Could you ditch email?

Read the Cisco article here first, titled "Could You Ditch Email for Spark Overnight?" Then come back and continue reading below.

For "all internal communication" a room based chat app (whatever you want to call it these days) can work. However, only if you're in complete control of your entire team and their communication devices will it work fully. One key person whose device, network or ideology fits outside of the scope and it's a bust.

From the blog:
"If team members wanted to stay informed of what was happening in Switzerland, they needed to be part of the Swiss Spark room. All key information—weekly news, win messages, organizational announcements and changes, and all other official communication"

This is an interesting comment. Were all these pieces of information previously done through email?  Are they creating more unimportant things for everyone to read just "because they can"? Here lies my main issue with chat apps, you can get flooded with new things to read, some important, some not. You'll end up with people who feel the incessant need to over share so everyone else is forced to weed through the junk to find the relevant information.

Adoption, usage and productivity rely on a few key factors - and this could be said about any new form of communication tool:

1. Understanding why there needs to be a switch - is communication being missed in the current method?
2. Top to bottom buy in and a desire to switch.
3. The time to switch with the understanding that with each new tool comes a learning curve.
4. Making sure people don't use emojis or post pictures of dinner and use the tool like a professional.
5. Being able to wrangle in the people who abuse the new method of communication - remember when you first had email and all the chain letters and other sorts of bullshit you received (uh, and still get)?

Of course their line of reasoning is solid to eat their own brand of dog food and switch/ditch, write a blog about it and use it for marketing. I can't argue with that.

Auto Zoom and Tracking Cameras; do they work?

Auto zooming and tracking cameras are now whittled down to price points that anyone can afford. But the real question isn't "should I buy one", but it's more "do they work".

I'm in video conferences for several hours per week. Many of the far end points have auto tracking cameras, either Polycom's Eagle Eye Director or Producer or Cisco's Speaker Track. If you've ever been in a meeting with one these that are active on the other end, you'll know it immediately.

You'll know them because:

• The camera moves around, sometimes without reason
• The camera takes 3-4 seconds to pan over to whoever is talking (and by that time, they may be done talking)
• You start waiting for it to move - and that's completely distracting.

Imagine if you're in an important meeting and you start sneezing. Guess what, you end up on camera front and center so everyone can see you sneeze. Well, actually since the delay is so long, they get to see you wipe your nose instead. Great, isn't it? This technology assumes that only one person is ever going to speak at a time. The problem is, meetings aren't like that. Meetings aren't just one person in site A talking to one person at site B. They are dynamic with sometimes several people speaking at once.

Not to mention that most people who have them tell me they turn them off because they simply "don't work".

It's best to see actual demonstrations of the products versus marketing videos. These two videos speak for themselves.

Notice the length of time it takes to switch. The people who stopped talking look a little lost.

If you're considering one of these products, or one of the new USB offerings out there, take it for a long test drive. If you are the decision maker, don't put it in your room, put it in a room you talk to often. That way YOU can get an idea of the pros and cons of the technology.

Cisco Spark Board

https://www.ciscospark.com/products/spark-board.html

2017.1.24
Cisco introduced the Spark Board today and here are some random thoughts about it.

Unlike most things in video conferencing, I like it. While it reminds me of a giant iPad, I think it's pretty cool. Revolutionary? Maybe not so much. A step forward and in the right direction? Sure.

The only thing I really don't like is the camera, or more exactly, its location. A whiteboard is used for stand up work and putting the camera up top will create a much worse video capture for seated participants than a typical PTZ in its typical location (which is already horrible). This is why I'm adamant about dual screen use - at least there is somewhere intelligent to put the damn camera.

You won't be mounting a touch screen at anything other than what would be considered appropriate for writing on it while standing. That's much higher than a display that's used traditionally in video conferencing at the end of your board room or huddle space. The 55" is going to be bad enough, but I think the 70" version will put the camera so high that the experience will be quite poor.

