And, by the way, kicking some dirt at bitter rival Vidyo.

“A couple of weeks ago we crossed the million minutes-a-week level,” Blue Jeans chief commercial officer Stu Aaron told me yesterday. “We’ve got thousands of paying customers.”

The company has been monitoring usage patterns on its existing payment plans — a minutes-based plan, a per-user plan, and a per-device plan — and is unveiling a new option Aaron thinks is the best one yet. It would appear that Blue Jeans customers agree — a hundred of them have been testing the new plan since November 2012, and they grew their usage of videoconferencing at ten times the rate of other Blue Jeans clients.

The new plan sees participating companies pay one annual fee, plus between $10-50 per month for active users — employees who use Blue Jeans videoconferencing at least once per month.

“It’s a site-license option,” Aaron says. “Everyone gets an account, everyone gets unlimited usage, for an attractive low annual fee. All employees have accounts, but you’re only paying for active users.”

The new pricing model will come in hand when competing with videoconferencing rival Vidyo, whose CEO recently called Blue Jeans out. Vidyo’s quarterly growth in billings was 68 percent, he said, while competitors were flat or down. And, he said, a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

Them’s fighting words, as the saying goes, and Blue Jeans accepted the challenge and knocked off the chip.

“That was not a correct statement,” Aaron told me. “Our customers are typically pay cents-per-minute or tens of dollars per month, and there’s no way anyone has an advantage over those price points.”

In addition, he said, Blue Jeans is growing fast, having reached the 50 million annual minute run rate — even assuming no further growth in 2013 — after just over a year in business. That means, Aaron says, that Blue Jeans is probably a quarter of the entire videoconferencing market.

“There’s 100 billion minutes a year used for audio conferencing, and 200 million minutes a year in video conferencing,” he said. “Since we’ve exceeded the 50 million minutes a year run rate, we’ve grown to 20-25 percent of the market.”

The new plan seems to be a hit.

Not only are existing customers adopting the plan and increasing their use of videoconferencing, 25 percent of Blue Jeans new customers signed up in April were signed up on the all-you-can-meet plan.

That’s impressive, and given Blue Jeans’ ease of use and wide compatibility with a vast array of devices and software (including Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync, Skype, Google Video, WebRTC Browser, and smart mobile devices), it portends well for the company’s future sales as well.

One small caveat before small businesses get too excited: To get the $10/user price point, you need over 10,000 users. Less, and you’ll be somewhere between $10 and $50.

photo credit: iandavid via photopin cc

According to a new uSamp survey of 1,000 Americans, 65 percent of companies allow remote work, and an even higher percentage of big companies take advantage of home and virtual offices. But what does that do to productivity?

If you ask workers, there’s no question about the answer: 67 percent feel more productive when working remotely, and a slightly higher percentage says they feel “liberated” when working from home. But there are some who prefer to go into the office. Some of us — 23 percent — prefer to have face-to-face meetings. And a similar percentage report being more productive in their offices than at home.

And some combine the benefits of both.

David Kaminsky, the chief financial officer of video-conferencing software maker Vidyo, told me this week he prefers meeting by video — even when both participants are actually in the same office.

“My CEO sits right next door, and many times we’ll meet just via video,” he said with a laugh.

That’s something that might not be for everyone. And even in the 69 percent of large companies that allow employees to work remotely, only slightly less than a third of workers actually take advantage of the possibility. A big chunk of us, 47 percent, just go into the office every day because that’s what’s expected of us … even if the company officially allows home office and other working arrangements.

But the advantages of working remotely are too visible to ignore, uSamp CEO Matt Dusig says:

“With the advances in technology, it is easier than ever for employees to perform their jobs at a high level while working remotely.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t advantages and benefits of both, as Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, who famously banned working from home, recently said.

“People are more productive when they’re alone,” she said at the conference, “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

Which, I suppose, means there’s a place and a time for everything.

More data on virtual offices in visual form, here:

photo credit: Paul Mayne via photopin cc

Shapiro’s talking about videoconferencing pioneers Cisco and PolyCom. He’s talking about Innovator’s Dilemma-style growth. And he’s talking about $17 million in new funding the company is announcing this morning to expand even faster, building its total venture capital raised to $116 million.

Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google’s Google+ Hangouts and Nintendo Wii’s videoconferencing, is disrupting the fast-growing video communications world on at least three levels, Shapiro said.

One is technology: moving from the big, expensive telepresence rooms to simple, cheap, built-in components. Another is moving from on-premises solutions to the cloud, and the third is Vidyo’s business model: revshare partnerships with carriers and other partners, like NTT Telecommunications in Japan, Google, and 24 other new telecom partnerships inked recently.

The technology transitions are key, the company says.

“PolyCom and Microsoft say they’re doing it, but not well,” Shapiro states. “We are by far the leader here.”

And his model, he says, is also much more competitive than innovative upstarts like Blue Jeans Network, because he’s betting on a lower price point and higher numbers. Blue Jeans Network, which offers in-browser video conferencing that connects to legacy systems as well as integrations with partners like Salesforce, charges $.30 per minute per leg of the call, Shapiro said, meaning that a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

“I believe the price point is just starting to erode,” Shapiro says.

Which is why Vidyo’s sales model is partners, who then leverage the power of their own networks for Vidyo and grow its sales without Vidyo having to maintain a large sales staff. The strategy seems to be working: Vidyo partners like Arizona State University, which is using Vidyo on its Internet2 deployment, are increasing their usage of videoconferencing by an average 18 percent per quarter. And CERN, the European science facility with the world’s largest particle collider, uses Vidyo so intensively Shapiro told me it has 15X Blue Jeans call volume alone.

“We want to price equivalent to a voice call,” Shapiro says. “Our competitors offer an inferior product for more money: Blue Jeans 15 time more, and other competitors 300 times more.”

