17 August 2010. The California Telehealth Network (CTN) has been officially launched by The California Telehealth Network and its partners - the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and the California Center for Connected Health Policy.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the California Telehealth Network Board of Directors and partners to usher in the new era in healthcare in California. Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to President Barack Obama was also present.

The CTN provides an example nationwide for what broadband technology can do for healthcare services, CTN will allow patients in rural and underserved areas of California to receive the specialty care they need. CTN will connect more than 800 California healthcare facilities to a statewide and nationwide broadband network of healthcare and emergency services.

The $30 million project is funded by $22.1 million from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with $3.6 million in matching funds from The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and other public and private entities.

A telehealth consortium led by the University of California Office of the President and the UC Davis Health System was formed in 2007 to create a statewide broadband system for health care. It selected AT&T to build a secure, medical-grade telecommunications system as part of the California Telehealth Network.

AT&T's tasks for the project included establishing new, or upgrading existing, telemedicine connections, especially in rural communities throughout the state. The $30 million project increased bandwidth capacity for telecommunications so that clinics, hospitals or other provider sites will have direct, peer-to-peer connectivity to all network members, plus connections to a wide range of external networks and services.

The CTN is a peer-to-peer system, enabling each member to have reliable, high-quality connections with public and nonprofit health care providers located in both rural and urban locations. Communities will benefit through improved access to clinical expertise in 40 specialties ranging from oncology and radiology to infectious disease and psychiatry.

The CTN also will provide opportunities for continuing education and distance learning for health professionals, along with access to clinical research and the possibility of access to commercially hosted electronic health records systems.

The CTN will be a peer-to-peer network, enabling high quality broadband connection to a statewide and nationwide network dedicated to health care, providing communities increased access to specialty medical care in more than forty specialties, continuing education/distance learning, disaster preparedness, and access to new technologies. The CTN will be made available to both for- and non-profit facilities in both rural and urban areas of the state.  

This is how it works ......... Redwoods Rural Health Center has become a member of CTN. When an RRHC patient has a condition that cannot be adequately diagnosed or treated locally, his or her provider will refer the patient to a CTN specialist. An appointment with the specialist will be made and the necessary paperwork faxed to the specialist's location. The patient will come to RRHC for the scheduled appointment and will talk to the specialist through two-way video. Currently, specialists from the University of California at San Francisco, Davis, and Irvine are available for consultation through CTN.

The service is provided at no additional cost to either the patient or RRHC, as it will be paid for entirely from CTN's $30 million grant. Patients and/or their insurers will be billed only for the services and tests provided by RRHC.

Another service, called “Store and Forward,” is particularly useful for puzzling skin conditions. For example, if a patient has a rash that RRHC staff cannot identify, a picture of the rash and the provider's notes can be sent to a CTN dermatologist for evaluation.

Mark Mowrey, R.N., the clinical nurse manager at RRHC, said: “”We're excited about giving our patients a broader experience of care and reducing transportation issues. This is a great opportunity that we hope people will take advantage of it.”

23 August 2010. Thomasville Medical Center in Lexington North Carolina has been a nationally accredited Stroke Center since 2006. Now the Stroke Center has added telemedicine in responding to the need for emergency stroke and critical neurology care, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Thomasville Medical Center is now part of the new teleneurology medicine program with Forsyth Stroke & Neurosciences Center and the Novant Neurosciences Network Solution which enables its medical staff to rapidly connect with neurologists using videoconferencing technology at the patient's bedside in the emergency department.

When a potential stroke victim enters the emergency department, the staff will be connected to an on-call expert neurologist and establish a videoconferencing link using a mobile unit that can be brought to the patient's bedside. The consulting neurologist will then be able to view and discuss diagnostic test results, including CT scan images performed. During the consult, physicians, patients and family members will continue to have real-time discussions about diagnostic results, course of treatment and patient response.

A significant advantage of having an experienced critical stroke care neurologist involved immediately is to assist in determining if the clot-busting drug tPA should be part of the treatment. This is important as tPA must be administered within a three hour window from the onset of the first stroke symptoms. When a person suffers a stroke, 1.9 million nerve cells in the brain die every minute. This steady loss of brain cells can often be curtailed through the use of tPA.

Dr. Keith Miller, medical director of the Thomasville Medical Center Stroke Center said, "We are proud to continue to offer our patients the best possible emergency neurologic care. This partnership with Novant Neurosciences Network Solution, coordinated through the Forsyth Stroke & Neurosciences Center, is an extension of that commitment and ensures our patients will receive immediate specialty care day or night. This teleneurology service adds to the clinical strength of our stroke center and will help us to even better serve our stroke patients as well as our local community."

The new program will link Thomasville Medical Center and Specialists On Call (SOC), a Joint Commission-accredited organization of board-certified, specialty trained, community and university neurologists.

