Types of random algorithms

There are random algorithms that always produce a correct result called Las Vegas Algorithms. There are Monte Carlo algorithms, random algorithms that have a margin for error that can be made as small as required (one of my lecturers at the university proclaimed that once you reach 2^-300 - usually not very hard, you have a better chance to locate a specific atom in the universe). Both of these use some random way of accessing the problem. I though, would like to discuss statistical algorithms, which are algorithms that do not use random number generators, but instead rely on the input to be sufficiently random. They may not always produce the best result, but in the long run, they produce good enough results, especially since they are far more efficient than the perfect algorithm.

Take sorting a stream of random elements for example. Sorting efficiently takes a little memory overhead and can be done with logarithmic efficiency. What if we don’t really need perfect sorting? What if we just require that the smaller elements be separated from the others? That can be done with constant efficiency - just deciding if the element is one of the smaller ones or not. Of course, we need to decide where we draw the line between small and large elements. We could do so statistically, for instance, start with some arbitrary number and for every element processed, add one if it is larger than the limit and subtract four if it is smaller than the limit. After some time, we will be very close to separating the smaller 20% of the numbers. Moreover, the limit will adapt to changes in the input: if we suddenly start getting larger or smaller elements, the limit will shift to its steady state: 20% of the time it will be lowered by four and 80% of the time it will be raised by one, hovering around the same number.

The solution displayed above is not correct all the time, but if the input is random enough, it will give good results most of the time. The trick when using statistical algorithms is to accumulate the good results and try to reiterate the incorrect results. In the best case, an accumulation of good results that can be detected and separated, allowing the algorithm to improve its work. Such is the case of memory fragmentation.

Efficient Allocation

One of our protocol stacks here at RADVISION, MEGACO, suffered from a memory fragmentation problem. It uses dynamic memory allocation, and in some of the operating systems, allocating and freeing small memory sizes degrades performance over time. It became necessary to manage the way memory is allocated. We created a memory manager that allocated large memory sections (we called them “pages”) and divided each page to smaller allocations (called “blocks”). Memory allocations were rounded up to the nearest block size and when pages were filled up, new pages were allocated.

The problem was with freeing memory: we could only free a page when all the blocks in it were freed. At the same time, we needed to allocate memory from the same pages. A perfectly correct algorithm would need to keep a sorted list of the pages by their fullness, and allocate from the fullest page only, or perhaps consider the relative allocation times. These lists should be resorted on each allocation and freeing of a memory block, hindering efficiency. We decided to create an algorithm that would be mostly correct, but much more efficient. We divide the pages into four bins by fullness, and we allocate memory from the bin with fullest pages first. We assume that memory freed could belong to any page, so by allocating memory from the fullest pages, we allow pages that are vacant to free up until they are empty and can be released. The division to bins then helps memory pages that are partially vacant to continue the process until freeing up completely.

Let’s study the algorithm: memory load rises, so more memory is allocated. We keep allocating pages and allocating from them. Each new page starts at the freest bin and moves to the fullest. Then we stay around the peak load for a while and memory is freed and allocated constantly. Almost all the pages will remain in the fullest bin. Now the load decreases somewhat so pages start freeing up. As soon as a page drops from the fullest bin to the not-so-full bin, no allocations will be made from it - there are enough pages in the full bin. This is what I called “separation of good results” earlier. Pages that dropped to a lower bin should keep moving through the bins as old memory is freed and new memory is allocated only from the full bin. At this stage, there is a significant memory overhead, but this would be the case even if our algorithm used the best predictions, and in the long run, our algorithm will achieve almost the same results.

Similar Applications

• Branch prediction schemes
• Reinforcement Learning
• Optimal Control

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We’ve been led to believe that video calling is the best next thing. It hasn’t really happened, although there are signs of oil. To understand why video calling isn’t catching yet, we must look at the main problem today that hinders its growth - it’s not bandwidth, It’s not even money. It’s connectivity. Pure and simple.