I’m sure his competitors would have something to say about that, and it’s certainly the case that Blue Jeans and others offer features that Vidyo does not. But with $17 million new cash in his pockets, Shapiro is focused on the future.

“Things are going great, but we always find ourselves working on many things,” he said. “We want to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of the opportunities we see … it’s almost a land grab in the industry.”

The $17 million is almost all from existing investors, including in some cases general partners’ own money. Two-thirds of it is from Triangle Peak Partners. With the new cash, Vidyo will grow headcount from 285 to about 320, CFO David Kaminsky said.

photo credit: courosa via photopin cc

Essentially, interoperability is beating closed systems.

Previously, while anyone with a $10 webcam in a cheap laptop could start or join a conference via their browser and be a first-class client at the video-conferencing table, Microsoft’s Lync users could only join conferences. They could not share their desktops to users of other videoconferencing systems as they could with other Lync systems.

Now, Lync users will be first-class citizens in heterogenous technology environments too.

“Tens of thousands of Lync endpoints have already participated in Blue Jeans meetings,” Stu Aaron, Blue Jeans Network’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “With this new bi-directional HD desktop sharing feature, Lync users can now also share their own desktop content, including presentations and other documents, the way they are used to, in high definition with other meeting participants.”

In other words, the world of video conferencing and desktop sharing is far bigger than the Lync userbase, but now Lync users can use their investment to broadcast and receive from anyone, anywhere, on virtually any system.

Blue Jeans Network, whose corporate goal is flipping the annual 100 billion minutes businesses spend on audio conferencing into video, is not a stranger to first-evers. The company also was the first to integrate video-conferencing tools into Salesforce.com.

Now the company’s technology is often serving as the glue that ties together disparate video-conference systems.

According to one system integrator, Blue Jeans helps businesses integrate room-based conferencing systems with Microsoft Office 365, Lync with Cisco or Polycom hardware, or simple browser-based technology with any of the high-end solutions.

“Blue Jeans acts as a simple, reliable, and scalable solution to allow businesses large and small to benefit from interoperable video conferencing without the headaches of on-premise solutions,” Neil Setchell, CEO of systems integrator and consulting firm ExtraTeam, said.

The new technology is fully implemented in the Blue Jeans cloud, requires no software or hardware, and is included with every Blue Jeans subscription, the company said.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Until now, it’s been a mystery who was providing the video-conferencing technology in the Wii U. It turns out that Vidyo, the same company that powers Google Hangouts, helped Nintendo deliver living-room teleconferencing.

Vidyo is “disrupting” business-to-business video conferencing with a fairly radical price point — free — and is now looking to expand its reach in business-to-consumer, via the living room.

“We’re trying to bring video-conferencing to the world,” Vidyo chief executive Ofer Shapiro told me last week. “We want to carry it to the masses.”

That’s not because Vidyo wants to display Skype for simple person-to-person video communication. Rather, it’s because it sees a whole new consumer platform based on simple, high-quality, living-room teleconferencing capability.

“Imagine the yoga teacher doing online yoga to 50 people,” Shapiro said. “Think about an audience of 100 million people … for instance buying a subscription for an online Zumba class.”

People have that capability now, Shapiro admits, on devices such as laptops, tablets, and netbooks. But when it’s in the living room, on the big screen, it’s different, he argues. Different enough to create a new way for content creators, teachers, coaches, speakers, and others find and build an audience for live video content.

“The big screen,” he told me,” is more social. You can move around … certain things are better in that environment. Also some people are still more fearful of computers — this reduces the barrier. It’s a market expansion.”

The first uses of Vidyo’s technology, of course, are the in-game experiences and the video chat built into Nintendo’s Miiverse. It’s a software-based solution that runs on Wii OS and does not require any special hardware, Vidyo’s senior VP Amnon Gavish, told me.

Gavish would not reveal the quality of the Wii U’s video-conferencing technology, saying only that it is “excellent, but not trying to have the same quality as a professional system.”

With this deal, Vidyo now has more than 25 partners including Google, NTT, Philips, and others who are bringing its technology to market. Most of those are revenue-share deals focuses on expanding the market for video-based conferencing. Now with Nintendo, Vidyo has a unique opportunity to hit the mainstream — and the living room — at the same time.

That all depends, however, on whether the Wii U is a market success or not.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Polycom, maker of video conferencing technologies, today unveiled a new software suite it claims will be worth $12 billion by 2015.

The cloud-based product for the enterprise integrates with the most popular consumer video tools. Polycom’s RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite, released today, lets existing customers add anyone on Skype, Facebook, and Google Talk to their video conferences from a browser via a simple hyperlink.

With a growing number of companies employing a mobile workforce, video conferencing services are touted as a huge market. However, this announcement comes at a time when the market has stalled. According to research firm IDC, video conferencing revenue worldwide fell 10 percent, in part due to the global economic crisis.

There is interest in video conferencing, but it’s not seen as a necessary IT spend — yet. Is this product rollout enough to spike interest and increase the market for these tools?

According to Polycom, this is the most significant business development in years, and will give the company a competitive edge over Cisco, the established market leader. Cisco holds 41.9 percent of the video-conferencing market for enterprise, according to IDC.

Universal video conferencing is a huge need, but Polycom faces a tough competitive landscape. Privately held companies like Vidyo and Avaya are snapping at its heels with their cost-competitive video software. And enterprises are holding on to legacy tools, so Polycom is struggling to compete with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and Citrix.

According to Reuters, the success of this new product is a “vital” for Polycom, which still generates most of its revenue from hardware-based systems but (similarly to computer-maker, Dell) is shifting to a software model.

Analysts are saying that while Polycom has a brief head start by integrating with other services, it’s only a matter of time before Cisco (which is already moving in this direction) catches up. And as Ira Weinstein, an analyst at Wainhouse Research, pointed out, startups are already moving in this direction.

