FaceTime is a really interesting move coming from Apple on their recently launched iPhone4. It is a mobile video telephony service which runs over IP, which by now probably have had more video calls done than mobile video calls done on all other existing handsets in the world in the same period of time. Instead of spending my time thinking of what else to write about this new service, here are a few interesting posts that I have found in
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 16th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
Now that I have actually made a FaceTime call or two from iPhones of some of my colleagues, it is time to say the truth: Apple has done a great job when it comes to the experience FaceTime provides. The audio quality is great. The video is more than adequate for a mobile device. And that portrait/landscape shtick is cool in a geeky way. But, as always in this case, Apple can improve. Here are a few ideas for
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 2nd, 2010 | Filed under Clients
My dear friend, colleague and office ‘roommate’ Sagi Subocki is our Product Manager for everything SIP and IMS for developers. Last week, Anatoli Levine and Sagi hosted a webinar about LTE and the future of IMS. There was lots of interest in this webinar, with a high registration and participation rate. I guess the topic of LTE coupled with IMS is something that is getting high demand, and it makes sense – especially when you look at the VoLTE initiative
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 7th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
I was on a business trip last week, visiting some prospective clients in Asia. If there is anything that I learned there is that the Android OS is about to get a real boost from the Asian vendors, a lot bigger than the one we see now. This is quite big in its own right – there is good reason why Android sales have surpassed the iPhone – it’s a simple matter of scale. But there was something that came
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 17th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
If you haven’t been on this planet for the past several weeks, then I should tell you that Gizmodo have put their hands on a future iPhone prototype. I don’t really want to delve into the realm of questions running around how much they paid, whether it really is an Apple product, staged or got lost. iPhone launch day Instead, I want to deal with the video chat camera issue – not the question of is it real or
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 10th, 2010 | Filed under Clients
Here’s a thing I realized talking to a friend of mine the other day: Apple isn’t going to focus on visual communications in 2010 – not in their Macs and probably not on their iPads either. My friend, who is aware of our own SCOPIA VC240 product – a 24″ PC monitor with built-in HD video conferencing capabilities, told me that Apple’s 27″ all-in-one Mac monitor should probably add such a capability as well. He didn’t understand why they didn’t
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 9th, 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
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
[Antoine RJ Wright is a smart person I have never met, but one who I met through this blog. I've ended up reading his writings and also his comments on this blog once in a while. In my search for a Skype killer post, Antoine left an interesting idea that I just had to have clarified a bit. I ended up asking Antoine to write a guest post on his idea of the open address book, which he did. I
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By guest | January 18th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Is it only me or are service providers missing the train? Skype has just come out with a press release at CES around HD video telephony embedded into televisions. These televisions won’t be available until later this year, but what’s a few months between friends. The end result? Our televisions are about to take away the need for telephony services from those service providers’ triple play packages. And they do that by throwing presence AND video conferencing into the package. Would I be paying 20$/month for an unlimited national calling package from my cable company here in Israel or would I go for a 6$/month plan from Skype with the added value of being able to call people on Skype and do video calls as well? Tough question. Not. Time to wake up and smell the humus Service providers need to wake up and smell the humus. If they want to be able to provide communication means to us consumers, they need to make sure VoIP companies don’t get their share by migrating from the desktop into consumer electronics. Skype understands they can’t rely on the desktop and are actively moving into businesses, mobile handsets and now consumer electronics. By doing that, they are ensuring that initiatives such as One Voice won’t kill them. It seems like operators aren’t fast enough in their decisions.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 7th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
