IP Video

Innovations in Screen Technologies

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:23:12 +0100

This Austrian startup and university spinoff has a compelling technology sure to stretch the imagination of display and interaction engineers. Debuting in the US at the InfoComm show later this month, isiQiri (pronounced eye-see-keer-ee) brings its patented Q-foil technology to bear in the Q-Screen. Based on thin-film optical-sensing technologies coupled with triangulation-oriented software, the Q-foil enables large screen interactivity with laser pointers or user touch. The company's website s...

Cisco Doesn't Get It

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:57:05 +0100

Cisco's dropping the price of Umi by 20% and cutting the monthly service fee by 75% to $499 and $9.95/month. These price reductions came with an announcement of support for interoperability with Cisco TelePresence rooms and a Mac and PC clients. The Mac and PC clients are useful so travelers could video home from a hotel and say good night to their spouses and kids while on the road without having to bring a redundant box and camera with them. The interoperability with TelePresence rooms is a li...

Avistar Brings Video to Virtual PCs

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:49:29 +0100

The PC video conferencing company, Avistar provided a recent update on their latest announcement of support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the classic method for delivering PC-class of services to many users without the cost or hassle of issuing each user a PC. VDI avoids assigning each user a Windows license or providing a hard drive. In VDI there is still a need for mouse, keyboard, monitor and a low-cost device at the terminal that provides the high speed networking of the presentat...

Cisco and Home Telepresence

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:09:10 +0100

Well, the rumors are flying that Cisco's statement that they'll be debuting a major new consumer product in October means home telepresence at $500/unit. The pundits point out that the Cisco unit responsible for the Flip video camera is the likely starting point of the product. My concern is three-fold: a. an October announcement is likely to miss the critical consumer Thanksgiving - Christmas shopping period, or worse starve or stuff the consumer channel with product they can't get enough of o...

Avaya's New Tablet Positioned as a Video Device

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:24:44 +0100

Leveraging the coolness of a tablet computer, Avaya's new Personal Video Conferencing Device is a 9" Google Android tablet with 3 USBs, WiFi and Gb Ethernet. A front facing HD 720p video camera is capable of 30 fps transmission and the touch screen can support 720p 30fps presentation. It comes with a nice pullout u-shaped stand for desktop/tabletop stability, freeing up hands for doodling, note taking or presentation support. The newly shipping device also sports a new UI called Avaya Flare, sho...

Cisco Cius

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:37:21 +0100

Clever branding aside, the Cisco Cius (pronounced SEE-us) telepresence pad announced by Cisco at its annual customer event promises to change the game in a couple of key areas. As with any new not-particularly well understood device the big question is what's the usecase, who will use it? Firstly, as David Deans pointed out, the platform is designed to bring together all of Cisco's other collaboration services (Cisco Quad, Cisco Show and Share, Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center,...

HP Still Needs Enterprise Channel For Telepresence

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:11:18 +0100

With Cisco's acquisition of TANDBERG, and its own acquisition of 3Com now complete, HP continues to set the stage for its competitive alignment vis-a-vis Cisco and announced at InfoCom its plan to OEM software from Vidyo to create a complete video conferencing product portfolio for rooms and PCs. The new video product line breathes a shot of seriousness into its otherwise stagnant HALO Telepresence offer, something that several other analysts agree on. However, one analyst in particular (Wainh...

RADVISION Sets Sights on Small Business Market

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:16:16 +0100

The room-based video communications market is very much an inverse pyramid-shaped market. There are many endpoints in a large number of large organizations and very few endpoints in a small number of small organizations. Below some minimum threshold, there are no video rooms installed. An elusive growth opportunity has been the small business market, where there are few endpoints required since there are only a few locations. Most vendors up to this time have deployed small site products for sma...

Polycom Hopes to Change Market Dynamics With High Profile

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:56:29 +0100

Polycom announced its support for H.264 High Profile on the RPX, TPX, ATX, its new OTX suite and on its RMX 4000 and RMX 2000 bridges. [[H.264]] is an international standard for video image compression, now widely used in high definition and telepresence video conferencing products and services. The standard is utilized across a broad array of applications such as surveillance, broadcast, communications, storage, entertainment, gaming and computing. 17 sets of capabilities are defined in the sta...

Polycom Brings 'techno' Styling to Telepresence Line

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:59:39 +0100

In keeping with a concerted effort to keep the competitive pressure on Cisco, Polycom announced this morning, as part of its InfoCom presence, the OTX, a new line of next generation telepresence suites. The OTX is quite the departure from the routine Polycom design with several design enhancements. Taking a page from the TANDBERG T3, Polycom has toned down the natural wood accents of its RPX and TPX lines and upgraded the white-black plastic/techno finish style that appeals to Asian and Europea...