Is this technology worth $12 billion? Voice your opinion in the comment section below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Teleconferencing is broken, and Craig Walker wants to be the man to change that.

Walker is the entrepreneur behind GrandCentral Communications (now Google Voice), Dialpad (now Yahoo Voice), the chief executive of product accelerator Firespotter Labs, and the first entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures. (And he’s also an attorney!) Frankly, if his next venture were an Alpaca farm, he’d still be fighting off investors with a stick.

ÜberConference, the startup that claims to be “teleconferencing done right,” has already raised $18 million from Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Today, the free audio conferencing service has announced the public launch of its beta and its new premium service for business users. The startup, which will shortly be relocating to San Francisco, has been gathering steam with its beta product earning the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012.

“Our goal with ÜberConference from the get-go was to solve the biggest pain-points of conference calls,” Walker told me. Among them, that eight-digit long PIN, no frame of reference for who’s on the call, and a lack of recording capabilities.

On an ÜberConference with its cofounder, I could browse his LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook profiles via the visual dashboard (it won’t take you to any external web pages), which provided background for those hard-hitting interview questions. It’s bit distracting, but it’s far better than having to frantically search for information about who’s on the call if you’re unprepared or there’s a less minute addition to the conference.

For Walker, the visual dashboard is the value proposition. “Audio-conferencing has been ignored features-wise for the last 30 years,” he said. The team is constantly updating the product — they recently had an idea for an “earmuffs” feature, which lets you click on participants’ featured photos to mute them, so you can enjoy a private chat.

The premium version, also launching today, is available for $10 per month. It includes:

• Access to local area codes: If you prefer to have a conference line with a local phone number, virtually every area code is supported.
• Increased conference size: Up to 40 participants can dial-in.
• Recurring conference calls: Ideal to schedule those weekly, bi-weekly or monthly calls.
• Outbound dialing: Simply pick up your phone to access the meeting. This removes the need for a dial-in altogether.
• …and a personal favorite: Customizable hold music! No more of those horrendous Kenny G-esque tunes. Also, because it’s awesome, check out Firespotter cofounder Alex Cornell’s “I’m on hold” song.
• Evernote integration: Also available on the free version.

With its premium product, ÜberConference is gearing up for an enterprise push. Similarly to companies like Dropbox, it’s hedging its bets on the “consumerization of the enterprise” trend. Rather than convincing IT to make the switch from legacy vendors, they’re hoping that employees will use ÜberConference in their personal and professional lives, which won’t go unnoticed by key decision-makers.

They’re also not ready yet for this kind of push as there is no enterprise-wide billing system. Going forward, however, ÜberConference is planning to expand marketing and sales team. No doubt, wide-spread enterprise adoption is a major part of how the company plans to make money in the long-term.

Walker told me that ÜberConference is well-positioned to conquer the space due to its “deep, close relationships with providers and carriers,” from his Google Voice days. He doesn’t view the legacy vendors as competition due to their high price. However, ÜberConference will increasingly be up against Microsoft Lync, Cisco’s Webex, and others, once it moves into the enterprise.

ÜberConference is currently available on the web, with a mobile version under development. Check out the video about the new features for the pro version, narrated to you in a posh-sounding, British accent.

Photo credit: Barnaby Kerr Photography

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ultramodern. Sexy. Uncompromising.

No, I am not talking about Angelina Jolie. I am referring to FuzeBox, a real-time video conferencing application. Today, the company is announcing the debut of Ignite 2.0, an updated toolkit that it asserts has model-like qualities, as well as being simple to learn and easy to use.

FuzeBox enables enterprise professionals to conduct high-resolution, real-time meetings where all participants’ screens are synched from anywhere, no matter the device. There is also a suite of tools available, like zoom and laser-pointer, and the ability to include presentations, graphics, videos, audio, and documents in the meeting.

The company strives to recreate real life meetings as closely as possible in a web environment.

The new collection of APIs will enable its customers to integrate FuzeBox services into their existing applications and systems. Integrations include Microsoft LYNC, Box, SAP, and Yammer. Users will be able to seamlessly pull information from these sources and share them during a meeting.

The new toolkit also includes features like a direct billing and chargeback system, deployment without needing to install servers or software, a single log-in, and data analytics to assess the effectiveness of meetings. FuzeBox is releasing an enhanced set of training programs, client services, and technical support as well.

By further enabling all enterprise data to be introduced into real-time video streaming, FuzeBox continues on its mission to fuse the physical and online worlds, at least when it comes to business meetings.

This update comes just six weeks after FuzeBox announced raising $21 million in its first round of financing. The company currently powers 78,000 meetings a day in 122 countries and 10 different languages.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to video conference with Angelina Jolie, but who knows what the future will bring?

The FuzeBox application allows people on any device, on any operating system, from anywhere in the world to conduct live video meetings. All the screens are synced so participants see the exact same thing. Furthermore, users have a host of tools at their fingertips, like zoom and a laser-pointer, as well as the ability to upload and access documents, graphics, videos, presentations, and audio files.

“We are creating a whole new category,” said CEO Jeff Cavins. “Our goal was to revolutionize the way the world does business. You can conduct online meetings without sacrificing the quality of human collaboration and interaction. The three most important components in business are the telephone, email, and the airplane. We think we are the fourth.”

FuzeBox strives to recreate real life interaction virtually, thereby making business trips obsolete. Why fly to Buenos Aires when you can conduct a meeting with 10 attendees in a secure, high-resolution environment online? However, the app is also useful for those who don’t lead the jet-set lifestyle. Creating an easy user experience was as important during the design process as incorporating tools for professionals.

Cavins mentioned three customers the company kept in mind during the design process: the 91-year-old CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation, a 10-year-old girl with a lemonade business, and the female executive who takes care of the home but still has to attend meetings. Each of these customers can conduct business from their iPad.

