Video conferencing gets cheaper, nastier easier

In a hotel

So you get all the misery of business travel, coupled with the disadvantages of video conferencing (as opposed to being there in person.) Worst of both worlds.

Has no-one thought...

... of buying a big monitor and high resolution webcam/microphone for these people?!

$500,000?! That better include a full 20 years of support and free upgrades\repairs along with- at a minimum- native-HD 1080p cameras\screens. And a good number of wireless tie-clip microphones rather than a big omnidirectional one. And a bloody quick dedicated internet connection.

If not, don't the people who buy this stuff realise that their kids are quite possibly doing it already to talk to their friends over MSN etc?! MS Office Communicator even supports it if they need a more "businessy" looking one- and the half-million dollars saved should go some way to updating their network infrastructure to handle the massive amount of video content for a good few VCs going on simultaneously too.

I'm off to start a VC with a co-worker. From my desk. For free.

Save yourself some money..

...and just use some PS3's and eye-toys. Job done, a solution even the most techno-gimped middle manager can use.

You can also settle business disputes with inter-office games of COD4, everyones happy.

iMacs or Macbooks?

A couple of macs and AIM/ICQ or google accounts on iChat and you have a working simple to use solution.

Never mind the width, feel the quality

Git yea gold plated taps 'ere. Only £20k the pair. Its a barhg'in.

Sounds to me like there is a business model installing a video conferencing solution for free and installing yourself in the middle taking a rake off for each call. TV and camera, even at HD, should total £1k. The vendors should be ashamed of themselves.

@Joe K

Ah, yes: settling intra-office dynamics in a "gentlemanly" fashion! What a trip! Back in my younger "cruiser-weight" days, we often settled software design disputes - literally - in the parking lot - with fisticuffs! There were days when the entire system software team looked like they were extras from "Fight Club"! (BTW, I lost ALL my matches, but got respect for being the only QA guy that was willing to "step out". And I'm still close friends with all the members of that bank's "Fight Club"...)

More seriously, I've been testing video conferencing systems for the past 15 years, and still have yet to find one (including the Cisco and HP offerings) that truly add value to an organization. However, what I have discovered it that a decent voice conference call setup with the ability to quickly exchange documents and including a "virtual white board" works for nearly all situations that I need to discuss things with remote colleagues. It's the white board capability that is the biggest problem: I use an old NEC tablet PC to sketch things out in real-time, but folks trapped with a desktop or laptop and a mouse are at a significant disadvantage.

Microsoft is probably furthest along the "right" road here with SharePoint services, but eventually the approach will end up with something like a custom MMRP game server that implements the white board or, even simpler, a WEB 2.0 application that allows direct interaction on a shared page. This is outside of my expertise, but should be straight-forward (if not especially easy) to do.

(The dead vulture to commemorate what I looked like after a "design meeting"...)

Halo

I've seen a Halo room in action and I can tell you that it is most certainly not like using a webcam. The image quality is phenomenal, the latency imperceptible, and the immersive nature of the tele-conference is way beyond any desktop solution. It's Alice through the looking glass - very spooky and incredibly cool.

Chat to the girlfriend with iSight, discuss the billion dollar deal in a Halo room.

Did any body tell these customers

...About telephones?