Steve Cheney started guest posting on TechCrunch. In one of his posts, he states that Apple’s strategy of vertical integration is ingenious: Perhaps the best example of this so far is FaceTime, Apple’s take on video-calling. FaceTime makes video-calling on the Android-based Sprint HTC EVO look silly, because the EVO awkwardly requires users to sign up and download a third-party app, then launch it every time they want to talk. Normal people simply won’t do this. Apple eliminated this friction
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 12th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Last week I attended a technology event dedicated to embedded solutions. In one of the sessions, a company focused on operating system abstraction layers (OSAL) presented their take on porting. To make a long story short, the hour was devoted to showing how porting becomes a breeze for customers using their product to the extreme – you just “use the product” and voila – no need to think about porting ever again. As someone who’s done his share of porting
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 28th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
TrendChip Technologies Corp., a Taiwanese company, has around 20% market share when it comes to ADSL CPE chipsets. Today, these access devices can also support VoIP, and for that RADVISION offers a few solutions – one of them is the Multimedia Terminal Framework (MTF), which TrendChip is licensing. When you couple ADSL with VoIP, it usually also gets a new name – either IAD or ATA. As TrendChip officially announced their new line of IAD solutions, with a warm reference
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 10th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Texas Instruments (TI), a leading manufacturer of DSP products, just announced a new joint offering, with RADVISION, based on their leading DaVinci Video Processor (DM6467) called VCE6467. If I need to sum it up in a single sentence: VCE6467 is a new product that provides an off-the-shelf video communication engine to allow easy integration and time to market for any embedded device. Leaving out the marketing-speak; I think it is the first time that a leading chipset vendor has come
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 1st, 2010 | Filed under Clients
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
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 31st, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
[Here's something I've tried in the distant past, and liked it enough to start it over again. The idea is to talk to a customer, ask a few interesting and relevant questions, and have the Q&A published here (with the approval of the customer, of course). In a sense, it's a testimonial packed nicely inside a blog post form.] As a start, I’ve approached Seowon Intech, a Korean company in the device component field. One of its product lines deals
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 13th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
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,
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 6th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Most of the time we try to obey the 3 Bs: Better, Bigger, Bolder. This is also true for our marketing activities, as well as for our blog posts. But here’s a little secret I can tell you about our industry (and not just it): when it’s time to walk the walk, we are all slaves of the almighty RFP. As our industry caters mainly for large enterprises and government agencies, a lot of the deals out there are won
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 25th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Last month I’ve stated that I don’t see visual communications done in software anytime soon. But then the question is when – when WILL visual communications be prominent in software solutions? I’d like to risk it and come up with an answer that is a bit counterintuitive even to me: never. Software is never going to be the path to go with visual communications. And why is that? Because as we get closer to a point in time, when the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 4th, 2010 | Filed under 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