The opportunities to use this technology are endless, as evidenced by the impressive and diverse roster of clients FuzeBox has under its belt. Apple has had major involvement and even featured the app in recent commercials. Other customers include eBay, Disney, NASA, Spotify, CBS Interactive, multiple universities and health organizations, large non-profits, and even the Department of Veterans Affairs.

FuzeBox was able to build up this kind of clientele by providing features other web conferencing apps lack. Its servers are built with advanced technology that can support massive entities like government agencies or large corporations.

“If you are going to win NASA or Reuters or Apple, you better have the security stuff nailed tight,” Cavins said. “We have high encryption standards. We also own our own phone company, and our platform is built to withstand the most difficult pounding. All this is extremely expensive and not something a little startup can do.”

And FuzeBox is certainly not a scrappy startup. It arose out of company called Callwave that went public in 2004. At the end of 2007, Jeff Hinley, the chairman of the board at Oracle, recruited Cavins to invigorate the ailing company. In 2009, Cavins and three other partners retired the shares, took the company private, and spent $40 million to build FuzeBox.

Up until this point, the company did not need to raise additional funding. This round which was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Insight Ventures and will be put towards scaling the products and taking marketing efforts worldwide. Cavins says this is just the beginning of where the company can go.

“If this is a 9-inning baseball game, we are coming out of batting practice,” he said. “I think this could be a $6 billion company, it just has to grow into that valuation.”

While countless other online meeting applications exist, like WebEx, Live Meeting, Go to Meeting, and Join.me, no other app functions on this level. Fuzebox already powers over 78,000 online meetings a day in 122 countries and is translated into 10 different languages. Over half the customers are outside of the US. FuzeBox currently has 56 employees in the US and about the same number in Europe. It is based in San Francisco.

Google Plus, eat your heart out. Group video conferencing service Meetings.io has grown to 100,000 users since launching in April. The startup’s three founders have been heads down developing screen-sharing and file transfer features, released today, with lofty plans of taking on Webex and other clunky video conference services for the enterprise.

The promise of this Y Combinator company is a free tool to start conversations with anyone in the world in seconds, no registration required. If you choose to sign up, you’ll be given a permanent meeting room. Invite up to 5 friends into your room with a link (for example, Meetings.io/John), and share a side-by-side screen.

Since launching, the company has found a niche in supporting short-term contracts and one-off meetings. For this reason, Y Combinator became one of the first customers. The seed accelerator now uses Meetings.io to screen potential candidates and prepare successful teams before their arrival to the Mountain View headquarters. Once the meeting is over, contact information is not saved.

The lack of sign-in or registration is the major value proposition for the company. The reason I’ll switch over from Skype is that my contact list is bloated with former colleagues and one-time interviewers.

Video conferencing tools are proving to be a hot space for startups, but few — including Google — have succeeded in toppling the status quo. By targeting consumers first but avoiding gimmicky features like chat roulette, Meetings.io is slowly trickling into the enterprise in a manner akin to Dropbox or Yammer.

The company can continue to operate a free service and incorporate the standard features of a professional tool: high-quality video, a chat box, file transfer, and screen sharing. Anticipating early adoption from companies, the team has developed underlying technology to crack tough corporate firewalls.

At this point, the founders say they remain focused on designing a slick visual interface. One added perk you may soon see is the ability to accessorize your permanent meeting room in line with your decor. Mine may take on a swanky hot pink veneer.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the design and asked ourselves, ‘what would WebEx or GoToMeetings be like if Apple designed it?’ We want the product to be intuitive for first time users and enable them to focus on the conversation, not the tools,” chief operations officer, Randy Lubin (pictured top left), told VentureBeat (in a Meeting.io video conference). Lubin, a Stanford MBA alumni, is the company’s first hire.

In April, the company hit the market with $1 million in seed funding from investors including Yuri Milner and SV Angel.

More and more technology is driving business. Whether it’s the bring-your-own-device movement, cloud computing, or video conferencing, business is adapting and advancing as quickly as it can.

Video calling and teleconferencing are now so commonplace that actual travel for business is now just one of many options. However, much like social networking and using your smartphone, video conferencing comes with its own set of etiquette rules. Here are seven big Don’ts to avoid when dialing in.

DON’T be late

This is a central tenet for all meetings, really. However, online meetings have the added element of unpredictable technical problems that might pop up. You can compensate for any potential issues by logging in a few minutes ahead of time, which will also help keep the meeting starting and ending at its scheduled times.

DON’T be unprepared

Before you even get to the log-in point, some preparation is in order. Make sure you have any necessary directions for the meeting easily accessible to all participants. Likewise, any digital or physical documents should be ready at hand.

DON’T get off track

The best way to make sure that online meetings stay on track is to provide an agenda before the meeting begins, and to keep the agenda at hand in case the conversation starts to stray away from the planned topics. It’s also a great resource for anyone who arrives late to the meeting, or is accidentally disconnected.

DON’T multitask

Sure, it’s tempting to try to handle email or other tasks while the meeting is happening, but doing that means you’re not paying close attention to what’s actually happening in the meeting. That can lead to some awkward moments when you’re asked a question and have no idea what’s actually going on. Also, running multiple programs can cause your computer to run slowly or disconnect from the meeting. Additionally, and this should really go without saying, don’t eat during the meeting. No one wants to hear you munching away during a discussion of next quarter’s forecasts.

DON’T forget you’re in a professional meeting

Many online meetings are taken outside of a traditional meeting room, so participants often feel more casual about the process. However, make no mistake: This is a real meeting. It’s just taking place in a virtual environment. That means extending everyone in attendance the courtesies you would if you were meeting in person.

