As rumoured here a couple of weeks ago, Cisco have launched their home telepresence in the US. Named umi, it offers full HD 1080p video calling through your TV.
This could be an interesting development, because home use of this kind of technology can only help drive corporate adoption.
To use it you need a umi box, camera and remote which will set you back $599.00, as well as a subscription of $24.99 per month which gets you unlimited calls. You’ll also need an HDTV to plug everything into, as well as a broadband connection.
It’s greatest plus point as I see it, is the decision to centre it around the existing TV, rather than creating an entirely separate device. There isn’t a great deal of information on the website, but it certainly looks like it should be fairly simple to operate judging by how few buttons there are on the remote.
Of course the obvious down side is that you can only connect to someone else who has umi, and it may be some time before it gets past the early adopter audience.
Oh, and before anyone in the UK gets too excited, it could be that the broadband requirements would be a stumbling block if Cisco are considering a roll out here. It requires an upload speed of 1.5Mbps for 720p and 3.5Mbps for 1080p. Just in case that wasn’t clear that’s the upload speed. I’m using a 24Mbps service, which gives me an actual 16Mbps download speed but I’m lucky if I can get an upload speed of 1Mpbs (according to Cisco’s test, I managed 0.933Mbps).
Tag: telepresence
Home Telepresence Coming This Week (Rumour)
There are plenty of rumours running around that at a scheduled press event on Wednesday morning Cisco will be unveiling consumer telepresence. According to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital the hardware will cost between $200 and $500 in the US, although the lower price may be subsidised by the network carrier.
There’s no doubt that the full telepresence experience is impressive, but will the same experience be possible when piped through your home TV or PC?
We’ll have to wait until Wednesday to see if the rumours are true, but if they are is this something that you would be interested in using at home?
Interoperability Matters
Despite the increasing use of web conferencing, instant messaging, and social media tools in the workplace, email shows no sign of disappearing. There are plenty of arguments for and against email, but it has one very big plus that most other systems don’t have; no matter which email system you’re using, you know it’s interoperable with everyone else’s email system.
Imagine if GMail users could only email other GMail users, or if you could only email other people inside your organisation. Of course, it would take away most of the benefits of using email. It works because everyone adopted the same set of standards, and although there may sometimes be inconsistencies with style and formatting, you know you can usually rely on the message being delivered.
The same can’t be said for web conferencing and telepresence platforms, and it’s easy to understand why the platform vendors like to keep things closed; they usually work on a per seat licence basis that wouldn’t stand up to a more open model. It’s hard to imagine email (or the telephone, mobile phones or text messaging) becoming as commonplace as they have, if the user was tied to a particular vendor, software, hardware or network.
I’d like to see this same open approach to standards applied to web conferencing, because I’m sure that it would increase overall adoption. It seems to me that the budget decision to invest in this kind of platform must be easier to justify if you can demonstrate more opportunities to use it.
Things may be heading in the right direction. When Cisco aquired Tandberg, they announced that they would be adopting their own Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and that they would open source it, a commitment that they recently delivered on. It allows interoperability between Cisco and Tandberg telepresence systems, as well as any third party system that supports it. At the moment that’s limited to Cisco’s own Webex Meeting Centre, and Microsoft Office Communicator, but let’s hope that other vendors adopt the same standard, rather than introducing their own.
Cisco Acquires Tandberg
Cisco today announced the acquisition of Tandberg, a Norwegian video communications company. Tandberg offer a range of hardware and software solutions from personal video conferencing through to high end Telepresence solutions, as well as network and content infrastructure tools and professional services.
According to their press release “This proposed acquisition would combine TANDBERG’s best-in-class telepresence and video conferencing portfolio with Cisco’s world-class collaboration architecture and network capabilities.”
This is a significant acquisition for Cisco, that clearly indicates a belief that there is a growing market for virtual communication technologies.
Cisco shows the way with TelePresence
Extract from The Economist showing Cisco’s use of its own Telepresence technology.
This week’s Economist contains an interesting feature on Cisco. In Reshaping Cisco: The world according to Chambers, the article reports on Cisco’s own prolific use of it’s top-end video conferencing tool TelePresence:
“The firm—to borrow a choice Silicon Valley expression—eats a lot of its own dog food: digital tools that allow cheap and efficient communication. These include wikis, social networking and web-based collaboration services, of course. But the most important tool is TelePresence, so that nuances such as body language and tone of voice, essential ingredients of face-to-face meetings, are no longer lost. The number of TelePresence meetings at Cisco averages 5,500 a week. This has also helped the firm to cut its annual travel budget by $290m, or more than half.”