Corporate videoconferencing gets hot this week
Tomorrow a big company (not Microsoft) is going to announce a new videoconferencing system. I got a preview last week and it blew me away — you’ll see in my video that it feels like (I’m embargoed from talking about it until tomorrow morning). I’ll have the video up sometime tomorrow.
Microsoft too has a new videoconferencing camera that’s pretty innovative (I got demos of this back when I worked at Microsoft) that’s getting a bit of attention on TechMeme. I want one for our conference room at PodTech.
It’s going to be an interesting week for corporate videoconferencing.
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October 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 am
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2118
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:31 am
Mihir: the one I saw wasn’t from that company. :-)
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:44 am
None of these videoconferencing gadgets are worth a damn really. Videoconferencing solutions continue to be proprietary for the most part. To be a viable alternative to travel, they must standards-based and use technology as ubiquitous as the telephone.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find that “All you do is connect the RoundTable device to a computer that’s running Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Meeting”…..must use MS software.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:48 am
Unfortunately none so far that I see deliver on the promise of ubiquitous, ad hoc, serverless, multiparty conferencing (audio only would be good enough for my liking) with real time application/data sharing.
Do either of the two you refer to have this capability?
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:49 am
Interesting.. I am curious now :)
If it is an extension of iTrip it will definitely be slick :)
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:50 am
I meant iChat, not iTrip.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:51 am
Brian: nope. What you’ll see tomorrow doesn’t solve those problems, but comes at it a completely different way.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 am
Mihir: what’s coming tomorrow is for corporate types. Translation: folks with BIG money. But it IS cool. So, not from Apple either. Sorry. Although a Mac with an iSight is pretty darn good.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:58 am
My guess would be Cisco, HP or Polycom. A recent WSJ article profiled some of the efforts earlier this year. If it was a small company, I would have guessed SightSpeed
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Robert, you aren’t talking about Roundtable, which Microsoft already announced, are you? Because I don’t see how anyone can top that. Roundtable isn’t just the coolest corporate videoconferencing tool I’ve ever seen, but can you imagine doing a video blog with it? Just sitting experts around a table and letting the conversation fly. It could turn The Maclaughlin Group on its ear.
If it’s better than Roundtable, I’d like to see it.
http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/10/22/microsoft-roundtable-becomes-a-reality/
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Did you update your post and I didn’t notice? I didn’t see that whole second paragraph and the “(not Microsoft)” in the first one. Findory didn’t show the “(not Microsoft)” note either. If you update your post, and people are already commenting, you could do an update, not an edit, because now I look like an idiot who didn’t RTFA.
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Nathan: I have not edited this post. The (not Microsoft) was always there. Or, I might have edited it within a minute or two of posting it. Even then, though, that’s strange that it didn’t show up.
Either way, the whole second paragraph is a link to Roundtable, so you should have caught that anyway.
October 22nd, 2006 at 4:40 pm
For the consumer of small business person, I love using SightSpeed for video conferencing. It works across the Windows and Apple platforms and the quality is absolutely great. It doesn’t have application sharing but you can jerry-rig Windows Live Messenger or Persony to do that if you want. Also, it works behind firewalls like ISA.
October 22nd, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Oh, well, sorry, I must have just completely misread it. Still, I’d love to hear what you think about doing one of your interviews with the Roundtable camera.