The InfoComm Trade Show is the world's largest gathering of AV professionals and the world's largest exhibition of telepresence and visual collaboration technologies.  This year's show attracted over 32,000 AV professionals from more than 90 countries and 925 exhibitors who took up 475,000 square feet of exhibition space.  Telepresence and visual collaboration was well represented this year with new exhibitors, major product announcements, and demonstrations of telepresence group systems, environments, podiums, kiosks, video network infrastructure, inter-networking, and managed service solutions.  Telepresence Options was there and we are pleased to provide you our complete review and our first ever "Best of Show" awards. 

InfoComm 2010 was, as usual, a whirlwind of activity and complete sensory overload.  It is a challenge to try and take in the whole show especially with a diary full of scheduled meetings, seminars, and panel discussions.  Even though I was there the whole week I feel like only saw between 65-75% of what I am interested in or should have seen. 

My main takeaway from InfoComm is that the state of the telepresence and visual collaboration industries are vibrant, dynamic, and growing.  New solutions continue to appear, price points, capabilities and quality-of-experience all continue to improve, and the utility of who can be reached and what can be accomplished using visual collaboration continues to expand. 

One thing that remains the same is the industry is still debating the exact definition of the word: "telepresence".  I participated in the IMCCA's "Ask the Experts Panel" and we devoted the first 20 minutes of the panel discussing the meaning of the word.  For the record, my own definition remains: "Visual collaboration solutions that address the human factors of participants and attempt to replicate, as closely as possible, an in-person experience."

Whatever the industry ultimately decides to call the revolution that we call: telepresence, the world is connecting together via video, beginning to collaborate on data, and the solutions are becoming more natural, intuitive, and easier to use than ever before.

InfoComm 2010 kicked off with a keynote and technology demonstration from one of the industry's leading lights: Marthin De Beer, who runs the Emerging Technology Business Unit at Cisco and has been mentioned as a potential successor for John Chambers when he retires.  Marthin wowed the crowd with a demonstration of what I am calling, for lack of a better moniker: Video Network Intelligence or the ability for the network to understand/transcode/transcribe/classify/metatag/catalog/secure/manage/distribute and otherwise take video content generated from multiple sources (telepresence and visual collaboration environments, flip cameras, traditional videography, broadcast/narrowcast capture, etc.) and make that video content more easily findable, accessible, and usable in enterprise and educational environments.

Marthin demonstrated a number of new Cisco technologies that were both in production and coming soon with the key technologies being Cisco Show and Share and Cisco Pulse (See Below).  The demo took the live feed of Marthin's speech and digitized it, transcribed it to text on the fly, added the appropriate lower thirds with the Cisco logo and Marthin's name, meta-tagged the video with his key concepts, and then transcoded the video to make it available on multiple platforms including the iPad.  The video was also seamlessly uploaded to Cisco Show and Share (which can best be described as "Secure YouTube for the Enterprise" where he demonstrated the ability to search the video for a specific soundbite by key word and immediately view that section.  Marthin also demonstrated Cisco Pulse which catalogs expertise in an organization by scanning the content traversing the network to determine who the experts in a particular topic are and enabling instant collaboration.  Marthin also demonstrated the ability for the network to recognize new content that is applicable to an employee's interest or job and automatically notify that new relevant content was available.

The second major trend was interoperability of telepresence environments and videoconferencing endpoints and the inter-connectivity of telepresence and videoconferencing networks both enterprise through exchange service providers and traditional carriers.  This is one of the most important trends as improving interoperability and interconnectivity of networks improves the utility of telepresence and visual collaboration as more and more organizations are able to connect to their business partners, vendors, and customers in higher quality.

Interconnectivity of Networks - Glowpoint and Tata announced a partnership to connect their telepresence and videoconferencing exchange offerings and then Tata and BT announced an agreement to connect as well.  York Telecom was showing off their recently announced WAVE Business-to-business exchange service.  Shortly after the show Tata and Telefonica announced a partnership to connect their telepresence exchange offerings as well. Carriers and enterprise networks continue to come together in telepresence and videoconferencing exchanges to connect their networks to pass high bandwidth video at high-quality which is enabling inter-company visual communications which, in turn, is raising the utility, value, and ROI of deploying effective visual collaboration.

One of the topics that I have been writing on and speaking on for a number of years is the virtuous cycle of effective visual collaboration pricing and quality:  The cost of all the major components of telepresence and effective visual collaboration environments is dropping  as quality and capabilities are skyrocketing.  Some examples:

• Bandwidth is getting cheaper as submarine cables continue to land around the world increasing network reach and Quality-of-Service on and between IP networks improves.
• Video and audio codecs are getting cheaper as quality goes ultra HD and audio goes wide-band.
  
• Flat-panel displays are getting larger as prices drop through the floor.
• etc. etc. etc.
  

