We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence and visual collaboration industry with a profile of Tata Communications. You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, Glowpoint, Extron and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here. You can check out Tata's telepresence solutions in our Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog.

Tata Communications is a leading global provider of IP, telepresence and wholesale communications services. With a leadership position in emerging markets, Tata Communications leverages its advanced solutions capabilities and domain expertise across its global and pan-India network to deliver managed solutions to multi-national enterprises, service providers and Indian consumers.

The Tata Global Network includes one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks, a Tier-1 IP network, with connectivity to more than 200 countries across 400 PoPs, and nearly 1 million square feet of data center and collocation space worldwide.

Tata Communications currently (Aug 2010) has 17 public rooms on their network with an additional 25 planned for 2010 enabling broader access to Telepresence for businesses. Together with their Telepresence Exchange service, Tata greatly expands B2B Telepresence calling and global reach for any organisation's business ecosystem of customers, suppliers and partners.

The Carlson Wagonlit Travel Management Institute has released a major report on meetings and events that, among other data points, surveyed 222 meeting planners and requesters from 15 countries across North America and Europe.  One of the major finding is that virtual meetings including telepresence and video conferencing meetings are up substantially over the past three years and headed higher! 96% of survey respondents reported using some type of virtual meeting technology with 50% of respondents reporting that virtual meeting use was growing by more than 10% annually.  The study also found that telepresence rooms were averaging 20 to 25 hours of use per week while videoconferencing rooms were averaging just 2.5 - 4 hours of use per week. The report extrapolated out the cost per hour vs. usage and estimated that videoconferencing cost was $197-$212 per hour vs. telepresence at $204-$211 per hour.  Here is an excellent summary by Sue Hatch, from Meetings.Net and links to the full report.    

Sony has created a prototype cylindrical 3-D display that's 10 inches/27CM tall with a diameter of 5 inches/10cm .

The display produces a true 3-D image where a different proportionally-correct view is visible from each side of the display. There is even a gesture recognition sensor that allows you to turn the objects inside it to see them from all angles.

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff via Video Over Enterprise

There has been a lot of talk in the last months about the democratization of video. If you're not familiar with this term, it basically means that anyone, and everyone, would be able to create, broadcast and share videos. User-generated content (UGC) websites such as YouTube, easy to use video editing solutions such as iMovie, and the successful proliferation of video cameras create a reality where anyone with a camera can become a video producer and broadcaster.

In a recent IMTC2025 panel titled "The Democratization of Video Conferencing" RADVISION's Amir Zmora, together with a few esteem counterparts, discussed the same reality in the video conferencing market. The availability of high quality cameras, even for desktop users, the ability to conduct a video conference in high definition from your desktop, and the improvements in call quality have made video conferencing as popular as ever, allowing anyone, and everyone, to communicate using this technology. What I call a real means of communications.

The signs of the democratization of video calling process are everywhere: Steve Jobs announcing FaceTime, Skype and its likes reporting record numbers, and the continued growth of the video conferencing market.

We continue to expand the Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog, the most comprehensive overview of visual collaboration solutions intelligently explained and organized on the Internet.  This month, in addition to new solutions from MUSION, Aethra.net, BT Conferencing's Global Video Exchange, and the Haivision Furnace, we have added a new section to the catalog (Classifieds & Used Systems) where companies can advertise new and used telepresence, videoconferencing, and visual collaboration solutions as well as services, events, and publications.  Our first advertiser is offering a Polycom 210M RPX System that originally sold for $379,000 for $199,000.  The system is still brand new in its original packing crate with a price reduction of $180,000! You are definitely going to want to bookmark the Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog for future deals like this!

The business lexicon has a new word for meet - it's Vu. It stands for a smarter way to conduct meetings, reviews and interviews without travel. It's redefining telepresence by offering features hitherto unheard of.

The experience of meeting people across the globe using the latest in telecommunication technology, yet feeling as if they were present across the table is VuTelePresence.
We invented the word Vu to redefine the way the world meets each other. Soon, you won't be meeting your CFO in Tokyo, lawyer in Florida, scientist in India, doctor in Chicago or manufacturer in Estonia. You'll be Vuing them.

The convenience of HD quality conferencing with eye contact, life-like images, distortion free sound and easy interoperability could also be listed as our strengths. A technology that gets out of the way and makes it easy for end-users to operate the system without IT intervention, a technology that leverages state of the art techniques to reduce bandwidth requirements even with noisy link quality. And finally, a solution that makes video collaboration affordable and a source of competitive advantage that can be extended to all users in a company.

We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence and visual collaboration industry with a profile of Vidyo.  You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Verizon, Digital Video Enterprises, Iformata, BT Conferencing, Telepresence Tech and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010-2011 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here. You can check out some of Vidyo's telepresence solutions in our Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog.

Vidyo pioneered 'personal telepresence' by being the first to enable multi-party video conferences  with natural, HD-quality interactions over general purpose IP networks using commodity desktop, laptop, and smartphone systems as endpoints. VidyoConferencing uses patented technology which leverages the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard and is recognized for delivering very low latency and error resiliency.