Mute your line when you’re not speaking so no ambient noise disrupts the call. Make sure your location is clean and presentable (if you’re video conferencing). And don’t interrupt others — aside from being plain rude, it also makes it difficult to understand what everyone is saying. It’s also a good practice to introduce all participants at the beginning of the meeting, and if there are a lot of attendees, to announce your name before you begin speaking.

DON’T reference unavailable materials

If some of the meeting’s participants are attending virtually and only have an audio connection, they may not be able to view the PowerPoint presentation you have up on the screen or the sales sheets you’re handing out. If you can’t make documentation available to everyone beforehand, make sure you’re explaining everything fully for those who may not have eyes on the situation. Don’t discuss documents or items they can’t see, unless related to the meeting, or hold side conversations about things that virtual attendees do not have access to.

DON’T forget to follow up

Once the meeting has adjourned, type up a quick follow-up document that covers what happened in the meeting, what will be happening next and who is responsible for what. Sending out notes from the session helps to minimize miscommunication and also provides actionable items (and time frames) so everyone who was in attendance understands what is expected of them.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Vidyo president, chief executive, and co-founder Ofer Shapiro

Updated 5/22/2012: This funding is not Vidyo’s fifth round, but rather an extension of its fourth round. A few details about the company’s technology have also been corrected in the story below.

Video conferencing and telepresence company Vidyo has raised a new round of funding, an extension of the company’s fourth round.

Vidyo enables video conferencing at 1080p HD quality and 60 frames per second, with up to 100 participants and displaying video from up to nine people simultaneously. People can access these conferences through a wide variety of platforms, including multi-screen telepresence rooms, ordinary video conferencing rooms, desktop and laptop PCs, and iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets. It added support for the iPhone 4S in October, 2011.

It now claims more than 1,850 enterprise, healthcare, education, and government customers.

QuestMark Partners led the round, along with other existing investors: Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Additionally, Juniper Networks joined as a strategic partner, through its Junos Innovation Fund.

Vidyo did not disclose the amount of the investment, saying only that the company has raised $97 million to date. Since that’s the same total it boasted eight months ago after its $22.5 million fourth round, we can only assume that someone’s math is not adding up correctly, or the company is hiding the size of the round for its own reasons.

Vidyo says its pricing, from $20,000 and up for four screens at 720p HD quality, is lower than competing video conferencing products because it delivers HD video over ordinary broadband networks, at 384 Kbps and up, instead of requiring more expensive MPLS links. It dynamically adapts to the amount of bandwidth available.

Juniper is a company that makes high-speed networking equipment. The fact that it is investing in Vidyo is evidence of the growing importance of top-layer services like videoconferencing to network providers. A partnership like this works because it allows one company to sell the equipment needed to provide lots of bandwidth, while another company delivers the equipment to soak up that bandwidth.

On the low end, Vidyo competes with Microsoft’s Skype as well as Apple’s Facetime, though both products are much lower resolution and support a more limited array of hardware. On the high end, it competes with video conferencing systems from Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize, and others.

Vidyo was founded in 2005 and is based in Hackensack, N.J.

Photo of Vidyo president, chief executive, and co-founder Ofer Shapiro courtesy Vidyo.

You have a video conferencing system in the office. You know you should probably get around to actually, you know, using it. But much like the exercise equipment you received for Christmas, it is still in the box. Or perhaps, IT set one up three months ago but your employees are still calling clients long-distance instead of using it for product demonstrations.

So, what’s the best way to get into the habit of adding a video conference to your daily routine? Well, first make sure you’ve got the five tips below covered, and then jump in and start scheduling video conferences. Once you’ve taken care of these basic hurdles, it should be much smooth sailing.

1. Set Up a Dedicated Space: …but embrace mobile opportunities. In the office, find a space to set up the video conferencing system so you can test it thoroughly, train employees on it, and access it easily at any time. However, part of the benefit of video conferencing is that it can be done from anywhere — and will sometimes need to be done from less-than desirable locations (in an airport from a laptop, for example). Make sure your in-house set up is running smoothly, then ensure you have a mobile component in place for traveling employees to dial in.

2. Invest in the Experience: Trying to cut corners on cost here will do you no favors in the long run: Make sure you’re working with solid equipment, from mics and cables to webcams and Internet connections. Likewise, pay attention to audio quality during your test runs: Is the mic too close to a keyboard? Is there a delay before you hear audio? Fine tune the system, upgrading or adjusting as necessary so you can have a good quality experience.

3. Look for Opportunities: Perhaps a member of your team is stuck at home waiting for a repairman, or you’d like to give a product tour to a new client — in Tokyo. Maybe you’d just like to give your system a solid run-through after a new software upgrade. Does your IM program integrate with video? There’s another opportunity to video chat instead. The more you identify places where you can use video conferencing, the more everyone can practice using it and thereby, become more comfortable with it. And practice what you preach: upper management should use video conferencing whenever possible in order to lead by example.

4. Inform the Team: Employees are generally more receptive to ideas when they understand the motivation behind them, so make sure you’re clear on why you’d like to incorporate more video conferencing and how you intend the company — and staff — to benefit. Perhaps you’re trying to cut travel expenses, or have better communication with off-site employees. Additionally, it will help ease anxieties if you are clear about the rules you expect employees to follow while video conferencing i.e. no texting while conferencing, don’t be late, schedule in advance, be prepared, etc.

5. Provide Training: A lot of the hesitation around video conferencing comes from intimidation over complicated conferencing systems that require multiple calls to an IT department to get running. However, with the variety of VoIP services, smart phone apps, and video-based web services, video conferencing is becoming increasingly painless. Providing a clear set of instructions on how to access and run all video conferencing technology (be it hardware or software, or both) can give employees a quick reference while they become accustomed to using the technology. Also, make sure there is someone available should employees have questions or run into difficulties.

Video call image via ShutterStock

Much like public speaking, the very idea of video conferencing can fill us with anxiety. Any number of things can go unexpectedly awry, leaving attendees dreading what should be a quick and easy experience.

