Smith On VoIP

Someone better buy a few units of Cisco’s new TelePresence videoconferencing system (US$79K, US$299K) because they have to pay for their purchase of Orative, a private maker of applications for mobile devices. They spent US$20M on Orative (great name), so they’ll need to sell about 70 orders of the high-end version of TelePresence to make up for it.

As for TelePresence, Cisco is claiming it’s like having remote participants there in the room. Well, the screen is certainly large enough. Don’t forget to shave, huh? But as for real telepresence, unless you’ve got a (hundred) gigabit connection, I’m not so sure I buy it. I certainly won’t be buying it, as I certainly couldn’t afford it. Somehow I think that while Cisco may own over 40% of the ip phone market, they won’t be owning the video-conferencing market. At least not at these prices. Those honors will probably go to SightSpeed.

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