For me, I’ve found that I have to get my hands dirty to really understand and appreciate something. There can be a big difference between learning something in the abstract and applying it in real life, particularly in production environments.…
Category: video
Video conferencing industry poised for disruption?
As many of you know, my views on video conferencing are contrary, if not downright sacrilegious. Those views come from deep reflective research, the kind of research that gives you an answer other than the one you wanted, but you can’t ignore…
Introduction to GlideTV What’s On Service
When I first wrote about the Glide TV Navigator five months ago, I didn’t realize I’d get involved with the company and help them develop and release their “What’s On” service. But that’s where we are today and therefore, a…
Glide TV “Navigator” looks really slick
I ran into Chris Painter a few months back at a local SF East Bay New Tech Meetup event. I know Chris from his Sony days. I found out at the time that Chris now has started a new venture,…
Verizon CEO exiting one dying business for another
The NY Times reports that Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has finally accepted that his landline business is going to keep sliding: Mr. Seidenberg said that his “thinking has matured” and that trying to predict when the company would stop losing…
Whitepaper provides unconventional perspective on “videoconferencing”
I have released a brief whitepaper summarizing my contrary position with respect to “videoconferencing”. The paper is titled: Practical Applications of Low-cost Network-Based Video: Beyond Videoconferencing as a Substitute for Face-To-Face and is available at the following link: http://www.toyz.org/whitepapers/video_social2009.html This…
More unconventional video wisdom
Tsahi Levent-Levi at the TMC Talking Video blog refers to my recent post on video in which he says: Andrew MacDonald tried to see what’s his perceived audio quality threshold. He shows that improving audio quality improves the medium and…
Not so startling Cisco research on video
A tweet from Dina Mehta via Mark Petrovic pointed me to an article titled The psychology of videoconferencing that refers to some research Cisco recently released. Cisco says: [research published in 1971] revealed that only seven per cent of our…
Spykee wi-fi robot – first looks
I saw the Spykee robot at Costco and so I went home and researched what it was all about. Then I decided to run back to Costco and pick one up before the US supply runs out. It was $229.99…
Roku Netflix Player
Well, I was going to get one of these, but now I see that it doesn’t have an interface for searching and selecting movies. You have to first log into your Netflix account and add the movie to your queue…