs gifts and those sorts of things but it also includes things like rest movies which is kind of convenient multi data rate rest movies which allows you to have say two different live streams going on 14 56k modem users and one for broadband users there's also lots of really clever things you can do with with ref movies as well you can do audio only movies of course you can do audio movies with picture tracks which is very convenient so if you want to really really low bandwidth sort of way up to do your live presentation you can have an audio only feed and stick in a picture track of the presenter so even maybe users on even 28 modems could be able to view a presentation utilizing that and then you pair that with multi data rate movies and you don't have everybody sitting at the lowest common denominator you have everybody having a customized experience based on the level of bandwidth that they have access to and of course it can handle streaming rtsp or HTTP or progressive which is interesting a lot of people tend to forget that the quicktime progressive download fast start feature is a really really fantastic alternative to doing a full-blown rtsp stream so you could certainly use a progressive QuickTime movie in the slide area or in the video area in cash stream and it's a it's a very useful thing to be able to do if you don't have access to say a quick time streaming server when you're doing your on-demand archived presentations so some of the common issues for the video area firewalls are obviously something that you have to be concerned up quicktime handles that very elegantly with an HTTP fallback feature new in quicktime 6.3 just within the last couple weeks is the ability to automatically set up the transport which is handled by this new sheet in quicktime 6.3 and some other common issues in video area our lack of bandwidth that's obviously something that does come up a bit and you can deal with that by doing things like audio only feeds audio is picture tracks like I mentioned and using multi data rate rest movies to help you customize that experience for each user so the caching slide area also based on quicktime allows you to display any quicktime compatible file accessible via a URL so this is all sorts of still images jpg gif paying picked BMP every obscure format that you can think of all different kinds of video RTSP and progressive so most people tend to do progressive videos in the video window they'll take some sort of video that they use in the classroom or whatever and encode it and display it as a slide but you could also do another live RTSP stream in the video window if you wanted so that allows you to set up say multiple cameras at an event and have a camera on something and a camera on something here and you can switch between them through the course of your presentation insert those slides wherever you want it's a very convenient cool thing to be able to do you can use some of the specialty media types of course quicktime VR wired sprite and flash all kinds of things you can do with those technologies and of course everything scales on the fly in the slide area so if you have slides that are 640 by 480 and they will automatically be scaled down to the proper size or scaled up if necessary obviously you know bandwidth is a concern so we do recommend if your slides are too large that you actually do scale them yourself ahead of time just to save the bits but if you're less concerned about bandwidth am more concerned about just getting your stuff done as quickly as possible then scaling on the fly is certainly an adequate solution and lastly we have the cash stream banner area which is very similar to the slide area actually it also can display any QuickTime compatible file accessible via URL it can do all the still image types as well video both RTSP and progressive as well specialty QuickTime vr wired sprite and flash and it's often used for animated gifts a lot of times that we do have people also doing flash in this area because it's such a lightweight media type and you could do so much more than you would be able to do with with an animated gif so we're also using the QuickTime data handlers the cash dream we're using both HTTP and the ftp data handlers for downloading slide media which allows you to place your side media either on an HTTP server or an ftp server whichever you'd prefer it's cross-platform and it's sort of a browser paradigm you pass off the URL to quicktime quicktime returns you a file and then you can do whatever you want that it's very very convenient here's a URL to some sample code about the QuickTime file transfer protocol so we're going to move over to the demo machine I think I'm still wired over here yes I am which is fantastic and we're going to show you cash game here i'll just adjust something here see if this works so this is our vice president of operations is that correct Jeff Jameson who's going to be talking to you for a little bit about some of the rich media content the cash stream can display okay Jeff are ready to go I'm just going to send him a message here typing in front of people is always kind of embarrassing sort of saying there you go so Jeff should be soon as he gets our message he should start rolling okay great all right so just let me know real quickly Chris that you can actually see and hear me okay and we'll go ahead and get started okay great all right well hi everybody my name is Jeff jameson on the vice president operations to your cash dream hope everybody is enjoying the show today so far which I could be there myself but because it turns out Christmas Eve need some help with a live demonstration here today so here I am so real briefly and spend about 15 minutes I want to talk about what exactly cash dream is and then I'm going to show you some rich media examples and how we utilize quicktime inside our distance learning application so let me jump right into things here so you know before I get started I want to apologize for any redundant information I'm sure christmas eve of kind of talked a little bit about this already but Blair with me and I'll just go through for those folks you might have missed it so what exactly is cash dream well cast stream is a quick time-based enterprise