“…Communication breakdown,
It’s always the same,
I’m having a nervous breakdown,
Drive me insane…”
I got a sense that something is broken, when someone asked me why I stopped writing on my blog for the 4th time that week. Me? Stopped Writing?! Didn’t know what he was talking about. But when I talked about it with Tsahi, my fellow blogger and the guy who runs our blogging platform, he informed me that “Google broke our RSS feed”. Do no evil, huh?!
Anyway, the boring technical details are that FeedBurner, which we are using for our RSS feeds, is moved over to the Google “platform”, which caused some problems involving with their “MyBrand” service, Yahoo Pipes and a bunch of other minor inconveniences. Yada yada yada…
Bottom line – we had a communication breakdown. The one everyone fears. You start to rely on a communication means, become dependent, and when it breaks you are lost. It’s the stuff nervous breakdowns are made of. Remember Gfail?! Our communication breakdown was longer and much more depressing. Drove me insane.
Well, Tsahi worked very hard on making the whole damn thing work again. And we’re back. Via RSS that is. And you don’t even need to change anything in your RSS reader. But that won’t make up for a communication breakdown, will it?
And so, in case you were part of the breakdown, here’s a quick catching-up list for you, with all the stuff you missed in the last couple of months:
A Well-Organized Trip Down Memory Lane
The Scorpions classic ballad “Still Loving You” made me wonder how – if everything is in our finger tips, using the Internet – we are unable to retrieve our most precious information, our memories.
In this post I discussed “the even more impossible box”, a really personal recorder that documents everything that’s going on in our lives.
My CES 2009 From-A-Far Impressions
Tsahi went to Vegas for CES 2009 and all he got me was a bunch of photos. But it didn’t stop me from writing my own impressions of the most important conference for consumer electronics out there, even if those were impressions from a-far.
Everything got bigger and… smaller, video conferencing became inexpensive, Telepresence yielded a… robot, everybody was talking about open platforms and social everything, and 3D was everywhere. BUT – nothing really big came out of CES this year. Maybe next year…
The “Call” In “Call Center” Can Be A “Video Call”
Video calling is becoming more and more common. So why not use it for customer service? I’ve written before about the visual contact center, but it’s not a simple change for any organization with a contact center infrastructure.
So what can you do? RADVISION has developed a solution, and filed for a patent on this piece of innovation, and I was discussing this technology, which allows anyone to add video on top of their existing call center solution in this post.
Predicting The Future Is A Grand Challenge
Predicting the future in a very difficult business, especially if you’re a tech company looking a couple of years ahead, trying to predict what the next big thing will be. Therefore, I was thrilled when my good friend, Mor Naaman, contacted me regarding the Multimedia Grand Challenge.
Leading tech companies – Google, Yahoo, HP, Nokia, RADVISION and others – are participating in this challenge, posting technological challenges as motivation/inspiration/source for research for researchers world-wide, in an attempt to develop the technologies of tomorrow. Sounds interesting? Read all about the RADVISION challenges and the competition itself in this post.
Killer App? We Don’t Need No Killer App… Just Some Features.
It seems that everyone is still waiting for the “Killer App” to help bring video conferencing to every home, desktop and mobile handset. On the other hand, this technology is already mature enough to be massively deployed today.
In this post I argued that although we don’t need a Killer App, we could use a bunch of features that are missing in today’s conferencing experience, and even discussed a few such missing features.
The Evolution of Video Conferencing
After reading in WebUrbanist an article about “the evolution of 10 essential gadgets & technologies”, I decided to follow suit and write about the evolution of video conferencing, from the late 1960s to today’s high definition world.
You should know your history, if you want to succeed in the future, and this post serves as a great history lesson.
Streaming The Knowledge
Video content is exploding all over the internet. Through user generated content website online video is shifting from entertainment to a seroius wealth of knowledge.
Enterprises can, and should, use streaming media and video conferencing as a means to “stream” the corporate knowledge effectively across the organization. This is a fast growing market, and one that will surely take off in the coming years.
Don’t Follow, Innovate!
Following an inspiring lecture by Prof. Uri Weiser on Multicore challenges, I wrote a piece on the importance of innovation in the hi-tech industry in general, and in tech companies that are NOT “number one” in particular.
While everyone is tempted to just “follow”, most companies must innovate, and disrupt the market in order to “fight” the “giants” and gain market share. And innovation is not a momentary thing. You can never follow, you must always innovate, if you want to stay in the race.
10 Commandments for Collaboration Software
There are tons of collaboration tools out there. Lots of them support video. It’s really hard to tell them apart and decide what is best for your need.
In this post I offered some guidelines to choosing a video-enabled collaboration tool. I called these guidelines “my 10 commandments”.
Thou Shall Not Say What Your Competitor is NOT Doing. Thou Shall Focus On What You Are
Across the blogosphere, fellow blogger Stefan from Polycom, wrote a piece on available collaboration software, and – on top of giving out some good points about it – bad mouthed the competition, RADVISION included.
I wrote this post in return, detailing a few facts that Stefan got wrong as well as some insight to RADVISION’s philosophy and what we ARE doing in the video conference and collaboration arena.