Video conferencing isn’t going away any time soon, especially with the popularity of video-enabled smartphones and tablets. Used in business, medicine, education, and media, video conferencing not only helps connect us to people around the world, it provides a green solution for interviewing long distance job candidates, conferencing with colleagues, or keeping tabs on a classroom.

Most woes about video conferencing can be solved with the simple edict of practice, practice, practice. Here are seven more tips to get your company happy and enthusiastic about video conferencing.

1. Know your system. This cannot be understated — there is nothing more frustrating, embarrassing or unprofessional than having to wait fourteen minutes to start a meeting because no one figured out they didn’t have the right cables to hook up the web cam. Have your system, whether it be a high-definition desktop application or a simple smartphone web chat, set up beforehand, and give it a test run at least 24 hours in advance. Know how your webcam works, what kind of login you need for the videoconferencing software, how loud the sound system is, and if your firewall or security software will conflict. Have this all settled in advance so you can jump right into it.

2. Test connections ahead of time. This is a bit of a reiteration of Know Your System, but it’s important enough to merit its own number. What kind of connections do you have available? 3G? Fiber Internet? Speed is important, but not nearly as important as having a connection that isn’t going to stall out on you. Astronauts in space are still using Windows XP because it’s a solid system they know won’t fail on them. Be like the astronauts and opt for a simpler, but more solid and dependable connection.

3. Look the part: Video conferencing can make anywhere part of the public arena, even the living room, so make it professional. Dress as you would were you in the office, clean up the background where your video conference will take place, and make sure there is sufficient lighting. Make sure you won’t be sitting too close, or too far away. Reduce background glare and, even more importantly, background distractions. Mute cellphones, turn off music, make sure your cats or kids won’t interrupt (just hand them an iPad). Likewise, if you’ll need to refer to documents or details during the meeting, have those open and ready to go when the conference begins.

4. Have a trial run. Heck, have three – the more you run through the process, the less nervous you’ll be when it’s actually go time. If you’ll have multiple employees appearing in video conferences, type up a few beginners tips to pass out, and include them in the trial run as well. If you’re using a system that requires participants to create a login or dial-in, skipping this step will guarantee confused emails the day of your meeting asking how to get on the call.

5. Pay attention. Give the video conference your full attention. That means no texting in your lap or opening up web browsers instead of looking at the meeting attendants. While you’re speaking, look into the web camera as though it were the eyes of the person you’re speaking to. When it’s not your turn to speak, look at the window that displays meeting attendees. It may help to email an outline to attendees beforehand in order to keep the conference on track — video conferencing is best when kept short and to the point anyhow.

6. Work around weaknesses. One of the biggest issues with video conferencing is the delay between participants replies; it is quite easy to cut off other speakers or have a jumbled discussion with everyone speaking at once, as there may be some delay between when someone starts speaking and when it reaches your screen. Allow time for replies and speak clearly. Also, be aware that even if you have a high-def solution set up, the person you’re video conferencing with may not. Some systems get grainy when they attempt to process quick movement (blame the slow refresh rate), so try not to fidget. If you’re using a smartphone or cellphone, find a sturdy stand to avoid shakiness.

7. Take advantage of strengths. Low refresh rates and poor sound quality aside, video conferences do allow you to share documents and information over the Internet, and have other added bonuses like recording. There are several pieces of software available that do this, and many conferencing clients will provide such a service if needed. Likewise, video conferencing has come a long way in the security realm. Users who need a more secure setting now have options such as meeting in a virtual room with a moderator, requiring PINs or moderator approval to join the discussion, and data encryption for information that is being shared during the conference.

Video conference image via ShutterStock

One of the great advantages of telecommuting is that you don’t having to worry about dressing for success. You can attend meetings in pajamas, sport some Don Johnson stubble or the latest ironic mustache, and type while reclined on a sofa with a cat warming your feet.

But now video conferencing is having a moment, and like it or not, how you present yourself on video is just as important as how you do it in person. Here are a few tips to make sure you come across like the professional you are in video meetings. And if you crop it right, they’ll never know you’re not wearing pants.

Have good lighting: Most built-in computer cameras and third-party web cams are low-resolution with small sensors. They’re not optimized for low-light or other tricky lighting situations, so you have to be conscious of where your light is coming from. Make sure you have front lighting and never stand directly in front of a source of light. If the light is only behind you, the camera will expose for that and you will appear as a mysterious silhouette like Hitchcock.

If you really want to go for gold, bounce a direct light (like a desk lamp) off of a nearby white surface and make sure it hits your face at a slight angle.

Back lighting is bad (left), front lighting at a slight angle is good (right).

Sound like you look: There are a multiple problems with depending on your computer’s built-in microphone. If you are working while you meet, the mic will pic up the sound of you banging away on your keyboard. You might also find yourself leaning in to be heard, getting entirely too close to the camera and looking a tad silly and distorted. Your best bet is an external microphone — ideally a collar mic that can be discreetly clipped to your shirt.

Don’t wear loud clothes: You don’t necessarily have to wear corporate clothing, but dress just as you would if you were going to meet people in an office: clean, crisp, and conservative. But looking good on video is more than just wearing nice clothes, you also need to stick to simple solids and muted colors. Garish Cosby sweaters or loud patterns (pictured left) will confuse the camera’s color balance and distract the viewer.

The company, which competes with the Cisco owned WebEx and Citrix‘s GoToMeeting, is trying to be the less clunky, more integrated option for all kinds of businesses with video conferencing needs. Up to 25 people can interact with the video as a participant or a viewer, and can toggle between the two. The technology exists not as a separate service, like WebEx or GoToMeeting, but rather as code integrated directly into the website. This makes it easier to brand as your own, and since it’s embedded on your website, it’s easier for your participants to find and join the video conference, a criticism of its two main competitors. Businesses can also use Watchitoo to live stream events.