solution for e-learning we synchronize live audio and video in this window here with rich media presentations in this window over here cashton supports both live and on-demand broadcast which means what you're seeing me here live today I congested easily be recording this and archiving for later on demand use cash stream is also scalable from almost in all internet connections from 56k modem all the way up through internet land the most importantly craft stream is completely cross-platform again because we leverage quick time were able to display of various types amount of types of media to the viewers regardless of what platform there on whether that be mac OS i know is 10 or course all the iterations of windows 98 and t2000 cetera so how do you create your media for use with presentations inside Cashin well the good news is that we don't require any you don't have to learn any new tools for cash dream you can already continue to use the same authoring environment that you're already familiar with whether that's keynote or PowerPoint or even photoshop and again because we're leveraging quicktime we're able to display some more exact media types like quicktime vr interactive movies and mac need your Flash so let's jump right into some examples here of what we can do inside the media window first thing I want to talk about is flash flash a very popular media tech these days and it's popular because it's not just a static slide it's not just a bunch of graphics and text it actually has motion it typically has animation of some kind of moves around and that just generally grabs your attention and of course you know being vector-based and whatnot it makes for a very low file size so it's great for low land use for low bandwidth users let me show you an example is flash real quickly this is the depiction of Hurricane Floyd moving up the eastern seaboard here as you can see this slide already is much more compelling than the slide before it not it doesn't just have text and typical you know grabs we're not has animation to it you can see the hurricane it's moving up the eastern seaboard here but we decided to get one step further and Chris if you haven't already take a look in the upper right hand corner and you can see some buttons up there there's a stop in a play button we've added some interactivity for the users so go ahead and play with those buttons and you'll go to seek be able to see that you can manipulate this animation and move the hurricane up to code this is a really powerful thing you know it's it's great to see the animation and have control over this but inside an e-learning space like this this is a really great thing because you know do the cast room technology here this actual slide is cached locally on your machine so you're able to manipulate this slide and click on the button is completely independent and free of any of you our moderator control and you know that's a really important thing you can learn at your own pace it's something that's very easy to do you know and you're able to play with this button in any kind of environment so you know a great example for you to flash in an eeyore and to like this would be for example specifically if we were to utilize this slide perhaps I would be a senior meteorologist and you guys are all a bunch of meteorologists or maybe on the national weather service of some kind and I want to give a demonstration on you know the latest hurricane up did or maybe this already happened and the hurricane passed through and I kind of wanted to talk to you guys about you know what exactly happened and because you have independent control over this you can actually manipulate this side you can stop you could play it while I'm talking to you and describing things along the way you can make notes as necessary and that type of thing you know another great use of flash is some type of tutorial I had seen it really great interactive on an electronics company website similar to that of light good guys in circuit city and this was the tutorial that was really designed to help folks learn how to set up their surround sound speakers and they were able to simply log on to this interactive piece and it showed a depiction of a living room environment you can click on the front of the room and you know streams in and it shows you the front speakers and that type of thing then you can zoom to the rear and you know Lord about the rear speakers and that kind of thing and that's a really compelling interactive piece in its own but now take that piece and bring it inside an e-learning tool like this one and now suddenly it's a whole lot more compelling you've got me sitting here actually talking to you live so not only could you be actually manipulating and playing when interacting with this flash piece but you also have me here I could be talking you through it you could actually be asking me questions live and I could be addressing those questions as such if needs be so that's a couple of really good examples how do you like to flash inside any learning tool like this one okay so the next minutes ever want to talk about is quick time you know because we're leveraging in quick time we're able to display nearly all the media types that cook times displays and that's over 80 different media types from simple you know still graphics like gifs jpegs and tips similar to the one you're seeing now it's a little more interactive stuff like the flash piece you just soft but specifically I want to discuss some more proprietary technology to quicktime things really more exotic media types like you know interactive movies quicktime vr panoramas and object movies so let me show you this of an example of one of those right now so while this appears to be a simple photograph of you know a beautiful shot of a boat on the water here in Bermuda this is actually a QuickTime VR panorama so kristef you would go ahead and grab that with your mouse and move it around and you can you know take a look at the environment there now you know I'm sure all of us have seen quick times VR panorama is before but this is probably the first time you're seeing it actually working inside an e-learning tool and again because it's actually hear in the media window you actually