Telepresence & Video Conferencing Blog
Video communication news, uses & success stories.
2010
Reaching the Hearing Impaired Via Video Conferencing
Video conferencing has become a common tool in many businesses. While it can streamline communications, hearing impaired individuals have often been left out. This is a sizable group: more than 30 million Americans are deaf or hearing impaired. TANDBERG, now part of Cisco, has worked with companies, such as Deaf Link, to develop video conferencing services for those individuals, so this area is undergoing significant growth.
One reason for the interest is that businesses need to be able to communicate with deaf and hard of hearing customers in order to comply with government regulations. For instance, the Federal Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 mandates equal access for individuals with disabilities.
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2010
Psychiatric Couches Take to the Air
Video conferencing has become popular in many business environments because it is quicker and more convenient than face-to-face communications. Those benefits are now being applied to the psychiatric profession as a growing number of practices are turning to telepresence systems to alleviate busy schedules and reach individuals in rural areas.
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2010
Video Conferencing Enhances Online Support
Online chat was a major improvement in customer service for many businesses, and now companies such as ON24 Inc. and Second Life want to take the concept of online help a step further. They have been designing Virtual Briefing Centers, which increasingly include a video conferencing component to deliver automated, animated help to customers, suppliers, and employees. These services perform functions like showcasing products, training employees, or briefing workers on various company services.
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2010
Should You Join a Telepresence Community?
The advent of social networking has enabled resource groups to facilitate the collaboration and sharing of expertise on a wide (and ever growing) range of video communication topics. With Telepresence gaining so much interest recently, it is not surprising that a number of sites have popped up supporting this technology. So where are these sites and what information will one find on them?
Information, here, there, and everywhere. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is not easy to locate needed data in a timely manner. Online social networking communities enable individuals and companies to interact by asking and answering questions, which can be broad (What are the Telepresence best practices in the health care industry?), or narrow (How much memory should a company allocate to archiving its video conferencing sessions?). Such information is typically housed on a chat-like forum.
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2010
Five Reasons Companies Should No Longer Worry About Network Bandwidth
Network bandwidth has long been an inhibitor to video conferencing deployments. However, recent network advances both at the customer site as well as with telco services have made it easier for companies to justify such deployments. Here are five reasons why corporations no longer have to worry about having sufficient bandwidth to support their video conferencing applications.
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2010
The Importance of Archiving Video Conferencing Sessions
Typically, a great deal of information is exchanged during a video conference, so it can be difficult for the participants to remember exactly what transpired. When they go back to examine such interactions, they find that not all video conferencing calls are archived for later review. In fact recently, a bevy of low cost (in some cases, even free) video conferencing systems have emerged. While businesses may be intrigued by the service pricing, they may also find that the cliché, “You get what you pay for,” is often true.
There are a couple of reasons why a company would need to archive its conferences. In some cases, an employee will miss a conference because of illness or a conflict but will need to glean information and insight from the meeting. In addition, many businesses are now posting conferences on their Web sites for viewing by any interested, internal party. It is one of many steps they are taking to improve communication.
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2010
Video Conferencing Changing the Classroom
Increasingly, educational institutions are seeing the potential benefits that video conferencing systems, such as TANDBERG’s T3 and T1 offers them. It is not surprising, then, that more than half (53%) of schools plan to purchase video conferencing technology in the next year, according to a survey by Cisco.
Educational institutions often tend to follow rather than lead the pack in regards to new technology. Consequently, it may be a bit surprising that many educational institutions have been busily trying to find ways to leverage video conferencing features to maximize use of their teachers’ time, reach remote students, and interact with fellow institutions located abroad.
Time is a valued commodity, and academic institutions would like to maximize this resource for their faculties. Increasingly, video conferencing is emerging as a way to increase their productivity. Video conferencing is being used for virtual office hours, so teachers and students can interact whenever necessary. Teachers have also been recording and archiving lectures, presentations, and projects that can be shared with students at any time. The Aachen University of Applied Sciences is one academic institution taking advantage of telepresence features to enhance the learning experience.
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2010
Telepresence Sparks Rise in Virtual Trade Shows
Cisco solutions bring new alternatives to trade show travel
Tired of jumping on a plane, staying in a hotel, and finding taxis when attending industry conferences? Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid the hassles and attend the meetings virtually? Well, that certainly seems to be becoming more possible. A growing number of vendors, including Cisco, have recently been focusing on helping event planning groups make their interactions more virtual through the use of telepresence systems.
Such moves are capturing the attention of show organizers. One benefit is they can more easily find speakers because experts no longer have to be at the show’s location.
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2010
Tablets Emerge as Latest Video Conferencing Platform
Heard about Apple’s iPad? Chances are you have. Since Apple’s introduction of the device in January, interest in tablet systems has skyrocketed. One ripple effect has been the emergence of these devices as the newest video conferencing platform.
Apple did a good job providing robust features for its system, but the first iteration of the company’s device was not geared to video conferencing—it does not have a camera. While the iPad could support one-way video connections, it would not mesh with video conferencing applications.
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2010
Why Smaller Companies are Increasingly Interested in Hosted Telepresence Services
Cloud computing has become an accepted way to deploy business applications. Increasingly, the IT marketplace has been shifting from premise based application deployments to hosted solutions, such as cloud computing. In fact, Gartner found that companies spent $10 billion (a 21% increase) on these services in 2009. This trend is impacting the video conferencing market where a growing number of companies are offering hosted video conferencing services and users- both large and small – are adopting them.
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