Video phones!

Jetsons Video Phone

Well not quite… but we’re getting there. Video conferencing has been common in business for years – admittedly with varying levels of success – but at home other than computer based calling with things like Skype it’s never really been an option.

It looks like that’s starting to change. Cisco, one of the big players in the business video conferencing game, has just announced a product call Umi, pronounced you-me apparently! It’s a basically a high quality HD camera and box-of-tricks that you plug into your television to turn it into a video conferencing unit. The idea being that you;ll be able to both talk to and see friends and family around the world. Well providing they have either an Umi of their own or a computer with Google Video chat.  It’s not hard to see Cisco linking with a connected version of their Flip camera in future either.

Cisco aren’t the only ones either, Microsoft’s new Kinect add-on for the XBox will provide much the same capabilies, this time linked with XBox Live and MSN Messenger. Google are also getting in on the game through their Google TV platform. Whilst details are scarce it’s looking likely that people like Logitech and Sony will be offering video calling through their Google TV appliances.

Will it take off? Who knows. Skype is a pretty popular way for people to stay in touch, so having a better way of doing that video calling is probably an attractive proposition for a lot of people.  That said, the bandwidth requirements for Umi (the only ones published so far) are pretty hefty.  Full 1080p HD video will need 3.5Mb/sec upstream capacity.  I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but here in the UK where ADSL is the most common form of home connectivity upstream bandwidth is typically below 1Mb/sec.

The other key consideration is of course is interoperability, you’re not going to buy into home video conferencing unless you can be sure you can talk to your buddies. If an Umi user can’t call a Google TV user or an XBox user the value is limited. Fortunately there are some well established standards for the technical aspects of setting up a call and transferring video, but how compliant these various solutions will be is a little unknown. Seeing as I have a Kinect on pre-order I’m hoping that MS will extend it’s reach out to Skype, Google etc. Time will tell I guess.

HP’s Windows 7 Slate Tablet lives on

hp-slateThis is interesting, according to Engadget HP’s much publicised Windows 7 based state tablet isn’t in fact dead as has been reported.

Personally I think this is great news.  I’m a long term fan of the slate having had one of HP’s old slates the TC1100 for years.  It’s a great bit of kit but Win7 really challenges its 2004 specs.

According to Engadget HP are planning to launch the new tablet later this year targeted at the enterprise market.  This makes a lot of sense to me. The iPad has the consumer world all wrapped up but in business (currently) it’s more of a novelty to anyone that needs to do more than email.  A Win7 based tablet that has a pen as well as touch and can run apps like OneNote would be very welcome. 

What’s more it gives HP a good product on which to take some market share from Motion Computing, who have been doing quite well selling Windows based slate tablets into industries like healthcare and engineering. 

Of course there have also been rumours of a HP tablet based on Palms WebOS, which of course HP now owns.  While that would definitely be an option in the consumer world I’m not sure businesses would find it all that attractive.  The reason I say this is that currently WebOS has next to no security built into the OS, at least none that is compatible with the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) security policies used by Microsoft and Google (see this article for more info).  So in that sense a twin platform might make good sense for HP.

Google Search Appliances support OpenSearch and Windows 7

opengsa

A while back I posted up some info on using the OpenSearch features of Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 to provide search integration into SharePoint.

OpenSearch is a protocol for easily sending search queries and sharing the search results.  Windows 7 and  IE8 use OpenSearch to allow external sources of data to be searched directly from Windows as shown in the screenshot below.

SharePointSearchinWindows71[1]

Personally I think it’s a really nice bit of functionality, it’s something I use all time now I have it.  So it’s good news then that a couple of days ago Google announced support for OpenSearch on it’s Google Search Appliances (GSA). 

If you’ve not seen these before they’re essentially a server running Google indexing and search that you can plug into your network and use to provide search internally to your business.  You basically pay for the number of documents you index.

This new support will allow you to send search queries to a GSA and have the results displayed in Explorer or IE just as shown above.

You can find detailed technical info on the Google site and download the feature on the Enterprise Labs site.