But, just like WebEx and GoToMeeting, interactivity is key for a productive user experience. Like video conference software on the market today, Watchitoo allows you to chat, share desktops, PDFs and videos, but these are only the beginning of what internet collaboration can achieve. To honor that, the company is incorporating what it calls “layers.”

“Like in broadcast television, a layer or multiple layers can now be added on top of the existing streaming content with Layers,” said Tom Clark, executive vice president of Watchitoo, in a statement. “Our revolutionary and scalable video streaming platform gives people the ability to apply this functionality to their streaming video with the click of a mouse.”

The first layer is a simple identification label, which can be populated with a name, position and company. This then pops up over the video chatter who currently has the floor. The second layer is a multimedia overlay to your video. This is called the Dynamic Visual layer, which lets you insert still and animated images, as well as flash content to help drive home your point or simply get people’s attention (look, it’s a blinky thing).

Another way to get people’s attention is to give them the option to weigh in on an issue. That’s where the third layer comes in: polls. While chatting, the meeting holder can create a poll, which exists over the video image. Polls results are tallied in real time and distributed to the audience, so they can see where their peers stand and the conference holders can receive reactions to their meeting.

What really deviates from the video conferencing norm, however, is the last, e-commerce layer. Businesses use Watchitoo not just for the mobile workforce, which needs a way to connect back to headquarters and has driven much of the innovation in the web conferencing arena. Instead, some organizations are using it to live stream events such as fashion shows. Recently, Watchitoo live streamed the RaiseCache fashion show, which was held to raise money for HackNY, an organization trying to breed technology innovators in New York. This layer allows for organizations such as HackNY to make money off of what is being shown in the video.

Video conference organizers can pop up a checkout box, showing an article of clothing or product the viewer is currently watching. For instance, in a fashion show, you can buy the dress you just saw down the runway right within Watchitoo while continuing to watch the show. This isn’t limited to fashion, however, it can lend itself to a small scale shopping network, or a product launch.

Outside of the obvious competitors who have their own set of layers and functions, the company sees Google Hangouts as a competitor, which falls more in line with Watchitoo’s vibe. Hangouts are a video chatting service, which can be accessed from Google’s social network Google+. Nine people can hangout at any point and time, and any number of people can act as viewers and watch the Google Hangout live. Google Hangouts are much more relaxed than traditional video conferencing software, but have sophisticated collaboration tools that businesses do use.

Watchitoo may not be the perfect solution for enterprises, as it feels more tailored toward the small business that wants to get ahead with a cooler interface and more creative options. Perhaps Watchitoo is the mullet of video conferencing, business in the front, with interesting, fun ways to use it in the back.

It’s a great feature for when you want to, say, rope a non-Google+ user into a Google+-powered meeting or conference call.

For example, the VentureBeat team frequently uses hangouts in our weekly staff meetings to wrangle our nationwide staff into face-to-face communication. But for the non-users (me!), we’ve also had to use a separate conference call line. It’s logistically messy, and Google has apparently just made it a lot easier.

The new feature will be available first in hangouts with extras, the hangouts lab where users can help test new features. Calls within the U.S. and Canada are being supported first, and calling is free.

It seems like a small feature; however, enterprise use of hangouts for conference calls and meetings is an important use case for Google+ as a whole. And all those paying Google Apps customers will surely appreciate the added flexibility of phone-friendly hangouts as Google+ moves from an experimental social product to a mature and pervasive backbone for all Google’s web apps.

“Today we’re making it possible to make phone calls from inside a hangout, so you can dial people into the room from wherever they’re at,” Googler Jarkko Oikarinen writes on his Plus profile, noting that it’s “helpful for party lines and conference calls alike.”

Oikarenin goes on to outline the steps for bringing a telephone user into a Google+ hangout:

1. Start a hangout with extras, and click “Invite” at the top of the window.
2. Click the Phone tab on the left side of the window. Enter the phone number you are trying to call.
3. Click “Call now.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Vidyo is now offering high-quality video conferencing on the Apple iPhone 4S, the company said today.

The Hackensack, N.J.-based company creates telepresence software that allows people to hold high-quality video conferences even if some participants are using portable hardware.

The company is now launching its VidyoMobile app for the iPhone 4S and it has demoed a video conference with four users sharing content on Apple’s latest smartphone. Vidyo taps the stronger A5 processor of the iPhone 4S to deliver high-quality video imagery, just as it does on the iPad 2. With the app, you can enlarge an image of a given participant via pinch and zoom controls on the touchscreen.

The new app “enables mobile workers to hold a true enterprise video conference system in the palms of their hands,” said Vidyo chief executive Ofer Shapiro.

This means that users can participate in a video conference even if they’re on the road or working remotely. The app is now available in the App Store. VidyoMobile allows users to participate in conferences with more than 100 users, with the ability to display four participants on the phone screen at any given time on the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S.

Vidyo has raised a lot of money recently, including a $22.5 million fourth round of funding in September.

Skype is now officially a part of Microsoft. The software giant announced today that it has completed its $8.5 billion purchase of the video chat company.

Now that the deal — Microsoft’s biggest yet — is official, Skype CEO Tony Bates will become president of the Skype Division at Microsoft, reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. Skype will still have employees located all over the world — including Russia, Sweden, and the UK — but Microsoft will explore more ways to integrate Skype into its offerings.

“Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s goal to reach 1 billion users daily,” Bates said in a statement today.

When news of the deal was first announced, Microsoft said it was interested in bringing Skype to its Kinect Xbox 360 accessory (which has a built-in camera), Windows Phone, and Office. The potential integration for Skype is almost limitless, as there are plenty more Microsoft products that it could improve. Microsoft previously said it would continue to offer Skype software for other platforms.

