I just wrote about why Apple won’t go for visual communications on their 27″ Mac display. But I also don’t believe they will be adding that front facing camera on the iPad either. There are numerous rumors regarding Apple’s plans in this area – some surfaced before the iPad was even introduced to the world and some state that the camera is there but hidden for the time being. Similar rumors have surfaced about the iPhone as well. My own
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 11th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
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
We started rolling out VC240s in RADVISION, and just a few days after I took the picture of the monitor with the oh-too-many-cameras, it’s time for an updated picture of what my colleague now has on his desk: Yes, this is not an optical illusion: he now has 4 different cameras mounted on his screen. What you can actually see on the screen is the use of 3 of these cameras in a single MCU conference using SCOPIA Elite: Top right corner images are a picture-in-picture layout that the VC240 monitor itself supplies. You can see there the video coming from the MCU to the VC240 terminal. The large screen in the middle is the SCOPIA Desktop client, opened in the call as well. On the right side, below the picture-in-picture view, there’s a small window. This one is the video coming from the Cisco VT Advantage, which shows the remote video on the PC, while doing the voice call from the Cisco phone. While I wouldn’t recommend this setup as a reasonable one, I must say that now the only question left is: why the 4th camera?
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 8th, 2010 | Filed under Miscellaneous
Some of the ideas for posts I write here come from lunchtime discussions. You know the drill: we go out, sit at some restaurant close by, chat, overhear conversations, and once in a while a post idea comes to mind. Making calls on the go This time the idea came from a snippet of a conversation I heard the other day from the table beside me. Of course it had all to do with the (in)famous iPad, and of
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 1st, 2010 | Filed under Clients
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
I’m not kidding here. What is telepresence good for anyway? And just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, here’s a reminder for one of my own definitions of telepresence: “The high end of the high end of video conferencing”. Sagee had a more thoughtful definition of telepresence, which is two years old. And since we’re already delving into nostalgia, here’s another doozy from around the same time – Moz Hussain, director of product management at Microsoft
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 22nd, 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
Two weeks ago, the IMTC has publicly announced its progress in the work of defining SIP video. People here may ask why SIP Video needs any defining work. After all, SIP had the ability to deal with video channels for ages. And the answer is that while it may have that ability, it doesn’t really interoperate with that well. RADVISION has taken part in the work done at this IMTC activity group, and I’ve been silently monitoring it from
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 15th, 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
It seems like a fight has started over the communication device on our desktops. Not the fight over voice – that one has already been fought and won time and again by the ubiquitous desktop phone, with some signs of the mobile handset providing any serious competition to its reign. What I am talking about is the fight over visual communications: doing video chat and video conferencing from your desk, wherever that is. Here’s a list of the current contestants:
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 8th, 2010 | Filed under Clients, Technology