have me here to talk about it and you know a great example of use like this might be that i'm actually a travel consultant and you've come to my website to attend a travel seminar specific maybe Bermuda and I want to teach you about Bermuda and you know I can talk to you over the phone I could even send you some brochures but really by immersing yourself inside this this actual application you've got me here live talking to you I can address your questions I can tell you hey i recommend the specific hotel because you know you come out the door the hotel and there's a dock you walk right out and it's a beautiful thing well i can actually share that with you i can have you allow you immerse yourself inside this whole scene and so you know the opposite end of utilizing quicktime vr panorama might be to use an object movie for example let's say i'm a sales manager of a sports equipment company and you know we've got a new line of shoes coming out and you know hasn't been released to the public yet but we really want you guys the sales us to get out there and start selling it well you're going to need to see it you're going to need to look at it you're going to need to hold it kind of a thing so with a QuickTime vr object movie I can actually show you the shoe I could let you spin it around look at it for various angles maybe look at the tread you know you're going to have to answer questions for the resellers are going to want it you know no specific thing and maybe even I can do some really interesting things like throwing some wired sprite layers and maybe have some buttons there that allows you to show the different types of colors of the shoe comes in so those are a few examples of some really neat ways of utilizing some more exotic quicktime types inside annie lennox base like a stream alright alright so the next thing i want to talk about is video you know videos is becoming one of the most popular media types on the web these days nearly every website you go to you see some type of link somewhere that it has some kind of video to display and with cash dream you're able to display and show some really high quality video images in the media window here am i right you know video is so immersive it's so exciting and you know enthralling really grabs people's attention every time you go see a movie to theater you just sit in there and you're really immersed and you find yourself just getting into this movie you feel like you're a part of it well we really wanted to bring that kind of feeling into an e-learning space with cash trip so what we've done is we've again leverage quick times to be able to display for really high quality videos here now you know we're on the internet now we're streaming and you know in actually using video for this live feed it's a really simple thing it's a really great thing you're seeing me here at about a hundred kilobits or so and that works great for a talking head shot like you're seeing me and now of course if I move around a lot that kind of thing might get a lot more pix elated and choppy but fortunately because we have this e-learning space because we have we leverage quick time in the media window I can show some much more high quality cd-rom quality videos in here so let me give you a demonstration of one of those right now [Music] my name is Stephen King and we are at the townhome studios and women alright so that was a really good example of some really high quality video much more compelling than the video seeing me in here again constrained by the internet and the band amount of connection that the viewer had so you know a great example using that video if if you've noticed that this video window here continue to play simultaneously with the video streaming with the other video you just saw in the media window and I could have done some really interesting things there I could have turned down the volume of that video and maybe walk you through it perhaps I was you know an audio engineer of some kind and I wanted to share with you you know when I went to West London to see the town house studios and i met this particular audio engineer or that audio engineering etc that's everything and that's a really compelling way because i can show you some really high quality video there without having to worry about the constraints of being on the internet and streaming to you another great example of video use might be let's go back to the travel agent scenario you know I shows you the great immersive VR but you know you're still not certain so maybe I can show you some actual video that I've taken from the hotel I can walk you through it step by step you know this is the lobby this is the the rooms look like that type of thing and even take us you some testimonials from particular folks who might have stayed at that hotel so you can see that's a really powerful way to utilize video in an e-learning space alright alright so the next thing I want to talk about is assessment and you know assessment is probably the most critical function in any learning environment with cash stream you're able to integrate real time live audience polled you can ask either single question polls or test or you can actually string together multiple questions to ask a multi choice test or surveys type of thing so let me show you how easy this really is to do right now I'm just pull up my pull control under here and you know I can either take the time here do this the night before and prepare a whole set of questions and then load them in for my presentation today but actually didn't do that today and i'm going to put Chris on a spot here because I really wanted to show an example of how easy this is to submit a question so Chris if you would simply type me in any kind of question that you can think of on the fly here and I will enter it in repurpose it for to use to go back in and question the audience here so go ahead and type in any question that you can give me give me something here Oh what is the name computer k i'm just typing in my question here yesterday all right so i'm going to set up a couple of answers here and again i'm doing this on fire here and all right so i put in a few different questions i'm going to choose to show the results you and