During the course of my regular briefings with industry professionals I often come across information that I find newsworthy. We have created this recurring feature as a way of sharing these items with you. Below, in alphabetical order, are notes and thoughts from a few of my most recent briefings.
Borderless Learning
I had a great conversation with Jules Trono, President at Borderless Learning. I’ve known Jules for some time and she is one of our industry’s biggest experts when it comes to training solutions to help companies use and support video, UC, and other collaboration technologies. Borderless Learning is a recent rebrand of Compass Business Solutions, but provides the same intense learning courses and videos designed to help you and your team improve your job performance.
What I found most interesting was a slight shift Jules noted in the types of courses that her customers have been requesting. While standard certifications and technology courses are still very important, that isn’t the entire game anymore. Productivity and workflow are the new hot items for business adult learners. Getting the technology to work is great, but figuring out how to manage your team for maximum efficiency and productivity is even better. With this in mind, Borderless Learning offers a number of courses in Project Management. Between covering technology and productivity, Jules is offering a one stop shop for business education.
eZuce Viewme
I’ve been following this interesting solution for some time. It is a cloud VMR service with a somewhat unique UI and feature set. Differentiators aside, at the end of the day it is a strong offering with HD multiparty video, recording, phone dial in, etc. I spoke with Mike Picher, (VP of Product Innovation), who surprised me with the current direction of the offering.
eZuce is using the Viewme video technology to power a new offering (expected launch is end of Q2), which they are calling Vibe. At first glance, Vibe appears to be another persistent team messaging solution, with your expected text chat channels. However, it has a unique workflow element that I find compelling. When you enter a Vibe text channel, you also enter a VMR for that room. You are muted by default, but you can see everyone else who is hanging out in that room. The idea is to give a better sense of teamwork and comradery to remote workers. We might not need to talk to each other all the time, but if I am working on marketing, and I join the marketing Vibe channel, its pretty cool to see live video feeds of everyone else on the team currently working on marketing. Also, I can always unmute, or grab people into a private video meeting. I love this concept. It gives a little more humanity to the remote team and the virtual office.
NVIDIA
The leader in graphics processing, NVIDIA, recently made the gaming community pretty happy with the release of their new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. However, many not realize that NVIDIA’s processing technology goes far beyond gaming and graphics. In particular, the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 (the first major upgrade to the Jetson series), is more than just a graphics card. It is a basically a mini computer designed to enable AI on devices that are on the “edge” of the IoT.
One notable example from the collaboration industry would be the Cisco Spark Board, which are powered by the NVIDIA Jetson cards. This is exactly the type of device NVIDIA is referring to as an “edge of IoT” device. While the Cisco Spark Board experiences is really cloud driven, the device itself needs to have enough intelligence to handle certain tasks itself. Some capabilities (like facial and speech recognition) should be processed locally to avoid the latency, bandwidth, and security concerns of sending it to the cloud for processing. Jetson can already be found in a number of products in addition to the Cisco Spark Board including: Drones, telehealth devices, industrial robots, automated farm equipment, and more.
PeekTime
I met with Francois Montandon, Business Development Manager at PeekTime. This is a somewhat unique service leveraging the Pexip Infinity platform for video, which was chosen in part for its interoperability and “no install” browser-based video portal. PeekTime also incorporates a few value adding capabilities, such as a whiteboarding feature, recording (powered by REC.VC), as well as streaming over YouTube Live and Facebook Live. I like how they are taking advantage of the flexibility of today’s various technologies and platforms to build a custom service for their customers. I also appreciate their flexible pricing for enterprise, allowing for shared VMRs along the lines of the old port based pricing model.
