Day 2 of eComm promises to be quite engaging, with a focus on voice and mobile. Perhaps one of the most interesting turn of events has been  how people have dealt with the travel problems that the Icelandic volcano has presented. Quite a few presentations have been cancelled because the speakers were not able to make it to the show. However, a couple have gone forward by presenting remotely via Skype. Martin Geddes is currently discussing cloud communications from his living room in London. The calls have been dropped a couple times, but overall the presentations have been very effective, and provided a good argument for video conferencing in lieu of in person meetings, as well as the value video can bring to a call. Martin’s video dropped out about 5 minutes into his presentation, and it became much less engaging and more difficult to follow the talk with only the audio. But I find it interesting that it took an act of god to get a conference about emerging communication technology to embrace video conferencing as a presentation vehicle.

More after the morning break.

Afternoon Update

The main theme of the late morning/ early afternoon talks was telecom policy, culminating in a panel on the National Broadband Plan. There seemed to be a consensus that it was a good move for the plan to focus on allocating more spectrum (500 MHz worth), as the future of the Internet will be mobile. However, there was quite a bit of disagreement, and spirited discussion, on how to ensure equal access to content, and how that might be regulated. Panelists seemed to be split on if there are adequate tools to measure service, with Richard Bennet from ITIF indicating that websites like Speedtest.net were adequate, while Susan Estrada from FirstMile maintained that there is a lack of standards for service measurement, and that it is difficult to ascertain where in the series of networks which comprise the Internet possible bottlenecks and disruptions of service may occur.

 Perhaps the most contentious issue (no surprise) was net neutrality. There were a lot of great points made, some of which I had never considered. Tracy Rosenberg from Media Alliance was a strong advocate for structural separation and protection for independent voices. Susan countered that the topic of net neutrality is premature and confuses the discussion, which should really focus on internet access, and not content. Richard agreed, pointing out that a third of Americans do not have access to the Internet, and furthermore many Americans do not want to pay for a high speed connection. My first reaction was to also agree with Susan and Richard. It made sense that we should try to get everyone Internet before we worry about regulating it. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why the issues had to be tackled sequentially. If we wait too long to figure out net neutrality, won’t it be harder to enact some sort of reform once we establish an acceptable level of broadband penetration? And aren’t the issues somewhat related anyway? Paul Brigner from Verizon asserted, to no one’s surprise, that Verizon has no interest in blocking service to its subscribers. But, as the panel began to discuss right before they were cut off, access in rural areas is one of the biggest issues in the Broadband Plan. So while Verizon may claim they have no interest in limiting service, they may not have an incentive to provide service to some consumers if the cost of doing so is too high. At that point  there needs to be either regulation to mandate coverage, or a way to subsidize network expansion. Basically, there need to be rules for how service gets provided, and who is responsible for management, which evokes net neutrality in my mind.

There was also a good open discussion around many issues, including the video conferencing ecosystem. From the attendees, it seems like there are still some concerns about quality. But the main issue remains interoperability. I claimed that consumer networks will probably continue to be separate, but enterprises will have to be able to connect. H.264 SVC should hopefully accelerate that. 

 My favorite talk was again something that was a little off the beaten path. Marc Smith evoked my inner social science nerd by introducing us to NodeXL’s analytic abilities for social networks. Really cool stuff.

Time for some coffee.

Late Afternoon Update

The afternoon sessions seem like they are leading up to tomorrow’s sessions pretty nicely. Tomorrow is all about augmented reality, and we have been getting a taste of what is possible with that. For instance, Jason Kolb from Cisco discussed how Google Wave and XMPP can enable social communication apps that help people interact with other folks in their immediate environment, in a very elegant, user-friendly way.

Now, before yesterday, I had no idea what augmented reality was. But over the last 24 hours I have been able to get a bit of a handle on it. Similar to virtual reality, augmented reality uses information from outside one’s current physical environment to enhance their experience. When I first heard this, I thought of people running around with clunky helmets in a lame sci-fi version of the future. But the more I learn about it, the more I can see a practical purpose for AR apps.                                                                                     

One of the most promising areas is mobile communications. If you are already using GPS or navigation services on your phone, wouldn’t you also like to hold the phone up to get even more information in real time about your surroundings, such as when landmarks were founded, or sales at stores in the neighborhood? AR apps give you that by overlaying additional information on top of a more traditional cell phone or camera view.

