Monday was press conference day at Sharp’s, with one at their Tokyo Ichigaya building about the not-so-interesting Ion Plasmacluster line, and a second one a few hours later at their subsidiary iDeep’s office in Roppongi, about a new badass high-tech office solution. Kimura-san and I decided to do what any reasonable adults would do when confronted to such a situation; we held a no-holds-barred Janken street brawl. Much to the disappointment of my Japanese fellow writer, I ended up having the upper hand. Beginner’s luck I guess…

The press conference was quite long (around 4 hours) but also pretty interesting, from time to time at least. In between market research summaries and hundreds of statistics was the unveiling of a pretty intense office technology. iDeep’s TeleOffice is a software/hardware solution allowing multinational companies to coordinate their offices around the globe with ease. It is composed of a software suite, combined with 60” touchscreen, IP cameras and A4-sized slates.

As far as software is concerned, we’re looking at a Silverlight RIA (Rich Internet Application)-based suite, completely relying on cloud-computing, allowing anyone from the company with the right access to work on anything, anywhere. What’s more, the RIA allows user to access the software from virtually any device with WiFi, WiMAX, 3G, 4G or LAN capability. A specific UI was designed for iOS, Android, Symbian and RIM amongst other OS.

The hardware doesn’t look bad either; offering 60” “Super Boards”, touchscreens with 1080p, USB, HDMI and, D-Sub connectivity, accompanied by Intel Core based “Super Tablets”, 16.4” tablet/laptop hybrids with a Core i5-520M 2.4Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD and all the i/o you might require.

TeleOffice is not a revolution in itself but it’s a quite impressive, easy to use and very powerful tool for companies with offices around the globe who want to work on a paperless basis and keep in touch with every branch.

PS: sorry about the photos, I have a hundred valid explanations as to why it turned out like this and why I couldn’t get a glimpse of the tablet thingy, but you don’t want excuses, do you? I will up the post when the official press release comes around.