Archive for February, 2010
Most of the time we try to obey the 3 Bs: Better, Bigger, Bolder. This is also true for our marketing activities, as well as for our blog posts. But here’s a little secret I can tell you about our industry (and not just it): when it’s time to walk the walk, we are all slaves of the almighty RFP. As our industry caters mainly for large enterprises and government agencies, a lot of the deals out there are won
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 25th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
I’m not kidding here. What is telepresence good for anyway? And just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, here’s a reminder for one of my own definitions of telepresence: “The high end of the high end of video conferencing”. Sagee had a more thoughtful definition of telepresence, which is two years old. And since we’re already delving into nostalgia, here’s another doozy from around the same time – Moz Hussain, director of product management at Microsoft
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 22nd, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Earlier this week I’ve outlined what the SIP parity group at the IMTC is all about, but then again – a question does arise – where in the world is H.323 these days? Does Carmen Sandiego know where H.323 is? (image by ~5ir3ntropy) I’ve heard people announce the death of H.323 a lot of times. I guess the first time was about 8 years ago. Funny thing is, it’s still going strong – we actually have new customers
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 18th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
Two weeks ago, the IMTC has publicly announced its progress in the work of defining SIP video. People here may ask why SIP Video needs any defining work. After all, SIP had the ability to deal with video channels for ages. And the answer is that while it may have that ability, it doesn’t really interoperate with that well. RADVISION has taken part in the work done at this IMTC activity group, and I’ve been silently monitoring it from
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 15th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] Now that we’re past the camera glossary part, it’s time to take a look at what is required from a good camera for visual communications. I’ll start by saying that, as a rule of thumb, desktop video conferencing cameras are usually USB webcams and professional video conferencing systems have professional HD cameras. These are two separate types of cameras, using two
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 15th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
It seems like Apple has succeeded where others have failed – it has opened up the market in Korea for foreign handset vendors. And it has done so singlehandedly. Before the iPhone, most of the Korean handset market has been ruled by local vendors. The service providers in Korea had their own set of special specifications, usually written in Korean, making it harder for foreigners to participate in the game. One success story of a foreign company in Korea
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 11th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
It seems like a fight has started over the communication device on our desktops. Not the fight over voice – that one has already been fought and won time and again by the ubiquitous desktop phone, with some signs of the mobile handset providing any serious competition to its reign. What I am talking about is the fight over visual communications: doing video chat and video conferencing from your desk, wherever that is. Here’s a list of the current contestants:
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 8th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
Last month I’ve stated that I don’t see visual communications done in software anytime soon. But then the question is when – when WILL visual communications be prominent in software solutions? I’d like to risk it and come up with an answer that is a bit counterintuitive even to me: never. Software is never going to be the path to go with visual communications. And why is that? Because as we get closer to a point in time, when the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 4th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
It is with great joy that I am writing the words above, welcoming to the RADVISION family new members, coming from the delightful city of Ancona. Il Porto Di Ancona. (CC) Yep, the word is out – we have acquired the intellectual property of Aethra, a video conferencing endpoint manufacturer and a long-time partner of RADVISION, as part of our end-to-end strategy. I worked with engineers from Aethra throughout my years in RADVISION. As most of our industry, they were using our developer tools. I have always found the people there warm and friendly. Not that there’s any wonder here -after all, they are Italians… But back to the acquisition — We will now have a development center in Italy, one that will specialize in high-end High-Definition video conferencing room systems. This is going to be a great complement to our current array of video infrastructure and endpoints. I’d venture to say that I see this as a great step forward, as now customers will be able to enjoy our end-to-end video conferencing solution – infrastructure, room systems, personal terminals and desktop clients. Not to mention our endpoint technology, that can be licensed to build your own communication products, which will work perfectly and seamlessly with all of these. So – il benvenuto alla famiglia, RADVISION Italy!
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 3rd, 2010 | Filed under Miscellaneous
We’ve had a chat the other day during lunch about the future of video conferencing (yes, we sometimes speak about work during lunchtime). The issue that was raised is where, if at all, do we see telepresence in the future – what role will it play? While I’d love to try and answer this question, want to set the ground first, as I don’t really think there’s a good definition our there for telepresence. So here are a few definitions
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 2nd, 2010 | Filed under Technology