I am sure I am just scratching the surface, but John G. should be able to dive a little deeper tomorrow.

Last week, Sprint announced that it will release the HTC Evo this summer, making it the first phone to run on Sprint’s 4G network. The Evo will run on the Android OS and the same 1GHz Snapdragon used by the Nexus One. Sprint currently offers 4G service in 27 US cities, covering approximately 30 million users, with a plan to quadruple its coverage by the end of the year.  

Perhaps the most significant feature offered by the Evo is that it has cameras on both sides of the phone. As I see it, the biggest technical hurdle to mobile video conferencing isn’t operator acceptance or network quality (though those are certainly issues) but it is the lack of front facing cameras on the vast majority of smartphones. It is pretty difficult to have a video call if the mobile user is pointing the camera away from himself or herself, or is looking into the camera, but cannot see the screen. GIPS’ VideoEngine Mobile product has been available for over a year, and the first thing we say when asked if someone can use it to develop an application on a given mobile platform is, “yes, but does the phone have a front facing camera?” The enabling technology for mobile video has been there for a while, but phones are just now catching up.

The other important piece of this news is that Sprint’s network should facilitate mobile video conferencing adoption. While video calling is possible over 3G, it should be a lot better over 4G. I mean, 4 is better than 3, right? Well, probably, but it will depend how widespread the coverage is, how easily video calls will be handed off between cells, and if Sprint has the capacity to manage a significant number of users accessing the network at once. Sprint claims 4G download speeds are 10 times faster than those of 3G, but if users are demanding more bandwidth intensive services, will Sprint run into the same problems AT&T experiences from iPhone users overloading the network? Since the Sprint won’t be offering a 4G device for a few more months, there is no way of knowing yet. However, this is something to keep in mind as Sprint steps up its efforts to promote its 4G service.

In recent months LG Electronics, Panasonic and Samsung have announced television sets that allow people to view online content such as videos and photos through an easy-to-use web interface that’s built into the TV. What this also can enable is two way video communications – though the cameras need to be separately purchased from the television.

Earlier this week GIPS held a webinar on the topic ‘Is the Television the next Two-Way Communication Tool?’ If you didn’t have a chance to listen to the webinar, you can always listen to the recorded version. We took polls from the live audience, as what better way to affirm our own research conclusions on the TV as a future two-way communication tool.

We directed 4 polls to the audience and 400 people provided the following results:

As TV audiences have fragmented and evolved their tastes, the television has become less central to the home/family experience.  The evolution of the TV as an interactive device has the ability to take back ground lost as a focal point in the home – recapturing the living room perhaps. 98 percent of poll respondents view the TV as becoming an interactive consumer electronic device and perhaps competing with the PC.

The live webinar audience was a solid mix of broadcast industry professionals, so it was interesting to see their response to this question: Who will benefit most from two-way communication via the TV? There are opportunities for all slices within the broadcast industry but ultimately who will benefit is the user. While we didn’t include the end user in this poll, our assumption was that the TV watcher will ultimately benefit in the long run.

While this next poll would be better directed towards consumers – it was interesting nonetheless to gauge the industry professionals’ opinion.

Finally, we asked the broadcast audience when they see the rollout of interactive programming and TVs. Well it’s already happening and as we discussed in the webinar. Oprah, CNN and Sports reporting are just a few of the places this is already happening.  The times are a changing for the broadcast industry and as Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

It’s not often I see public telephone boxes anymore – they are out there but who uses them? A recent article in the New York Times got me thinking about this archaic piece of equipment. Here in the US, we live in a society where 277 million people subscribe to a mobile phone service.

The ubiquitous home phone is also seeing a decline too. “The decline in the cordless phone market is indicative of a larger story,” says ABI Research practice director Jason Blackwell, “which is that of wireless substitution worldwide. In developed nations a growing number of people are dropping their fixed phone lines altogether in favor of mobile-only services.”

There are a multitude of reasons for this decline: mobile phone usage, cultural, cheaper long-distance calling services, the economy and perhaps relevance. Much like cable television losing out to the Internet, the landline telephone is losing relevance with the introduction of its younger sibling – the sleeker, smarter mobile phone.

