It's midday. The thermometer is nearing bursting point as the dust stings your eyes. It's time to head inside and gaze at those cool breezes and mountains of the Highlands and Islands and thank web cams for planning your next holiday away from the searing energy-sapping heat...
After complaining about the dark winter days and using broadband to head off to the sun, it’s time now to turn the idea back on itself. If we in the Highlands and Islands can wistfully contemplate far away places in the deep mid winter, the technology of the web cam, it is worth remembering, is a two-way street.
For how many millions of tourists are there out in cyberspace for whom a real glimpse of the Highlands and Islands could be the decisive factor in planning their next holiday? When you consider there are something like 15 million people alone worldwide who claim Scots ancestry, there is no denying a massive untapped market maybe just a broadband connection away.
One of the biggest obstacles to buying online has until relatively recently been portraying goods and services in a meaningful way. Small grainy pictures could never hope to compete equally with walking into a store and seeing and feeling the real deal.
Now, however, the always on, high bandwidth broadband connection has made web cam technology cheaper and more practical than ever before. For a modest sum, anyone can hook up a web cam and broadcast live 24x7 to a potential worldwide audience. As a marketing tool, the web cam is unprecedented, allowing even the smallest of companies to provide real time footage to their web site users. And some web cam packages even enable the web site user to take control of the camera temporarily to move the view, pan and zoom to points of interest.
Not everyone may be happy to make too much play of the weather we are blessed with, but an interesting, well promoted web cam offers web site users a completely new dimension on which to base their purchasing decisions. A web cam can often be the next best thing to actually being there in person.
So who’s using this technology already to lure in the punters?
Here’s a small selection of web cams to be found in the HIE network area.
Logins Inn, Stromness
Loch Ness
Lunna House Hotel, Vidlin, Shetland
Cairngormmountain.com
Aviemore Highland Resort
Kyle of Lochalsh
Ben Nevis
