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
Google now offers two separate operating systems: Android OS – used by smartphones out there, ported by companies onto a bunch of other consumer electronic products including netbooks. Chrome OS – a browser-based operating system, which essentially lives within the browser. Oh, and people are starting to think of placing it on netbooks as well. Why would any sane company go and invest their resources on two operating systems that just… do the same? Which OS would
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 28th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
This is a question that was frequently asked during our sales meeting this month. I’d like to try and answer it here. In the last couple of years, we’ve had tremendous success with Windows Mobile – we’ve done a bunch of successful projects and had a few product launches. A lot of vendors who develop handsets needed our 3G-324M stack or some other product of ours to be integrated into their device, so life was good. Something got broken the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 25th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] In my previous post I’ve discussed on the requirements from an OSD engine. These requirements will affect the decision making of chip selection for the OSD. But there is another aspect that affects that decision and it is the software you will use for visualization – the OSD engine. While I do not pretend to be an expert on GUI, I have
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 25th, 2010 | Filed under HD VoIP
It’s not every day that an opportunity falls in my laps not only to talk about something dear to me, but also to have a press release accompany it. And when opportunity knocks, who am I to say no. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve published a press release about MediaTek selecting our 3G-324M stack for their system-on-chip solutions for handset vendors. I thought I would share with you a short story of what went on behind the scenes… A
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 20th, 2010 | Filed under Clients
It seems like we’re writing on our blogs a lot about Google lately, but here’s another post about one of their ground-breaking products. This time – the Android operating system. The Google Android OS was designed and built with mobile handsets in mind, but for some reason, almost from day one, people tried using it for a variety of different devices and products. Here are a few examples: Enterprise Desktop Phones Allan Sulkin reports on NoJitter about Cloud Telecomputers, a
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 24th, 2009 | Filed under Clients, Technology
[This post is part of our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] I’d like to take a bit of a break from all those hardware posts in my “HW for HD” series, now that I’ve covered the video coding chip, as well as scaling and layout issues. Instead I want to delve into the realm of designing the software architecture of the application itself. The hardware you design will affect your software architecture. As you
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 21st, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
[This post is taking part in our Designing Hardware for HD series. Be sure to check it out!] One of the most burning issues involved with designing a video telephony device is where the video codec is going to reside. The reason is that this is by far the most CPU intensive task of the whole system, especially when going up to high definition. I’d like to discuss the various options that exist today on the market, with their relative
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 2nd, 2009 | Filed under HD VoIP
Hi everyone for another new and interesting week. This time the carnival is again in Israel, where we are currently enjoying our Sukkot holyday. Before I start off with the interesting set of posts on our carnival, I want to invite you on behalf of WIP Jam to their UnPanel event on October 8 at CTIA in San Diego. They’ve got a day chocked full with great speakers – one of them is Lauren Thorpe, Senior Director, Developer Relations, Qualcomm
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 5th, 2009 | Filed under Around the net
Video conferencing has been around for a long time – I should know, working at RADVISION for over a decade. It had been fun times, with lots of development and features being added. Then came HD – be it HD video or voice, increasing the quality (and experience) of a call dramatically. And then what? The hard truth is that for the last couple of years there is no real innovation in the video conferencing industry. Yeah, we talk about moving from 720p to 1080p, moving from 30 frames per second to 60 frames per second, adding another camera, adding more screens. But really – who cares? We’re marketing and selling the same solution we did years ago. It’s a bit faster, maybe a bit better, but that’s all. The margins companies make on video conferencing endpoints are diminishing yearly. The way to keep the pricing today Is to increase the video resolution. But there’s just so much you can charge for more resolution – we’ve already reached the point where it makes no sense to invest further. The open question to our industry is: what’s next? What will be the next innovation that will drive our niche and maybe, just maybe, bring it to the critical mass I’ve been told exist just around the corner.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | September 7th, 2009 | Filed under Technology