i'll explain that in just a moment i said we update that question i highlight that question and I turn around and I ask it to the audience now you'll notice that a new window just popped up above your player that's a really subtle thing but I'd like to really kind of point out something particular with that we chose to do that intentionally because if this really was a true testing environment I might have want to test you on you know one of the slides is in the media window right now and I wouldn't want to have to take that medial way in order to ask a question to the audience here so Chris if you would go ahead and click on an answer choose any answers just so you know wait okay don't know I'm sleeping of course I'm sure everybody's sleeping there right but as you can see as soon as Chris answered it updated in real time back showing a hundred percent of the people here answer don't know I'm sleeping and of course you guys are the only folks connected if we did have some other folks connected you see that what what happens is that people connect as people answer the question the results are update real time in a percentage it's running constantly as people you know sister and submit their answer and it would show as it shows now a hundred percent don't know I'm sleeping would show you know fifty percent here sent there that kind of thing and so forth so and again just as well because I asked a single question if this really was a true testing environment I could have chosen to check uncheck the show poll results and I would have presented a question to you again it simply would have asked you the question you would have selected an answer and then would've said thank you very much and close the window goodbye and the next thing would have been a series of question where I can take a series of stale xa10 multiple question multiple choice questions string those together and you know Gotye how to present that to you and you'd go through similar you I where it says question 1 through 10 2 through 10 etc so what do we do with all the information that you actually when people submit answers what we do with all that stuff well the good news is there's no big server on the back end you don't need sequel server or anything else to manage this all the information is submitted back to the moderator here at my local machine we capture things like the name and location that you entered as well as the IP address of the machine that you're connecting from there all this information is stays into a simple tab delimited format spreadsheet so you can easily export either on the fly during your presentation or when you're done and bring it into any one of your favorite spreadsheet applications like Excel and whatnot alright so that is polling so Chris if you'll go ahead and close that window let me go ahead and let's move on alright so we just recently announced version 2 cache stream and I just want to touch on a few of the highlights features here and go through that real briefly the first thing is that we now support up to 500 concurrent users each iteration of the server will support up to 5 simultaneous broadcast and now to 500 users concurrently that means for example I can be giving a presentation to 250 people on this server as well someone else connected on the same server could be giving another place 250 people and so forth we now offer a choice of window size of the media window the wouldn't media that you're seeing here to my right it's 480 x 360 and we also have a smaller size at 320 x 240 which just helps reduce the ones and zeros for those folks on lower bandwidth connections we now support some great great feature for some folks with disabilities we have a slide text captioning feature we recognize that there's some people out there that may have hearing disabilities and so we allow up to a thousand twenty four characters to be associated with each slide Chris if you haven't already go ahead and open up your side text captioning window using command T and keyboards there and you can see that window pops up there's a couple buttons there to increase or decrease the size of the font because again we recognize there some other folks that might have additional disabilities as well so with capturing to we also support now multiple moderators which means that we can have actually two three or multiple different moderators at different locations physically you know I might have set up a presentation work I've got 20 slides and maybe one through ten or my slides and I'd like to pass it off at slide 11 to somewhere else day in Boston on the East Coast and what I can do simply highlight that person in my user list I select him I grant him control and let him go through the slides and as a master moderator I can simply take that control back when you've done and finally can stream has a really powerful URL linking feature which means that you can basically associate any URL with any slide and it's as simple as setting us up on the slide properties and the moderator here I simply type in the URI want and it makes them so easy so that when i get to decide but you user can simply click on this slide and it will open their default browser and take them to the Associated URL so Chris again if you would please just click on the slide and you can see it will open up his default browser and take you to which is of course Safari and take you to the Associated site that I've set with this slide now you'll notice that you know as the browser opens you can still hear me in the background I still continue to run flawlessly and seamless which here with the browser as it searches out for the website and this is a really great way to get people to kind of share some other two other materials that you might have for your presentation it's kind of out there on the web without them actually leaving the learning environment here alright so those are the cashew highlight and that basically wraps up for me Chris unless there's something else specifically that you want me to go back and review let me know otherwise I will happily sign up so is there anything you'd like me to go back to review specifically note we're good alright well thank you very much everybody take care and enjoy the show alright