If you look at today’s video telephony deployments, they are enterprise centric and they usually happen in large, multi-national enterprises, where you have multiple office locations spread all over the world. In these cases, there is an IT team that takes care of the video telephony network and equipment in the company - someone to call whenever something doesn’t work.

I know that because I actually work in such an organization. We sell equipment to these companies, but to be honest - I have never ever had a video call with people outside of RADVISION - unless they were located in a RADVISION office elsewhere.

And why is that? Is it because firewall traversal is a pain for video calls?

Or is it because there’s a dial plan issue, where dialing others is a pain?

It’s probably a bit of both, and until these are fixed, video is not going to succeed: there are a lot of small and medium enterprises out there that have no use for video telephony simply because they have a single office - it doesn’t make sense to call within the office. But - if you can come to such an enterprise, and offer a video service that allows them to communicate better with their suppliers or customers - how many of them wouldn’t want to use such a service (cost aside)?

Solutions such as SCOPIA Desktop ARE solving this problem. They do that by offering a thin client that can be used by virtually anyone with a PC and a webcam, and it doesn’t matter if he is part of the organization that deploys the solution or not.

The missing links at the moment are the room systems, which still dominate the video communications market - they need to catch up with the desktop solutions and provide better connectivity out of the organizations they cater.

Once that happens - video will become the default communications tool of SMBs.

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This may come as a surprise, but for the past couple of years I have been quite focused on “now” and on products in my “day job”, as I was busy leading teams of developers developing RADVISION’s video bridging technology.

I was part of the R&D organization, but as in most hi-tech companies I was mainly doing D - development - and haven’t really gotten to the R part. I was always working on “now”, trying to get things done and get products out as fast as possible (preferably yesterday).

I guess a change was due.

Well, as you can see from the picture above, a change has indeed come. And I am off - off to a new position, that is.

In my new role, I will be researching technologies in the CTO’s office, responsible for the evaluation and the development of them, as well as assimilating those into the R&D work. Yep, I’m talking research here. Research with a capital R.

Some consider this new role as “moving up” (I’m actually moving from the 8^th floor to the 9^th). Some call it “moving aside”. I prefer to think of it as “moving on”. I just hope I make as much difference, learn as much, and enjoy myself as much as I did in my previous role.

Wish me luck!

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The essential theme in Nick’s essay, in case you haven’t read it or his new book (which the essay is built on), is that technologies change us, often in ways we can neither anticipate nor control. Therefore, we should be careful in adopting all new technologies, especially if they can truly change the way we live our lives.

I LOVE technology, as I have already admitted here, but I have no problem with technology criticism, which probably has existed since the first technology (”Is The Wheel Making Us Lazier?”). One of the most famous tech critics I know, who is a very interesting writer and someone who inspired Nick Carr, is Neil Postman, author of “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology“.

Postman claims that new technologies are not critiqued enough, because we live in a state of “Technopoly”, where technology is defecated and becomes THE culture, instead of offering tools for creating culture or at most play a central role in the culture.

Psychological Barriers? Give Me a Break!

Postman’s criticism is quite a brain-teaser, but as I said, I have a problem with people who - based on Postman’s views - reject technology without asking the right questions and getting the right answers. In this post, I will obviously discuss video conferencing as I find myself, time after time, amazed when people who put it down because “it has powerful psychological barriers“.

I have already discussed here the way video conferencing is different than our existing means of communication, for better and worse. And I agree that video brings with it a level of intimacy that all of our communication means currently lack, but isn’t it a BIG advantage?!

Oddly enough people feel they should “prepare” for a video conference, while they are much more “natural” “just talking” on the phone. Others resent the fact that on a video call the other party can see them - follow their gaze, determine if they are focused, interpret their emotions, etc. (something that would happen in a REAL LIFE meeting). Most people claim that they are simply “not comfortable” with video conferencing because they do not know how to behave in front of the camera.

Video Conferencing (in)Etiquette.