Specialists On Call neurologists have a minimum of 10 years in clinical practice and include nationally recognized physicians affiliated with departments of neurology at world-class medical centers, including Brown University, Florida State University College of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine. SOC physicians have provided more than 7,000 consults in 2009 for neurological emergencies.

"Sixteen SOC physicians are now affiliated with Forsyth Comprehensive Neurology and have become licensed in North Carolina and credentialed at both Thomasville Medical Center and Forsyth Medical Center," Dr. Cheré Chase, , medical director of stroke and neurocritical care at Forsyth Medical Center says. Many people are aware of the dangers of high blood pressure, or may be able to recognize the signs of a heart attack. But most think a stroke can't happen to them.

"Thomasville Medical Center will be able to have real-time physician-to-physician consultation to quickly determine the best course of treatment for patients requiring emergency or advanced neurological care," continued Chase.

Source: The-Desptach_com Lexington, NC.

24 August 2010. Poundland, the UK’s biggest single-price discount retailer, has deployed its video conferencing-as-a-service (VaaS) and expects to save £28,000 per annum on postage and re-labelling costs.

Poundland sells high quality products all for £1, serving almost 3 million customers every week from its 293 stores nationwide.

The majority of Poundland’s imports come from China and are managed by its Hong Kong office. Until recently, the sampling process involved posting products to the UK for quality assurance checks and approval against packaging and quality standards. 

By enhancing this physical sample process with video conferencing from mvision, the Retailer has significantly shortened the approval cycle for some imports. It has enabled samples to be viewed and decisions made about them without having to physically send samples between the UK and Hong Kong offices.

Mike Gray Head of IT at Poundland explained, “We looked for a solution that would fit with our current technical set-up. We have a variety of IT support services but we really wanted a solution that the business could operate itself without the need for IT support. mvision’s VaaS was an infinitely more attractive option for us; it’s always on, available and works with whoever we want to communicate with by video.”

“It’s incredibly easy to use, so adoption has been rapid and we’ve realised a great deal of value from our investment,” continued Gray. “We encountered a few connectivity issues when the project started, but had we not bought the systems as part of a managed service it would have been far more difficult to resolve them. mvision owned the whole technical installation for us.”

Poundland has room-based Cisco systems placed on portable trolleys and connected to the mvision dedicated video network. These systems are used in Birmingham and Hong Kong where colleagues from the buying department assess products for quality and their suitability for the UK market. 

This not only reduces postal costs between the two sites, but empowers the team to meet UK quality and packaging requirements and helps avoid a costly re-labelling or returns process once product has arrived in the UK.

Terry Dwyer, Managing Director at mvision added, “The solution not only meets the original business case, but has greatly improved the communication between Hong Kong and the UK. It allows colleagues, including members of the executive board, to use video conferencing for meetings; encouraging the whole team to connect more regularly and productively.”

Poundland now plans to connect with its suppliers at other locations via video conferencing to achieve similar efficiencies through its supply chain.

mvision is one of just five Cisco-Tandberg certified global managed service providers, and supplies, installs and maintains its Telepresence and video conferencing equipment. With its award-winning videoconferencing-as-a-service (VaaS), mvision removes the last few barriers to wider videoconferencing adoption: convenience expense and infrastructure.

23 August 2010. The General Services Administration is hopeful that the lessons learned in deploying online travel services across the United States government over the last seven years will make the next generation of systems ETS2 closer to what employees use in their personal lives.

GSA awarded Carson Wagonlit, EDS (now HP) and Northrop Grumman contracts to provide e-travel services for all civilian agencies in 2003. Since then 23 of 24 major agencies have implemented, or are implementing, one of the three systems. The Commerce and Justice departments are the two big outliers when it comes to E-Travel implementation.

GSA issued a request for proposals for the E-Gov Travel System 2 (ETS2) on 23 August. Project proposals are due by 6 October and GSA plans on evaluating bids this winter.  GSA expects to hold a bidders conference the week of September 14. A date and place should be finalized in the next week or so.

Then in early 2011, GSA will downselect vendors and ask the remaining ones to provide a final and best offer as well as go through an independent verification and validation (IV&V) of their proposed system. GSA then expects to make one or more awards in mid-to-late summer 2011. Under the new RFP, GSA expects to move from three vendors to one or two.

"We identified many usability issues with ETS1 and many customer dissatisfaction areas that could be improved," said Tim Burke, director of the Office of Travel and Transportation Services in the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, in an interview with Federal News Radio.

The U.S. government does 2-to-3 million transactions a year.  Its agencies spend between $10 billion and $12 billion a year on travel expenses such as airfare, hotels and rental cars.

Burke said there are several basic pillars for ETS2:

- Improved usability - That will come from a improved technology application, better business intelligence, better personalization and better navigation technologies.

- Optimized online travel planning - Burke said the goal is to model ETS2 after many of the commercial sites such as Orbitz or Travelocity.

- Sustainability - The new set of services will integrate with customer agency's existing tools such as telepresence, Web conferencing and other collaboration applications. Burke said ETS2 will help employees make a decision whether to travel or conduct the meeting online.

