The date was pre Internet time, early June, 1995. The occasion? A personal invite from Andy Grove, CEO Intel, to the top 350 decision making executives of the real estate finance industry. The reason an entire corps of industry elites made the trek? Dr. Andy Grove's personally hosted introduction of video conferencing technology for loan origination.

And so Video Conferencing came onto the real estate scene like an angry lion, bellowing out an attention shattering roar, demanding coronation as the latest greatest thing to ever happen. Real estate would never be the same. Today though, we see most of those same industry execs making a hat in hand trek to Redmond, WA. The Beverly Hills Hilton this trip is not! The 1998 journey to see what Chairman Bill has planned for their future is about as exciting and inspirational as a half swallowed cyanide capsule. My, how things have changed. And if one dares look back at the past, there, like lambs let out to graze in the pastures of past promises, are the grand video conferencing schemes. So loud they came, and now so quietly they have faded away.

What happened to video conferencing anyway? The concept seemingly had all the ingredients to be that next great "technology" leap. Promising to bring loan origination efficiencies to the conference rooms of Realtors everywhere, video conferencing business models looked to be a win-win for everyone. It was a "faster, better, cheaper" solution in every conceivable way, with brokerage based control of a proprietary system to boot. Real estate practitioners were promised a means to re-engineer the business process without losing touch control of the clientele or dominance of the gateway. Lead generation and the directing rights to the decisions that followed fit the NAR objective. Keep the Realtor "at the center of the transaction".

So whatever happened to Virtual Realty, the Intel backed star of the Hilton show? Fame is fleeting, but these guys didn't make it intact through the next 45 days! Or what of FlagStar, Mellon Bank, Citicorp., Citibank, B of A, Weyerhauser, Chase and Countrywide, so noticeable in that first tier group of participants? And then we must wonder, what happened to Lynden, Mortgage Flex, Gallagher, EMB, and FtF, the eager system providers?

The list goes on into the hundreds of participants, most whom would likely squirm at the mention of how much money and resources was thrown into that bottomless hole. Worse, the time and effort that went into perfecting the video conferencing model came at the enormous expense of missing what proved to be a far greater "Internet" opportunity.

While the players who should have been first to the Web were distracted by dreams of video conferencing based "closed system" monopolies, waves of unknown interlopers seized the day. Loan origination on the Web has come to be dominated by global entrepreneurs more noted for ponytails and gen X attitudes than the button down, pinstripe silk stocking look of the generations of financiers they left in the dust.

Could there be anything further from the trusted institutional names of the past than that of HomeShark, KeyStroke and eLoan? How about Intuit, Microsoft, Excite and Yahoo!

To me the demise of video conferencing is just part of the continuing eCommerce lesson. That is, "universal access and exchange" beats "proprietary and controlled" every time. "Open Standards" trump "proprietary monopolies", every time. Wide spread opportunity and the chance to participate, always wins out over closed systems that seek to own every angle and control every piece.

What drove the video conferencing model was the combination of remote application sharing and direct interaction. What slowed it down was the exorbitant cost of deployment and troublesome limited access.

The Internet easily displaced these application sharing advantages, while providing universal access at ridiculously lower costs. The key factor for attracting consumers remains the inventory of available properties. The issue of "interactive" exchange remains problematic, but a number of factors are converging to convert this detracting aspect into the single most positive feature of Web based loan origination. In other words, you haven't seen nothing yet and you probably will not see any more video conferencing.