Microsoft Eyes Future of Teleconferencing with RoundTable
It's not the RingCam yet, but give them time.
Anybody who has struggled through an audio-only teleconference knows the shortcomings of this technology. Typically, if more than five people get on the call, you can’t tell who’s talking. And, you can’t see any of the non-verbal communication that can be so important when people from different cultures try to communicate.
Alternatively, most videoconferencing systems are expensive and complicated to install and operate. As a result, these systems are usually confined to specially configured meeting rooms, which have to be booked days in advance of a conference call.
RoundTable is plug-and-play. You need almost no training to set it up or use it. All you do is connect the RoundTable device to a computer that’s running Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Meeting via a USB connection. We expect RoundTable devices will be available for less than $3,000. That’s about the cost of a high-end speaker phone and a fraction of the cost of most video-conferencing systems. Some of these video-conferencing systems cost $50,000 or more. How many of these set-ups can even the largest, most lucrative business afford to install? - Gurdeep Singh Pall
Unified Communications Group’s blog:
Corporate videoconferencing gets hot this week Here's a video of RoundTable in action.
This must have come from Microsoft Research and their continuing efforts to perfect the video conference experience. They had been working on a system that required a network connection to Internet-2 and as only a few Universities have access to Internet-2 that hasn’t get much traction.
There will always be a value in traveling to a conference where you meet with many people to talk business and socialize, but who wants to fly to Milwaukee for a forty minute meeting?