Writing for the Atlantic Online, Joseph Burgo describes his experience providing psychotherapy sessions over video as a mental health provider. Burgo has some interesting things to say about expatriates and the psychological problems they confront. But his article suffers a major flaw: he doesn’t realize that his online practice is…

The BART strike hit Bay Area’s 400K daily commuters this morning with a slap in the face. Oakland ferry lines were stretching around the corner and the Bay Bridge has been backed up since 5:30 a.m. KTVU-TV’s @sal_castaneda tweets: In 1997 [the last BART strike] most people couldn’t work from…

Guest Post by Sankalp Garud – a 16-year-old problem solver, math whiz, online learning evangelist and entrepreneur.  You can watch his educational videos on http://YouTube.com/tapthetech I’m glad I can write this post at a time when the education system seems to be in a transition phase. With the development of great free online…

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…

Over the last few weeks of working at VSee, I’ve been realizing that VSee is more than just a videoconferencing tool.  It’s a video collaboration tool.  Of course, it can do the things that videoconferencing does, but on a much more dynamic and work-friendly scale.  It’s the difference between a…

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…

1.  Skype’s beta only allows up to 5 callers—I’ve had an 11-way call* on VSee. 2.  Skype only shares desktop OR video—VSee shows both. 3.  Speaking of screen sharing:  Skype’s screen sharing quality can be sub-par—VSee’s starts pixel perfect. 4.  Skype has little else for collaborative tools—VSee does it all.…

…But it’s just not there yet.  I mean, we’re free for most users, right? So this was an interesting bit of news today from TechCrunch and ViVu. Basically, ViVu created a Skype plug-in called “VuRoom” that will enable multiparty calling and some additional collaboration tools. Aaaand they’re going to charge…

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…

When people ask me how VSee compares to the other solutions in the marketplace, I’ll often say that VSee has the video quality of Polycom or Tandberg, the collaboration features of WebEx or Sametime, and the simplicity of Skype.  I’ll stand by that analysis, but Skype does pretty well on…

This article was originally posted on my personal blog, and was what started my discussions with VSee, resulting in my becoming Chief Product Officer there. Video conferencing has been a popular staple of science fiction at least since Flash Gordon‘s Spaceograph, 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s video call from the moon and,…