Tim Burke, director of the Office of Travel and Transportation Services in the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA is quoted as saying that ETS2 will not be a telepresence or technology buy. Instead it will let employees determine the best use of money in terms of traveling or holding a Web meeting.

25 August 2010. India’s Business Octane based in New Delhi has extended its already impressive range of Telepresence three-screen solutions with the launch of its CollaboratorTURBOMAX™ Immersive Telepresence single-screen Collaboration Suite(See picture).

Business Octane has recently signed deals with DuPont and Citrix for their Indian sites. DuPont has deployed CollaboratorTURBOMAX™ 8/16 VX in their Gurgaon facility and Citrix will deploy CollaboratorTURBOMAX™ 13/13/19 ZXi in their new facility at Ulsoor, Bangalore.

Business Octane says that with Collaborator TURBOMAX™, enterprises will discover a new way to meet colleagues, clients, partners and suppliers worldwide, without the need to travel. The TURBOMAX Suite fosters a truly immersive dynamic Telepresence meeting experience between remote participants with their true-to- life images, natural eye contact, and stereo spatial audio and  content sharing in real-time.

The TURBOMAX Suites seamlessly interoperate with Business Octane’s entire collaboration and learner solutions portfolio and other standards-compliant videoconferencing systems. Users can establish a multi-site collaboration with up to 120 Business Octane’s Suites in a single call using a Polycom MCU.

The Business Octane Telepresence Collaboration Suite CollaboratorTURBOMAX™ is designed with elliptical seating to facilitate collaboration between local and distant teams across the enterprise. The suite is available in eight seating capacities  is available in eight seating capacities ranging from 12 to 37. These Suites are fully integrated solutions that include the entire furniture and interiors that have been natively embedded with complete networking, lighting, electrical, audio and visual, conferencing and control systems.

TURBOMAX comes in the model variants FXi/FX and LXi/ LX.  They can be upgraded to VXi/VX variants and to ZXi/ZX variants with three largeTelepresence screens at anytime. The unusually large number of different Business Octane Telepresence solutions are explained with plenty of useful pictures on the company’s web site www.businessoctane.com.

Mr. Sanjay Bansal, Chairman of the Board & Managing Director, Business Octane, said: “Our solutions provide in true sense as effective as face-to-face meeting experience over Telepresence to our customers. CollaboratorTURBOMAX™ induction provides our clients dynamic immersive Telepresence at one third of the existing bandwidth requirement, starting as low as one Mbps driving its adoption in the marketplace”. He also claimed Business Octane Telepresence systems cost 40% less than other Immersive Telepresence suites.

All the solutions offered by Business Octane are designed as per its value philosophy PDTC (Passionate Difference to Customers) and design philosophy FAST (Functionality, Aesthetics, Simplicity Together) for giving its customers highest return on their investment.

Mr. Sanjay Bansal has worked with a majority of the Fortune 500 companies and top corporates in India and won several accolades for innovations in sales and marketing. His passion for excellence and continuous learning have helped him create a very customer-caring sales team. He personally trains each and every sales person to imbibe the Business Octane values of genuine desire to help the customer and not to look for deals but a long-term partnership with every customer.

Business Octane is headquartered at Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi. Business Octane haims to achieve market leadership position in the global telepresence industry. It already has Executive Experience Centers at Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad where customers can come and experience its solutions first hand. Business Octane plans to increase its pan-India presence significantly and has worldwide ambitions.

Reaching a turnover of $1 billion has beeen mentioned as a long-range target. Given the company’s strength in sales and marketing, this could be achievable over time.

23 August 2010. Fraunhofer IIS, a European source of excellent audio and multimedia technologies, presented technologies for telepresence@home at IFA 2010 in Berlin. Fraunhofer demonstrated its technology for PC-based video conferencing at its booth 5/7 at IFA TecWatch (Hall 8.1).

Its telepresence@home and HD videoconferencing systems feature low-delay, high-quality audio and video.  Fraunhofer’s technology allows users to experience completely natural conversation just as if the participants were sitting in the same room. Users feel as if they are in the same room whether they are playing a game, interactively sharing videos or just having a conversation. This same-room feeling means that distance between people no longer impacts the quality of their communication and relationships.

The telepresence@home system demo is part of the European Union’s “Together Anywhere Together Anytime” (TA2) project, which aims to enable new media experiences to nurture relationships between families and friends.  Fraunhofer contributed its Audio Communication Engine to provide the highest quality audio, and now delivers a matching low-delay video solution through its work as a research partner within TA2

This new video technology reduces delay to a level that allows for natural communication experiences. In contrast to conventional video conferencing systems, the Audio Communication Engine and low-delay video technology deliver a complete Telepresence@home system that provides the highest audio and video quality along with imperceptible latency.

“Current low-delay video technologies require either a much higher bit-rate or rely on very expensive dedicated hardware,” said Dr. Nikolaus Faerber, low-delay video project manager at Fraunhofer IIS.