Nick Carr says it best - the Net is already becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears into our minds. Just like the advantages of having immediate access (via Google, or whatever search engine you’re using) to such an incredibly rich wealth of information is obvious, so are the advantages of using it to enhance our communication possibilities.

Most People Simply Don’t Know How to Have a Video Conference

Neil Postman suggested three questions one should ask himself when confronted with a new technology:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
2. Whose problem is it actually?
3. If there is a legitimate problem here that is solved by the technology, what other problems will be created by my using this technology?

With Video conferencing, the problem it aims to solve is quite clear (and so are the benefits). It’s quite obvious that it is our problem (as in most of society), and so the benefits will also be ours. Regarding the problems it creates, I believe they are all just a matter of familiarity.

Fredric Paul, editor-in-chief of bMighty.com says that most people simply don’t know how to have a video conference. Everyone knows how to have an in-person meeting, some of us know how to attend an audio conference, but video conferencing is a whole different ballgame.

Video conferencing ups the engagement level of its participants - you can’t “hide”, you can’t mute and multitask, you can’t yawn too much or fall asleep on your desk, you have to be more conscious of your body language. In fact, you have to conduct yourself almost like you’re in the same room with those people…

Baby-to-baby video call via Skype. (CC)

Familiarity will take time. Video has already begun creeping into our hearts and minds via the media and the big names jumping in with video for our desktop . And as Fredric Paul observed, video eventually becomes “quite addictive”, and “once companies start using it, they find more and more uses for it and usage levels go up”.

So, if you are taking your first steps in the wonderful world of video conferencing, here are a few tips on the how in “how to have a video conference”:

• Connect a few minutes before the scheduled time to adjust your camera and sound levels.
• Avoid eating, drinking, gum-chewing, etc.
• Disable any potential distracting applications.
• Keep your gaze at the screen at all times.
• Don’t multi-task while you’re in a video conference.

To sum it up, I would say: treat a video conference as any other in-person meeting, except that you have to accept that you rely on tools and so you need to prepare them just like you prepare yourself.

Video Conference Would Just Become Part of Our Culture

The Internet has altered our mental habits, worries Nick Carr. Visual communication will alter our communication habits, but only for the better. And while Nick is haunted by a Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: a Space Oddyssey“, where people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be (SPOILER ALERT!) a machine in the end, I believe that relying on video conferencing infrastructures to conduct most of our communications would not flatten, but broaden our hearts, minds and human interactions.

In “The Third Wave“, Alvin Toffler predicts a time of stability in terms of culture and technology in the future where the latest wave of change has enhanced our lives and sorted itself out in a way in which we can live in peace with both culture and technology. I’d guess that there I wouldn’t need to explain anything about video conferencing - it would just become part of our culture, just like Google.

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CES is the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow, with more companies than time allows to meet. I’ll be there with some of our closest partners for a new project we’ve been working on for the last couple of months.

I’ve spent the last few days going over the names of companies at the show and preparing a “hit list” consisting of the companies that can become potential customers for our technology or those that we can partner with for their own technology or services.

I’m really looking forward for this show. If you’re going to be at CES and would like to meet /leave me a note in my contact form, I’d love to read what you have to say.

Las Vegas - here I come!

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High Definition has many different definitions: it’s 1080p (1920×1080) for sure. It’s also 720p (1280×720). At times, 480p is considered HD as well (HTC Touch HD has 480×800 resolution). The term is being overused for so many things.

I prefer just taking Sagee’s perception regarding HD, stating that it is the best available resolution at a given point in time.

Number of pixels in different resolutions

I know people who don’t see the need for 1080p - they can’t see the difference from 720p. And now, there’s this TRUEDEF thing that does 4096×2048 resolution. Four times the pixels as 1080p. Hmm.

As for the technical differences of the video coding technologies of TRUEDEF from HD, I’ll leave that to others who are more suited to deal with them than I am.

Do we really need this kind of resolution? Isn’t 1080p enough?

I’d rather go for 3D than invest time and money into more pixels.