With any camera that sits that high, your visual experience is better the farther away the remote participants sit from it. However, since the idea is to touch the screen it throws that theory out the window.

Everything else is cool and useful.

Pricing is $4990 for the 55" and $9990 for the 70" each with a $199 monthly service fee. Not something for the small businesses out there.

It was highlighted during the product introduction about ease of use of the product and of Spark itself. What needs to be said again, is that ease of use does not necessarily mean a better user experience. Read my blog HERE for more on that.

I won't comment on Rowan's remark about his camera engineers forgetting more about video conferencing cameras than what anyone else knows.

As a side note, I hope the MX series follows suit with at the very least smaller cameras.

Spark is a great start

Today from Ohio, I watched Rowan's keynote live from Enterprise Connect in Florida. It was all about Spark. I really appreciate the direction Cisco is taking with this, mainly from a meeting control standpoint (as I am not into virtual chat room things at this moment). Even though this is a great start, there are some hiccups in the thought process. Let's dive into it.

Polycom Realpresence Debut vs Cisco SX10

With the recent release of the Polycom Realpresence Debut, it makes sense to compare it with its nearest competitor, made by Polycom's nearest competitor, Cisco's SX10. Keep in mind that I've not tested either product, it's strictly a subjective by the paper review. So let's just call it a preview instead.

On to it.

November 2015 around the industry

The news, views and reviews for what I think are important things around the video conference industry.

The most important news item for obvious reasons is Cisco's acquisition of Acano for a few bucks. For every reason out there, this makes absolute sense and is a great pickup for Cisco. I've yet to read any logical case in opposition, save for the purchase price. The only thing I would be interested in is the length of term the Acano guys had to sign for before the golden handcuffs come off. In my opinion, in about five to seven years from now we'll be seeing some cool and very innovative stuff come our way repeating history.

Vaddio introduced a new camera, the ClearSHOT 10 this month. While it is a pan tilt zoom (PTZ) camera, it does have one thing really going for it. The design. Hats off to whoever is the designer of it. It's beautiful. It was smart to make it in colors friendly to the industry.

I got a new laptop to replace my battery suckfest of the Acer Transformer. It's my first Chromebook, but since I mostly work within the Google ecosystem, it made sense to get one. The battery life is outstanding and better than I had hoped. The Acer will take up permanent residence in our company conference room as a control PC. Okay, so that had nothing to do with video conferencing, but oh well.

No one has wondered, but I thought I would let everyone know what I've been up to since I've been fairly quiet on the blog and social media fronts for the last couple of months. There's been very little time to devote to the fun stuff - yes I consider writing and pontificating about video conferencing as "fun stuff", don't judge. As Array presses forward, I've been spending most of my time on product development with our camera and processor. It's been a tough couple of years working for a startup but the look in the eyes of people we are demonstrating it to makes it fulfilling so I'm keeping the big picture in mind. At some point I'll post a long (too long) blog about the genesis of the technology and the product since it did start in the living room of my old farmhouse. But for now, I'll continue to be relatively low on the radar simply due to lack of time and not lack of opinion. I keep trying to write Array related articles but I get torn between trying to promote the product I work on and keeping an objective eye on the industry so the Array stuff will be few and far between.

That's all for now.
Bryan

August 2015 Around the Industry

Here are some interesting items of note for August 2015 around the video conference industry.

Although it happened in July, the reigns were officially handed over to Chuck Robbins as the new CEO of Cisco. To celebrate John Chambers leaving, Cisco threw a huge party, spent a ton of money on it, and laid off some employees. Not only did they shed some employees via layoffs, but it seems as though many are leaving on their own (let's hope that's the case and they aren't being shown the door)

I started writing for a new group called Masters of Communication. These posts will exist on LinkedIn, the Masters of Communications website and I will re post mine here. Note that as of this blog date, MoC and my own blog are where I currently post content. 

Above is video worth watching regarding Gartner's magic quadrant.

