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Contextual Awareness- Is This What 2025 Will Look Like?

September 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

On June 26, 2012, IMTC held its bi-annual 2025 Virtual Conference. The main issue discussed in the conference was how will technology impact our lives and operate in 2025?

Nowadays, video communication has reached a point of maturation as TV’s support Skype video conferencing and smartphones are capable of delivering HD quality videos. These are all part of larger phenomenons such as TV content personalization, second screen applications and TV everywhere. In addition, motion and gesture control, as well as 3D telepresence, have all become a reality. But where are these technologies leading us? What will our offices or living rooms look like as we head into the future?

One of the participants of the Virtual Conference was Joe Burton, Chief Technology Officer at Plantronics. Mr, Burton is responsible for setting and driving Plantronics’ technology direction and leading the company’s global engineering teams and programs. Before joining Plantronics, Joe held several key executive, engineering leadership and architecture-level positions at Polycom, Cisco, and Active Voice.

Most recently, Joe was EVP, CTO, Chief Strategy Officer, and General Manager for Service Provider at Polycom where he led Polycom’s long-term strategic agenda and next-generation focus areas. He is the author of several communications patents and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Reynolds College in New York.

In his presentation, 2025: A view of things to come, Joe offered an analysis of what our lives will look like in 2025. His analysis is based on the assumption that by 2025 there will be 50 billion internet connected devices in the world. Joe examined how this amazing statistic will affect the way we work, play and even receive medicine.

Today’s smart devices have become so advanced that they actually “know us”. Our smart devices have the ability to learn our preferences, routine, areas of interest and even where we are each minute of the day. This has all given way to the delivery of personalized information and tools. Joe refers to this personalization as “contextual awareness”.

Contextual awareness comes into play when we search our iPhone for nearby coffee shops while standing in the middle of Prague. Our smart device needs to understand that we are no longer in our home or workplace but are actually halfway round of the world. In addition, our smartphone has to know what time of the day it is. Otherwise, he might send us to a charming yet closed Cafe.

Contextual awareness has been taken to the next level by the growing use of sensors. Accelerometers placed in our cars, on our laptops or even on our body have the ability to analyze our movement. Other sensors can measure the temperature outdoors or inside the house as well as measure our heart rate. Given their affordable price and miniature size, it is expected that such sensors will become an integral part of our lives and will even begin to communicate with our smart devices thereby adding to the contextual awareness.

Creating a link between all our internet connected devices, such as smartphones, tablets, TVs and even refrigerators, and an array of sensor, will give way to the next technological revolution- PAN: Personalized Area Network. According to Joe, an example of PAN is having your mobile phone “talk” to the heart sensor you are wearing. Once you hit the targeted heart rate of your physical exercise, your smartphone will lower the volume of music in your connected headsets in order to tell you that its time to start lowering your pace.

Joe expects, that the PAN revolution, coupled with cloud technology and the ability to store and analyze large amounts of information, will profoundly impact our lives by 2025 in areas such as health, education, commerce and entertainment.

Want to learn how? View the presentation in the video below:

In addition, come and visit our Youtube channel for more presentations from IMTC 2025 conference.

About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Industry News, Telepresence Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Industry News Summary: Opera, Galaxy S III and Google’s self driving cars

August 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

opera browser
Industry News Summary- Opera hopes Apple will change iPhone & iPad policies, Galaxy S III’s share of Web traffic surges and Google’s self driving cars reach another milestone.