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I hope I’ve already written one or two useful posts by now, but just in case you are looking for more, here are a couple which were not written by me, but go along very well with what I write (and preach):

On Tsahi’s blog, a colleague of mine, Amit Klir, has recently posted “Video Coding For Dummies“, which can certainly clarify various terms used by myself, as well as other bloggers, when dealing with video over IP. It also appears in the free eBook on Video Conferencing we just released last week (hey, that’s one USEFUL book… :-).

Mike Pihlman, who’s excellent review of Scopia Desktop I mentioned in my last post, wrote a similar post a couple of weeks ago, titled “Videoconferencing 101, Chapter 1“. In this post Mike defines and clarifies some basic terms you should know especially if you are reading this blog.

So if you’re interested in learning the basics about video coding and video conferencing, here’s a nice idea for a new year’s resolution - learn something new about video and video conferencing every week. Bookmark these, keep reading my blog, and slowly but surely dive into this wonderful world.

Enjoy, and a happy new year to us all!

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We got some good feedback on “Try Scopia“, but I have to admit that when I saw that Mike Pihlman’s, “Technology and Product Reviews For Everyone” blog was planning to review SCOPIA Desktop, it interested me the most.

Mike, who I have been following for a while, writes a technical blog on technology and product reviews specializing in video conferencing and other “green” technologies. Mike knows video conferencing, and so his feedback in the form of a product review, I assumed, would be something to look forward to.

And I wasn’t disappointed. Last week he posted “Radvision Scopia Desktop Review“, where he carefully reviews EVERYTHING about the product, from download and installation to video conferencing participation and recording. Bottom line - Mike says:

“The ability to instant collaborate is extremely valuable…

I see the SCOPIA Desktop as the culmination of years of effort to introduce a standard-base desktop product that can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Radvision has succeeded…

I would install the SCOPIA Desktop in a heartbeat…”

A Video Capture of Mike’s Video Review of SCOPIA Desktop.

In his post Mike was asking some good questions regarding SCOPIA Desktop, and it is my pleasure to assist with some good answers, which I gathered from the SCOPIA Desktop team. I thought it would be great to share them here as well:
[remarks and clarifications for Mike's answers in brackets]

How many people can view the stream [of a real-time video conference] at the same time?

SCOPIA Desktop’s integrated streaming experience, which includes audio, video and the presentation (with annotations), supports both unicast (1 to 1) and multicast (1 too many) streaming.

There is no limit on the number of clients that can simultaneously view such a stream (multicast), and the number of clients who can view different streams (unicast) at the same time is limited by the number of servers you get (of course you can deploy multiple servers).

In order to maximize capacity and optimize bandwidth utilization, an administrator can determine which users will view the stream in unicast and which users will see the stream in multicast.

Do all viewers need the Rad app [SCOPIA Desktop, that is], or can we also view it via REAL, QT, WM [popular video players] Or via an H.323 [video conferencing] client?

The SCOPIA Desktop web plug-in is needed for a full interactive experience. This plug-in is free to download “on demand” from the server when a user connects.
However, any standards based H.323 or SIP client can also connect to a meeting.
For a “view only” experience, participants can use the SCOPIA Desktop portal which embeds QuickTime’s streaming components.

When recording a meeting, is the “data” presentation also recorded?

Yes. And since SCOPIA Desktop records the data presentation in H.264 and in 720p, you can enjoy a great meeting experience, even when it is “just” a playback.

Is the desktop VC app H.323?

Not entirely. The media, RTP and SRTP are fully standard. Signaling is different because of the difficulty H.323 has with firewalls. This is especially true with remote users, and so we use a proprietary SIP-like protocol that is firewall and NAT friendly with HTTPS tunneling capabilities. Everything is, of course, automatic and transparent to the end user.

If not, where is the translating completed to connect to an H.323 MCU?

Translation is done on the SCOPIA Desktop Server that connects to the MCU via H.323. Therefore, you can conduct a meeting using a mix of desktop clients, room systems (SIP & H.323), mobile phones, and fixed phones.

