Dear Marissa, At Heidy Maldonado’s wedding 10 years ago at the Stanford Memorial Church, I shared with you my dream of creating a simple tool that lets people work remotely with the same productivity of physically being together. I am now the CEO of VSee – a video chat and…
With revenues down, Logitech is looking to unload its video conferencing division, which include LifeSize and Mirial in the next 90 days. Logitech acquired LifeSize for $405M in 2009 just as video conferencing and telepresence were on their way up. These days the high-end video conferencing market is much tougher.…
Zoom.us, the hottest new video conferencing company, is revealing its paid UMX (Unified Meeting Experience) offering for businesses. Zoom previously raised $3M in angel funding. It has also just raised $6M in series A funding, from some of the biggest names such as Qualcomm Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and…
Early last quarter, Polycom made some exciting announcements about its newest product — RealPresence CloudAXIS, which will be available March 2013. What makes CloudAXIS so exciting is that it allows you to video conference with others without bothering about which service they normally use. As GigaOm tech blogger Stacey Higginbotham…
In an earlier article I had said that Google Hangouts had dropped Vidyo in favor of WebRTC. I made a mistake. Google Hangouts has NOT dropped Vidyo. Moreover, Vidyo executives have contacted me to let me know that “Google has a great relationship with Vidyo”. I have checked my sources and verified that Vidyo is…
Updated July 9, 2014 So Google really has dropped the Vidyo plugin for Hangouts as it switches over to its VP8 video codec. It’s still not on WebRTC, although it’s surely getting there. On dev versions of Chrome, Google Hangouts is now plugin-less. In my article on VSee vs. Google+ Hangouts, I…
After returning from an awesome trip to Gabon where VSee connected Harvard Medical School to the Alfred Schweitzer Hospital (HAS), I had lunch with Gabon Ambassador Michael Moussa-Adamo in DC last weekend. It was an opportunity to brainstorm ways to celebrate and share with the public the centennial of HAS’s founding in…
by NW Indiana artist Steve Johnson With Nefsis (now OmniJoin) being acquired by Japan-based Brother Industries, I thought it was a good time to revisit Nefsis and see how its video conferencing product has matured since I first tried it in graduate school. Early this week, we got a group…
maternity ward at Albert Schweitzer In a previous blog post, Penny talked about the unique opportunity we had to travel to Gabon to deploy VSee telemedicine for the The Albert Schweitzer Hospital (HAS). The hospital was the first one to be established in Gabon nearly 100 years ago and continues…
Are VSee and ooVoo really that different? After all we both claim to have HD video conference, ongoing collaboration, free video calls, and no need for fancy equipment. While I can’t tell you if VSee is the ooVoo alternative for your needs, I will point out some issues with video quality,…
Several people have commented on the speculative nature of my earlier article on the TokBox acquisition being a semi-fire sale. I want to give our readers a more thorough explanation for my statements. When a company is acquired for more than $20-30M, typically the price is leaked, since the acquiring…
Last week, a struggling TokBox announced its acquisition by Telefónica Digital for an undisclosed amount. This is a pretty sad news for TokBox and its investors. They raised a lot of money, and given this is a semi-fire sale, its investors lost money. Also, its people, who have worked long…
Airtime is the latest venture of Napster co-creators and entrepreneur superstars Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. However, just four months into their video chat foray, and these masterminds are floundering in the same snafu that has muddled many a great mind since even before the first public videophone was developed in 1936. The key reason:…
Last week was a big week for Polycom as it drummed up business with a bunch of new video conference offerings. Perhaps the biggest eye-catcher was its RealPresence CloudAXIS suite, aimed to help Polycom cash in on the mobile trend in enterprise video conferencing. According to Jim Kruger, senior VP…
The newly launched Zoom Video Communications hit the waves last Tuesday and received a rave review from WSJ’s Walt Mossberg. In his AllThingsD review of Zoom, Mossberg was wowed by Zoom’s “free, high-definition, group video calls for up to 15 people simultaneously,” its ability to work over “wired and WiFi Internet connections, or…
Airtime was launched on Tuesday by the founders of Napster – Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. This Chatroulette-inspired random video chat service seems to have piqued the curiosity of even Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The event was filled with celebrities, but with so much fanfare, 2 years of work, and…
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…
Yesterday Heyward Drummond from Adobe Systems commented on the VSee blog: “Rest assured Adobe Connect which was just named by PC Magazine as the best Web Conference Solution for 2011 is not going away. Adobe is concentrating it’s sales and marketing efforts (sales force) on government and education markets. The U.S. Dept.…
