March 2009 Archives

Modeling the visual communication market has been on my mind for some time now. I think that, as all things in the world, it can be split into 3 segments:

• Large enterprises and organizations
• Small and medium businesses (SMBs)
• Consumers

All are emerging markets, with SMBs being the newest one. All are doing virtually the same thing - using video calls to communicate. And still they are quite different from one another in nature.

Large enterprises and organizations

This can easily be called the traditional video conferencing market. Continue Reading...

I would like to draw your attention to two webinars that may be of your interest.

Title: Improving Video Quality in Your Network - Pre and post deployment network assessment of video quality.

Who: RADVISION (my company)

Description: While video deployment is experiencing a significant boom both in enterprise and carrier networks, overall user experience does not always live up to the expectations. RADVISION experts will discuss how to avoid this pitfall through pre and post deployment network assessment of video quality.

I admit that this one is a bit of a shameless self-promotion of a webinar by my company, but I believe the content is highly important to our industry and my readers.

Where: subscribe to RADVISION's free webinar.

Title: The Videoconferencing Market - Challenges and Possibilities Ahead

Description: Principal Analyst, Roopam Jain, has completed an extensive analysis on the Videoconferencing market. The research expert will lead a short teleconference about new findings that affect the market, followed by a live question and answer session.

Roopam Jain nails down the adoption challenges of video conferencing in the enterprise. This is a great webinar if you're relatively new to video conferencing, and the Q&A section is good as well.

When: Two weeks ago... Continue Reading...

I am placing here a bunch of links, once in a while, of news items and blog posts that I find interesting and are related to visual communications.

If you have items you'd like to feature here - just email me at tsahil@radvision.com.

This time, the roundup is mostly about Vidtel.

They decided to give several bloggers a taste of their service, and the good reviews were not late to arrive:

• Jolly Mom reviews a videophone she received from Vidtel. This is definitely THE way to go for the consumer market. No "special" software, just a plain old telephone with a cool new video screen.
• jkOnTheRun received Vidtel's videophone as well, and has a video review of it.
• Ken Camp from The Next Web also wrote his review on the Vidtel's service. My takeaway is in the last paragraph:

Tomorrow, video will be a central part of our lives.

No.

Not all of them.

It's not that I don't believe in visual communications. After all, I am writing a blog titled "Talking Video". I just don't like the over-hyping our industry is going through with the economy downturn.

Yes - companies are reducing flights. Yes - they can gain from doing video calls instead. Continue Reading...

A press release I bumped into the other day, about Siracom's UniData WiFi Videophone, set to launch at CeBIT (that's like yesterday), got me thinking --- What a cool idea!

We already have mobile phones with video telephony embedded into them. Many Smartphones today already support WiFi. And we also have a bunch of WiFi phones (mainly for enterprises). So why not a WiFi videophone?

I admit this is not the first one I lay eyes on, and it is still at a low resolution (QVGA, 320x240), but it's video and it's mobile, so I will talk about it here.

I wrote about VoIP on mobile handsets on my VoIP Survivor blog just two days ago. Continue Reading...