Do the [virtual] meeting rooms have to be set up in advance, or are they pure “ad-hoc” needing only a set prefix?

Virtual rooms are set up in advance by the administrator to control the corporate use (define passwords, maximum allowed bandwidth, etc.).

A typical deployment will provide everyone in the organization with a virtual room number, similar to providing a personal phone extension.

Resources are not used unless someone is actually in the virtual room.
Ad-hoc meetings, where you can specify a prefix and a meeting ID, are also supported.

When I connect can I choose a meeting “location” of my choice? For example: 56123679 rather than 56666

Correct.

Can I hold meetings in two or three or four different virtual rooms? For example: 542345, 678456, and 1234?

Yes, you can have as many virtual rooms as you want.

Can a gateway be included to receive telephone or cell phone calls in meeting?

Absolutely. You can even include 3G phones in a meeting with the RADVISION 3G gateway. In that case, you will be able to send and receive video to/from a 3G phone just as easily.

If I were an enterprise buying this, what do I get? MCU? Server? GK? GW? What is essential and what is optional?

What you get is a bundled solution.
The SCOPIA solution includes SCOPIA Desktop, iVIEW (our management system), an integrated Gatekeeper, and the SCOPIA MCU.
This package includes unlimited client distribution, firewall traversal, streaming, H.323 & SIP connectivity to room systems. You designate a package with the appropriate number of concurrent users that you wish to support.
Conference recording and Gateways to ISDN, PSTN and 3G are optional.

I see you use IE to fully connect. Will you be supporting Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc in the future?

Yes, support for more browsers as well as other platforms for the interactive experience is in the works.
Note that to view a stream of the meeting (Audio, Video and Presentation) you can use any of these, as all web browsers are supported, on both Windows and Mac.

How many people can meet in a live videoconference at one time?

Up to 200 interactive participants

I want to gather usage statistics such as: hours used per month per person, utilization, total hours used, etc. What do I need? Will that cost extra?

Call Detail Records (CDRs) are available from the iVIEW management suite, which is included in the bundle.

.

I hope that following Mike’s excellent review and the answers above, you will give SCOPIA Desktop a test drive, if you haven’t done so already. Just like Mike, I believe that this is THE way to communicate, from your desktop and to anyone, anywhere. I’m glad to see that others outside RADVISION share our enthusiasm and accomplishment.

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We technical people always look at things from the spec sheet side of life: What protocol? What codec? What resolution? What I want to bring to you here is the opposite view of life, that of the non-technical user. By non-technical I don’t mean in the sense of someone not knowing the detailed differences between SIP and H.323 or between G.711 and AMR-WB but someone who doesn’t know the acronym VoIP.

I was onboard an airplane about to return home from Hong Kong to Israel. Next to me was an ultra-orthodox Jewish guy who looked to be in his mid-late 50s. I thought: Not much to speak about with this guy, good thing I have my Bose Noise Cancellation Headphones and iPod with me. As we started preparing for takeoff the flight attendants were taking the “turn off all electronic devices” thing seriously so they weren’t that happy with me when I kept my music rolling. I was forced to turn it off, and I ended up diving into a conversation with my neighbor.

He told me about his company that exports clothes from China and imports them to the US and South America. The guy lived in Hong Kong for some 20 years and is now living in Israel. He has offices in Hong Kong, Israel, the US and Brazil.

When it was my turn to talk, I looked for a simple, non-techie way to tell him we are into providing software building blocks for VoIP applications. When I got to our video stuff he started getting excited telling me he is using video on a day-to-day basis. In his offices he has video terminals from some of the leading vendors in this space, which each cost him thousands of dollars. These terminals are deployed at the desktop level, meaning not in meeting rooms but on some of his employees’ office desks. He said this is the only way for his people to really see their colleagues and bosses in other offices. All-in-all, he said, video is going to be found in every office. It’s going to be just like a FAX.