so there's an example of our distance learning solution obviously you're designing your own solution you're going to have many similar goals and you're going to want to achieve we have the most familiar with caching of course which is why it's easy for us to to talk about it but Jeff did cover a lot in his presentation there so and some of the things I was going to cover too so I'm going to go a little bit quickly through some of my last remaining slides here and then we'll get dr. Steve nearly up here to show you some cool applications he's doing with cash dream so can we go back to slides please thank you so what sorts of things do you need to be concerned about when you're designing your distance learning solution other than the obvious things with audio and video and whatnot so you need to be concerned about slide creation you need to be able to create slides in a variety of applications so that people can work in tools that they're already familiar with supporting tools like keynote PowerPoint flash Photoshop Illustrator app works those things are very important utilizing QuickTime allows you to basically have support for any applications that can produce something that QuickTime can display so anything that can be played back in quicktime player you can play back in with in cash freeman and as part of your presentation in our case we happen to have some actual integration with keynote that we've done using applescript so you export your keynote presentation and then you process of an apple script in quicktime player pro which then prepares the slides for use of cash stream this is very convenient for people who do use keynote allows them to retain the transitions and all sorts of cool things that you have as part of your keynote presentations you need to be concerned about slide synchronization as I mentioned before the video is delayed by the live broadcast sure in our case we came up with the technology called sync sure to make certain that the slides in the video did remain I think throughout a broadcast and that's something that you'll also need to sort out and here's our cincture slide delay slider in the broadcast setup you can sit anywhere from 0 to 30 seconds to compensate for the latency in your streaming connection there's also an additional thing she replied delay competition in the player this is really convenient for people who happen to be much further away from your broadcast point than others so if you said say a four-second delay which is good for most people some people say in Australia might actually be experiencing a six second delay so they can actually add on to the delay if they want to keep their slides in sync chad is very important because users need a way to communicate with the presenter or the moderator to ask them questions and provide them feedback that sort of thing they generally need a way to communicate with each other this is useful up to a certain number of people it can certainly get out of hand if you have too many people but if you have a moderately sized group allowing the group to chat amongst themselves is certainly something that is an option for you to do it is nice to be able to turn that off though you know there are situations where you don't want people jabbering amongst themselves while you're giving your presentation so you can actually turn that off as a moderator you have the control to do that so in that case the chat with the presenter becomes sort of a one-way thing where you're typing in questions it's showing up to the presenter and nobody else is seeing those questions it's also really convenient for the presenter if you want to pick and choose which questions you want to answer allows you some level of editorial control check would be globally disabled / broadcast or individuals individual users can close the chat window if it's distracting to them so if you're not interested in being part of the conversation you can just click that disclosure triangle and close up the chat window and you don't have to see any of it and polling is very important as Jeff spent some time talking about presenters need a way to pull the audience to perform tasks just that's interest and to guide the presentation which is an interesting thing a lot of our users tend to create presentations that are much larger than the presentation actually end up giving and they ask the audience in the middle of the presentation how they want to proceed they get a sense of where they're at with the content and they were get a sense of what they really are interested in and they go to that portion of their presentation they allow they have basically branching points that they can go to so that's a convenient use of the polling architecture so here's an example of the cast ringing poll in this case we're talking about widgets as you do and I'm buying a wacky widget pro there I guess the polling system has no back-end database the results are stalled rectly in the moderate application this is really key because it's a little daunting for most people to set up some sort of back-end sequel database and all those sorts of things in our case the data store directly in the moderator and it can be exported as tab-delimited text it's very very simple to the user you don't have to write a single sequel select statement and that data can be imported that into Excel or FileMaker appleworks or various learning management systems so the last thing you probably really need to be most concerned about is your cross-platform considerations various marketing support for various platforms Mac os10 obviously is incredibly important various versions of Windows was important but if you're targeting education you also do need to consider Mac OS 9 because there's still a lot of Mac OS 9 machines out there quicktime supports the vast majority of desktops in the world so obviously you can't go wrong there in our case caching ms developers real basic which allows for carbon and win32 compilation from a common code base which is an incredible time saver when you're trying to ship for six or seven different platforms at one time so here's some links to some documentation about the sorts of things we talked about obviously the basic QuickTime documentation can be found