Aver released a new USB PTZ camera, the VC520. What I fail to understand is the insistence that software cameras be 1080p. If a camera is meant to only be used with software codecs, 1080p is only for marketing department bullet points as getting that much resolution into a PC will lead to bad video quality, based on my experiences only. I've had video chats at 480 that were better than 1080 due to pixelization, blocky images and high latency that comes with attempting high resolutions. Anyway, I like Aver products in a general sense.

This month I read "articles" on the death of the telephone, email, voicemail, television and of course hardware codecs. I won't link them because for the most part these articles/blogs are bullshit. Most of these are written from the standpoint of "since I don't use them or I sell something else, they must be dead" so I don't give much attention to them. Nor do the "industry experts" know exactly what's going on in every enterprise around the world. To read some of their articles makes you think we're all going to be working from home using video conferencing on a smartphone all day long. Sounds like their vision of a perfect world is Solaria from The Naked Sun, and that's not a world where I want to live.

The Stock Ticker

• Polycom took another slide to $10.79 as of 8-31 down from $11.38 at the end of last month. That's down from $13.52 at the beginning of June
• Cisco dropped to $26.00 from $28.42
• Avaya dropped to $15.02 from $16.38

Bad Marketing Photography

Let's just get it out there - I'm not fond of marketing photography. Why do I have such a problem? False advertising. I've seen too many marketing documents either portraying video conferencing wrong or photoshopping key items out of pictures.

Practice What You Preach

Forward the video to the 29:30 mark. It was mandatory that Cisco's acquisitions move to San Francisco.

What's wrong with this? Well, a look at their website shows that Cisco is pushing telecommuting/teleworking for their customers. Makes sense, right, since they sell video conferencing and collaboration related products. However, they are forcing relocation of their acquisitions? I thought with teleworking everyone was supposed to be more efficient and happier. If the company that sells the highest end communication products in the world doesn't practice what they preach, then why should anyone think working from home is the way to go?

Now of course I know nothing of Cisco's situation other than what Rowan shared in that video. But still, on the surface if you're trying to sell products that has a specific purpose, you really should use them your damn self for that purpose.

June 2015 around the industry

Here are some interesting items of note around the video conferencing world from June 2015 - Infocomm month!

• VDO360 released a new product combining their camera with an Intel NUC. It's a logical advancement in the space. Read what David M had to say HERE about it.
• Google's Chromebox for meetings got a refresh. What does this mean for enterprise communication? Nothing. I don't know if the $250 per year support is mandatory or not. Either way, I wouldn't bother with it since it's using Hangouts which is inferior to most dedicated software video conference products out there.
• Pricing and release date for Microsoft's Surface Hub was announced. I saw it at Enterprise Connect and it rated a "meh". It's expensive. The only people that I've seen who are excited about it are its resellers.
• David D had a great take on the Surface Hub HERE 
• Here is David D's take on Infocomm 
• Ira Weinstein with Wainhouse posted his thoughts on Infcomm HERE 
• David M posted his take on the show HERE and HERE
• Polycom's stock took a dive in the last part of June. More details at this link.
• Below is an interesting podcast with Cisco's Rowan Trollope. The podcast is called "This Week in Startups" which I find interesting that he would be on. I know that Cisco likes to BUY startups but they are most certainly not one themselves so that's why I thought it was odd. Anyway, after listening to the it, I have a better appreciation for Rowan and what he's trying to do. He does use the word "I" quite a bit and it makes me wonder how much influence he has on product creation. Personally, I've never been a believer in taking credit for work not personally done by myself. Now if he actually did do this stuff, well, that's cool.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it to Infocomm this year. By the time I found out that we weren't going to be exhibitors it was too costly to book the flight and hotel. From the blogs that I read, it didn't sound like I missed much. There were many rants about lack of revolutionary technologies. I'll cover the reasons behind that in a future blog.