To me it was really fun hearing these words from a non-geeky, non-technical person who is excited not because of the technology but simply because of the value it brings him. He doesn’t know if what he is using is SD or HD and he is sure that H.323 is a special model of the Mazda 323 (a car that was once dominant among Israeli High-Tech employees). BUT what he does know is that some of his employees have never physically met yet they meet face-to-face daily through this technology.

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Voice and Video Quality

• Bandwidth - video requires huge amounts of bandwidth. You simply can’t do video over the internet.
• Processing Power - CPUs can’t process video fast enough, and if they can, they cost too much.
• Latency - the bandwidth is good, but latency is killing the quality. You can’t have a conversation if someone can’t interject when you breathe or know when you finished a sentence.
• Packet Loss - the networks quality is lousy, and video is just so sensitive. If you work on a noisy network, you just can’t get decent video.

Management/Deployment

• Firewalls - firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translators) make video deployment impossible.
• Walled Gardens - today’s systems are closed islands of deployments that can’t interwork with each other.
• Complexity - video systems are too complex. You must have IT people handholding you on every video conference you make.

Pricing

• Cost - video costs a fortune.

Human Factors

• People Don’t Like to be Seen - when you place people in front of the camera they think about how they look and not about the conversation. Video conferencing reduces the communication level and focus, instead of increasing it.
• No Real Need - who needs video? Voice is good enough for almost everything.

I can say that nothing on this list strikes me as being true today, or as a barrier that can’t be overcome with good technical solutions.

The trend I see is that the technical problems are being solved one after the other. I’ll devote some of my posts in the beginning of 2009 to discuss the relevant solutions.

Oh - and if you think I missed a reason - feel free to add it by commenting.

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A Teleworker’s Dream (CC)

VoIP and firewalls - a must-solve problem

I have already mentioned RADVISION’s desktop client, Scopia Desktop, as it is used by all RADVISION employees for daily video conferences. Scopia Desktop enables any member of the organization, as well as customers and partners outside of the organization, to participate in any corporate video conference as it incorporates a built-in firewall traversal mechanism.

Ran from “Code of Contact” next door has already explained why VoIP is so hard on firewalls and NATs. IT people are working hard on blocking anything outside of the private network, including video conferencing clients. Ran discussed ways to solve this problem, but most are pretty sophisticated and/or require an additional investment - for instance, reconfiguring the firewall (huh?) or adding a Session Border Controller (a what?!).

As a user, especially someone who just received an e-mail inviting you to a video conference on some enterprise system, you really don’t want to bother with firewalls or any other technical obstacles. All you want to have to do is double-click the link, and get connected. No downloading, no configurations, no nothing. That is just what Scopia Desktop does.

An e-mail invitation to a Scopia Desktop conference (right) and the Scopia Desktop Portal (left).

When you receive an e-mail invitation to a conference, as seen above, you receive a hyperlink for the Scopia Desktop Portal. The portal gives you access to any meeting going on in the enterprise using a browser based user interface. You simply have to log in, click on “Participate Now” and… that’s that! Every time I use it, at home or in order to talk to someone outside of RADVISION, I am quite impressed at its simplicity.

What is Scopia Desktop Doing?!

As I am a tech guy, I don’t believe in luck, and so I wanted to get to the bottom of things. I had an insightful conversation with Emmanuel Weber, System Architect in RADVISION’s New Hampshire team, in charge of Scopia Desktop. Since RADVISION applied for a patent on this piece of innovation and the application is public, I can discuss here what Manu was kind enough to explain.

You need to understand: No matter how well you setup your company’s network to allow endpoints to connect from the outside, some video participants may not be able to connect. This is because you do not control the network parameters of the other side, and some organizations apply very strict policies (for instance, not allowing any other traffic than HTTP and HTTPS to/from the outside world). In other words, firewalls are fighting with the video.

To solve this problem, our inventive R&D guys developed a method of “tunneling” stuff over HTTP and HTTPS. It involves “hijacking” the packets to be sent over the network (over a connection-less channel - UDP), encapsulating them and sending them over a secure, connection-based, firewall-friendly connection to the remote party. In this manner the firewall has no way of knowing what is sent over the connection and therefore lets the media go through.