Opera challenges Apple’s policies- The Times of India reported today that the Norway based company behind the Opera browser wants Apple to change some of its policies regarding third-party-web- browsers in iOS stores. Officials at Opera say that Apple’s tight control over content and apps precludes the company from offering Opera’s full version on iPad and iPhones. Read More

Samsung’s Galaxy S lll’s web traffic surges according to Chitika, which runs an ad network and performs data analytics- following the Galaxy S III’s successful launch, the smartphone is surging in its share of web traffic. According to Chikita, the S III jumped from zero to 11.23% of all Samsung smartphone Web usage in just six weeks. Learn more here

Google’s self driving cars reach an important milestone- Google announced that its much anticipated self driving vehicles have driven 300,000 miles without a single accident while under computer control. Google posted a blog post stating “ We’re encouraged by this progress, but there’s still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter” . For further reading press here

About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Industry News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Industry News Summary: The Olympics, LTE networks and Mountain Lion OS

August 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

OlympicsIndustry News Summary- The evolution of Olympic coverage, a new research on how LTE has increased data usage on smartphones and tablets and Apple’s new OS.

And the Olympic medalist is… The 2012 Olympic games could be dubbed The Twitter Olympics as twitter users flock to the social network in order to get the latest results from London. But this is just another stage in the evolution of Olympic coverage which began with carrier pigeons. Acme Packet, a network solution company, recently compiled an infographic report on the evolution of Olympic coverage. Take a look.

Informa Telecom & Media and Mobidia Technology, Inc. offer new insight into use of smartphone and tablets on LTE networks: Earlier today, Informa and Mobidia released the second part of their whitepaper “Understanding Today’s Smartphone Users”. The research offers insight into consumer’s data usage via smartphones and tablets on various networks, including LTE. The results demonstrate that LTE networks and devices have indeed increased data usage. In addition, Wi-Fi is quickly becoming a primary mean of connectivity for all smartphone users. Learn more here.

4 days, 3 millions copies: Apple’s new OS “Mountain Lion”, that brings features from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac, and includes tight integration with Apple’s iCloud, as well as a “Notification Center”, sold 3 million copies in just four days. Read more.

About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Industry News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Mobile Video Series – Radvision Scopia Mobile V3

December 22, 2011 by 1 Comment

Back in May, I was arguing about the true meani

ng of Telepresence. An analyst named Rob Bamforth from Quocirca wrote an article saying that the true meaning of Telepresence isn’t big screens and costly systems – it’s the illusion of being there – and for that he argued that low-lantancy is enough. I for the other hand, thought that low-lantency is only a part of the picture, and that for total immersion one must need eyesight level cameras and all the technical mumbo-jumbo.



Room Systems – anything less isn’t ‘Telepresence’?

But putting aside the exact semantics regarding the *videoconferencing* term called Telepresence, let’s talk about the general concept of tele-presence:
Lets say for a second that I own a business that relays heavily on out-of-office workers – and from all I concern, those workers are just as available in terms of communications, as people that work inside the office – isn’t that telepresence? Isn’t that the notion of having those people ‘here with me’?

From a business, and practical point of view – that is telepresence.


Cisco’s Cius – good for remote workers, but not as widespread as an iPhone

A few years ago, achieving that goal was costly and sometimes impossible. It is mainly because of the work of vendors such as RADVISION and Vidyo that this situation has changed. Scalable Video Coding is the key behind recent developments in both low-cost HD video systems and mobile video conferencing. This relatively new technology allows for high quality video communication over the unmanaged connections, such as the Internet. If the codec couldn’t have the ability to adapt to unstable bandwidth it would be impossible to connect remote workers reliably to a conference call. But now with SVC and broadband – it’s possible. These days, EVERYONE has smartphones that are capable of video communication – so wouldn’t it just make sense to turn them into a small video-conferencing device?One of the first companies to introduce a mobile client for it’s video-conferencing platform was RADVISION. When they released the first version the mobile client, it only had the ability to manage the video conference, not to be a part of it as a video client – effectively making an iPad a neat remote control pad. Today both iPhones and iPads has cameras and the latest version of Scopia Mobile is a fully functioning one – at last, the ability to connect to a conference call when on the go.


RADVISION’s Scopia Mobile – high-quality videoconferencing for iDevices

Just like the desktop client, Scopia mobile support video-conference with multiple participants (up to 28) and data sharing via h.329 (which is super important for out-of-office workers). But what’s really special about it that it just work well. IMTC is using Scopia internally for meetings and webinars, and in the latest meeting, the VP marketing of IMTC – Kfir Pravda, had to call in while driving, from his iPhone, over a 3G connection. That was a conference call with multiple people around the world, Kfir himself was in Israel!