What's in store for July?
Thanks for reading
@bryanhellard

Reduce Your Email Usage

Does Spark, or any messaging app reduce your email usage?

We would all like to reduce the amount of emails we get over any day, week or whatever. Email is a fact of life for those both in the technology industry and those outside of it. What if there were a way to significantly reduce your email?

Image taken from letsdovideo.com on David’s opinion piece of Project Squared, now renamed Spark

Cisco’s Rowan Trollope let us in on a little secret when he publicly announced Project Squared. This has greatly reduced his email messages as seen in the chart. This is fantastic! Any way we could reduce the daily clutter that is getting messages from co-workers would be awesome. Oh wait…Spark is part messaging app. It’s obvious to anyone who uses any sort of messaging, when you switch to another format or program for messaging, your older means will go down in usage. Let’s not kid ourselves.

I’ll put it this way; if I decided to start calling everyone who I would normally email, my email usage would go down (and everyone else’s voicemail usage would go up). This is net zero impact as the amount of pure information I need to disseminate hasn’t actually gone down. Spark may or may not be a better way to do it but it’s not reducing the amount of pure information that’s flowing. Time to action may be reduced, but I would wager a guess that anyone who has Spark on their smartphone also has their email account on it as well.

So of course a new way to message, if you adopt it, will in fact reduce your old way of messaging. The question to ask is if the new way will work for you and your team.

Bryan

Follow me on Twitter @bryanhellard

Enterprise Connect 2015

Now that Enterprise Connect is over and I’m back home to decompress, here are my usual random thoughts about the whole thing, in no particular order of importance. This being my first EC, I had no idea what to expect. Here is a sample...

Cisco IX500 vs Polycom Immersive Studio

In this blog I compare Cisco's IX5000 to Polycom's Immersive Studio

Originally posted here:
http://letsdovideo.com/comparison-cisco-ix5000-vs-polycom-immersive-studio/

With the release of the IX5000 in November of 2014, it made sense to do a compare and contrast of it versus its nearest competitor, Polycom’s Immersive Studio. These will be the go-to immersive telepresence room systems for 2015 from the two biggest players in video conferencing. Note this is all subjective and opinions are those of the author only. Specs and features can change without my knowledge.

I’ve provided my initial thoughts on the IX5000 here (http://letsdovideo.com/initial-thoughts-on-the-new-cisco-telepresence-ix5000/ ) and the Immersive Studio here (http://hellarddesign.blogspot.com/2014/02/polycoms-realpresence-immersive-studio.html )

Features

Display

Cisco: 3~70” 1080p

Polycom 3~84” 4k with a 55” (55”?) data display that sits a mile away.

I don’t know if Cisco is planning on utilizing the small table panels for data or just control. Other than that, they’re using the 70” for data and removing participants from the meeting (because you can’t see them when data is filling up the screen). Sitting close to 70” 1080p screens may not be the best thing. Both products lose points however for being three-screen systems.

Winner: Polycom due to dedicated data display and data in the table, maintaining the immersive meeting – unless they throw data up on the video screen then forget it. Of course, there’s no way you’re seeing any content on a 55” display if you’re in the back row.

Score: Polycom 1, Cisco 0

Cameras:

Cisco: 3~4k camera heads in one enclosure above the middle screen

Polycom: 3~1080p camera heads in one enclosure, placed in front of the middle screen right in the chest of a person.

Winner: Cisco, due to over capture and the ability to digitally manipulate some things.  If my review gave negative points, Polycom would get one for putting the camera in the middle of someone’s chest.

Score: Polycom 1, Cisco 1

Room Requirements

Cisco 8’H x 19’W x 13’-8” D (six seat version)

Polycom: appears to be roughly 8’H x 24’W x 18’D (nine seat version)

Both companies are touting limited room remediation which is ridiculous. Cisco’s is much friendlier than Polycom, but I’m still betting they are going to need room remediation in many instances. Cisco’s product may meet various seismic requirements, while Polycom’s definitely will not as a standalone product.

