Budget cuts are costing many American students their arts education. As a wanna-be artist and overall proponent of all things creative, I have long valued the impact of arts education – especially in public schools. Unfortunately, these are the programs that are too often cut when budgets are slashed and difficult decisions must be made.

OK, so you probably won’t argue with me that art is important – after all, as children, it’s how we learned a lot of things, right? Who doesn’t have at least one thing they use a song to remember? I only have to key into the tune of ’3 blind mice’ to remember how to calculate the area of a circle (thanks to Mr. Bowlware, my fourth grade math teacher).

Studies show, too, that arts-engaged students show more positive outcomes in a variety of areas than their low-arts-engaged peers – especially in socially and economically disadvantaged student populations. This is exactly what makes programs like Fred Martin’s Urban Entertainment Institute (UEI) so valuable – and inspiring. Read More »

Tags: arts education, Bridging the Gaps, Cisco, edtech, TelePresence, Urban Entertainment Institute, video, video conferencing, videoconference, virtual concert

Collaboration technologies power a new way of working where everyone, everywhere can be more productive through face-to-face and instantaneous communication.  In previous posts, we’ve discussed how VoIP, TelePresence and Mobile Collaboration are reshaping the government workspace. For those organizations that often forced to do more with less, flexibility in service models is essential to accessing these transformative technologies.

As we’ve seen in education, the move from on-premise service models to the cloud gives organizations the ability to deploy advanced collaboration services while minimizing the requirements of an upfront investment. But a hosted delivery model not only minimizes cost, it also increases efficiency and effectiveness, reduces the burden on IT staff and ensures access to the latest releases.. With the right deployment model government workers can access the collaboration tools they want, whenever they need them.

When the City of Charlotte, North Carolina was preparing to host the 2012 Democratic National Convention cloud was the easy choice. With Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) the city was able to integrate its contact call centers and deliver excellent caller experiences to citizens and visitors before and after the political convention.  With Cisco HCS the city found a solution that scaled to meet their needs during a major event and continues to better serve its citizens. But the benefits of choosing cloud don’t end there. With cloud services the City of Charlotte has lowered the total cost of ownership for the contact centers saving the city more than $100,000 a year!

With that kind of financial and operational flexibility, it’s not a surprise that more agencies are turning to hosted solutions. Is your government organization ready to take advantage of the cloud?

Tags: cloud, Collaboration in the Cloud, federal government, HCS, Hosted Collaboration Solutions, local, state, TelePresence, video, voip, WebEX

In the midst of tremendous disruption, it is impossible to tell where the global media industry is ultimately heading. But a recent analysis from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) explores four possible future scenarios for the media industry. While they do not “predict” the future, the scenarios help build our understanding of possible outcomes — and how various industry players could be affected.

The Shape of Things To Come: Four Scenarios

We explored the ways certain industry developments could swing future outcomes. Combining these drivers into logical groupings (consumer behavior, regulatory requirements, technology, and macroeconomic conditions), we were able to define the following four scenarios, as shown in Figure 1. These scenarios are differentiated by consumer demand, industry structure, and content supply:

• Dark Ages — low demand, consolidated industry, and relatively low content supply
• Survival of the Fittest — low demand, fragmented industry, and high content supply
• Golden Age of Content — high demand, consolidated industry, and controlled content supply
• Wonderland — high demand, fragmented industry, and high content supply

Obviously, each of the scenarios will have different winners and losers. The financial impact and the implications for players across the industry value chain will substantially change by scenario. And in each scenario, distributors and infrastructure providers will need to consider different types of investments. Consequently, each type of player will need to adapt its competitive responses to the future scenario taking shape.

Figure 1.   Four Future Scenarios Are Based on Various Groupings of Industry Drivers.

 Source: Cisco IBSG, 2013

Following are examples of how two future scenarios could play out: Read More »

Tags: broadband, Cisco, cloud, cloud services, content, IBSG, infrastructure, media, media industry, monetization, over-the-top, regulatory requirements, service providers, video

If you are deploying or managing video and collaboration applications, you might have realized that providing good quality experience for users can quickly become complex and costly as you deploy so many different applications and endpoints from different vendors at the same time in the same infrastructure.

The figure below compares voice and video applications. As you can see, the characteristics of voice applications are very consistent when compared with the different video applications. Different video applications have different bandwidth requirements; traffic is bursty, unpredictable and highly compressed and often available in a variety of form factors from different vendors.

Read More »

Tags: business video, collaboration, enterprise networks, medianet, rich media applications, video

 If you find yourself in Austin, Texas next week, you’ll want to swing by the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) Meeting and Tradeshow which runs from May 5-7. 

Growing annually by leaps and bounds, ATA 2013 is expected to be their biggest and best conference yet, with over 6000 attendees.  The ATA 2013 exhibit hall will host 300 leading vendors with groundbreaking remote healthcare technologies and services.

And you can count on Cisco to be there front and center.   

So while you’re there, don’t miss a visit to the Cisco booth (#332) to see market leading solutions that overcome the barrier of distance while improving the patient experience.  If you take a second to let us scan your name badge, you’ll be in the running for a chance to win a $250 American Express gift card!

Finally, don’t miss Cisco executives in these two sessions:

Monday, May 6: 3:00 – 4:00 pm
Selling Abroad: Companies Making an Impact in the International Market
David W. Plummer, General Manager, Cisco HealthPresence

Monday, May 6: 4:15 – 5:15 pm
Market Watch: Not All Telehealth Markets are Equal
Barbara Casey, Senior Executive Director, Cisco Healthcare Business Transformation

In the meantime, you can learn more about Cisco Care-at-a-Distance solutions for telehealth by clicking here. 

We’ll see you in Austin!

Tags: healthcare, TelePresence, video