Lessons Learned From The Iceland Volcano

Sun, 09 May 2010 02:56:56 +0100

Warning! Short term events don't translate into long term effects on global business The Economist reports that with the recent events of all air travel being halted for about a week in Europe, some feared the disruption might turn the tentative recovery into a second recession. However, the long term negative economic effects are minimal and there has been some good that came about. In the short term, businesses and the people in them, have goals to achieve and most importantly they have alte...

RADVISION Scopia Desktop

Fri, 07 May 2010 02:54:37 +0100

As is my practice, I've captured a screen shot of the RADVISION Scopia Desktop for Mac. For the longest time Scopia was not available for Mac users (like me) but in a recent release the community of Apple users can be enabled for desktop video conferencing and room-desktop collaboration. Here's the screen layout showing the video users in the upper left, that's me in the lower right hand side of the video screens. The audio controls are on the lower left and the big space in the center is the col...

Skype To Trial Group Video Conferencing

Thu, 06 May 2010 12:58:42 +0100

In a Wall Street Journal article this morning (sub. required), it was reported that Skype, the privately owned international long distance company plans to trial multi-point video conferencing. Trials are free, but the company plans to charge for the service later in the summer. Typically, the Skype business model is to have free PC-to-PC calls, but charge for SkypeOut calls (calls that terminate on the Public Telephone Network) in flat-fee in North America and per-minute in Rest of World where ...

The Big Debate at the Inter-Company Working Group

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:03:56 +0100

Presentations by Howard Lichtman of the HPL, Brent Houlahan of Unisys, Aaron Roe of Deloitte and Peter Brockmann of Brockmann & Company, were well received by the nearly 30 attendees from Canada, the US and Europe. After the final presentation, Howard led a working group discussion with executives from a number of leading Video Managed Service Providers in attendance (iVCI, iFormata, York Telecom, BCS Global and the carrier MASERGY to name a few) to review the state of inter-company telepresence ...

BCS Gains Momentum on PSVN

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:27:50 +0100

Partnering originally with Cable & Wireless and now iFormata, the Public Switched Video Network initiative, led by BCS Global is gaining momentum. The announcement, made April 20, 2010 strengthens the multi-service provider framework that aims to facilitate video conferencing service providers and carriers to seamlessly inter-connect their B2B Video Exchanges to a Public Global B2B Video Network, not unlike the evolution of the Public Switched Telephone Network. The new relationship between ...

Opening Day of First Ever Inter-Company Telepresence Working Group

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:19:14 +0100

Your intrepid reporter attended the Human Productivity Lab's opening dinner at Clyde's in the Reston Town Center and thoroughly enjoyed the meet and greet of video professionals, service providers and the Lab's network of specialists - Kirk, Chris, Thomas and of course, Howard Lichtman. Discussions of course revolved around golf, history of the industry, a shorter version of 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' with Howard as the guest and serious scotch consumed while attempting to solve the SIP regist...

RADVISION's New Rad-Rooms

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:53:22 +0100

RADVISION announced April 19, 2010 the company's latest entry into the endpoint product market. With technology acquired from Aethra in February 2010, the new Scopia XT1000 is the company's first entrant into the room equipment market. Aethra had been a RADVISION OEM partner integrating the MCU and Scopia desktop portfolio with Aethra cameras and codecs. With channels primarily in western Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America the new RADVISION product lineup promises to aggressively add to RAD...

Cisco-TANDBERG Begin Integration

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:37:51 +0100

Goodbye TANDBERG. Hello Cisco TelePresence endpoints, infrastructure and cloud services. Cisco announced today that they've completed the voluntary acquisition of 91.1% of TANDBERG shares and will begin the mandatory share purchases of the remaining minority shareholders' stock as allowed by Norwegian law. The integration implementation begins today. Fredrik Halvorsen leaves behind his CEO responsibility and takes on the SVP Cisco TelePresence Technology Group, reporting to Marthin DeBeer, SVP ...

Volcano Curtails Flights, Stimulates Video Meetings?

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:00:17 +0100

Q. So, what do video and volcanos have in common? A. They both start with the letter 'v' and they, they both make a lot of people change their travel plans and they both work to cool the planet. The Icelandic volcano first made the news on Wednesday and Thursday of this past week as thousands of European flights were cancelled as the ash plume dissipated over Northern Europe. Modern aircraft and these ash plumes, which are made up of tiny rock and glass particles don't mix very well. Recent exp...

Polycom Simplifies and Boosts HDX Lineup

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:11:00 +0100

Polycom is stepping up its game and using the time leading up to the close of the Cisco-TANDBERG transaction to its fullest advantage. The last few months have seen updates to its technology alliances - Avaya, Juniper, LifeSize and Siemens. Polycom has been both strengthening its offerings to compete with the inevitable Cisco-TANDBERG combination, and strengthening the offerings of Cisco's UC and networking competitors to minimize any product or technology gap that the acquisition might actually...