“The third video we have sponsored in support of the American Bar Association’s Mediation Week looks at the role religion has played in our current partisan divides and could play in promoting and supporting civil discourse. The video, “Civility and Civil Public Discourse: What’s Faith Got To Do With It?” features an interview with two retired ministers from The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Reverend Larry Veatch and Reverend John Yonker who discuss why and how people of faith care for, and learn from, each other even as they explore their differences. We invite you to show this video in your own faith community and invite further discussion. Here are some questions you might ask the group to consider: what are the traditions in your own faith regarding faith and politics? what texts support civil discourse? what in the video resonated or raised concerns? how do we as people of faith share our values and also honor our country’s tradition of separation of church and state? We invite you to share your comments and experiences by using the comment feature on this blog.”
This is reposted from buildingdialogue.wordpress.com and is part of a serials of videos sponsored from my company (VTCStream.com) and The Communications Center (www.buildingdialogue.com) as part of the American Bar Association’s “Mediation Week.” This year’s theme was Civility and Civil Discourse, reflecting the adoption of Resolution 108 in August.
“Our second video, sponsored in recognition of the American Bar Association’s Mediation Week focuses on mediation skills that everyone can use to promote more civil discourse. We welcome guests Paul Ladehoff who directs the University of Missouri’s Campus Mediation Program and also the Law School’s LLM program in Dispute Resolution, and Noel English who is the director of the University of Missouri’s Equity program for this discussion on “Civility and Civil Discourse: Mediator Skills Everyone Can Use.” We invite you to show this video to groups you may be involved with and invite further discussion. Questions you might ask include what types of communication invite conflict? which invite further discussion? what are some of the specific skills mediators use that can help calm emotions and invite further reflection and dialogue? Which might you be willing to use? How would our communities benefit if we had more civil dialogue? We also invite you to share your comments and experiences by using the comment feature of this blog.”
This is reposted from buildingdialogue.wordpress.com and is part of a serials of videos sponsored from my company (VTCStream.com) and The Communications Center (www.buildingdialogue.com) as part of the American Bar Association’s “Mediation Week.” This year’s theme was Civility and Civil Discourse, reflecting the adoption of Resolution 108 in August.
“Welcome to our video series sponsored in recognition of the American Bar Association’s Mediation Week which this year focuses on Civility and Civil Public Discourse. That focus is related to the passage of Resolution 108, which encourages more civil political discourse by the ABA House of Delegates in August, 2011. Our first video, “Civility and the Rule of Law” features an interview with Professor Richard Reuben, who is the James Lewis Parks Professor of Law at the University of Missouri Law School, and who also, in his role as chair of the ABA Dispute Resolution Committee on Public Policy, Consensus Building and Democracy, played a key role in the drafting of Resolution 108. We invite you to show this video to groups you may be involved with and invite discussion. Here are some questions you might ask the group to discuss: How does civility help improve (or a lack of civility erode) our collective problem solving capacity? What is the rule of law? How does civility interact with the rule of law? What can we do to promote greater civility in our public discourse? We invite you to share your comments and experiences by using the comment feature on this blog.
This is reposted from buildingdialogue.wordpress.com and is part of a serials of videos sponsored from my company (VTCStream.com) and The Communications Center (www.buildingdialogue.com) as part of the American Bar Association’s “Mediation Week.” This year’s theme was Civility and Civil Discourse, reflecting the adoption of Resolution 108 in August.
This is reposted from buildingdialogue.wordpress.com and is part of a serials of videos sponsored from my company (VTCStream.com) and The Communications Center (www.buildingdialogue.com) as part of the American Bar Association’s “Mediation Week.” This year’s theme was Civility and Civil Discourse, reflecting the adoption of Resolution 108 in August.
“Many of the skills we have talked about on this blog are skills used by mediators to resolve disputes. Skills like reflective listening, using open-ended questions, and sharing new information without debating can be used by citizens to promote more civil discourse. We will be sponsoring a set of 5 video interviews and will post the links on this blog. We hope you watch and share your thoughts. If enough of us act to promote civil discourse, we can help to heal our political systems and improve our country’s problem solving capacity.”
