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
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | July 6th, 2010 | Filed under Innovation, Video Conferencing
Everybody’s talking about telepresence these days. And it doesn’t really matter if this is “true” telepresence or just a marketing term, it seems that everyone wants in on the video conferencing game. And while telepresence is great for big enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, or service providers, there’s a giant market out there that is being mostly ignored by our industry so far – The Small and Medium Businesses (or SMBs). In July 2009, a Wainhouse Research study entitled “Benchmarking the
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | May 26th, 2010 | Filed under Video Conferencing
A Year ago I wrote a post on The Evolution of Video Conferencing, from the AT&T Labs’ Picturephone built in 1956 to the latest and greatest endpoints that we have today at our disposal. If you’re reading my blog, you must be well aware of all the great technologies introduced to the video conferencing market in the last few years – high definition video, high definition audio, multiple displays, life-size images, multi-directional microphones, even 3D. But if you are a
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | May 20th, 2010 | Filed under Collaboration, Innovation, Video Conferencing
“There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards or crystal balls. Collectively these methods are known as “nutty”. Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as “a complete waste of time” - Scott Adams As 2010 begins, it’s predictions time again, when everyone who’s writing anywhere must give their predictions for the up-coming year. I will not disclose here my methods for predicting
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | January 26th, 2010 | Filed under Video Conferencing
A few weeks ago we held our annual conference in Tel-Aviv. This year the headline was – surprise, surprise! – Unified Communications. During the day my division, the Networking Business Unit (NBU), focused on exposing the local crowd, executives and IT managers from leading enterprises and organizations, to the latest trends in IP communication and collaboration. Other than some very interesting presentations given by my colleagues and myself about unified communications, desktop collaboration, video conferencing and video technologies, there were
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | January 12th, 2010 | Filed under Collaboration, Video Conferencing
In a previous post I argued against the “One Internet”. I claimed that for video conferencing to work all access options to the network must be supported and the network itself has to be media-aware. That being said, one might get the impression that I believe that only a dedicated video conferencing network, one that connects (at least) the entire enterprise and offers a “clean” environment for our precious means of communication, can provide a worthy quality of experience. And
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | December 15th, 2009 | Filed under Video Conferencing
Last week Tsahi wrote a funny post on what Twitter would look like if Microsoft was behind it. Well, I thought to myself – I love Twitter, I love video conferencing – how about writing my own twist on Tsahi’s post, and try to imagine how video conferencing would look if it was built by the Twitter folks… Video Conferencing would be given a much cooler name. Viddo? Confr? Each speaker would be limited to 140 words. After 140
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | November 3rd, 2009 | Filed under Video Conferencing
What Greater Social Responsibility Is There Than Climate Change? Last year I participated in Blog Action Day and promised myself to make it a tradition. After
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | October 15th, 2009 | Filed under Video Conferencing
In a recent post on “Talking Video” Tsahi discussed a recent Forbes Insights study, that stated that “Business Executives Prefer Face-to-Face Meetings over Virtual Contact“. While Tsahi discussed why video conferencing is a legitimate alternative, I took the time to read carefully the study and its results, specifically these: 58% of the respondents said they were travelling for business less today than before the recession (January 2008); 34% indicated they were travelling much less frequently. 59% of
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | October 6th, 2009 | Filed under Video Conferencing
There has been much talk, too much IMHO, about video conferencing reducing the need to travel, eliminating millions of Airline seats in 2-3 years. And while the airline companies admit that “video conferencing is now a strong competitor“, it seems that they are not really doing anything about this future threat. Nothing but this… This is a genuine commercial for Air Tran, an American low-fare airline targeting business travelers. Their bottom line is that you should fly to visit
(read more...)
By Sagee Ben-Zedeff | July 28th, 2009 | Filed under Video Conferencing
