by NW Indiana artist Steve Johnson

With Nefsis (now OmniJoin) being acquired by Japan-based Brother Industries, I thought it was a good time to revisit Nefsis and see how its video conferencing product has matured since I first tried it in graduate school.

Early this week, we got a group together for a 6-way test call.  My feeling is that Nefsis is having a midlife crisis.  It can’t decide whether it wants to be good at web conferencing or good at video conferencing.  Moreover, it thinks it can stay hip by adding on new features like live annotation and language support but without doing any real design work.

To give Nefsis credit, it does have excellent audio quality which stays excellent even as the number of people in a call go up (usually a key feature for web conferencing).  However it loses massive points with me on its user design and its video quality. Continue reading →