However, the television may be set to regain its position in the household and push out its little cousin the telephone.

Only recently at CES did both LG Electronics and Panasonic announce Internet-enabled TV’s and a partnership with Skype. The Television is growing into new and expanded places and could function as both the PC and telephone. The possibilities for content, cable and Telco providers to monetize additional communication services in this way are vast.

Next week – GIPS will be presenting a webinar on the subject, so if you would like to sign up click here.

If two recent reports are any indication, video is quickly becoming crucial to enterprise communications. According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, annual revenues for the Unified Communications market will outpace the enterprise voice market through 2014. While there are many important features included in a UC solution (including voice), video is a prominent component that helps differentiate a UC product from one that only includes voice.

In addition, GIPS released a survey last week of 1,200 business professionals in the US and Asia regarding their use of video conferencing, and discovered some surprising results. Among the findings:

-          In three of the four countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had participated in a video conference or video chat.

-          79% of those who use video conferencing technology rely on consumer applications.

-          The most common reason that participants gave for using video conferencing was to communicate and understand others more clearly and effectively.

-          Video delay and freezing continue to be technical concerns for many users.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, you can find it here.

As long as I have been involved with VoIP the debate whether QoS methods are the solution to providing good voice quality has been ongoing. With QoS methods I refer to protocols that allows for prioritization of packets that have low latency requirements such as VoIP packets. Of course, if from the VoIP applications point of view, the network is perfect you should also expect perfect quality. As a a side point, that is a very reasonable expectation but unfortunately something that is very often not the case. The reasons can be endpoint hardware or software related or a combination of both. I discuss some of the potential issues in a previous blog post.

The reason why QoS methods are not heralded as the savior of VoIP quality (and video for that matter) is that they are often impractical to implement and not as efficient as one might assume. For example, if the amount of data on the network that needs to be prioritized represents a significant portion of the total traffic the scheme will fail completely. Another issue is the impact on the so called background traffic that doesn’t get prioritized and may result in unacceptable behavior of the less prioritized data streams.

QoS methods are successfully used in well managed and controlled networks but because the VoIP traffic often traverses many networks, including the largely unmanaged Internet, rarely can end-to-end prioritization be guaranteed.

because of these limitations of QoS methods it is crucial that any voice or video offering over packet networks deploy endpoints that can compensate for network issues.

So, you may ask, what can I do on my own network? In this article in  ComputerWorld you can learn how to tweak your WiFi router settings to implement QoS on your home network. As I mentioned previously, this will unfortunately only help the performance of the WiFi network and it requires changing the router configuration in a manner most consumers are not aware of or not able to do because of the complexity involved. So, even though I think it is a good idea to make such adjustments they only solve problems on a small portion of the data path for a call (the actual broadband connection is much more often the real culprit) and are unlikely to be done made by most end users. Therefore, as a developer of a VoIP or video over IP product you can never assume that QoS will save you, you have to make sure that your product has been properly designed to mitigate network issues.

The video hype is ever increasing where Cisco buying Tandberg and Logitech buying Lifesize are just two examples. I think the video hype is good news and has written about it a lot.

But, as one of our biggest and most famous customers almost reminds me when I meet them, don’t forget about voice quality. Voice quality is much more important than video quality they say. I totally agree with this!

During a video conference business meeting, the important thing is to have very high quality (HD) voice with robustness. The speech shouldn’t be garbled so that the attendants can’t follow the conversation. Also, a consistent high quality is needed to combat attendant fatigue and increase the effectiveness of the meeting.

Video quality is also very important for the multimedia experience of the attendants. However, if the video sometimes gets a little jerky or freezes, the meeting will still continue as long as you hear what is being said clearly.

I can’t resist pointing out that GIPS is uniquely well positioned to enable our customers to provide the desired end user experience since we started out on the voice side and continuously strive to provide maximum voice quality!

Once again GIPS is sponsoring eComm but this time it’s in Amsterdam. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the conference in California earlier this year, here’s a little more information about the show.

