Librestream – My Blog

Funky video collaboration II

My post on LibreStream as a funky collaboration tool attracted some interest, not least from Kerry Thacher their CEO… At first I was concerned he’d taken umbrage at my suggestion that my old employers Cisco might take a keen interest in his technology but this fear was very much ungrounded.

To recap and expand, what I had in mind was taking LibreStream’s highly industrial collaboration cameras, making them small funky and consumer and connecting them up via wifi as a fun consumer to consumer app. Now of course these could also function as rather ubiquitous internal communications tools too, maybe more on that later.

What inspired the thought and the Cisco connections was Tandberg and Flip acquisitions, add to that LibreStream and you have something qualitatively more – realtime mobile video collaboration, in ya pocket. Stuff that inspired me ona design side were robust consumer products encased in rubber, stuff like the Nokia 5140, which a friend, The Chiswick Gardener liked to throw over his shoulder to show how robust it was. Take also the Tivoli PAL, fine audioware encased in said too….

So that’s the box, what gets fun is when video gets connected via handhelds using wifi, plus white-boarding. Click shoot share. In live video.

But what happens if you take these new handheld wifi video collaboration phones and take it a step further. How about telepresence too? Sound a bit mad? Well there’s always LifeSize Passport:

LifeSize Passport is the first truly portable telepresence-quality system; Passport is so small, it fits in the palm of your hand….you get true HD video quality – 720p30 – for natural, realistic interactions at only 1Mbps over any internet connection. And LifeSize Passport is the first HD video communication system that works with Skype™, making connecting with colleagues and customers easier than ever.

This would give the ability to project the image outside of the tiny phone – think maybe the hologram scenes in Superman or Star Wars. Almost there…

But what you need next I don’t know if it can be done. For it to really gel, there needs to be some sort of socialising the camera. There needs to be a way of the sender being filmed. So what if these things piggy-backed off of each other so I film someone near as they in tern film me via some sort of reciprocal sharing?

Now we’re talking truly next gen phones…

Update – we’re probably also talking about Foucault’s description of the Panoptican gone mad….

LibreStream: The next funky collaboration tool (or Cisco’s next acquistion)

Must confess I found Oliver Marks’ recent contribution to the ‘social media expert’ debate rather fun Fads vs Business Value: Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0. Oliver looks back to the pre dot.com bubble burst era when e-learning was all the rage and cockily wryly remarks:

Back then the shiny new idea was that we could share knowledge as never before thanks to the web, and a whole enterprise industry sprung up around ‘elearning’ with ‘learning management systems’ being touted as the cost effective educational source for businesses to enlighten and track employee’s intellectual sophistication.

I found this especially fun as back then I worked in e-learning, most specifically in Cisco EMEA’s E-learning team. Come to the dot.com pop and that e-learning team was reformed. Myself and some colleagues were reformed too, as characters and in roles and we formed a new team we dubbed Communicating@Cisco.

The aim of the team was to enhance comms and to save money and one key way we did that was to heavily promote erstwhile e-learning tools such as the virtual classroom as virtual meeting places. Neat scenario was that meeting online and collaborating via the internet saved money on travelling. it was a novel idea then. The technology we used here was PlaceWare, and interestingly Cisco’s future acquisition WebEx was hardly used at all.

What we did use though was Tandberg and a colleague of mine actively touted ‘video conferencing in a box’ with 2 large and rather heavy Tandberg video conferencing units being carted across Europe to various demos. previously video conferencing hadn’t featured much, the fact that the Tandberg units could do it over IP rather than ISDN and were basically portable made them mobile video conferencing devices. Well sort of, they are rather heavy!

Now of course Cisco recently acquired Tandberg, following on from their acquisition of Flip and before that Kiss. All prime video companies! And I thought of these when a colleague in my current role for a big oil company showed me a Librestream Onsight camera. These things are awesome!

To begin with I thought it was a funky battle-hardened camera – all industrial bounce rubber and spark proof high quality camera for an explosive or otherwise hazardous environment – perfect for use in an oil field in Africa or on a rig in the North Sea. And they certainly do meet that spec. But god do they do more.

These things have full wifi video conferencing abilities plus VOIP connectivity. They have whitescreen drawing capabilities on the viewer screen too – see a video, scribble on the back and the person at the other end sees that. They even have IP based remote control.

So what we’ve got then is the essence of the virtual classroom in a camera – realtime sharing, synchronous data – voice, video and graphics. Now if Cisco don’t either acquire this company or the technology and put it in a small consumer device, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Or am I one already, what can the latest Tandbergs do?

n.b put me down for the first rubber flip video conf boxes. Hmm, Cisco still own the iPhone trademark, I wonder if they’ll want it back from Apple when these video phones get released?!

Ctd….Funky video collaboration II