Winner: Cisco wins here due to smaller footprint and easier installation/remediation

Score: Polycom 1, Cisco 2

Multi-purpose

Cisco: Absolutely not

Polycom: Yes, but most likely ineffective

Polycom’s table is over 18’-6” wide. For reference, go sit that far away from a friend but don’t face him and have (or try to have) a conversation. Cisco’s continued negligence toward being able to have a local meeting in their flagship product baffles me. Negating the importance of making rooms multipurpose will continue to hamper sales.

Loser: Everyone

Score: Polycom 1, Cisco 2

Can You Stand Up

Cisco: Yes with caveat

Polycom: Yes

Cisco now has a push button digital vertical pan to allow stand up capture. How often this will be used is anyone’s guess. Polycom remembered that people stand up in meetings and accommodated. This “feature” was in the RPX, then eliminated in the OTX. Now it’s back.

Winner: Polycom

Score: Polycom 2, Cisco 2

Seating

Cisco: 6 or 18 with back row

Polycom: 9 or 21 with back row

I guess the nod goes to Cisco because in the Immersive Studio the person in the first seat is so ridiculously far away from the person in the ninth seat that it’s impossible for them to talk to each other.

Winner: Cisco

Score: Polycom 2, Cisco 3

Price

Cisco: $300,000+ from what little I found on the internet ($50,000 per seat)

Polycom: $425,000 ($47,000+ per seat)

Price does not include installation and the required maintenance packages. I have an idea what Polycom charges for this but no idea about Cisco.

Winner: Cisco – because “no one gets fired for buying Cisco products”

Score: Polycom 2, Cisco 4

Aesthetics

Cisco: “Scandinavian simplicity meets Californian approachability” whatever that means

Polycom: We outsource design

I’m assuming that the IX5000 was designed in house. At first blush, it’s not a radically different approach from their previous TelePresence offering. It looks pretty nice, though it seems they are heading in Apple’s direction (lots of white recently).

Polycom made one big step forward by going back to its immersive roots and allowing stand up, yet made some odd steps back. A 55” data display that’s way up there? 18 feet between me and the guy I’m supposed to be having a meeting with? It’s not a surprise that the Immersive Studio was designed by an outsourced industrial design firm, yet they should have hired one that specializes in furniture. The same firm created the OTX and their Group Series codecs. I guess by outsourcing it forces no single person at Polycom to be on the hook for design. And that is a huge problem.

Winner: Cisco

Score: Polycom 2, Cisco 5

Extras

Cisco: De-skew a whiteboard

Many people who know the company I work for and what I do have asked me to comment about Cisco’s de-skew capability. I understand what they are trying to do with it, but it’s flawed. A generic four point keystone of an image may make a whiteboard look square on screen if you are perpendicular to the display, but it will make everything else look off, including the person in the capture. There are also limitations on where to put the whiteboard in the room. I could also go into a long mathematical exercise with drawings and fancy pictures but I will try to sum up my thoughts as briefly as possible. When you sit at an aggressive angle to the displays as you do in the IX5000 (the outer seats looking at the outer displays), you get a natural skew of it. In many instances, a skewed on screen whiteboard will actually appear normal to your eye in those circumstances. Keystoning, or de-skewing it therefore INTRODUCES skew to half of the room, not fixing it. But again, I see what they’re trying to do.

Polycom: Room within a room concept

I will admit that I am still a fan of the room within a room concept when in a point to point situation. The introduction of BYOD, desktop people and random video sources eliminate most of the benefits of this concept though. In point to point meetings in rooms that are appointed alike, it really give you the feeling that you’re in the same room. And that is what I consider Immersive Telepresence.

Winner: Polycom

Score: Polycom 3, Cisco 5

There you have it, my run down on what really are the only two immersive telepresence ‘products’ that are out there getting any publicity. Agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts.