Recently in General Category

Last week we held the RADVISION Unified Communication Summit in Tel-Aviv. I was tasked with giving a key-note presentation on social media, and decided to look at it from an inter-personal communications perspective. These two concepts may seem very different, but my point was/is that they are set to meet, one way or another.

On one side you have the social media people, who are now regarded as cool and trendy. They tend to look down upon the "old" marketing tactics (from the '90s, that is), and they talk about how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the likes can help your company make millions with hardly any need for investment.

On the other side you have the unified communication people, all suited up and ready for their corporate daily work. Continue Reading...

Last week Stacey Higginbotham reported on GigaOm about the coming upstream revolution:

Demand for upstream bandwidth is growing. Floyd Wagoner, a director of marketing and communications for Motorola Access Networks Solutions, said in an interview today that a U.S. cable provider has seen peak upstream bandwidth use increase by 24 percent from 2007 to 2008. The same provider saw average upstream bandwidth use increase by 17 percent.

While this demand didn't come from video conferencing (or at least not directly), it is important to note that video calling require a lot of bandwidth - both downstream and upstream: a typical 720p HD call, for instance, will take about 1 Mbps, upstream and downstream - a lot more than you have on your average ADSL contract.

While downstream bandwidths are rather decent, upstream bandwidths is one of the main reasons why quality video conferencing hasn't reached the masses and is left in the realm of corporate users. Continue Reading...

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've meant to write about downloadable VoIP Clients for a long time now, but didn't quite know how to tackle the issue. I finally wrote about it on my VoIP Survivor blog, stating I don't see the value of having downloadable VoIP clients in mobile application stores. However, there's an additional aspect that needs to be tackled, and that is video.

I'll start by quoting Morten Hjerde on the fragmentation on development platforms:

"... if you intend to interact with the phone itself - if your app uses the camera, the GPS, or any other internal phone feature - you are back to developing a separate app per manufacturer...the dream of cross platform development seems further away than ever.

Andy Abramson stated recently, once again, that video conferencing will take off in 2009:

I've been saying that IP based video conferencing will be taking off in 2009 and it looks like I'm right with that prediction.

NASA and Verizon have reworked their agreements and now will have IP based video and web conferencing supplied by the Baby Bell.

I must say that I believe Andy is correct. It was not that apparent at CES that video is happening, but it was there - in the fringes. It is happening on desktops already and it is gaining popularity in enterprises as well.

Vidtel launched a video telephony service, and now, another service provider called GlobalLinx is reported to join the fray.

Add to these Creative's Broadxent subsidiary and you get a brave new world of video centric service providers.

Video is definitely happening.

They call it talking heads for a reason.

Video chat will never be the same for me.

Found this one at Carl Tyler's blog.

Hi there.

My name is Tsahi Levent-Levi and I work as a Product Manager at RADVISION. Here, I also write a blog called "VoIP Survivor" as part of RADVISION's company blogs.

When I was approached by Greg Galitzine with the offer of having my own blog on the TMCnet blog network, there was no real debate on whether or not to accept the offer - it was just a matter of choosing the right topic. During the past 10 years at RADVISION, I've been working on various technologies - IP and 3G, both signaling and media related, and as a developer and a product manager.

Finally, I eventually decided to focus on video telephony technologies, a topic which I find to be both interesting and "hot", a topic that is set to change the way we communicate.

A name was therefore chosen - "Talking Video", and this is exactly what I will be doing here: Talking Video.

I'll try writing here once a week, publishing a post every Wednesday, so stay tuned.

I'd appreciate any comments or questions you might have.

See you soon,

Tsahi