LifeSize Communications

I talked about H.264 a while ago as a great standard for distributing high-quality video. Would you be surprised to find that H.264 is also used for high-definition video conferencing?

LifeSize Communications provides interesting solutions for businesses and all sorts of organizations, from international NGO’s, to governmental agencies. The ability to communicate is important; the ability to see each other in LifeSize is a luxury, made possible by their telepresence solutions. Long-distance communication is so much more effective when everyone can see the others’ gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Let’s talk more about the video. In October of last year, LifeSize Communications “rocked the high definition conferencing world” when they released a 720p product, allowing for high-definition telepresence on a typical broadband connection. The resolution is 1280×720, and amazingly, 30 fps. Typical (competing) video conferencing solutions are simply webcam quality; they aren’t well suited to a business environment or one in which the appearance of face-to-face communication is essential. LifeSize products lets you meet with the illusion of life-sized participants!

These are great solutions for any small business, enterprise, or organization. The best video conferencing solutions around!

Brought to you by our sponsors at LifeSize Communications.

(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Blu-Ray the winner, Microsoft fined $1.3 billion

By no means are the two related; Blu-Ray winning the format wars of 2007 (and a bit of 2008) has little to do with the E.U.’s judgement that Microsoft charged too much for interoperability.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have really been going at it, and with the withdrawal of their HD-DVD players from the market by Toshiba (the last manufacturer of HD-DVD players), HD-DVD is officially dead. There were so many benefits that I feel it had, but Sony had the PS3 with which they could BUNDLE another product.

By taking the risk and including a Blu-Ray drive in their PlayStation 3, Sony was able to push the Blu-Ray technology into more than a million homes in North America, and effectively leverage the appeal of one of their products (PlayStation) to introduce customers to another (Blu-Ray).

If this is sounding like what Microsoft did during the browser wars (after which they won), you’re right. There is the element of BUNDLING. But what Sony has done was not illegal under antitrust laws. (Until a lawyer can come along and prove me wrong by winning a lawsuit against Sony, I stand firmly behind that statement.) They do NOT have a monopoly in gaming consoles: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all dominant players, with the Xbox sales at the highest, and the Wii in hyped demand.

Since Sony did not make use of a monopoly to try and gain a monopoly in another field, they cannot be held culpable under law.

However, they did gain a monopoly: since Blu-Ray is effectively the only remaining high definition, large storage disc medium, it will surely dominate the field.

In other news…

Microsoft has been ordered by the European Commission to pay $1.3 billion (USD equivalent) in fines for failing to comply with a 2004 ruling until October 2007. Microsoft was requested to open its software and protocol specifications to other developers, but they have charged large sums for any use of the documents.

Recently, Microsoft has claimed that it will make available the official file format specifications of previously proprietary formats like .doc, .xls, and .ppt. Many are doubting whether or not they will actually do what they have claimed they will do.

There is nothing but contempt between Microsoft and the European Union. It doesn’t seem to be improving, and hopefully the European Commission can put a stop to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

Will the EU fine change Microsoft? by ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn — I think Microsoft needs to undertake some diplomacy that will put a final, definitive line under all this. But what would you do if the EU fined you?

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