Remember way back when, when phone calls didn’t include video? I miss these days. Unbeknownst to my clients — sans the occasional siren or Harley Davidson motorcyclist, there were many, many times where I would jump on a call with them and walk, and walk and walk while strategizing. I loved it. Not only was […]
Zoom just delivered a few new updates for the Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars application as well as announced new hardware solutions for Zoom Rooms. Adding something called “vanishing pen annotation,”a Zoom user can now highlight text or objects on the shared screen without having to undo or erase highlight annotations. Use the vanishing pen […]
Many years ago, I worked for a facilities-based CLEC selling POTS (plain old telephone services), DSL, T1 (1.5 Mbps), bonded T1 lines (3 Mbps), phone systems and VoIP (voice-over-IP) solutions. This experience helped me to really understand the business criticality of quality-of-service internet bandwidth and continues to help me to this day. After IT/telecom, I […]
As businesses and educational institutions prepare for the return to work, meeting rooms and classrooms will see heavy technology investments to support hybrid work and learning. Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, State of the Global Video Conferencing Devices Market, Forecast to 2025, finds that by 2025, the number of video conferencing devices, including room-based endpoints, […]
Have you seen the movie “Groundhog Day”? You know, the one where Bill Murray is forced to repeat one day over and over? Well, here it is a quarter past Groundhog’s Day 2021, and I don’t think any of us expected that we’d still be conducting our lives — business and otherwise — online. But […]
I formally joined Zignage (CMS software solution company) on Feb. 3, 2020, and attended ISE 2020 in Amsterdam from Feb. 10-12. On March 3, I attended the New York Build 2020 Expo at the Javits Center and continued going into New York City for meetings — March 9 (my office) and March 12 (small vendor […]
I’ve written at length this past year about how COVID has affected, well, everything. The adaptions we’ve all had to make to our changing circumstances have been pervasive. I was just organizing all my paperwork to send to our accountant for my taxes. My total travel/work expenses for 2020 added up to $440. In a […]
Skype, FaceTime and now Zoom. Each of the past several iterations of videoconferencing have a few things in common. First, they became part of the consumer lexicon, becoming verbs, in fact. Second, they became popular because of their use by, and availability to the general consumer. Only Zoom, however, grew at what can be described […]
This month, Nvidia announces an open beta for Omniverse, a 3D simulation and collaboration platform — and Maxine, a cloud-native streaming video AI platform. It’s now a phygital world — and as the physical and digital worlds fuse to simulate reality in real time and with pixel perfect detail, the company that AV should pay […]
THIS IS A PROMOTED POST Times are changing, and today’s hybrid working world — with some people at home and some in the office — means team collaboration is more necessary than ever. We’ve got a great story to share with you today, and we hope you’ll read it in full, but let’s be realistic; […]
There’s no doubt that Microsoft Teams has been playing catch-up with Zoom for months; some would argue years. But, this week, Microsoft upped its game by adding a host of features that even Zoom power-users will love. Here’s a summary look at each one: Together Mode: Together mode re-imagines meeting experiences to help participants feel […]
By Kane McKenna Futuresource Consulting The rate of growth in the office based headset market has been steadily increasing in recent years. A key driver of this has been the rising importance of video conferencing, explored in Futuresource’s 2020 Video Conferencing report. Many end users have been looking to improve their videoconferencing experience, leading to […]
By Chris Evans Futuresource Consulting The challenge for many businesses to facilitate home working at scale has proven to be a major catalyst in making video an everyday business tool. This has been one of the most significant operational and cultural changes businesses have faced in decades and has proven to be a fast-track education […]
I’d never heard the term “double join” until a few months ago on a call with one of our board members, John Case, who is a great resource to talk with if you’re researching the world of video conferencing. John spent a long time at Microsoft building the Office 365 product family and now puts […]
Videoconferencing solutions continue to move into the commercial foreground, with videoconferencing hardware achieving pre-COVID-19 volume and value growth of 28% and 9% respectively in 2019, according to a new report from Futuresource Consulting. The report covers all aspects of videoconferencing hardware; it also combines desk research, sales data from vendors across seven key geographies and […]
By Adam Cox Futuresource Consulting It is not an exaggeration to say that the world as we know it will be forever changed once we emerge from the all-engulfing COVID-19, with one of the major shifts being how we choose to work effectively in the workplace moving forward. Ultimately, collaboration technology is at the center […]
By Adam Cox Futuresource Consulting Populations are adjusting to COVID-19, with social distancing orders having compelled people to find alternatives to face-to-face meetings. As a result, cloud video conferencing solutions have never been more popular. With hundreds of millions of people now working from home, vendors such as Cisco, Lifesize and Microsoft have responded to […]
