SMS is king today. At least in the realm of text communications on mobile handsets. I have seen people praise IM as the savior of SMS costs, and others who saw the death of blogs in Twitter’s micro-blogging service. Not going to happen. I’d like to suggest a different way of looking at it: as a set of different services that give different added value for users. And for that, I’ll start by specifying what a service is. How do
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 24th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Today, there are two standardized real-time video communication technologies that are available on commercial mobile handsets: video telephony and video sharing. From questions I receive once in a while from people, it seems like the differences between the two are not that obvious. What is Mobile Video Telephony? Mobile Video Telephony is a circuit switched based technology that uses 3G-324M for bidirectional video calls. It is available on a large (and growing) number of handsets. The way you use it
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 13th, 2008 | Filed under Clients, Technology
Video based services are becoming a standard means of communication for both enterprises and service providers; however, video conferencing, surveillance and other video-based services are bandwidth hogs, making video quality a real issue when deploying them over live networks. Video quality is affected by a wide range of network parameters: bit rate, frame rate, packet losses, jitter, etc. Each can contribute to the reduction of the user’s quality of experience. As enterprises and service providers struggle to deploy video communication
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 7th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
There is no such thing as Unified Communications or Social Media. For that matter, Web 2.0 and Phone 2.0 are also non-existent. And there’s no Presence in TelePresence either. For the last decade, I’ve been a player in these worlds, working on either development or marketing of related building blocks for this industry. During that time, only three things have changed: There’s a lot more bandwidth waiting to be used There’s a lot more processing power There’s more acceptance
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 31st, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Interesting times in the mobile handsets arena. VisionMobile maps the new centers of gravity in this industry. I believe competition will lag behind Apple’s iPhone in their next release as well as copycatting its ideas and designs. Talking about the iPhone - I am thinking of starting a petition to ban iPhone from Google Alerts for 3G video. For the past two weeks I am getting nothing from that service besides iPhone jailbreaks and teardowns. Growing bandwidth and increasing CPU power will change television as we know it. It will also speed up the use of video telephony adoption and quality and this fits well with the trend of multi-core diversification I have written about. You can add to this TiVo’s two new deals with YouTube and Amazon - it’s only the beginning. HD is seen by some as the true promise of VoIP - this is certainly different than the Unified Communications pitch. What happens when you don’t have enough bandwidth though?
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 28th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
Everything today is High Definition (HD). Whether you’re talking about televisions, projectors, video conferencing or even voice calls - the latest and greatest is high-definition capable. That said, high definition is really complex to deal with, not just in terms of bandwidth requirements, but in terms of processing power - especially if we’re dealing with visual communications. The challenge Have you ever tried watching a movie encoded in high definition format on your laptop? Assuming you have a single
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 10th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
