VSee vs. Nefsis: When A Product Has A Midlife Crisis

Posted on December 8, 2012 by milton — 2 Comments ↓

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 →

Why AirTime Is Struggling: The Science of Video Chat

Posted on October 22, 2012 by milton — No Comments ↓

Airtime is the latest venture of Napster co-creators and entrepreneur superstars Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. However, just four months into their video chat foray, and these masterminds are floundering in the same snafu that has muddled many a great mind since even before the first public videophone was developed in 1936.

The key reason: hard human factor limits. For real-time video chatting, research has shown that people have little patience with low visual quality, video delays, and poor audio-video sync, just to name a few factors. Airtime, like nearly all social video conferencing tools (e.g. Chatroulette, OpenTok [aka Tokbox], Tinychat) made the mistake of picking Flash which does not meet the human factor requirements for video chat and video conference. This bad video experience is killing Airtime’s service right from the get-go.

Airtime began as a “family-friendly version of Chatroulette” (i.e. minus nudity) and has evolved approaches over several iterations. Jenna Wortham, technology reporter for the New York Times describes how it currently works:

After a user signs up for Airtime through Facebook, the service analyzes the user’s profile and pairs him or her with willing strangers who have similar interests. They can then chat and watch YouTube videos together. Airtime can also be used as a simple way to video chat with Facebook friends. Since its introduction the service has rapidly introduced features to let people leave each other video messages and get video reactions to items they post.

Source: Airtime, A Pedigreed Start-up, Is Tested

I am a big fan of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, and I think their intuition about the compelling nature of Airtime as a medium that allows people to discover and meet new people online is right on. Finding ways to remove the “nudity” that sunk Chatroulette wasn’t a bad call either. But at the end of the day, video chat must meet the basic human factors requirements. If they give up on Flash now and dig deep into the science of conveying visual conversational cues – then I think they will have a great company!

Zoom – New Kid On the Block (15 Friends Video Chat Free in High Def)

Posted on August 23, 2012 by milton — 4 Comments ↓

The newly launched Zoom Video Communications hit the waves last Tuesday and received a rave review from WSJ’s Walt Mossberg. In his AllThingsD review of Zoom, Mossberg was wowed by Zoom’s “free, high-definition, group video calls for up to 15 people simultaneously,” its ability to work over “wired and WiFi Internet connections, or cellular 3G and 4G networks,” and its “sharp and smooth” video quality. He also approved of the text chat and screen sharing features.

I also gave it a whirl. And I like it a lot. The product is simple, the video quality is good, and it has basic screen sharing. It also supports mobile devices – a big plus!

I was relieved, however, to discover that VSee video performance has a huge advantage compared to Zoom for group conferencing or when the network is not fast (like DSL, WiFi, 3G, etc, similar to the VSee advantage over Skype).

Zoom also made some less appealing design decisions like its voice activated switching. This can get very annoying since often we don’t want to see the speaker, but a particular audience member. Zoom also does not offer any security, and its screen sharing does not allow remote control or annotation. I should mention, this is a bit of an unfair comparison since Zoom is a consumer app, while VSee is designed for work. Overall, I have to agree with Mossberg – Zoom did a great job!!

Zoom is founded by former WebEx/Cisco VP of Engineering Eric Yuan. Eric did a superman job growing WebEx from 10 to 800 engineers. Eric was also an investor and advisor to Tango. Additional web searches suggest that their engineering team is in China, and they wrote their version of H.264 SVC, like Vidyo.

It will be interesting to see how Zoom pivots in its future. Will it go after Vidyo or Tango? Will it become a plugin for social networks or something else? Right now it is neither consumer enough nor enterprise enough – and that tends to be the Death Valley for video companies. I’m looking forward to seeing their next steps

Update: Will Zoom’s new enterprise offering hurt Vidyo and Blue Jeans?

FuzeBox Raises $20M for online collaboration

Posted on July 13, 2012 by christina — No Comments ↓

We heard that FuzeBox, an online collaboration and meeting tool, recently raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by Index Ventures.

“Fuze HD is a mobile and web-based collaboration service that features integrated audio conferencing as well as high-definition, synchronized video and image sharing.” – Crunchbase

FuzeBox uses Vidyo for their back engine, and this round is definitely a big win for both

Congratulations to FuzeBox and Vidyo!

To learn more about how VSee compares with Vidyo for your online collaboration needs, read this article on VSee: Free Alternative to Vidyo Telepresence Business Video Conference – Comparison

Blue Jeans = Skype + Polycom: Water And Oil Don’t Mix

Posted on November 28, 2011 by milton — 15 Comments ↓

photo credit: bitjungle

Blue Jeans Network is a hot video conferencing startup that has been gaining a lot of attention even since before the public release of its product earlier this year. They raised $23M from a set of A-list investors with its cloud-based solution that aims to bridge any video conferencing platform from any device anywhere including room-based Polycom and Cisco, desktop Skype and GoogleTalk, and mobile Skype and Android tablet.

I had the chance to drop by their booth at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week after I gave my talk and was quite impressed with their demo. They showed me how beautifully Skype linked with Polycom on both desktop and tablet. The video quality was good, and overall I thought everything was very well done.

The Blue Jeans video conferencing User Experience

However, when I examined the design of how they make calls and share applications, I realized this is where Blue Jeans had issues. Continue reading →

Simple Video Conference and Screen Share

Tag Archives: VSee competition