Mobility, Unified Communications and VideoMobility, Unified Communications and Video

Following up on my Telepresence piece, I've been trading some emails with Marty Parker about the role that mobility will play in Unified Communications, and how video will fit into that picture of mobile UC. Marty pointed me to a company called Myvu, which makes "personal media viewers," i.e., glasses that let you view video from your portable media player (iPod, etc.) without anyone else seeing.

Following up on my Telepresence piece, I've been trading some emails with Marty Parker about the role that mobility will play in Unified Communications, and how video will fit into that picture of mobile UC. Marty pointed me to a company called Myvu, which makes "personal media viewers," i.e., glasses that let you view video from your portable media player (iPod, etc.) without anyone else seeing.I'm less interested in the form factor--the glasses--than the ever-expanding ability to display media from portable players, be they smart phones or mp3-type players. One of the products shown at CES this year was a smartphone that could project photo images; the immediate consumer benefit was so that you could show your pictures to a group of friends without everyone crowding around the tiny display on your phone. But the business uses--Powerpoint presentations, for example--are obvious.

Most people now understand that smartphones and their ilk are just small computers, capable (in theory, at least) of doing just about anything a desktop machine can do, within reason. That really does open up a lot of opportunities for productivity.

The gating factors are those over which the UC platform and application developers have the least control: Battery life and bandwidth.

You start putting a lot of processing power and high-resolution video into your device, and you're gonna need a Sears Die-Hard to run the thing. Myvu says its glasses have a four-hour run time on their own batteries, but the Myvu unit is a peripheral; if you're trying to run some kind of souped-up projection display off a smart phone, you'll either need a place to plug the phone in (which in many cases you will be able to find)--or you'll be able to show about one PPT slide before the light goes out.

As far as bandwidth goes, note that the iPhone itself originally didn't come out with 3G interfaces, and if you're looking to the new 700 MHz spectrum for your hot new services, you'll be waiting awhile, as Michael Finneran pointed out when the auctions finished a short while back. So the future for mobile UC/video may be so bright you'll have to wear shades, but those Myvu things may not be the specs of choice for awhile yet.