“However, Fraunhofer’s solution is based on PC hardware, which is widely available at a very competitive price. The result is an HD video conferencing system for the home that delivers the best possible communication experience at a low cost.”

Fraunhofer’s low-delay video technology consists of low-delay, high-quality video encoding and decoding based on H.264 in conjunction with a custom designed low-delay frame grabber card. This combination enables high-quality HD video at DSL compatible bit-rates well below 100 ms delay end-to-end.

For audio, Fraunhofer’ Audio Communication Engine combines several components that vastly improve the sound quality and clarity of video conferences compared to present systems. First, the MPEG audio communications codec ‘AAC Enhanced Low Delay’ ensures CD-quality audio at very low coding delays and bit rates. Second, robust, multi-channel echo-control software reliably removes echoes, providing hands-free convenience and complete freedom to move around in a room. Finally, a specially matched IP streaming stack and error concealment tools allow for high-quality audio even under adverse network conditions.

“The combination of Fraunhofer’s low-delay video technology and Audio Communication Engine will enable truly outstanding video conferencing experiences in the home,” said Ian Kegel, Research Group Leader at BT Innovate & Design. He is Technical Delivery Manager in the TA2 project.

31 August 2010. Iformata Communications LLC has announced its VNOC Observer service for video conferencing and Telepresence. Built to complement its VNOC Producer service, the two systems provide previously unattained automated conference monitoring, diagnostics, event correlation and management capabilities.

 Eric Adelman, Director VNOC Services, Polycom, said: “VNOC Observer is a unique and innovative tool that helps ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for managed service customers. Problems are trended and identified before affecting the conference, enabling a swift proactive response to help preserve total customer satisfaction.”

VNOC Observer ensures video systems perform at optimal quality, measuring and storing statistics of endpoints and infrastructure. Performance degradations are classified according to ITIL standards with automatic reactions according to predefined responses configured by an account manager. Numerous automated activities are customizable including notifications, reboots, resets, reconnections, on-screen messages, renegotiations, automatic switch-over facilities, ticket escalations, etc.

 Scott Allen, Chief Executive of Iformata, said: “Based on the needs of the organization, we define acceptable limits of packet loss, frame rate, resolution, jitter, etc. and place these values into VNOC Observer. Using this approach, we establish several classes of performance criteria. When any of these classes are triggered by comparison or deviation, automatic activities are executed according to the process desired by that organization.”

“This support model is entirely unique and unparalleled in this industry. For example, an account manager may easily build a process that automatically sweeps video rooms during off hours, monitors for problems, opens tickets automatically, resets devices based on deviant conditions, and reconnects sites all based on rules scripting, even closing the tickets when issues are remediated automatically."

Tolerance thresholds may be heightened or relaxed by an account manager at any time through a control panel, applying service definitions to systems, groups of systems, or an entire organization. Up to 75 metrics are monitored in real time for infrastructure and video endpoints, including video frame rate, negotiated audio and video protocols, overall bit rate, audio and video packet loss, mute status, and many other indicators.

For example, if two HD endpoints negotiate less than 720p resolution, VNOC Observer identifies this fault upon conference setup, and if programmed to do so, will reconnect the locations and re-validate the preferred resolution. As another example, if two endpoints negotiate a low frame rate or an unacceptable audio or video protocol, VNOC Observer flags this problem upon conference connection and forces a renegotiation of acceptable parameters, noting the issue in a ticket log for reporting purposes.

VNOC Observer and VNOC Producer are part of the VNOC Symphony™ platform of tools and services, and are accessed through any of the VNOC Symphony ubiquitous user interfaces, including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, web interfaces, IVR interfaces, and others.

VNOC Observer and VNOC Producer, as part of the VNOC Symphony platform, provide the first ubiquitous toolsets in the industry to offer fully automated VNOC services to organizations, regardless of their size. The VNOC Symphony platform supports sole or mixed endpoints by Tandberg, Polycom and LifeSize, and it supports infrastructure by Tandberg and Polycom, managing port availability across multiple MCUs and making resource allocation transparent to user requests.

The VNOC Symphony platform and its associated tools are available through Iformata channels and partners.

24 August 2010. InterCall, one of the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services providers, has launched InterCall Streaming, a new communications and collaboration tool for customers. InterCall Streaming features technology and tools that enable streaming events to be more interactive, flexible and mobile.

Ben Chodor, senior vice president of InterCall Streaming, said :"We've worked with our customers for years to pinpoint and develop the ideal features to deliver what they need in a streaming solution. The new InterCall Streaming platform represents this feedback. We're giving customers an intuitive, interactive and customizable streaming experience with superb video quality. This is truly the next step in streaming."

Ben Chodor founded Stream57 which Intercall acquired earlier this year. Thie new service is based on this acquisition as can be seen in the new product’s support for integrated video encoding based on VP6 or H.264 parameters, as well automatic video in PowerPoint support. The Intercall offering is based on Flash technology, eliminating the need for users to download applets.

