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A while ago Tsahi forwarded me an e-mail from Vidtel’s CEO, Scott Wharton, raising an interesting issue: “I was at a conference the other night and I got a question from a media software engineer who is a heavy user of Skype. He made the comment that he thought the number one complaint about video conferencing was the weird view of a person’s eyes, that caused them to be looking up (or down sometimes) but not right into the eyes of the caller. He said all of his friends use Skype but get annoyed by this problem and then give ...

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A few months ago we announced SCOPIA Mobile, a first-of-its-kind mobile app for smartphones to control the video conferencing infrastructure. And ever since it was released, people are really excited by it. It’s like having the control of your conferencing bridge and your meetings from the palm of your hand, a remote control that is always in your pocket. The most common feedback we got for the SCOPIA Mobile app was “OMG it’s so great. Can I use it to control my endpoint?”. Sure, there are ways to control that meeting room system without a remote – via a dedicated ...

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It seems as though I can argue here until the end of the world on how much benefit people can get from video. As much as I do there will always be some guy who will say that he’s very pleased with his current means of communication, that audio is enough and that he can get all the communication he wants and needs from a plain old telephone (or IP phone in the best case). And while people debate endlessly about the pros and cons of video conferencing, with its psychological advantages and barriers, ROIs and deployment challenges, it seems ...

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With the risk of severe multi-tasking, I spend last Tuesday following not only the world cup (that’s soccer, if you’re Americans) and Google’s Marissa Mayer visit to Israel, but also CiscoLive, Cisco’s grand event in Las Vegas, where they are showcasing the latest in their product portfolio. The most interesting thing on John Chambers keynote, in my view, was the debut of the Cisco Cius: A 7″ touch-screen tablet?  You are probably thinking “iPad killer”, or at least a killer wannabe. But IMHO Cisco is not targeting Apple at all with this move. Cisco is not really a consumer ...

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I had this post in the oven for a while now. And when I say “oven” I mean the area where posts are written, in the deep dark areas of my mind. I’ve been waiting for a chance to bring it to light, an excuse to come forward and say it out loud: IT AIN’T ABOUT THE RESOLUTION! But then came this innocent-looking-yet-evil-as-usual comic strip from my favorite artist, Randall Munroe aka xkcd, and I thought: There we go. Here’s the chance I was waiting for. With All Due Respect To Resolution… I’m not interested in HDTV. Not ...

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Some two years ago I wrote about the 21st learning experience, or at least how I think it should be. Now I haven’t been a student for a long time, but still all around me students attend physical classes, limited to the teachers that are available physically in campus, limited to the availability of classes, and limited to teaching technologies which exist for a long time. Too long maybe. But there’s another side to the academic sector where visual communications really fits. In most countries there are various research institutes – universities, research centers, government agencies – that have to ...

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Last week I tried to share with you my disappointment with FaceTime, the video calling service Apple has just announced. You have to admit – If there’s one thing Apple does brilliantly is marketing. And so, Steve Jobs chose to tackle, hands-on, the one main obstacle that he has to know (because he’s such a great professional) can jeopardize the whole FaceTime dream – interoperability. What did Steve do? First of all, he dazzled us with a BIG, fat “OPEN” written all over his slide: Then he listed a bunch of open standards, some of which you would probably ...

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