there first time data handlers can also be found this next URL and there's an example file that I mentioned earlier but here's that URL again and excellent page about Apple script and quicktime player pro if you're interested in utilizing the apple script architecture to do some sort of integration of your app with with another app and that's it for me if you want to clip them introduce dr. D thank thanks Chris and I want to say also thanks to Jeff Jeff doesn't do demos every day and we sort of put him on the spot to do this one and I think he did a great job so thanks Jeff so the next speaker that I'd like to introduce is someone that I consider to be very lucky to know he's a very distinguished presenter dr. Steven dirty is the senior director of the office of academic computing at the wild medical school at Cornell University he's also the chief security officer he's also an associate professor he's an MD and a PhD one of the smartest people I've ever met and also one of our one of our first customers and I thought it would be really cool to invite dr. early to the stage to have him give you a sense of how he's doing this in the real world you know we can do demos and we can talk about how this stuff works but he had real problems to solve and and and real resources to apply to those problems and I'd love I'd like for him to sort of give us a sense for how he's doing it so dr. thanks a lot States fun to be part of the cast stream advertising team here well let me tell you a little bit about where where I come from basically the wild medical college is located in New York City the rest of Cornell is in Ithaca in case you guys know that we have had a computer-assisted problem based curriculum which means that the medical students are actually challenged with problems as opposed to getting lectures they're very very few lectures going forward I don't know what sort of the makeup of this audience how many you were sort of higher educated versus computer geeks any higher at people well good ok so this curriculum change was a major shift in medical education and it's happened in quite a few schools in the last 10 years Cornell had been Macintosh basin 1984 we actually started doing interactive video discs with Mac pluses and that was through a grant with apple and it was a lot of fun one of the things that it's recently happened is that we've opened a branch of the medical school in Qatar and I have a few of my colleagues here from guitar in the audience it's going to be a combined undergraduate graduate program so the first two years are going to be taught by cornell university faculty in Ithaca and the medical school faculty in New York City as well as faculty and guitar are going to be teaching the last four years so the problem is you know where is guitar I don't know at this point in time everybody watches the news probably know that the other major problem is how to pronounce it and I have some experts with me in the audience it's pronounced in many different ways and they're all correct supposedly but the big problem is how do we get enough faculty to teach there so one of the requirements was that this branch medical school would have to have the exact same curriculum in the same standards as the new york city of school as well as the ithaca undergraduate courses so while we are able to get some faculty who are willing to go to guitar we're not going to get every faculty member to go to guitar and also timing-wise are going to be courses going on at the same time on one campus on the other campus so we had some possible solutions we've played around with videoconferencing and in fact we do originally internet-based video conferencing between New York City and guitar all the time it's great for real-time conferences that we have between the tech staff and the administration however there's an eight hour time difference and a different weekend I don't know some everybody realize it but the weekend is different in the Middle East it although it's in Qatar it's changing its going to go from Thursday Friday to Friday Saturday which is a major boon for us and we're very happy about that but it's really not great for a very rich media and medical school we are very much into graphics and media I'm a pathologist and imaging is really important to us there are live streaming video solutions but again there's an eight hour time difference and again they're not really great for a rich media that we want to have as part of our curriculum so the solution was obviously casting notice we looked around and and and one of our issues was we needed to have a synchronous streaming video with synchronized multimedia so somebody could actually do this course remotely all right eight hours separate from when they actually gave the lecture you know quicktime is really great for the talking head we have synchronized JPEGs which basically all the media that they talked about they are exported from powerpoints and keynote are just basically exported jpg slides but some of the courses really had video and a lot of other stuff that we can talk about like synchronized high resolution still image and we're about we're just about to sign a contract with a company to do virtual microscopy where we scanned huge microscope slides and have an image that exceeds the bounds of quicktime and there's actually a company that has a flash interface to that so we'll be able to just plop it right into cast ring which is very cool I just found out about that this weekend so we have a demonstration that's perfect for this meeting it's late in the day and this is actually one of our one of our great professors in if a guy he teaches one of the most popular causes it's from psych 101 in Ithaca professor's name of dr. Moss and he's the author of power sleep and it's one of the largest courses at Cornell so this guy is not going to come to Qatar to teach 24 students so we had to figure out a way to do this and of course this is the most challenging course because this guy uses video clips 16-millimeter film clips everything so one of the big things we had to do with converting to digitize the entire collection so let me just go over to the demo machine you bring up the demo machine all right should I wanted