Important for training sessions, InterCall Streaming gives participants the ability to answer questions and to see a tally of how other participants answered the same questions. It tracks which participants answer the questions and enables users to answer questions using a standard text message. That capability is designed for people who watch a Webcast displayed via a projector or liquid crystal display.

InterCall Streaming is integrated Twitter and social media, which gives participants the ability to have a dialogue with other participants. This is a capability that would be useful for Webinars targeting doctors and other expert audiences, Chodor said.

To help ensure that the webinar audience remains engaged with the content during a training session.  The presenter can send out quick polls every few minutes to test participants' understanding of the material. If all poll questions are not answered, a training participant may not receive credit for completing the training.

The new tools are also a great way for participants to contribute to the presentation. Users can ask questions and respond back to polls about the content which the presenter can react and respond to in real time. They can also participate in group chats during the session. InterCall Streaming also takes advantage of new mobile technologies, integrating SMS polling and social media functionality. Some of the new features include:

Videos in PowerPoint presentations will be automatically encoded and streamed during webcasts. Slide and Screen Broadcast zooming and panning allows users to zoom in on slide and screen broadcast content — great for slides with complex graphs and charts .

Founded in 1991, InterCall helps people and companies be more productive by providing advanced audio, event, Web and video conferencing solutions that are easy-to-use and save them time and money. Along with a team of over 500 Meeting Consultants, the company employs more than 1,500 operators, customer service representatives, call supervisors, accounting, marketing and IT professionals.

InterCall's strong U.S. presence, which includes four call centers and 26 sales offices, is bolstered by a global reach that extends to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. For more information, please visit www.intercall.com.

31 August 2010. Aruba Networks has announced that Polycom has certified Aruba's Virtual Branch Networking (VBN) solution for use with its suite of Unified Communications products for teleworkers. The joint solution reduces the time, cost and network engineering required to deliver telepresence, video conferencing and voice communication services to remote users working at home, in branch offices, or on the road.

VBN rightsizes the cost of remote networking by using centrally-managed, user-configured Remote Access Points (RAPs) -- costing as little as $99 per site -- to deliver secure access.

Oon September 22 you can join an Aruba/Polycom Webinar on teleworker solutions by registering at: http://tinyurl.com/2culsy8.

Previously establishing a remote network required complex virtual private networks that had to be installed by IT staff. Aruba's no-cost Virtual Intranet Client delivers RAP functionality to PC users, while a cloud-based content security service economically delivers enterprise-class protection for branches of one to many.

Mark Roberts, vice president of partner marketing at Polycom said: "Polycom and its ARENA ecosystem partners such as Aruba Networks are focused on proliferating new collaborative communications solutions that benefit organizations worldwide. Aruba's solution addresses the unique remote networking needs to simplify unified communications for teleworkers. In fact, Polycom uses the solution to provide remote video teleconferencing to our own employees at their home offices."

Polycom offers a complete portfolio of Unified Communications (UC) products that can now be easily extended to branch offices and remote workers with Aruba's VBN.

 Manav Khurana, Aruba's Head of Industry Marketing, said: "As enterprises have scaled up telework initiatives to improve productivity, reduce real estate footprints and lower overhead costs, the limitations and expense of traditional remote access solutions have highlighted the need for a better alternative. Aruba VBN addresses this issue with exceptionally low per user and per site deployment costs, unmatched ease-of-use, and centralized management that gives IT departments complete visibility into performance and hardware status. Used in conjunction with Polycom's best-in-class unified communications solution, VBN makes it practical to broadly implement telework programs across any enterprise, small or large."

The Polycom teleworker solution is available now through authorized Polycom resellers. Polycom resellers that are not Aruba partners can obtain the VBN products through ScanSource Communications, an Aruba distributor.

For more information, visit: http://www.arubanetworks.com

(1) AT&T has completed the sale of its domestic Japanese outsourcing services operations to Internet Initiative Japan Inc.. The companies originally announced the transaction in June 2010. As part of the sale, AT&T will transfer approximately 1,600 domestic Japanese business customers and approximately 245 employees who support those customers to IIJ.

AT&T remains committed to serving multinational corporations (MNCs) with operations in Japan and offers a robust portfolio of services including managed global connectivity, hosting, mobile enterprise applications, cloud computing, application management, security, Telepresence and unified communications.

AT&T's strong presence in Japan includes substantial operations and employees to support the domestic Japanese AT&T Global Network infrastructure, which includes four global network service nodes, remote access infrastructure for corporate clients, an Internet Data Centre and significant international subsea cable capacity.

AT&T intends to continue to sell domestic telecommunication services, including IIJ products, to the MNCs it serves that have operations in Japan. And IIJ intends to purchase global connectivity services from AT&T to support its Japan-based customers' global communications needs.

