Walter Cronkite once said that it was no miracle that men walked on the moon. The actual miracle, the news anchor believed, was that millions of people sat in their living rooms and watched it happen. Perhaps the real miracle was that television became a success at all, given all the tribulations that accompanied its upbringing – and continue today. Compared to the computer industry, where standards reign, the television industry is a mass of confusion.
Since its earliest experiments, television has captured the imagination of the public. But before it became a success, it was a legal and technological battleground. There were patent infringement lawsuits over who actually invented television. A battle over color television technology went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1950s. And even today, instead of one video format for traditional broadcast TV, the world uses three: NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.
Cisco introduces more affordable personal TelePresence endpoints, new TelePresence Cloud Services offering, and New WebEx High Quality video experience. To learn more click here.
I’ve been blogging about Cisco and non-Cisco stuff on my personal blog for a while and I’m thrilled to start contributing to the Cisco Social Media Blog too. To kick things off, in case you’ve missed these, check out some of our lessons learned and tips on live social video streaming, geo-location integration into B2B events and corporate tweet chats.
The 9 Secrets of Success with Social Video
Not another term that starts with the word “social”, please! Hear me out. This is not your average video story: we created a video, put it on YouTube and bang, thousands of people have viewed it. So then, what is it?
Never Stop Experimenting: Pushing the B2B Event Envelope with Geo-Location CiscoLive 2010. Another year, another planning cycle. “How can we push the boundaries of last year’s show? How can we do something new? How can we increase traffic on the show floor?” Read More »
Viewing “TED talks” online is one of my favorite sources of inspiration. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It started in 1984 as a conference, bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED).
In a presentation earlier this year, TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, says the rise of online video is enabling a worldwide phenomenon he calls “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of the printing press.
He adds, to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness.
Video is becoming the preferred method of communication for enterprises on a global scale. But what is the formula for making video as easy to use as making a phone call?
In the video below, Cordell Ratzlaff, director of Engineering for Cisco’s Voice Technology Group and head of the User Design Engineering team, discusses the important design concepts his team used to develop some of Cisco’s newest voice and video endpoints and encourage the use of video.
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