Been thinking more and more about UC and how the videoconferencing market might change in the next couple of years. After getting back from the VCI-Group meeting in New Orleans, and corresponding with Tim Kridel from InAVate magazine (www.inavateonthenet.net and www.timkridel.com) about an article he is working on, things are starting to make more sense to me. Although I am not sure that some of this bodes well in the long term for folks who are thinking that AV and Videoconferencing sales/integration will continue to be business as usual.
First, when is comes to UC, one must realize that there is no definition for what unified conferencing is and is not. Each company or manufacturer, is trying to leverage their existing install base to gain market share and define UC as their solution. In the case of Microsoft, UC is a desktop app that is best when tightly integrated into all your other MS apps. For a good demonstration of how Microsoft’s Lynx UC platform is designed to streamline workflow, check out these two videos:
Microsoft is emphasizing the “better together” idea for UC and MS products. The idea is to get organizations and businesses to not evaluate each part of a solution independently (don’t just pick the best in class for web conferencing, and then for email, and then for im, and then for VOip, etc). The idea is that you only can get the huge productivity gains offered by UC when you go with one vendor, instead of trying to roll your own solution with multiple vendors.. They commissioned this study to prove the point: Click here to download: TEI of Implementing the 2010 Microsoft Productivity Platform
Cisco too is taking a similar approach, but for them UC should be “in the network” and “free you from the desktop” (read “free you from Microsoft”). They envision that the tablet you will use for UC will be the one that docks with your Cisco Voip phone, namely the cius tablet . Although they have recently said “me too, me too” in regards to an ipad app and will release the MOVI videoconferencing client for the ipad soon.
For Cisco, the network will provide all the services that you need from language translation, videoconferencing, document sharing, etc. Just about everything that you need to get your robot dog repaired:
This has caused some frustrations on the part of customers who don’t want to purchase everything from one vendor or feel beholden to one vendor for everything:
Not to mention the CIOs and tech directors that have to implement these solutions: http://youtu.be/4nKh8bg3eHo
Vendors are pushing their UC solutions and there are some folks that are probably making the whole sale change to a one vendor UC solution. What what little I see, there is more of a mixture of solutions. Customers might integrate their video conferencing (room and desktop) and VOIP systems via SIP trunks for conferencing, but use OCS for chat, etc.
I think that a lot of the UC market is really still in play, and I am not sure that we will every really see a one-size fits all solution that will come to dominate the market. Vendors seem unsure of that are the key selling points of UC–what customers are looking for. However, I think that if Google wanted to make a play for this business, you could have a viable cloud based solution. If you use google plus or igoogle, you already have integrated presence information, chat, Voice communications, video communications, email, document sharing and probably other features.
The big question for a lot of us, is what does it all mean for AV integrators who sell and install videoconferencing system or for companies like mine which just specializes in videoconferencing. In this area there are several immediate effects that we have to deal with, the first one being the availability of several new cloud based solutions for videoconferencing. While there have been “cloud” based MCU services, rented by the hour, for years, the new solutions are offering more of a UC solution than just an MCU parked on the Internet. LifeSize Connections is the one that I am most familiar with and I think has a lot of potential to grow the market for videoconferencing.
First of all, a cloud based solution like LifeSize connections, allows a small vendor like me to implement very large projects very quickly for new customers. Say that I have a customer that wants 30 endpoints deployed around the US and 120 desktop systems for his mobile workforce and wants them all to be able to conference via a schedule or ad hoc as they like. In a traditional installation, this would take a lot of planning, a lot of work to get the infrastructure up and running, a lot of bandwidth or need to colo some central equipment, and a lot of time and training. With LifeSize connections, I can have the mobile systems up and running immediately–using the firewall traversal, the MCU, presence server, IM client that are build into the service. The endpoints can be added as soon as I can get a tech on-site. And in this case, the entire deployment would be done by techs that just needs to know how to hook up a codec and make a call.
However, if you run it out on a spreadsheet, it is actually better for a client with that many connections to get their own infrastructure over several years. But the service has short term advantages in that you can deploy the system with minimal hardware costs (say you use build in webcams on the mobile systems and the passport connect ($1000 each), then you are talking $30k total capital, and $90K of service for the first year), and then later in the year you can evaluate usage, adoption, etc, and decide if you want to continue the service, scale it up or down, or bring it all back inside your company by purchasing your own infrastructure.