We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence and visual collaboration industry with a profile of HaiVision Network Video.  You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Verizon, Digital Video Enterprises, Iformata, BT Conferencing, Telepresence Tech and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010-2011 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here. You can check out  HaiVision's telepresence solutions in our Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog.

Based in Montreal and Chicago, HaiVision Network Video is a private company and a world leader in delivering the most advanced and intelligent IP video networking technology. HaiVision's products are deployed worldwide within the foremost Fortune 100 companies; in the most rigorous military and defense applications; in state-of-the-art healthcare facilities for video collaboration and training; in highly renowned educational institutions for IPTV, teaching, and remote learning; in the most efficient interactive broadcast applications; and within the world's leading TelePresence suites. HaiVision distributes its products through value-added resellers, system integrators, distributors, and OEMs worldwide.

By Jon Rabiroff via Stars and Stripes

DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Korea -- Security along the DMZ has gone high-tech, as South Korea has quietly installed a number of machine gun-armed robots to serve as the first line of defense against the potential advance of North Korean soldiers.

The stationary robots -- which look like a cross between a traffic signal and a tourist-trap telescope -- are more drone than Terminator in concept, operated remotely just outside the southern boundary of the DMZ by humans in a nearby command center.

Officials refuse to say how many or where the robots have been deployed along the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas, but did say they were installed late last month and will be operated on an experimental basis through the end of the year.

South Korean military officials will then decide how many, if any, robots they want complementing the soldiers who man the area adjacent to the 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, which stretches 160 miles across the peninsula.

"The robots are not being deployed to replace or free up human soldiers," said Huh Kwang-hak, a spokesman for Samsung Techwin, the manufacturer of the SGR-1 robot. "Rather, they will become part of the defense team with our human soldiers. Human soldiers can easily fall asleep or allow for the depreciation of their concentration over time," he said. "But these robots have automatic surveillance, which doesn't leave room for anything resembling human laziness. They also won't have any fear (of) enemy attackers on the front lines."

We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence and visual collaboration industry with a profile of systems integration powerhouse and telepresence & videoconferencing managed service provider AVI-SPL. You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, Glowpoint, Extron and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here. You can check out DVE's telepresence solutions in our Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog

With nearly 40 offices coast-to-coast and international locations in Mexico and Dubai, AVI-SPL stands as a leader in the audio video industry. The company's unmatched expertise highlights a winning combination of more than 700 manufacturer partnerships and a highly-experienced team of certified specialists.

Customers depend on a full suite of resources to meet their unique communications needs, including managed conferencing services for videoconferencing and TelePresence, comprehensive design/build and integration services, and 24/7 support, both on-site and off-site. From classrooms to boardrooms, hotels and government facilities, AVI-SPL has successfully completed more than 25,000 installations worldwide.

We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence and visual collaboration industry with a profile of Digital Video Enterprises. You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, Glowpoint, Extron and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here. You can check out DVE's telepresence solutions in our Telepresence and Videoconferencing Catalog.

As a leading telepresence display and solution provider, Digital Video Enterprises has been recognized by ABI Research as a "Leader in Technology" and having the "Broadest Product Portfolio" in telepresence.  The company recently won "Best in Show" for their Immersive Podium at InfoComm 2010 by Telepresence Options and the company's Immersion Room won the Frost & Sullivan "2009 Global Conferencing Telepresence Product of The Year Award". Many of the company's solutions solve the problem of legacy telepresence and videoconferencing systems which mount cameras above displays so people appear to look down while conversing. DVE's product line truly simulates being there in-person with embedded cameras hidden behind images for true eye contact.  The company's solutions are open platforms for any videoconferencing codec and camera platform and can improve the end-user acceptance, satisfaction, usage, and ROI of existing videoconferencing deployments.

Last week, I attended Cisco Live! (Formerly Cisco Networkers) in Las Vegas which brings together Cisco customers, developers, partners, resellers, and employees from around the world. The event is part trade show, part learning & training, and part celebration. I was interested in what was coming next in telepresence and visual collaboration from Cisco & their eco-system of telepresence and visual collaboration partners. Here is what I found and some images to give you a flavor of the event.

I am in Las Vegas this week attending Cisco Live! Cisco's own personal version of InfoComm that brings developers, Cisco certified engineers, end-users, analysts, and the rest of the Cisco eco-system in from around the world.  The big development of the show so far is that Cisco has launched a tablet computing platform for business and education similar to Apple's iPad.  The device is called Cisco CIUS and it integrates tablet computing capabilities with high-definition interactive video and inter-operability with Cisco TelePresence.  The device is also compatible with a range of Cisco's other collaborative and video applications including Cisco Quad, Cisco Show and Share, WebEx, Presence, and IM.

We have just published the June 2010 edition of the Telepresence Options Telegraph, our newsletter that covers the latest in telepresence technologies and the telepresence industry. You can subscribe Here: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/syndication/