Cisco Debuts Spark Board and Spark Meetings

Cisco just launched two all-in-one, cloud-based products in Cisco Spark Board and Cisco Spark Meeting.

Cisco says it invented Spark Board to clean up the conference-room chaos and connect physical rooms to virtual spaces. The Cisco Spark Board will be available in both 55” and 70” sizes. It’s basically a few products in one, including:

1. A wireless presentation device which, as you approach, will recognize and greet you — no Bluetooth or special Wi-Fi or network connection required. You control it all from your PC, Mac, tablet or mobile phone. Cisco says they achieved it through a tight integration with the Cisco Spark platform plus a totally-new “ultrasound” wireless pairing technology.
2. An interactive digital whiteboard at its heart, Cisco Spark Board users interact with it locally or via a Cisco Spark app, remotely. Cisco says it all is in real-time and simultaneously. It automatically saves your work to a space that the whole team shares so that you can always pick up where you left off later. Of course, Spark Board integrates video calls and it’s software is integrated with a security platform called crypto.
3. The Cisco Spark Board has what Cisco is calling “theater-quality” audio and video. Its integrated with a 4K camera as well as a microphone array and their VoiceTrack technology.

Cisco has also launched Spark Meetings. By adding some of the popular meeting capabilities from Cisco WebEx, it in essence extends the meeting to include the time before and after — and in the process creates a fundamentally new way to meet. Cisco Spark Meetings is basically the Cisco Spark Board in your pocket. You can whiteboard together — even if no one has a Cisco Spark Board. They’ve built the functionality into all of the Cisco Spark apps. You can use it to schedule a meeting — it creates a team space so you can create the agenda, get all the people involved, share content and chat back and forth. Users can also post meeting comments, follow-up action items or notes from the meeting are all in integrated into Spark Meeting.

Cisco also changed the way a user navigates in the Cisco Spark app. An activity-based workflow will be the same on all of your devices: desktop, mobile phone, tablet, Cisco Spark Board.

The 55-inch version of the Cisco Spark Board will ship within a week and will list for $4,990. The subscription will cost $199 per month and include the cloud service, help desk and software upgrades. Cisco will make a 70-inch version of the board available later this year for $9,990.

Here are more details on Spark Board, while here are complete specs for Spark Meeting.