Apple’s FaceTime is now a fact. And by the success Apple had with the iPod and in recent years the iPhone, it is bound to change the market – maybe not the end users one, but definitely the handset vendors, who by now are looking for their own solutions to this problem. I’ve seen a bunch of webinars, whitepapers and other articles about how FaceTime-like services can be integrated by other handset vendors. Usually, these resources focus on a single
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 9th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
June has been a really interesting month. It started off with the iPhone 4 FaceTime announcement and ended up with Cisco’s Cius announcement – from mobile video telephony for consumers to enterprise “personal telepresence”. It happens that I’ve published this month a few posts on other blogs about these subjects, so if these subjects interest you, check them out. The past, present and future of Mobile Video Telephony (Vision Mobile) I have met with Andreas Constantinou from Vision Mobile when
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 1st, 2010 | Filed under Miscellaneous
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
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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
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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
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 31st, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
It’s funny how things go sometimes. Just yesterday I’ve crowned my day as the day of LTE – not because of any special reason, but simply because I bumped into too many LTE related posts in the blogosphere. Here are the interesting ones: It all started in the morning, when Andy Abramson coined LTE as Long Term Excuses. It brought me to Dean Bubley’s blog – a new blog I now added to my reading list. There
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 25th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization, Technology
What do you know? RADVISION has just become one of the first members of a new international organization, the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF). Other members include Aspect, AudioCodes, ClearOne, HP, Jabra, Juniper Networks, Logitech/LifeSize Communications, Microsoft, Plantronics, Polycom, and Teliris. UCIF is definitely not the first such organization that RADVISION has joined. Other such organizations come to mind are IMTC, IMS Forum and SIP Forum. These are all organizations dedicated to interoperability of VoIP related standards and in
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 19th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
In the past I took the opportunity to be part of RAVISION’s standardization efforts- especially those revolving around 3G-324M and fast call setup time. Ah, the good old days. I was doing that with the assistance of several of our standards experts. The best of them are kickass engineers – ones I had some hard time catching up with. An ITU-T meeting from a few years ago (I am the red shirt on the first row) So what makes
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 3rd, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
There’s a trend these days to employ Forward Error Correction (FEC) as a means to improve media quality in voice and video calls. It is also something that RADVISION has been actively pushing at the ITU-T – and will probably be added in one of the next ITU-T meetings as H.323 Annex I. When we started working on our SVC solution, and had to decide where to place the error correction data, we debated on a very basic question:
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | December 17th, 2009 | Filed under Technology
XMPP lovers out there – it’s time to pack your things and head home. It seems like SIP has won the battle for VoIP dominance. Don’t come complaining to me – Google is to blame. A few weeks ago we were all looking for Skype to step up to the plate, scoop Gizmo5 and save their asses from the patent issues by giving them a SIP infrastructure. Didn’t happen. Instead, we are now dealing with a much bigger issue: Google
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 23rd, 2009 | Filed under Standardization