(2) MASERGY, a privately held global network services provider,has announced the promotion of Chris MacFarland to chief executive officer and Rob Bodnar to executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Chris MacFarland joined MASERGY as chief operating officer in 2008. Under his guidance, the company has grown its revenue and profitability during one of the most economically challenging times while increasing its lead in customer satisfaction with technological leadership.

Rob Bodnar has served as chief financial officer since 2005, steering the company through continuous top-line and EBITDA growth, achieving a cash-flow positive balance sheet and eliminating all debt. The company attained this financial success during the current global economic downturn, while maintaining employee levels, improving employee benefits, expanding capital investment and growing the customer base.

MASERGY provides cutting-edge communications services to the Global 5000 in a unique and highly cost-effective manner. Its purpose-built MPLS network platform hosts a variety of customers requiring real-time, mission critical network communications on a global basis.

(1) FVC, the leading Value Added Distributor across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has signed an agreement with Netherlands-based logistics company, Merzario, to manage its supply chain and logistics in Amsterdam, Holland. This new hub has been set up to allow greater convenience for FVC’s partners in North & West Africa, taking advantage of direct cargo flights to this region.

K.S. Parag, FVC’s MD, said, “Setting up a supply chain hub into Europe has given our partners in North & West Africa an added value in terms of faster deliveries, speeding up the supply chain process. This is the most cost effective solution all around.”

As one of the region’s leading VAD, FVC researched the benefits of setting up a supply chain in Amsterdam. The new logistics hub in Amsterdam will provide the same services as FVC’s supply-chain hub in the Jebel Ali Free zone, UAE.

 (2) Jim O'Brien has been appointed General Manager of Vidyo's new VidyoCast business unit. VidyoCast is a groundbreaking line of cost-effective, easy-to-connect products and services for broadcast transmission and contribution. These products offer exceptionally high quality, low latency SD/HD video encoding and transport at one-tenth the cost of satellite. The product suite will formally be launched in September at the IBC Conference ) in the Netherlands.

Jim O'Brien has contributed to numerous technological breakthroughs in broadcast, cable and broadband over 42 years, with special expertise in the software control of television networks, TV production and playout automation, video servers, ad insertion and streaming media. Jim joins Vidyo from his position as President, Building4Media where his largest customers included CNN, CBS, The Weather Channel, NFL, Comcast, Star News, Sun TV, and PCCW.

(3) Atlas Gentech has signed a deal to distribute LifeSize’s HD video communications products in New Zealand. Atlas Gentech Managing Director Steve Varney added, “LifeSize is a leader in HD video communications. Now we are equipped with the solutions customers demand: immersive HD quality and the flexibility to easily adapt and integrate into today's network environments. We are pleased to team with LifeSize to deliver video communications that enable face-to-face meetings with anyone, anywhere at any time."

"We are pleased to have Atlas Gentech join our partner network to expand the availability of LifeSize solutions,” said Simon Claringbold, vice president of APAC sales, for LifeSize Communications. "We realise the tremendous value our reseller partners bring to LifeSize and we are committed to providing them with a fully encompassing channel program that supports their efforts and contributes to their ultimate success.”

(1) Glowpoint has upgraded its hosted, cloud-based, automated diagnostic application, called Video Room Sweep (VRS), to include support for managed service customers utilizing LifeSize and Tandberg technologies. VRS diagnoses health of all components of telepresence and video conferencing rooms, as well as network performance, to ensure complete readiness.

The initial version of VRS, which supported Polycom and Cisco technologies exclusively, was launched in December of 2009 to provide comprehensive diagnostic capabilities for Glowpoint managed service customers across the globe.

Glowpoint's VRS automatically performs comprehensive "sweeps" and emulations of video sessions for all components of Telepresence and video conferencing environments. Offering a more proactive, automated, and scalable level of managed service, VRS ensures higher in-use rates of video technology by providing predictable performance and a greater return on investment.

(2) Glowpoint has reinforced its commitment to greater interoperability standards for video users by joining the Unified Communications Interoperability Form (UCIF), alongside Microsoft, Polycom, Vidyo, and Logitech / LifeSize. The common goal of UCIF revolves around delivering open, unified communications solutions.

Glowpoint currently provides a full suite of VNOC managed services to approximately 700 telepresence / video rooms, and has produced more than 60,000 video conferences for its clients. In addition, more than 580 unique enterprises - and thousands of video systems with mixed video environments - are connected to Glowpoint's Telepresence interExchange Network (TEN), which enables business-to-business video calling across the globe.

(1) On the way to hospital in an ambulance, critically ill and injured children in Cincinnati get medical care through cameras and other equipment that link ambulance personnel with doctors waiting in the emergency room. Four ambulances in Cincinnati are outfitted with the equipment. Another hospital system outside that city may soon put the equipment in four more ambulances.

The system, called Transport AV, is designed and manufactured by GlobalMedia of Scottsdale, AZ.  The equipment is mounted on stretchers so that doctors can see patients while they are en route to the hospital, even before they reach the ambulance.

