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A few weeks ago I attended the World Innovation Summit, a very interesting conference on innovation and technology, held right here in Tel-Aviv. Multi-national companies, emerging companies and promising start-ups presented their pieces of innovation in various fields, such as mobile communication, cloud computing, visual computing and more.

I have to admit that as interesting as the whole day was, the highlight for me was the closing keynote, given by video conference from Boston by Ray Kurzweil, Kurzweil, in case you missed him somehow, is an inventor and a futurist, involved in many technology fields and considered a brilliant presenter and author.

Accelerating Returns and Moore’s Law

I’ve come to know Kurzweil via his famous best-seller “The Singularity Is Near“. In this book, which continues the theme of two of his previous books (The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Age of Intelligent Machines”) Kurzweil attempts to predict the future. His reasoning lays basically on the Law of Accelerating Returns, which describes an exponential growth of technological progress.

Just like Moore’s law for integrated semiconductor circuits, Kurzweil predicts the same exponential growth for any form of technology. And whenever a technology approaches some kind of barrier, argues Kurzweil, a new technology is invented and allows us to cross it.

Moore’s Law – The exponential growth in Calculations per second per $1K (Wikipedia)

In his keynote Kurzweil talked about technology being the main obstacle in implementing great ideas. When the advances in the relevant technologies are complete, the task at hand becomes feasible, even probable. It is then, when the window of opportunity is truly open. He, of course, gave many examples, such as the Human Genome project, as well as several from his vast experience, but the bottom line was: you got to know (guess?) when the technology will be ready, and then (and only then) roll out your innovative product.

In his new book, “Reverse-engineering The Human Brain” Kurzweil predicts that by 2030 we will have full understanding of the human brain (the “software”) and processors powerful enough to run that “software” on a $1000 computer (the “hardware”). Then, he believes, we will be able to build “brain-like” machines that will dramatically change our lives. Sounds like science fiction?  Well, he convinced me…

Reverse-engineering Video Conferencing?

But I couldn’t avoid thinking about our market and our technologies. Video conferencing has been around for more than a decade. But has the technological environment been ready for that long? Basically, video conferencing infrastructure is based on processing of video and audio and the transmission of the video and audio to multiple participants. So what do you need to accomplish that?

• Affordable, high quality cameras and microphones to capture video and audio in high definition
• Strong, sophisticated codecs that can compress high quality video and audio into reasonable amount of data, capable of compressing and transmitting in real-time
• Affordable, flexible, low power processors that will be able to run the complicated number crunching algorithms known as “codecs”
• Big fat pipes with enough bandwidth to transmit high quality video and audio across the Internet

Now let’s review the facts:

• The first codec to fulfill the promise of high quality video compression is probably H.264, completed in the end of 2003.
• The high quality cameras and microphones came around 2005 with LifeSize Room.
• The evolution in the enterprise LANs have only recently (last year?) allowed for each employee to use around 1Mbps of bandwidth for personal communication use.
• And last, but not least, a processor that can truly handle the processing demands of a video conferencing endpoint is a rather new thing, present for a couple of years only.

The Window of Opportunity is Open

And there you have it – RADVISION has been around more than 15 years, pushing this industry forward. I’ve been working here for 7 years, struggling with codecs, standards and processors,. But to be honest, and realistic, the technology has only recently become available. And only in the past 2 years has the video conferencing industry really stood a chance.

If you believe Kurzweil, if you believe his idea of exponential growth in technology – then in a year or two, we will be able to improve the experience we now know as video conferencing dramatically. And although I’m the first to say there’s no such thing as too much processing power or bandwidth, I believe that in the next couple of years video conferencing will become a true alternative, a true mass means of communication. I believe that the window of opportunity is finally open.