June has been a really interesting month.

It started off with the iPhone 4 FaceTime announcement and ended up with Cisco’s Cius announcement – from mobile video telephony for consumers to enterprise “personal telepresence”.

It happens that I’ve published this month a few posts on other blogs about these subjects, so if these subjects interest you, check them out.

The past, present and future of Mobile Video Telephony (Vision Mobile)

I have met with Andreas Constantinou from Vision Mobile when he last visited Tel-Aviv. We had a very nice chat, and at the end of it, he provided me with great contacts to collaborate with and I ended up promising him a guest post.

It took an additional month and the result is this post: a brief overview about the history mobile video telephony and the challenges it is facing.

While this post doesn’t cover iPhone 4 FaceTime (it was written before the announcement), it does give some perspectives about it and how successful (or not) it might be.

It has been a great experience writing it and I do hope to write for VisionMobile again – Andreas is a great guy with a great team and a great blog.

Oh, and if you missed it, here are a few additional posts related to mobile video telephony that I’ve written recently:

• How Open is iPhone’s FaceTime?
• Standards Doesn’t Mean Interoperability
• 3 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Android OS and 3G Video Calling Integration
• The 3 Biggest Challenges of Integrating 3G-324M into Android

Video calling is finally here, but where’s the infrastructure? (No Jitter)

2010 is turning out to be the year that video calling has made it into the consumer space, instead of being a niche for large and wealthy enterprises.

The iPhone4 FaceTime is one such indication, but there are a few others. I’ve decided to write about these indications and where the consumer video calling market is today at No Jitter.

My feeling here is that the elephant in the room of consumer video calling isn’t a specific company but rather interoperability. All of these early signs of oil for video calling are missing some solid interoperability, and until that happens – I don’t see any real adoption happening – not in the form of replacing the good old voice calling.

Telepresence is for the rich (No Jitter)

IMHO “telepresence” is a marketing term for an expensive video conferencing room system that provides the highest possible user experience.

It is also the reason why I truly don’t think it will succeed in the real world – at least not like consumer video calling or traditional video conferencing. It will sell hundreds or thousands of expensive units a year to a select few, but that isn’t adoption to me.

I have been trying to convey these feelings in several posts on this blog and also on No Jitter, but nothing I’ve written prepared me to a short chat I had with a friend in the park near my house: he works in a company that has Telepresence systems, but he doesn’t really use it. You can read more about his story over at the short story about telepresence and the rich post I’ve published on No Jitter recently.