3G-enabled conference with an iPhone – Amazing!

The call just worked. This is in my view, amazing, knowing how difficult it is to get a decent video-call quality from a 2-way call in a non-commercial system such as Skype (at least here, in Israel). In terms of features, again – that’s a fully functioning Scopia – and on the iPad2 it supports full 720P video.

I think that mobile video clients will create a revolution in video-conferencing, the form-factor is there (tablets), the technology is there (H.264) and the out-of-office situation will probably grew larger and require businesses to adapt accordingly.
Maybe Rob was right and the true meaning of Telepresence is just mobile video-conferencing that actually works.

Here on the IMTC blog we plan to compare a few mobile solutions over the next months, Scopia included. So stay tuned.

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About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Industry News, Technology insight, Unified Communication Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

IMTC SuperOp! 2010 – Continuing Advancing Interoperability

June 13, 2010 by 2 Comments

So the time is finally on. Long-planned and even postponed (thanks to the Iceland volcano with the unpronounceable name), IMTC SuperOp! 2010 is taking place in a small town of Jesi, near Ancona in Italy, June 14-18. Big Thank You to our hosts RADVISION Italy, Aethra.Net and Telecom Italia, as well as our sponsors Tandberg, Polycom, Cisco and Vidyo!

What is behind the name “SuperOp”, which sounds both big and cryptic at the same time? SuperOp!, a.k.a. “major interoperability event” is an annual gathering of IMTC member companies, getting together to conduct interoperability testing of IP Multimedia Communications solutions over one big network setting. Our First SuperOp!, took place in 1997, and then continued annually. SuperOp!’s goal is to help engineers to advance the level of interoperability of their companies’ products. Latest and greatest solutions, quite often include simply unreleased [yet] versions of software and hardware, that are tested for interoperability with each other. One can truly look at the SuperOp! as a giant development lab, where experts from the competing (sic!) companies work together to improve their products.

Is SuperOp! still relevant? It seems that interoperability is a key word, coming from every corner of the communications industry. From newly formed alliance, UCIF, which promises to focus on interoperability of unified communications, to the just announced Apple’s iPhone 4, which will provide video communications based on open standards, interoperability is a key topic for the whole industry. And interoperability is the major area where IMTC made the difference from day one – iNow profile and H.323 Forum Certification Program, numerous improvements in mobile video streaming standards and technologies, adapted by 3GPP, 3G-324M interoperability testing plans used by GCF as a foundation for certification program for mobile video telephony, MONA standardization in ITU-T, SIP Parity (video control enhancements over SIP)  definitions which are now making it into IETF, and latest efforts in the GSMA VoLTE and Telepresence multi-streaming and TIP – these are IMTC contributions into making technologies better in the practical hands-on terms.

So what will be happening at the SuperOp! 2010? First of all, there will be a lot of interoperability testing done in all of the Activity Groups – video conferencing using both SIP and H.323 (thanks to the year long hard work of the SIP Parity activity group, SIP-based video communication is becoming a reality), IP video streaming in PSS Activity Group, mobile video conferencing using 3G-324M. Then there will be a traditional SuperConnect – all-participants with all the video conferencing devices, always done on the last day of the event. In addition to this traditional activities, this year IMTC will also conduct Telepresence Workshop, where industry leaders from Cisco, Polycom, Vidyo, AT&T and others will present current state of affairs in the Telepresence Interoperability and lay out the plans to make Telepresence ubiquitously interoperable (audience poll: who thinks it is achievable, raise your hands J). All in all, we are looking at a busy week, a lot of work and a lot of fun! IMTC is open for every company interested in improving interoperability of their products (and enjoying the process at the same time!), so … c’mon over!

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About the writer: IMTC
Filed Under: Interoperability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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