There will be a revenue stream will shift from hardware sales to selling reoccurring services. The big danger here is the manufacturers will decide that they don’t need dealers. For example, I can sell a customer their own Clearsea server so that they can videoconference with their ipads, iphones, android devices and regular H323 and SIP endpoints. However, they can also just go to http://www.clearsea.com/ and sign up on a monthly basis, and I get no revenue from this. So right now, unless there is going to be enough usage to justify their own server, I have no direct financial reason to showcase this product.
I imagine that somewhere, someone in each on of these companies is working a spreadsheet that shows the amount a manufacturer “loses” in the distribution and dealer channel vs the marketing costs of that company dropping their channel partners and going direct to customers, e.g., gotomeeting. When the numbers shift, look out dealers!
Overall, I think that margins on hardware are drying up, and you have to be offering some service. I have actually been spending a lot of time in the past two months starting an infrastructure as a service company called VTCStream.com in which we rent space on devices that will stream and record videoconferencing because of this belief.
Your thoughts???
It’s been a while since I have posted to The FreeRange Technologist. The main reason is that I have been tied up starting a new business called VTCStream. This could best be classified as an infrastructure as a service (IAAS) business. We (I) rent space on a couple of LifeSize Video Centers that we have in colo facility in St. Louis. It might cost $40k to get one of these devices up and running and a small law firm with 4 video conference units and a desire to record three events a month can’t justify it. But they can justify $350 a month to rent space on a one of my video centers. It is selling well and we are doing a lot of work with other resellers to allow them to resell our services. I’m also offering to host and manage the Video Center’s that others own.
I decided to start up this offering under the name VTCStream since I also run a videoconferencing integration business called Kaleidoscope Videoconferencing in Columbia, Missouri. I wanted to make sure that if other integrators and videoconferencing resellers want do resell this service to their customers, that their customers will never see a link or reference to my integration company from the VTCStream site. In addition, I have setup noncompete and nondisclosure agreements to further assure other resellers that their customer base will never be approached by VTCStream or Kaleidoscope Videoconferencing for product sales.
One of the things that I have discovered in this new enterprise is how much difference there is in the pricing for bandwidth. Right now, I am using Hostirian in St. Louis as a colo facility. Price from Hostirain is $15-$20/Month for each 1Mb of committed data rate. So a 10mB connection is $150 plus rack space/power/etc. Quotes from providers in Columbia MO are in the $100-$150 per mB range. If we get a lot larger, then it will make sense to move the whole operation up to Chicago where the rates are in the $6/mb range at larger datacenters. Unfortunately such facilities require renting an entire rack (and the accompanying power) which can add an additional $600-1000 per month to the cost. Seems a little overkill for 4 RU of equipment, but oh well.
I decided on a pricing model whereby I make sure that I always have the bandwidth needed to accommodate a customer’s usage. I looked at how other folk who offer similar services are doing it, and they get a large pipe, but then just hope that they don’t have all of their customers trying to use the service at the same time. Instead, I reserve the bandwidth for each customer, so that they are not fighting for bandwidth with other users. So if a customer is regularly streaming to 300 people at 512K, we need to pay for and have available 150MB of committed data rate at our colo to accommodate this customer.
The hardest part has been to provide quotes for customers who have large streaming needs but only on an occasional basis. We are getting folks who want to stream to 1000 people, once a year. For a company wide meeting or something like that. That is just not the model I was anticipating. I am also looking at other data centers that charge by the gigabyte of transferred data, and have unlimited access to bandwidth (essentially). For customers with this type of usages, this would work much better since they could pay for an average amount of data transfer regardless of if it was all used in one hour or over the entire month. I am thinking that in the future we will put another video center in a data center that charges in this way for access to bandwidth. Another option that we are looking at is taking the Video Center feed and distributing that via some of the large national streaming networks.
An upshot of all this work with video streaming and recorded is gaining a lot of experience in various data storage technologies. While not as well know Coraid, seems to have the best and most economical solution with their ATA over Ethernet technology. It seems that not only will streaming and recording HD video be big in the coming years, but also economical and reliable storage solutions on which to store all that stuff. So now I am in the process of working with my one of my friends who has a lot more MS Server and Linux experience to evaluate the idea of starting a joint venture to sell Coraid data storage solutions.
It’s funny the way one thing tends to lead to another…….