This dynamic continues.  During last year's InfoComm both Polycom, TANDBERG, and LifeSize announced HD videoconferencing appliances around the $6,000 mark.  This year I saw at least 3-4 companies demonstrating HD videoconferencing appliances at $5,000 or less.  Vu TelePresence has dropped the cost of an HD videoconferencing appliance with data collaboration to $2995... $6995 with two 63 inch flat screen displays. Many of the most sophisticated desktop software clients on the market are free.

I believe we are seeing the telepresence and visual collaboration market separating into:

• Free/freemium/essentially free software-based codecs on the desktop/laptop that continue to integrate into unified communications platforms
  
• Low-cost, high-quality video appliances for SMBs and general purpose corporate conference rooms that will be integrated with better display technologies and collaborative tools
  
• High-end telepresence environments that will continue to get more and more realistic with improving capabilities for data collaboration that will become publicly available in a variety of formats.
  
• A robust market for the back-end video network infrastructure, video network intelligence, portals, managed services, collaboration peripherals, telepresence robots, and other solutions that make the growing numbers of telepresence and video endpoints more capable and easy-to-use. 
  

Trend # 4 - Telepresence Robotics






This is our 3rd year to do a comprehensive review of the latest and greatest at InfoComm but we have never given out awards before (although last year we did drop some hints).  I decided to take the plunge this year and make it official so I could get everyone mad at me.  Next year I am thinking about having my kids make some official looking awards out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue.  If you disagree with any of my picks or feel like I have forgotten anyone then I have opened up a discussion thread @ Telepresence Industry Professionals, our industry association on Linked In which we like to call the "Telepresence Industry Cool Kids Club".  We are almost at 1,400 members globally.

I thought this new 3-D HD Kiosk from TelePresence Tech was a natural for the big box retailers who often have more complicated products than they do product specialists to answer questions.  Potential customers can use the kiosk to access product information and even place orders using the touch screen interface.  If they have questions then the system can instantly connect them with a live product specialist to answer questions, help with configuration, or complete the sale. The kiosk can be customized with an organization's look/feel and provides the customer with an eye-contact experience with the rep (but the rep does not have the same experience with the customer because of the placement of the camera).  The kiosk, like all of TelePresence Tech's solutions, serves as an open platform for any videoconferencing system.

RadVision came to InfoComm announcing a new line of visual collaboration solution for SMB companies, but the solution that I found most interesting was their new "Telepresence Feature" that enables multi-party calls between different vendors group telepresence systems using the Scopia Elite MCU. The new capability supports telepresence group systems from Cisco, TANDBERG, Polycom, and Logitech/LifeSize as well as a wide variety of traditional videoconferencing endpoints.

Teliris, which usually saves up its major announcements for InfoComm, made a number including the industry's first 3D telepresence system, a relatively low cost "home telepresence" solution that extends their platform to home offices, and an iPad app that provides system control, scheduling, and ultimately touch sensitive collaborative tools but the solution that I found most interesting was their new executive system that provides a 41.5 " curved panoramic display that extends the Teliris group system experience to the desktop.  I told Teliris CEO Mark Trachtenberg that I thought the key to the success of this solution was to make it as capable a multi-monitor display when it is not in conference mode.

Best of Show - Videoconferencing Appliance
Vu TelePresence Premier

One of the trends that I discussed above was the cost of video conferencing endpoints coming down at the same time that quality was headed up.  Vu TelePresence is one of the companies that is taking the cost out of videoconferencing appliances while building a quality solution that rivals established players.  The new Vu TelePresence premier is capable of 720P HD video, has an embedded MCU, the ability to record up to 1500 hours of conferencing, and a webconferencing capability for data collaboration for participants over the internet. 

The appliance alone costs $2995, $3990 with  one 50" flat panel, $5000 with two, $4995 with a single 63" flat panel display or $6995 with two 63" displays.

In July the company is coming out with a free PC client that will allow a Vu endpoint to webcast to up to 50 remote participants for free.  Each additional participant will be $1 more per session.

I thought the best partnership deal of the show was the announcement that HP & Vidyo were joining forces.  The deal gives Vidyo a super-strong distribution partner for its software-based video solutions which will now be bundled with HP hardware. HP gets a next-generation software based codec and MCU-less multi-point upon which to build the next generation of its HP Halo telepresence offering on.  It was last year at InfoComm that telepresence group system provider Teliris announced that it had built it's 6th Generation telepresence solution on the Vidyo platform.

Here is an excellent analysis of the HP Vidyo deal by Wainhouse Research Senior Partner Andrew Davis and interviews with Vidyo's CEO Ofer Shapiro and HP's Darren Podrabsky.

Glowpoint and Tata Communications



Other Interesting Items of Note
LifeSize Communications Partners with LG

The LifeSize LG Executive with a 24" screen and a $2999 price tag

LG and Logitech/LifeSize Communications announced a new HD executive conferencing system using a 24" LG display, integrated camera, and a Logitech/LifeSize codec.  The system is designed to be compatible with IP/PBX installations to allow the system to be connected to mainstream unified communications technologies from vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Asterisk, Avaya, Broadsoft, Cisco, Microsoft and Shoretel.

CompTIA and InfoComm International Join Forces