The system includes an examination camera, a hand-held high-resolution video camera the size of a dry-erase marker, a digital stethoscope, microphone and headset. All are connected via the Internet between the stretcher and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. It costs about $30,000

Emergency-room doctors can control the examination camera remotely so that they can zoom in on faces or areas of trauma. Transport teams use the cameras to send real-time live video and freeze-frame images of the patient to the doctors.

The system uses little bandwidth. The images and sounds from respiration and heartbeat are transferred over 3G mobile telecommunications.

A Cincinnati doctor who oversees the division of the children's hospital emergency department that works with emergency-medical-service providers helped GlobalMedia design the system.

The system gives doctors uninterrupted contact with the patient, enabling continuous monitoring. Doctors can immediately diagnose patients and monitor the patient's condition and reaction to treatment throughout transport to the hospital, often saving critical time when sick or injured patients arrive.

GlobalMedia's mobile technology is being expanded to transportable exam stations that are being used by doctors who do outreach services for U.S. veterans. GlobalMedia's products are shipped abroad to developing companies, and it has customers in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. connecting global Fortune 500 firms within a highly managed architecture.

(1) In TED conferences organized by a small New York non-profit organisation called TED Conferences, audiences get to hear and see as streamed video the ideas of illustrious thinkers and speakers from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design (thus the acronym TED).

The talks given at these gatherings have a few distinctions: Many are by noted luminaries and professors, they last less than 20 minutes, and the subject matter is wide and varied, from feeding the world to finding aliens. The TED site rolls out more videos all the time -- there are now more than 700 online.

TED Talks videos show some of the most intriguing presentations from the many TED events -- the main TED conference held every spring in Long Beach, Calif., the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, in July and an ongoing series of local gatherings around the world, collectively known as TEDx events.

Go to http://www.ted.com/talks and view John Underkoffler on "Gesture-based computing". The concept of gesture controls is not new (they featured prominently in the 2002 movie Minority Report), but in this talk John Underkoffler shows off a complex example of a 3D interface that lets you use your hands to move pictures out of a scene, combine them on a table, or hand them over to a user at a different computer.

There are many other concise talks to view. hence the theme "TED Ideas worth spreading."

(2) Onstream Media Corporation, a leading online service provider of live and on-demand Internet broadcasting, corporate web communications and virtual marketplace technology, has announced that The Human Capital Institute (HCI) has signed a MarketPlace365™ promoter agreement to develop a comprehensive marketplace covering five communities of interest in the human resource industry.

HCI also plans to leverage MarketPlace365 to complement its six major physical conferences and many other events the company supports worldwide.

HCI is a strategic talent management network, consisting of over 175,000 members worldwide, and is growing at over 2,000 members per month. HCI's content library includes an ever-increasing repository of well over 100,000 media assets, including thousands of webcasts, hundreds of blogs, major research reports, white papers, case studies, podcasts and more.

The new HCI marketplace will consist of their five established communities of interest, existing conferences and events, all interlinked in a campus-style online environment. HCI's MarketPlace365 will include:
The Talent Strategy community, The Talent Acquisition community, The Talent Development community , 
The Talent Leadership community, and the The Talent Technology community.

Onstream Media's  MarketPlace365™ solution enables publishers, associations, trade show promoters and entrepreneurs to rapidly and cost effectively self-deploy their own profitable, online virtual marketplaces. To date, almost half of the Fortune 1000 companies and 78% of the Fortune 100 CEOs and CFOs have used Onstream Media's services.

(1) Cisco predicts that high-definition TV and 3D TV content will increase 13 times between 2009 and 2014. In total, HDTV and 3D video will account for 42 percent of the video on the Internet by 2014.

(2) Frost & Sullivan's new report "World Web Conferencing Hosted Services Market" is part of Frost & Sullivan's continued coverage of the web collaboration marketplace. Within this analysis, Frost & Sullivan has identified market challenges, drivers, restraints, competitive landscape, and growth opportunities within the web conferencing hosted services market.

There are several growth opportunities within the web conferencing services market. Businesses are being compelled to cut costs and enhance worker productivity. As a result, organizations are increasingly evaluating use of collaborative tools like web conferencing for connecting dispersed teams and remote employees. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in cloud services and IT is increasing the spending on SaaS-based offerings.

Estimates of the value of the global market and its segmnts are available in the full report.

(3) According to Zinnov consulting, the Indian market for Telepresence is growing rapidly at a CAGR of 53% and is estimated to reach $40 million by 2012.

(1) Saville Audio Visual is the first UK reseller to market Quadra, the remarkable new modular videoconferencing facility. Quadra is a freestanding, fully equipped, modular AV room system unveiled at ISE 2010 in Amsterdam. Quadra can be installed and operational within 48 hours, Quadra creates instant space for video conference meetings in comfort and privacy, simply requiring an Internet connection and a power supply to be fully operational – no structural work is required.

