2009 has been quite an interesting year – to the world in general, to the tech community, to the video conferencing market and to this blog specifically.
I thought that celebrating a new year is a great excuse to visit the posts I liked best in 2009, so here’s a recap:
January
If iPhone wants to be the future, I argued in January, it sure is lagging behind. And I was referring to the lack of a front facing camera in the iPhone 2.0.
A year later, nothing’s really changed, and although some creative minds are trying to bridge the gap, the result is still far from pleasing, and you can only blame Apple for that.
February
In February an article in WebUrbanist about the evolution of gadgets inspired me to write my own take on the evolution of video conferencing endpoints.
This year, with the recent acquisitions of LifeSize and Tandberg, proved that video conferencing endpoints are no longer nice to have, but here to stay.
March
In March I was trying to compare 2009 and 2003 in terms of the state of the economy and video conferencing. As I joined RADVISION in 2003, and as the Dot-com bubble burst just before, it was amazing to see how close 2009 was to 2003 in terms of the current status and the predictions we all make.
This lead to a post called “2009 Reality Check“, which I personally really liked, as it gave everyone some stuff to think about.
April
In April I was involved in too many meetings regarding hardware based solutions for video processing, which yielded the post “The Performance Chasers and The Case of The Multi-Core Processor“.
The bottom line was that although we can’t beat Moore’s law, we can still provide customers with a better experience, and the way to do it is to harvest the power given to us by the new and exciting multi-core platforms.
May
I love Seth Godin. And in May I got my chance to write about one of Seth’s posts in my blog. The post “Video Conferencing – The Kind of Meeting That Works” used Seth’s definition of the “three kinds of meetings” in corporate culture and explained why video conferencing can make most work better.
June
In June RADVISION announced many new exciting versions of its video conferencing products at InfoComm09. In the “InfoComm 09 Round-Up” Bob Romano, the NBU VP Marketing, reviewed them, along-side videos from the show.
I especially liked the quote from one of the senior analysts at the show: “it’s nice to see RADVISION regaining its technology leadership, where they belong”.
July
In July an Air Tran commercial really made me laugh. Bottom line was that even if video conferencing is not going to replace face-to-face meetings, air travel will change and everybody knows it.
So I wrote my post about “Business Travel Without Moving” to say, again, that I see no logic what so ever in the excessive amount of business travel done today. Not that it really helped.
August
On August a tweet by Roger Farnsworth got me travelling back through time to the mid 90s. When video conferencing started, and the user experience was, well, crappy (as Tsahi likes to say).
In my post “The Curious Incident With The Post I Read In The Night Time” I tried to explain how many myths regarding video conferencing are no longer true, and how the experience today can definitely replace any other means of personal communication.
September
“Get Me a $100 Endpoint, and Let’s Start Communicating” was a post I wrote following some debate on whether the endpoint everyone is going to use in a couple of years would be hardware or software.
My answer: who cares?! Just as long as it’s affordable, and can be massively adopted.
October
It’s been a year filled with telepresence, but in RADVISION we are already taking a glimpse towards the future. “If Telepresence is the Present, 3DPresence is the Future” I wrote in October, giving some details about an exciting project that RADVISION takes part in – 3D Video Conferencing.
November
2009 was the year of the cloud. Or at least the year of the “talk about the cloud”. I really liked Dave Michels’ “Cloud Series” and decided to discuss cloud technology in general and cloud-based video conferencing in particular.
“Cloudy, With A Good Chance of Video Conferencing” discusses how the cloud is going to change things dramatically, video conferencing included.
December
2009 was also the year everything went multi-touch. Suddenly everyone understands that UI is very important. But are touch-based interfaces the only way to go?
With Dr. Romi Mikulinsy I wrote about “Sensory Experience – A Sense of Interfaces To Come“, which tries to illustrate what kind of interfaces we can expect in the next generation of products.
I really enjoyed writing, reading your comments and receiving your feedback in 2009. Hope you’ll join me again in 2010.
Happy New Year!