It’s not a tradeshow, it’s not a sales pitch stage and it’s definitely not boring. If you’re a thinker, an innovator or entrepreneur it’s a great place to meet people wearing the same hat – it’s bubbling with ideas, products and futurists  and gathering all these people in one room is no small feat.

While shows like DEMO are great – it’s like trying to get into a nightclub, when you’re underage, don’t have the right attire or if your names not down you’re just not coming in….unless you want to pay nearly $20K. eComm is different; it’s that afterschool gathering of the Mensa Science club with brilliant minds from across the globe in one large conference room discussing emerging communications.

This year, Jan Linden GIPS vice president of engineering will talk about video conferencing with a focus on H.264 SVC. (Above is Jan’s presentation earlier this year on the iPhone.) So if you want to learn more you should seriously think about attending. Our CTO, Roar Hagen will also be at the show too.

It’ll be the best conference you attend this year.

I spent last week up in the Norwegian mountains moose hunting (and yes the hunting was very successful). This is way out in the wilderness, but a couple of years ago a cell tower came to a hilltop. No high speed data though because of limited link capacity out of there.

I brought my new HTC Hero Android phone to test it at this unusual usage scenario. Overall it worked very well. The most impressive thing is that it instantly jumps on a WiFi connection it has seen before. My friend that lives there has WiFi in his house and whenever I was at his house I synched up on email. Data roaming through the cell tower I had turned off. Another nice feature is that it warns for roaming charges.

One complaint I had was that the Microsoft Exchange Synch program was very slow. Don’t know why. The built in Gmail worked much better.

The big thing that happened in our business while I was away (at least for a Norwegian) was Cisco’s bid for Tandberg. In my mind, it further validates video conferencing and our vision at GIPS that anywhere, anytime, high-quality video conferencing is the future.

There are hundreds of millions of Internet and mobile telephone users across the globe that have experienced GIPS voice and video technology roughly the same amount who don’t know they had the experience. It has been a seamless and enjoyable experience  (unless the conversation turned sour…sorry we can’t do anything about that) allowing people to connect more clearly and on a far richer level than the tired old telephone that currently sits in the corner of your office or home – rarely used.

A brief history…The telephone that Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876 and made the first call was ground breaking – it was born out of Bell’s passion and teaching to help deaf people to be fully integrated into society. Nearly four decades later the first transcontinental call was made from New York to San Francisco. There were other improvements but pretty much nothing had changed until recently.

GIPS and HD voice popped along but it still remains pretty much an undiscovered technology to the majority of people around the world. On the one hand that’s a depressing story on the other hand it’s great – a huge opportunity lies ahead. From everyday phone calls, conference calls to emergency services – vast improvements are available and the tide will turn – especially as we migrate from the old copper wire to IP networks that run underground.

But HD voice is not the end of the story, it’s only the beginning. Video chat and video conferencing is becoming more prevalent. As people become more familiar with Skype, Gmail and Yahoo video chat – the more at ease people are with video as a communication channel.

So while we have GIPS engineers across the world, coding, de-bugging and tinkering with the perfection of HD video and voice communication – their biggest goal is not writing cool pieces of code it’s the user experience.

So it was nice to see some outside validation of GIPS’ efforts recently. In a company interview with San Jose Mercury reporter Mike Swift, he wrote:  “In short, the [GIPS video] technology is good enough that you start to forget about the technology, and concentrate on the conversation.”

It was very nice to read and I couldn’t have said it better myself. As our engineers recognize we aim to please our customer and their users. The experience is what matters – that’s why our engineers spend their waking lives trying to figure out how to make the experience both simple and better for users. It also allows our customers to focus on their business by relying on the latest video and voice technology keeping them one step ahead of the game: “Yahoo says its video chat traffic is up since it launched its latest version of Messenger with the GIPS technology … people in video conversations … now spend double the time per call as people on audio-only calls.”

So from Mr. Bell’s telephone call back in 1915 when Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson, (his former associate) talked and “heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago,” we now have video and you can see more clearly and communicate far better than before.

That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Back in 1915 the charge for a telephone conversation between New York and San Francisco was $20.70 for the first three minutes, and $6.75 for each minute thereafter. That same five-minute call today from San Francisco to New York cost would cost the equivalent of $756 in today’s money. Today we can video chat, have HD calls for much, much less.