Vidyo Demos Video Conferencing for the Kindle Fire
Vidyo is the first company to offer a personal telepresence application for Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet.
Called VidyoMobile, the software is now available with support for Android 2.2 to 4.0 as well as Apple's iOS. Vidyo its multipoint video conferencing on Amazon's Kindle Fire, an Android-based tablet/ereader solution, last night at the CES: Showstoppers event. The HD version for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was demonstrated on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smart phone.
"Easy-to-use, universal business-to-business communication is the holy grail of enterprise video conferencing," said Ofer Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Vidyo.
"Traditionally, the challenge has been interoperability among companies who use different video conferencing vendors and endpoint devices. Vidyo's software based approach offers a solution to this problem by providing high definition video conferencing over a multitude of off the shelf devices and interoperability with legacy systems."
Vidyo is among the pioneers of mainstream telepresence solutions, a topic that captured huge interest in 2010 but has cooled significantly in 2011. There is still interest in enterprise solution, but the consumer market, which Vidyo is targeting with the Kindle Fire, suffers from the fact that many consumers do not feel comfortable using a voice chat feature in combination with a video camera.
Mobile telepresence has been pioneered by virtual telepresence providers such as Mingleverse, which used avatars instead of actual video, but things have been rather quiet in the Mingleverse lately and we haven't received any update from the company in more than a year. Facebook's visual chat is also not quite the success it was cracked up to be.
Multi-point video conferencing, personal telepresence, or visual calling - all of which refer to a similar concept - has not quite resonated with consumers and mainstream businesses yet. The mobile version of personal telepresence is believed to be the holy grail of this market segment and there is the hope that people would want to attend meetings remotely, while traveling for business or working from home.
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Video conferencing without a camera now that's impressive.
Working From Home means working in your pajamas that's why video conferencing has taken a nose dive. If given the option. I would rather wake up and roll into work on the PC then take a shower at lunch maybe a nap.. Get my stuff finished up change from my bath robe at 5 and be out for the night. Working from home in comfort would turn into suit and tie at home which no one wants.
I am a Video Support Specialist working at the University of Alaska. We do 15-20k hours of video conferencing a year here. Video Conferencing has a large impact on education and the way students attend classes, even if it hasn't hit main stream consumer use. So I wouldn't agree with the statement that "it's taken a nose dive"
The Kindle has no Camera or Microphone.... Exactly WTF are they talking about?
I'm guessing it's using an "avatar" instead of actual video (since kindle fire does not have a camera). However, it does not even have a microphone. So yes, wtf are they talking about?
Kindle Fire doesn't have a microphone or a web cam, so maybe they should have a common understanding of the hardware specs for a device, before they say Kindle Fire is their target audience. I suppose you could use a bluetooth headset, but I don't think many people are going to bother with that!
Doesn't have Bluetooth either
I'd suspect what they are doing is something like Gotomeeting. You can follow along watching the presenters desktop, but you would receive and send audio on a telecon. There would be no video feed from outside the presenter. Given the requirement for Wifi access on the fire, and a separate phone connection, I'm missing the point of this altogether. Would be nice to have a more complete description of how this works in the article, or a link.