A lot of the hotels that I stay at require payment for Internet access. To determine who as paid and who has not, they filter based on the MAC address of your computer. So if you have two computers that you want to use the internet connection with, you would have to pay twice. Fortunately, there is a way around it, changing the MAC address of your second computer to that of the first. Since I am a MAC guy, here is the process that I use.
Pay your fees and record the mac address of the adapter that you used to connect. (in my example c8:2A:14:45:56:66)
Make sure network cable is unplugged or your airport is shutdown (which ever one you are using).
Launch the Terminal Program: Applications->–>Utilities–>Terminal
Set the mac address. In this example, I am setting the mac address for the wired connection.
Type: sudo ifconfig en0 ether c8:2A:14:45:56:66
Plug in Network Cable or turn on airport card.
That should do it. This setting will hold only until you reboot your computer through.
Worked last week on an installation at a government facility with a firewall transversal device (in this case a radvision pathfinder). While outbound connections worked great, the inbound connections didn’t work at all. The way that the pathfinder works is a little unusual, I’ll just say that it is a quasi gatekeeper. It will register as a proxy with the internal gatekeeper. When the pathfinder was first booted, it showed up as a registered endpoint in the internal gatekeeper, but after a couple of minutes it would disappear and not return. We found that the problem was a load balancing switch that was between the outside router and the internal network. Once we bypassed that unit, the inbound calls worked fine.
Also, another warning. When you are working with a Radvision Scopia Desktop Server placed in the DMZ, make sure that any H323 fixup protocols from the DMX to the internal network have been disabled as they will mangle the addresses for the UDP streams.
I recently got a notice from AMX corp that I was a winner in their Click It to Win it contest. My prize, second place, was a MacBook Air, or the cash equivalent. I took the cash since I had just ordered a new MacBook about a month ago. To win, I had to do two of the three:
Now, I have to say that I really like AMX. I have been an AMX programmer since 1994 and my company has been a dealer since 1998 or so. In fact, it was the first line that Kaleidoscope took on as a company. And I certainly like them even more with my prize winnings.
But I am not sure why AMX thinks that being involved in social media is that important for their company. AMX make high quality control systems as well as a host of other products (we mainly deal with their control systems). I would say that the average price of an AMX project that we do is $8,000 to $12,000. I would think that anyone making this size of a purchase is going to do some research at AMX’s website and not consult twitter or facebook.
Or perhaps they are trying to reach dealers, or provide resources to dealers. If so, why not produce a bunch of informative youtube videos that we can embed on our websites that show the power of AMX in a real world situation, not in a trade-show booth or commercial. Something that really shows a user how AMX can be used in their auditorium, conference room, board room or elsewhere and not just the same mix of technical sales language that most videos have.
Think about Apple. Does Apple have a facebook, twitter or youtube channel? I have no clue, but I spend thousands of dollars on Apple equipment every year. And when I visit Apple’s web site, the videos I watch, from Steve Job’s keynote addresses to the product videos, show me how much nicer my life will be if I just buy this or that piece of hardware, not the tech specs (ok, maybe a little, but those specs are always referenced to what great thing I will be able to do with the device).
The list of H323 TEST Sites has moved to a new permanent location at Kaleidoscope Videoconferencing: Click here to access. There you will find the list in various forms including address-book files that you can simply import into your codec or control system.
Civility and Civil Public Discourse: What’s Faith Got To Do With It?
“The third video we have sponsored in support of the American Bar Association’s Mediation Week looks at the role religion has played in our current partisan divides and could play in promoting and supporting civil discourse. The video, “Civility and Civil Public Discourse: What’s Faith Got To Do With It?” features an interview with two retired ministers from The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Reverend Larry Veatch and Reverend John Yonker who discuss why and how people of faith care for, and learn from, each other even as they explore their differences. We invite you to show this video in your own faith community and invite further discussion. Here are some questions you might ask the group to consider: what are the traditions in your own faith regarding faith and politics? what texts support civil discourse? what in the video resonated or raised concerns? how do we as people of faith share our values and also honor our country’s tradition of separation of church and state? We invite you to share your comments and experiences by using the comment feature on this blog.”
This is reposted from buildingdialogue.wordpress.com and is part of a serials of videos sponsored from my company (VTCStream.com) and The Communications Center (www.buildingdialogue.com) as part of the American Bar Association’s “Mediation Week.” This year’s theme was Civility and Civil Discourse, reflecting the adoption of Resolution 108 in August.