Videoconferencing for everyone.

My rant on video continues. With a little support from my friends at Skype and SightSpeed (although they in themselves may not be friends...). While companies like Tandberg, Polycom and others continue to change the way innovative enterprises communicate, there is plenty of help on the way for small business.

As with so much else in telecom today, video is coming to the SMB in the form of SaaS (see my acronym post for more on this). SightSpeed, long a leader in the delivery of high-quality, low cost video-calling has stepped up its offer significantly to push video past it's novelty phase. With productivity features like multi-user calls and online file sharing - on top of its indisputable video quality - SightSpeed makes a very good case for adding video to your monthly telecom spend. By this time next year, you'll be hard pressed to find laptop without a web-cam built right in, eliminating to the only real barrier to adoption. But it is truly a try-it-to-believe-it phenomenon. As I have repeated before, once you use video, a plain old phone call seems pretty light.

SightSpeed Business, it's called. I am still testing it and will report back.

Skype - ironically - announced a deal with Logitec around the same time the SightSpeed Business product was released. Using Skype video and some new equipment from Logitec (around $100), supposedly you can go full screen with any degradation. I must say, that would indeed be impressive. I did not receive my trial camera as yet...To learn more about this, go here.