IMTC Telepresence Activity Group

IMTC Telepresence Activity Group is the activity group who’s goal is to achieve Telepresence interoperability – The Telepresence AG research will help the IETF standardize the field.

We have asked the AG chairs – Allyn Romanow and Stephen Botzko to explain us about their work at the Telepresence activity group:

What is the telepresence activity group?

The purpose of the TP AG is to consider topics that help Telepresence interoperability. Telepresence is a wonderful being-there experience, but alas, systems from different vendors don’t easily interwork, limiting the potential ubiquitous growth of Telepresence. The AG focus on how to solve interoperability issues.

What does your activity group offer to companies in the telepresence field?

The AG offers companies the opportunity to collaborate closely with other vendors in creating a truly easy-to-use and widespread telepresence experience.

What is the role of the group chairmen?

The chairs of the TP AG help to organize the work of the group, including facilitating phone meetings and face-to-face meetings and maintaining a website.

What are the group greatest achievements to date?

The original goal of the group was to tackle the largest outstanding gap in standardization of telepresence – a standard way of describing multiple media streams. To this end, our goal was to introduce this issue into a standards organization. We have achieved this goal in a very timely fashion the IETF is chartering a working group to standardize the treatment of multiple streams in telepresence systems.

In addition, the ITU has started a Telepresence group to work on a wide range of important interoperability issues

The TP AG was extremely effective in describing the work that needs to be done for standardizing multiple streams, and produced a first draft charter for the IETF and a first draft Use Case document for the IETF.

What are the major goals for 2010/2011?

We intend to fully support, participate,and promote the standardization activities in both the ITU-T and the IETF.  This will require the active participation of the AG members in these bodies.  One goal is to ensure that these standards are architected to meet our industry’s present and future need for interoperability in this rapidly growing product area.  Another goal  is that these standards be developed quickly and broadly adopted.

As these standards become more well-defined (late in 2011), the AG will address interoperability testing.

Allyn Romanow, Ph.D:
Allyn is a Technical Leader in the Telepresence group at Cisco Systems, where she currently leads the open standards work for Telepresence products. Allyn has substantial experience in creating new networking technologies, including ATM, RDMA  (Remote Direct Memory Access) over IP, and Ethernet security.  In her previous standards development work, she was the  Area Director for the Transport area in the IETF, which included real time applications, editor in IEEE 802.1 (LAN Architecture), and she helped to found the ATM Forum.

About Cisco
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, celebrates 25 years of technological innovation, operating excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.

Stephen Botzko:
Stephen is a Director of Standardization and Technology at Polycom, and leads the standardization work for Telepresence.  Stephen has over 20 years of experience developing traditional video conferencing products, and more recently has been focused on telepresence.  He holds several patents on various aspects of videoconferencing technology.  He is the editor of several ITU-T standards, including H.323, H.239, and H.241, and is the rapporteur of the ITU-T work on telepresence (ITU-T Q5/16).

About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) is a global leader in unified communications solutions with industry-leading telepresence, video, voice and infrastructure solutions built on open standards. Polycom powers smarter conversations, transforming lives and businesses worldwide. www.polycom.com

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz

IMTC 2025 (Day2) Inside IMTC Activity Groups & Industry Standards

IMTC promotes industry standards and interoperability to help shape the future of multimedia telecommunications technology.
Inside IMTC panel explain a bit about IMTC itself and it’s value to the telecom industy.

Panelists:
Shantanu Sarkar, Director New Technology, Cisco (moderator)
Tsahi Levent-Levi, Product Manager & System Architect, Radvision
Allyn Romanow, Technical Leader, Cisco
Farid Benamrouche, Project Leader, NXP software
Ari Heikkinen, Director of Programs, PV Finland
About the writer: IMTC

HTML 5 & Standard Web Video Delivery – A flash killer?

A topic still very relevant today is the HTML5 vs Flash debate, fueled by devices like iPhone and iPad that lacks Flash support (and, apparently are more open standard oriented).

HTML 5 is still under development and the future looks very bright – Carl Ford (Crossfire Media) and Joe Hildebrand (Cisco) talks about HTML5 and the future of web video delivery.

Enhanced by Zemanta
About the writer: IMTC

Thank You Mr. Jobs

Image representing Steve Jobs as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday, Steve Jobs, Apple‘s CEO, Introduced FaceTime , a video telephony solution for iPhone 4. It is based on  open standards and integrated in next generation iPhone as a simple to use video telephony product.
Apple is known for its ability to revolutionize industries. iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad – all changed their respective markets.

We expect that visual communication, delivered in Apple’s style – simple, reliable and sexy – will do exactly the same for mobile visual communications as the whole.

The introduction of FaceTime by Apple is a vote of confidence in visual communication, and IMTC is certain that it will increase the uptake of mobile video telephony.

IMTC has the biggest visual communication expert pool, as well as rich history of ensuring interoperability and promoting adoption of standards-based visual communication technologies. From mobile telephony, to desktop video conferencing, to Telepresence, IMTC has the most active interoperability and testing groups in the industry.

As such, we are excited about yesterday’s news, and looking forward to support FaceTime adoption as an open industry standard.

Anatoli Levine, President,  IMTC

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
About the writer: Anatoli Levine

VoLTE and the IMTC

_MG_3750
Image by Richard.Asia via Flickr

One of the important aspects of an open standard is the ability to rigorously test it for interoperability. And then when you’re done testing – test yet again. It is an ongoing process that never seem to end.

Take our 3G-324M AG at the IMTC – I’ve been an active participant of this group from its inception, and that was over 5 years ago. And this year, the 3G-324M AG is going to have some more testing done – it seems like there is no rest for engineers.

So now that the GSMA has decided to go full force and work on the VoLTE specification so that operators can start rolling out all-IP mobile networks and still provide the basic services they do today, there was a missing piece in the puzzle – they have the ecosystem, but not real place to use for interoperability testing amongst the vendors implementing VoLTE.

That’s exactly where the IMTC comes into the picture [Read more...]

About the writer: Tsahi Levent-Levi