Wishing you and your family safe travel to your destination during this Thanksgiving weekend.  According to AAA, 42.5 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more during the holiday weekend (Wednesday – Sunday) although the average distance that people intend to travel is 110 miles less than last year.   Thanksgiving air travel is expected to increase with approximately 3.4 million travelers expected to fly to their destination.  Sixty percent of travelers say the economy will have no impact on their travel plans.  Over 900,000 people expect to travel via other modes including bus, trains, and watercraft. 

Many communities are working on strategies to improve the safety and security of cities and transportation systems.  

Watch this Discovery Channel video and see how video technologies are helping make travel safer in New York City.   The integrated Traffic Management Center (TMC) integrates city-wide video feeds for increased situational awareness,  mobile emergency response, and collaborative incident communications.

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Tags: force-multiplier, mobile emergency response, physical security, Public Safety and Security, Secure Cities, situation awareness, video surveillance

Video is making a huge splash this week at Cisco’s Collaboration Summit in Miami, Florida.

Analysts, Consultants and Cisco’s partner community are learning about how Enterprise Video is gaining a broader footprint, expanding from Video Communications, to also Video Content, the ability to capture, transform and share video to anyone, anywhere.

Attendees can see Enterprise Video in-person on the show floor through a variety of demos that showcase any-to-any video and how it is truly changing the Enterprise landscape as we know it today.

In addition to demos, attendees are experiencing firsthand how video can revolutionize a business through a technology tour of the JW Marriott Marquis.  The hotel has a host of Cisco Collaboration and Video solutions including Cisco Digital Signs and Cisco Physical Security.

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Tags: cisco digital signs, collaboration, digital signage, enterprise video, media experience engine, mxe, physical security, show and share, video sharing, webcasting

The Cisco Video Blog will explore the impact of video on people’s lives and all the ways it helps people to better communicate, collaborate, educate, and protect.  Video is transformative, and is for everyone, everywhere.  From large enterprise and small business to public sector agencies – people are using it in new ways to improve their organization and gain competitive advantage. Through this blog, we hope to inspire, educate and share what we know, in order to help you.

Let me introduce you to the editors of our blog.  I’m Julie McPherson and will be covering TelePresence and Parisa Bastani will be covering all other aspects of Enterprise Video – including medianet, the Digital Media Suite, Media Transformation, Physical Security and more.  We will share our experiences with you and help our team of thought leaders communicate about their specific areas of expertise.  We aim for this to be your go-to source for video and telepresence education and information.

Please post comments to let us know what topics interest you, to share your experiences and pass along information to your colleagues and friends.   That way we can all learn together.

Tags: physical security, TelePresence, video, video collaboration, video content

I read an article recently discussing the advantages and disadvantages of smartcards. I know that there have been quite a few distributed, but it seems to me that the adoption rate and the length of time they have been available are a bit out of sync. I would have thought that we would have many more smartcards, used in more places, being as they werer actually invented in 1968, and were widely used in French pay phones starting in 1983.

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Tags: government, identity, logical security, physical security, retail, security, smartcards, Smartphones