Less than a week after Facebook Launched Messenger Rooms — a videoconferencing platform designed to take on Zoom and Microsoft Teams — Kaltura, known for its lecture capture and storage platform, is entering the videoconferencing market, too. Kaltura Meetings, according to the company, is a “video communication and collaboration suite of products to take enterprise […]
The video communications provider, Pexip, today announced a record 50% year-on-year growth in contracted annual recurring revenue (ARR) after the first quarter of 2020, further enhancing the recently reported growth of 32% in 2019. Q1 2020 finished with a significant increase in delta annual recurring revenue (DARR) of 9.5MUSD, giving a total contracted annual recurring […]
With everything that is going on around us, we are seeing plenty on the news and about folks having to work remotely. Over the coming weeks and months, we will see quite a bit about how we’re not keeping up and that business continuity is failing. Based on what I am observing first-hand from my […]
Lifesize has released a new set of capabilities designed to help IT administrators remotely support videoconferencing through the Lifesize Admin Console. Available immediately worldwide, Lifesize customers can now leverage real-time reporting, refreshed dashboards and live meeting statistics to monitor network performance, call quality and organization-wide videoconferencing usage. With real-time reporting and live meeting statistics, admins […]
Zoom released a handful of new Zoom Phone features recently including expanded on-net calling and additional contact center integration. And, the Zoom App Marketplace just topped 200 app offerings. Here are some of the highlights from its latest Zoom platform release. Zoom Phone: On-net calling to audio conference phone numbers: If you’re a metered and […]
ClearOne has received Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (“Zoom”) certification for its UNITE professional videoconferencing cameras. The Zoom-certified UNITE 50 4K camera is USB plug-and-play ready with a 120-degree field-of-view, digital zoom and the ability to pair with any microphone/speaker combination. The camera’s ultra-wide-angle field-of-view is ideally suited for visual communication and collaboration in huddle spaces […]
Enplug has added the ability to broadcast Zoom video conferences via Enplug’s digital signage platform. Enplug’s new Zoom App is freely available to Enplug users via the company’s App Market. Enplug’s new Zoom App streamlines the process of broadcasting live events and presentations to multiple screens. From within Enplug’s Zoom App, users create a new […]
Pexip announced the release of “Adaptive Composition” to add real-time face detection, auto-framing and optimized use of screen real estate during UCC calls. The features seem pretty straightforward, but a lot of artificial intelligence went into making this happen: Participant auto-framing: Often, users do not realize how their video camera is framed in a meeting, […]
By David Danto Director of UC Strategy and Research, Poly Turning the page into a new decade gives us the opportunity to put our past into perspective and predict where we’re going. In the world of unified communications and collaboration, this exercise reveals a space that is eliminating most of the poor experiences and exploding […]
Remember when Polycom and Cisco were always mentioned in the same sentence? Seems like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, huh? Do you remember when we were all saying, “Why don’t Polycom and Cisco just make their stuff interoperable?” Well, that was what led to their ultimate demise — in […]
Kandao Technology is now shipping its 8K, 360-degree videoconferencing camera dubbed Kandao Meeting. Kandao Meeting combines two high-quality fisheye lenses, eight mic arrays and a speaker. It can be put in the center of a meeting room to capture all the attendees at 8K resolution, while automatically focusing on people as they speak. The remote […]
Earlier this month at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced that soon Microsoft Teams, the company’s web based video meeting and productivity applications, would be natively compatible with Zoom and later WebEx. If you missed this part of the story, rAVe founder Gary Kayye wrote about it here and it’s been a very popular article, especially in […]
TrueConf announced this week a new offering called TrueConf Group, a videoconferencing endpoint with built-in MCU that boasts high-quality video and audio clarity. TrueConf Group will be available for shipping globally sometime this fall in multiple configurations as ready-to-use kits for meeting rooms. TrueConf Group includes: 1080p60 video and content and enables users to share […]
Jabra announced today that Zoom Video Communications, Inc. selected the Jabra PanaCast as the video solution for its new telepresence capability, Zoom Rooms Speaker Switching. Announced this week at Zoomtopia, Zoom’s user conference, the Zoom Rooms Speaker Switching is an added feature to Zoom Rooms. (Zoom Rooms equips every sized conference room with all of […]
Zoom Video Communications just announced at Zoomtopia 2019 (its annual user conference) that major additions are coming to its software platforms. All of these, which are outlined below, will be become available on the platform by the end of January 2020. New Zoom Rooms Appliances: These are purpose-built Zoom Rooms hardware devices that Zoom is […]