Yes. Video calling is growing. Yes consumer video chat is upon us. Yes Apple’s FaceTime service will increase demand and usage. No. it will not be enough. We’re still talking about communication islands. If you look at the state of VoIP today, it is pretty safe to say that it is growing nicely. It might not be apparent at first sight, but the reason it does is the ubiquity of PSTN. And that is the heart of the matter –
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 5th, 2010 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
Last week, we hosted another webinar with TMCnet. This time about SIP servers on embedded systems: Powering SoHo communications. It seems that everything is moving to the clouds lately, and part of this migration is also happening in the PBX realm. That said, there is a wide range of servers that need to go into the small enterprise premises, as well as PBX implementations that doesn’t rely on the cloud. One of the poll questions that were addressed to the
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 7th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
This is one of several posts about Apple’s iPhone FaceTime service. The reason for writing about it is because it is such an interesting issue: Apple, the king of usability, is trying to solve the user experience of mobile video telephony. What I want to deal with here is a slew of open questions about the openness of FaceTime. And to start, you should read this post by Ajit Jaokar about possible meanings of open. Which ones can be covered
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 24th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
Here’s the thing – standards are a means to an end. The end game in this case is interoperability. How do I know that people miss this minor but important distinction? When they start talking about the openness of Apple’s FaceTime solution. Anatoli Levine was kind enough to give an overview of the different standards used by FaceTime. So why doesn’t it work with other, similar clients? It doesn’t even connect to Apple’s own iChat service. Yet. Furthermore, for
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 17th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Standards are everywhere: from the size and weight of the paper we place in our printers to the way we send emails. Standards are required so that multiple vendors can develop and deploy their products to be used by a large customer base. Have you ever thought how two phones can communicate perfectly well? Ever considered the fact that they were each manufactured by a different vendor? It is because of the ecosystem that was put in place and their
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 31st, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
It’s always nice to be a marketer. I know – I’ve been there. You spend your days thinking of how to get attention and maybe even create catch phrases that people will remember. It usually pisses me off when marketers try to oversell a solution. So yes, this is another whining/grunt post. You can skip this one if you’re not in the mood. My current best oversold marketing term is “desktop telepresence”. An oxymoron in a way, it takes telepresence,
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 6th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
[This is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] There are a few more issues I’d like to tackle in this series of posts, and some of these issues have more of a general nature to them. This time I’m looking into the future. If you are about to develop an HD video terminal, then you are going to invest a considerable amount of thought and time in your hardware. It also
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 24th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
It seems like everyone these days has an application. So it was only a matter of time until one of the video conferencing vendors out there would come out with an application of its own. Well, it’s our pleasure to be the vendor with this news – video conferencing? There’s an app for that! Yes, we’ve just released our SCOPIA Mobile app – an iPhone/Blackberry application that can essentially control our SCOPIA line of products. As someone who has
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 23rd, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Here’s an interesting announcement that got a big media coverage last month – video is going to be 90% of all internet traffic by 2013. That is, at least, according to Cisco’s Marthin De Beer, SVP of the Emerging Technologies Group. I discovered this from a Cisco post with a rather provocative title: De Beer Announces End of the Word at Cisco Live“: “Listening to Marthin De Beer… it’s easy to believe that in a few years you won’t be
(read more...)
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 18th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] [Fabrizio Ghetti, who wrote a very useful post on camera shopping tips had more tips for you about cameras, so here's another post - this time, camera positioning. As you'll be able to see, I assisted with the images.] So you’ve selected a camera. Great! Now it’s time to decide where to position it. This decision should not be taken lightly –
(read more...)
By guest | March 10th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
