Keep up in the latest insider video conferencing industry news

The New York Times posted an article last week titled, “Cameras May Open Up the Board Room to Hackers”, which has been all the rage in the videoconferencing industry. A great deal of video conferencing equipment is connected to the Internet without a firewall or gateway and is configured to automatically answer incoming video calls. “Hackers” are able to monitor both audio and video information, often with little or no indication to the target. In this instance, the hacker was HD Moore, a chief security officer at Rapid7, a Boston based company that looks for security holes in computer systems.

Video conferencing is not only for the elite corporate world anymore. Today our ambitious and aspiring students, all over the world are using video daily. Local field trips and DVD’s are so the presentations of the past.

When we hear someone mention holographic screens, many of us think of the many interactive touch interfaces seen in the movie Minority Report. The average Joe could only dream if living in an environment like that will exist in their lifetime.

Think back to your childhood and picture all the cardboard boxes you turned into spaceships and racecars. You customized them inside and out; the graphics, the door panels and the dashboards, with the help of Crayola I’m sure. Not this guy, he used McLaren’s crayons.

Have you just spent $35,000 on integrating your home with a top of the line Bang and Olufsen home automation system, the biggest and slimmest flat screen, and the raddest custom theater seating? If you said yes, you should stop reading this now. Now if you haven’t, you are going to be blown away by what Sharp claims that will become the norm in our homes soon.

Today travel apps are taking over the way we see the world, such as being able to zoom in to a relative’s home in Europe right from your Smartphone. Forget about exposing your kids to the world, this may be the only way you are getting exposed to the world right now. This may cut down on any vacations you could take or it may create vacations you want to take.

Packing a separate bag or extra large Ziploc bags for all of our gadgets’ cords, chargers and individual cases was the norm and still may be the norm. With today’s fascination of collecting mobile gadgets, are they all being used frequently or just collecting dust. Do we have the best of the best of each new device or just one do-it-all device?  

Have you ever thought of creating a robot to represent yourself at work, things would get done much faster, right? You could check on your staff, inventory and even your customers when your assistants are too busy. There are tons of video conferencing options out there, but none allow you to creep around the office when you’re present or on vacation. I’ve collected some info on a bunch of robots that companies have created to become your personal avatars:

It is so astonishing on how much we spend on traveling these days for things that last only a few hours. We all would love to have a healthier life and have more social time to do the things we love, outside of the office. This would involve leaving the office on time, not spending 3 hours a day in our cars, and having extra money in our pockets. Now if we had a tool that could make this easier for us, I believe the freeways would be a happier place.

Feb.7, 2011 - LifeSize announced interoperability between LifeSize HD video conferencing products and Microsoft unified communication (UC) platforms: Microsoft® Lync™ and Microsoft Office Communications Server™.  Connect users through HD video across the enterprise - from LifeSize systems to the desktop, and vice versa.