Cisco has a cool new system for teleconferencing. It’s called telepresence. This is the next evolution in web conferencing with the idea to make you feel like you are really in the room with multiple people from remote locations. Cameras are lined up in such a way that it appears as you’ve got eye contact with the person in the remote location.
I was curious about the topic so I did a few search engine queries. Almost everything was about Cisco, I had to dive deep to find some variety. Google was only giving me the popular side of the story. I needed to dig deeper.
Using Broadlook’s Market Mapper tool. I was able to find several vendors that have telepresence offerings. Time to do search: 5 minutes. Pages I would have had to weed through on Google: over 3000 (would need 3 separate queries).
Here is a partial list.
| Company | Web Page |
| FaceToFaceMeeting Telanetix Remote Meeting Technologies, LLC BrightCom, Inc. IVCi, LLC All Polycomm Cisco Haivision Tandberg HP Glowpoint |
http://www.facetofacemeeting.com/ http://www.telanetix.com/ http://www.rmtcentral.com/ http://www.brightcom.com/ http://www.ivci.com/ http://www.polycom.com/ http://www.cisco.com/ http://www.haivision.com/ http://www.tandberg.com/ http://www.hp.com/ http://www.glowpoint.com/ |
What I learned in 5 minutes is that Cisco is NOT the inventor of the technology and a closer look should be given to companies that were the poineers like Telnetix. Good research yields results that the popularity ranking algorythms of the search engines pass over. Cisco is big and popular. So mob mentality rules with all the blogs and posts about Cisco’s offering. If you want the mob version of a topic, use Google. If you want something that people, not algorthms control, try wikipedia. If you want to take research into your hands based on your decisions, check out Broadlook.