Zoom.us, the hottest new video conferencing company, is revealing its paid UMX (Unified Meeting Experience) offering for businesses. Zoom previously raised $3M in angel funding. It has also just raised $6M in series A funding, from some of the biggest names such as Qualcomm Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and…

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…

Milton and Jeff Immelt, GE Chairman and CEO Milton met with GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt at the GE Minds and Machines 2012 conference last week, where he also rubbed elbows with other leading technologists, business leaders, and academics including Marc Andreessen, Tim O’Reilly and DJ Patil. Milton shared with Jeff that there are no tools on the market…

updated: 3/20/2014 WebRTC (Real-Time Communication) has been getting a bit of press between meetings.io getting acquired by Jive (specifically chosen for its WebRTC technology) and TokBox announcing its new Opentok WebRTC for iOS SDK. What’s the big deal with WebRTC? WebRTC is exciting because it allows real-time audio/video to be…

Skype vulnerabilities are always cropping up. The newest Skype security leak was all over the tech news this week.  Apparently, its create-a-new-account procedure coupled with its password-reset procedure allowed anyone to take over another person’s Skype account just by knowing that person’s email address.  The Next Web actually reproduced the…

Several people have commented on the speculative nature of my earlier article on the TokBox acquisition being a semi-fire sale.  I want to give our readers a more thorough explanation for my statements. When a company is acquired for more than $20-30M, typically the price is leaked, since the acquiring…

Last week, a struggling TokBox announced its acquisition by Telefónica Digital for an undisclosed amount.  This is a pretty sad news for TokBox and its investors. They raised a lot of money, and given this is a semi-fire sale, its investors lost money.  Also, its people, who have worked long…

Last December, when Brother purchased Nefsis, I thought it was a great outcome for Nefsis and a great move for Brother.  Nefsis had a very complex pricing structure and needed a huge distribution partner to push its complicated solution into enterprises.  Brother had a huge distribution base, with its long…

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…

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…

Airtime was launched on Tuesday by the founders of Napster – Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. This Chatroulette-inspired random video chat service seems to have piqued the curiosity of even Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The event was filled with celebrities, but with so much fanfare, 2 years of work, and…

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…

Early last week Lifehacker posted a story about a recent Stanford University experiment on teleworkers in a Chinese travel agency.  It turns out that those who worked from home were significantly more productive (i.e. received more calls thus booked more flights) than their office-bound counterparts.  To be more precise, teleworkers logged…

Yesterday while I was at a conference Skype announced on their blog that they were dropping the ‘beta’ label from their Mac release, and that group calling would now be a paid feature.  Obviously, I had to respond.  🙂 I have a lot of fun talking about Skype because I…

Skype announced it will soon have an IPO.  (Also here.) Let’s not confuse this with being a business tool. Yes, video calling is handy for businesses.  But what about presentation and collaborative tools? Skype has an immense user base, and yet operational income for the first half of 2010 was…