This is quite simple and useful, but large enterprises often use an additional layer of protection over their network in order to avoid the misuse of this channel with a HTTP proxy, or a pool of such proxies that control the traffic.

Therefore, The RADVISION solution implements not only all standard HTTPS features, but also all standard features regarding working with HTTP proxies, just like any web browser. This includes HTTPS tunneling through the HTTP proxy. To reach the server through a proxy, the client first locates the proxy, and then it establishes a connection to that proxy and asks the proxy to connect via the HTTPS port of the Server.

This method has been deployed tens of thousands of times around the world and found to successfully traverse the firewalls of the most meticulous IT departments, including customers in the financial and federal markets, which are known to have strict security policies.

As RADVISION’s desktop client, Scopia Desktop, uses all of the above technologies to connect the video conferencing system, it creates a seamless experience in connecting to the Scopia Desktop Portal and joining a meeting, no matter your network settings.

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I have been reading the Presentation Zen blog for quite a while. The blogger behind the site, Garr Reynolds, is a master when it comes to presentations and what people should do with Powerpoint in the enterprise (hint - it’s not bullet points).

When it was time to make another large purchase of books from Amazon, I just had to put my hands on Garr’s book “Presentation Zen“. When the package arrived from Amazon, this book was the first I took. I spent several days reading it, and I must say it’s the best book about presentations I’ve read so far.

At the time I was reading it, an opportunity to try out the techniques in the book presented itself: a visit from VP of a large company was coming up, and I was called on to talk about one of our products. The occasion called for a new presentation, as the current presentation for this product was targeted at developers and product managers. It needed something of a different nature, so I wrote a new presentation, based on the book I was reading of course.

The result? I felt the Wow effect - The message was conveyed the way I wanted it. The meeting was successful. And now, I have been asked to fly to another meeting to give the same presentation.

If you need to give presentations at work, don’t pass the opportunity of improving them - purchase this book. Use it. The time it will take you to write presentations will grow, BUT: the presentations will be leaner, and they will convey the point you are trying to make more effectively.

Don’t forget to read Garr’s blog while you’re at it.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: VoIP Survivor

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“The Green Prophet” is an environment news and destination site reporting on Israel and the Middle East. It covers cleantech and green living solutions, as well as other green living issues. With a slogan like “The Middle East has never been greener” I couldn’t resist being somewhat of a green prophet, and so I wrote a guest post there about the green aspects of video conferencing.

My bottom line: Hard times call for hard measures. And so video conferencing should be regarded as a “must have”, not as “nice to have”, as the crisis we are trying to handle is one that we MUST solve.

You can read the entire post here. Comments, there and here, are most welcome.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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No elves or reindeers were harmed in the making of this blog post…

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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In our next bloggers meeting (yes, we have such meetings, where we drink expensive wine and discuss amazing things… NOT!) we decided it would be a great idea to have our own take on “passing out blogs”. We will collect some of the posts that were posted here in the past months and compile them together to form a book which our readers can use freely.

Even though I said before that I am a sucker for plain old books, we wanted something that could be not only easily distributed, but also could be easily used by you - easily distributed, easily shared, easily read. The answer we came up with was an eBook, one that will serve as a starting point for people interested in video conferencing and for those wishing to deploy video conferencing in their organization.

The result, “Video Conferencing, The Enterprise and You”, is a collection of articles, based on posts that appeared in this blog as well as some new ones that haven’t been published, that discuss video processing in general, video conferencing basics (what is it, why use it, etc.), and some interesting topics in regards to the deployment of video conferencing in enterprises.

If you’re interested in video conferencing, if you think of deploying video conferencing or just deployed a system, if you want to know more about it before you make a decision or made a decision but want to gather more information - feel free to download our eBook. You can send it to colleagues and friends, share it, use it as reference, send us feedback regarding it, or ask us questions- you name it.

The eBook is available here. Enjoy.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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