to do that I apologize this is a can demo but the bandwidth over the internet wasn't as secure as i would have liked so today we're going to talk about narcolepsy one of the most dramatic of all the sleep disorders 250 thousand Americans have this rather debilitating disorder for planners primary symptom deprived excessive daytime sleepiness is cataplexy so this is his powerpoint slides that we basically to appear you must job that's right we took offline and you know that the slide changes are going on as he's giving a lecture he's not he's when he clicked the synchronization we can remotely channel the slide after a funny joke and laughter is one of the time he's a really it's a really interesting topic I mean and the reason I want to show this because the the extra media that we have really makes the point of why this is important attack REM sleep right during the day times in the condition that i'll bump it forward a little slow wave sleep into REM sleep but in this case you're going directly from wakefulness interrupt it's rather frightening now these attacks are self-limiting after they're over the patient will get up and resume life just as it were before you told the funny joke and he or she got stimulated I'm going to talk about two case histories with narcolepsy people who have these cataplexy health you are probably not Northwest while it is probably very tired everyone senior citizen golfer who in his retirement loves to play golf but he says to me I've got one problem Jim and that is every time I get a great shot I get so excited I have cataplexy and I collapse right in the middle of the fairway it's a darn good thing I'm not a great golfer I never finished 18 hole types of things that bring on cataplexy are not only laughter but surprise anger fear sexual orgasm so you can begin to think about some of the problems with these people encounter no matter that point this way you get when you go to Cornell the night before this isn't two or three hours of them getting up in the morning they feel as if they had been up for 48 straight hours it is very very debilitating the other person I'm going to introduce you to is a woman who calls herself a laughing joke meter she works on the assembly line at the Henry Ford automobile plant in dearborn michigan and she has cataplexy is one of her symptoms and she says every time I come to work on Monday morning everybody on my assembly line tells me the funniest joke that they've heard over the weekend and the one who makes me collapse the longest is the one who wins the assembly line for the week is a very good sense of humor about this very debilitating disorder dogs also have narcolepsy in fact we breed dogs for narcolepsy it's a genetically linked disorder so that we can study those things in the dog that caused narcolepsy so we can perhaps isolate the brain structures in the human and hopefully treat them so that they no longer have that's a plug drug that's still better my hot here is my colleague out at Stanford builds a man holding a dog ginger the dog is not dead from cadiz having a narcoleptic attacker khalessi has cataplexy has excessive daytime sleepiness now you can't interview the dog to say how tired are you can certainly this we have a movie the dog in there and just like the humans laughter surprise sex fear will bring on cataplexy attacks in fact here bill is holding ginger the kakapo and she was licking his chin and being very happy now being held and cuddled as a laboratory animal and she got so excited that the minute the shutter would snap down ginger went as you can see bill holding her in a cat eclectic state I didn't know thank you very much better now first of the dogs now these dogs haven't been fed for about six hours and the mere sight of food gets them so excited they have cataplexy and they can't make it to the food dish then you'll see the golfer and then the woman who calls yourself the Laughing joke meter you notice we gotta we gotta have the Apple Bobo low going on 20 George I was tremendously exaggerated tendency to fall asleep a golfer excited by a successful golf stroke falls victim to a sudden attack of knowledge he loses all muscle control and instantly enters REM sleep dr. Martin Shaw protects him from injuring himself narcolepsy is a lifelong sleep disorder whose symptoms are excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden sleep paralysis although there are medicines to affect temporary relief there is no known cure for the disease after a brief time the golfer waist now the quality of the compression here not with causing that in the bad media when the original film very old who are familiar with the condition has a narcoleptic attack brought about by an amusing story was a good job all we know is a punch line fighting with all my might to come out if people keep saying things that I laugh at well I'll stay under I like to keep staying under and under until I can finally clear in my mind and make it a blank and then I'll come out of it was magic I'll stop it now since you'll have to pay for a cornell education so you know this was a tough course for us this is a really dynamic course the guys got media all the time so we did a bunch of things one as we convince them to move his entire lecture to keynote which was to was a real tough because he was a pc guy but once you saw the rotating cube that was it he was sold all that mattered and but by converting all of his media to digital we did a lot of things first of all we preserved his archive which is incredible second is we basically allowed him to give his entire lecture live from a single laptop which is really also amazing but we had the ability then to capture this we videotape the lectures and they're compressed my project manager sitting in the front John Ruffing you know he basically did a demo very quickly we just got a hold of the 20 recently we needed the bigger window we couldn't go with a smaller version originally and it I think it's a very effective ma I see everybody in the audience was not bored everybody was watching it so it's a pretty good way to present this material in a fashion that we could not do otherwise so as I said I think was a good solution to a problem so that's it thank you [Applause]