VSee was a smashing success at this past weekend’s ATA show in Austin, TX. With a truly innovative approach to video conferencing, VSee telehealth completely stole the show from Polycom, Cisco, and Vidyo. The excited crowds kept the VSee team so busy throughout the entire conference that the team barely…

Following in the footsteps of Apple retail stores, Polycom will be opening its own retail outlets in high-end malls, as well as some Costco Superstores, says Wainhouse Research. In a marketing scheme designed to cook up some chutzpah for a waning video conferencing product, Polycom will be teaming up with…

With revenues down, Logitech is looking to unload its video conferencing division, which include LifeSize and Mirial in the next 90 days. Logitech acquired LifeSize for $405M in 2009 just as video conferencing and telepresence were on their way up. These days the high-end video conferencing market is much tougher.…

A NY Times article shook the video conferencing space when it reported that hackers were able to easily listen in on the board room discussions of major firms. The dark secret of the industry is that almost all existing video conferencing systems ( Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Vidyo, Blue Jeans, Radvision ) use the H.323 protocol which has many security flaws I had…

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…

HP must be sighing in relief at finally getting rid of their Halo visual collaboration business unit since they practically handed it to Polycom for $89 million. Is It A Win-Win Deal? This means Polycom gets a whack at the telepresence market while HP dumps responsibility for its lackluster product,…

Cisco’s foray into the consumer market has proved too challenging for the networking giant. This morning, Cisco Systems announced that it would cut 550 jobs as part of its plan to exit some of its consumer business. This includes closing the video recording device division which manufactures the once-great Flip…

With all the research and effort put into recreating Star Trek fantasies of communicating via life-like screen images, you’d think people would be more enthusiastic about actually using the amazing videoconferencing technologies out there today!  But surprisingly, as mentioned in an earlier post, videoconferencing tools have been painfully slow to…

During my recent U.K. trip, while doing VSee calls all day long, it was IM and Chatter that I depended on the most to keep in touch with my coworkers.  Those tools in addition to one-click video calling were critical for my informal interactions–those casual conversations that are so important for…

A voice without the face is still the same person…right? Given that humans are highly visual creatures, and that a disproportionately large portion of the brain is devoted to processing images (Wolfe, 2001), it seems to make sense that including video in virtual conferences could dramatically improve communication between people. …

My friend Jeff Urdan, honcho of VeaMea (a friendly competitor of ours that uses a client-server architecture), sent me an interesting email yesterday with the title “A laugh for your blog?”  Apparently the big guys, realizing they’re a little behind in desktop videoconferencing innovation (read: not optimized for ad hoc workflow),…

Every day I have at least one conversation that revolves around using VC (“video conferencing” or “video collaboration”) to “get things done” rather than “meet”.  Obviously efforts to increase acceptance of putting video collaboration tools where they’re most beneficial are gaining traction. For example, I know of at least one…

Here is a list of all of the other video conferencing providers we have found. Adobe Connect “Universal Voice: Enabling audio integration regardless of platform” Avistar “Integrated applications for unified collaboration” BoostCam “We provide free, instant, and disposable two-way video conferencing. It’s simple, fun, and doesn’t require installing any plugins,…

Wow.  Great speech. I recommend that everyone read this speech given by Hillary Clinton today. From a video collaboration and human-computer interaction standpoint, this is a watershed moment in politics.  There are plenty of articles already discussing the humanist message or how Google’s showdown with China changed the world and…

Ah, lighting. Never underestimate the importance of lighting in a video call. No matter whether you’re using VSee or Skype, Cisco or Polycom, the people you’re talking to want to see you.  They don’t want to see… …which is lit mostly from the front.  You’ll note that due to the smaller space I am…