Saville technical services manager, Colin Etchells said: “Quadra can be pre-equipped with the client’s choice of AV equipment and furniture. It provides a premium quality facility and a very viable alternative to building a permanent, dedicated video conferencing suite.” Quadra is also ideal for use as a control room or crisis management facility and its unique footprint enables two, three or four units to be neatly grouped together. For more, visit:
 www.quadraconcepts.co.uk

(2) LG Electronics (LG) is staging simulated environments of a hotel, school, office and airport duty free shop at the Internationale Funkausstelung (IFA) in Berlin this week.

Thanks to LG's solution optimized for schools, a classroom can be upgraded into a fully interactive learning environment with a digital white board and multi-computing solution.

Among its unique features, LG Network Monitor E Series can connect up to 31 monitors to one host PC for a genuinely interactive classroom environment. While encouraging students to share work and consult with each other, the system enables teachers to monitor students' work from a single PC.

In addition, the 65-inch Interactive Screen promises to change and improve on traditional teaching methods by working as an overhead projector and an interactive white board.

(3) LG's advanced video conference system provides super clear, 720HD video, enabling highly realistic telepresence on a 24-inch high resolution LCD. To ensure smooth, uninterrupted output, LG's dynamic video control function automatically adjusts screen size if there are any disruptions to the network. And with their high performance built-in speakers and microphones, LG's video conference system lets users feel as if they are actually sitting in the same room.

(4) Researchers from Washington State University in Seattle are close to developing a low bandwidth system for video conferencing on smart phones for the deaf and hearing impaired people. This optimized compression algorithm allows the transferring of the sign language video streams over third generation cellular networks.

The scientists at WSU working on the project MobileASL (Mobile American Sign Language for mobile devices) are trying to keep the consumption of bandwidth low in their new technology for deaf so that their tariff plans could be kept low. The algorithm of compression works selectively, transferring only the high resolution images of person and his hands. This approach enables the transfer of video data at 30 Kbps, whilst videoconferencing over iPhone 4 (FaceTime) uses 10 times more bandwidth. The software automatically distinguishes, whether the person is using the sign language.

This week the MobileASL concluded the first stage of trials. Totally deaf students and students with limiting hearing of the university took part in the trials. So far the response has been positive. Deaf students of the university were excited by the possibility to communicate with each other directly, instead of SMS and mail as they usually do it.

Q3 2010

8 September 2010 from 12:30 to 14:30 for Telepresence demo and lunch at Barbican, London 
Telepresence Forum with demo of the Cisco Tandberg T3 Telepresence suite
and short breakout sessions covering topics such as:
- An Introduction to Telepresence: What's All the Fuss About
- Justifying the Cost of Telepresence and Guaranteeing ROI
- Taking the Stress & High Cost Away From Telepresence with Managed Services
-  How Telepresence Fits Into the Bigger Communication Picture
Register with mvision at: www.telepresence-forum.co.uk/

22 September 2010 from 09:00 - 11:00 for Telepresence demo and breakfast at Barbican, London 
Telepresence Forum with demo of the Cisco Tandberg T3 Telepresence suite
and short breakout sessions covering topics the same as above:
Register with mvision at: www.telepresence-forum.co.uk/

28 to 30 September 2010 at the St. Julien Hotel, Boulder, Colorado, USA
Tele-Presence Forum Expo - Boulder
Tele-Presence Forum 2010 Expo highlights the rising importance of Tele-Presence to businesses, organizations and institutions of all sizes. Speakers have been identified that can address present concerns, ongoing issues and the future outlook of Tele-Presence. Includes "Telepresence Best Practices" with Tim Szigeti of  the Enterprise Systems Engineering team at Cisco Systems.
Register at: http://www.telepresenceforum.org/xpo/

29 September 2010 at Long Beach Convention Center,Long Beach, CA, USA
AVI-SPL University Professional Series 2010 - Los Angeles
See how the RADVISION range of products can Work for You

Q4 2010

3-6 October 2010 at the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort & Spa in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
The Visual Communications Industry Group (VCI-Group) Annual Conference
The educational sessions cover a variety of conferencing and collaboration related topics.
Information and online registration details are at:  www.vci-group.org.

10-14 October 2010 at Eilat, Israel
RADVISION Annual Global Partner Forum 2010

13-15 October 2010 at Novotel London West, London UK
Streaming Media Europe 2010 Conference & Expo 
The conference in Europe to cover technology solutions and business models for online video. • Workshops 13 October, • Content Delivery Summit 13 October, • Online Video Strategies 14 & 15 October
More at: http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/europe/index.asp

Q1 2011

1-3 February, 2011 at Amsterdam RAI, The Netherlands
Integrated Systems Europe 2011
Europe's No.1 Trade Show for AV and electronics systems integration
organised by CEDIA and InfoComm International.
In 2010 there were 640 exhibitors and over 28,000 attendees