On stage today at the Dell World conference in Austin, Ballmer also expressed interest in having Skype power Microsoft’s Lync business communication tool.

The combination of Microsoft and Skype could be a major problem for Cisco, which has been pushing expensive video conferencing solutions to businesses for some time now. If anyone can get access to faster high-definition video chats from their own PCs, there won’t be much of a need to buy a more expensive solution from Cisco.

Skype recently acquired the group messaging startup GroupMe, and earlier this year it snapped up live video streaming company Qik, both of which could prove useful for Microsoft.

As I’ve written previously, while many are already calling this acquisition the end of Skype, there’s no doubt that the video chat company has a lot to gain from Microsoft. For one, it won’t have to worry much about its revenue problems anymore. Plus, Skype will finally be able to bring on more developers to polish its software — recent updates have added some cool features like group video chat, but the software has also gotten slower and more difficult to use in the process.

Microsoft also released the following infographic, which includes a bundle of interesting Skype tidbits. The company claims that Skype now reaches 300 million video chat minutes per day.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Polycom on Tuesday launched new mobile video conferencing solutions for its customers, with strong mobile apps for Honeycomb Android tablets and Apple’s iPad.

Several startups and major companies such as Polycom, Cisco and Citrix, are heavily expanding the reach and power of video conferencing solutions. With a more mobile workforce and increasing numbers of telecommuters, video conferencing abilities for enterprise and mid-size companies are becoming even more valuable and necessary.

I was able to see the Android application in action on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the floor at CTIA Enterprise 2011. At least when it came to seeing the app on Android in a controlled demo, the solution worked well.

Polycom’s video conferencing apps allow an employee to dial into a meeting while on the go and see up to 12 concurrent video streams, including their own. A person using a tablet to call into Polycom’s system will be able to hear more than 350 callers on the line as well.

Surendra Arora, Polycom’s VP of business development, emphasized that Polycom’s video conferencing was now interoperable and the only video app that allows for HD video transmission using the back-facing camera on tablets that support it. (Of course, you’d most likely use the front-facing camera so you can see the conference.)

“The solution is device and OS agnostic,” Arora said. “And the fact that you can use your own device like an iPad or Motorola Xoom, unlike Cisco’s dedicated hardware, makes video conferencing more accessible.”

Arora hinted that the company’s next move would be to bring video conferencing solutions to smartphones. However, he declined to give a timetable for when we could expect to see iPhone and Android phone versions of the Polycom tablet apps.

The company is hopping on the trend for telecommuting and the need to reduce travel expenses at companies, without losing the personal touch of in-person communications. It allows people to have meetings with groups of people who can all be using different video connections, such as an immersive “telepresence room,” a desktop computer, an iPad, or an Android mobile phone.

Vidyo has built an infrastructure that can handle all of those devices in the same video conference call, said Ofer Shapiro, chief executive of Vidyo. And it does so at prices that are a fraction of the cost of corporate video conferencing systems. The system could help disrupt existing telepresence rooms that make it seem like you’re in the same room with the person you’re talking to. Companies have bought those systems in order to save on the costs, hassles and risks that come with airline travel.

Hackensack, N.J.-based Vidyo has now raised $97 million since its founding in 2005. Vidyo has 9 patents and 27 pending applications for its VidyoRouter platform. In June, Shapiro showed me how nine people could use the system at once with crystal clear voice and picture quality. The video runs at 60 frames per second in the 1080p HD video format. And users can log into a wide variety of platforms, including 1080p HD 60 frames per second multi-screen telepresence rooms, video conferencing rooms, desktops, iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets, (including the iPhone, iPad 2, Xoom, Galaxy, Nexus S and others). The goal is to get it to work with 20 or more screens in the future.

Vidyo says it can lower costs because its solution uses less bandwidth than other systems, so it can deliver HD video over ordinary broadband connections. The company foresees customers using it for supply chain management, command centers for disaster recovery or military uses, patient monitoring, distance learning, financial services apps and others.

The cost ranges from under $40,000 for four screens at 720p HD quality and 60 frames per second. And it goes up to $60,000 for nine screens at 1080p quality and 60 frames per second. The cost is around $6,000 per screen for nine screens and $4,500 per screen for 20 screens.

Tim Krongard, a partner at QuestMark Partners, said that video conferencing will undergo exponential market growth in the next five years and new market leaders will emerge. He will join Vidyo’s board.

The funding was led by QuestMark Partners and it included existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo has more than 150 employees. Vidyo’s partners include Google, Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, and Ricoh. Rivals include Microsoft-Skype and Cisco.

The company revealed its mobile Facebook Messenger earlier today, as previously reported by Venturebeat. The app itself allows Facebook users to send real-time messages that integrate with both their profile and Facebook’s Chat and Messaging features.

According to the report, the video component found within the code should work on both Android and iPhone handsets. It’ll also likely tie in with Facebook’s recently announced Skype desktop video conferencing service.

A standalone Facebook Messenger app with video chat capability would be far more potent of a competitor against Google chat and Apple’s Facetime application.

The company was unavailable for immediate comment about the video conferencing features.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has let details of its future plans leak to the public. In July, a glimpse of Facebook for the iPad was revealed within the code of the company’s official iPhone app.

The new service is called “HDFaces” and allows up to six people in the same video confrence. The example to the left shows what a three-person conference looks like. Calling the service “HD” is a toying with the term a bit, because each person’s stream displays at 640 x 480 pixels, with a total maximum resolution of 1920 x 960 pixels. Regardless, it’s a useful addition.

“GoToMeeting with HDFaces changes the definition of face-to-face meetings from ‘a place you go’ to ‘a thing you do,’” Brett Caine, General Manager of Citrix Online Services division, said in a statement.

The best part of the introduction of HDFaces is that it is free for existing GoToMeeting customers. GoToMeeting’s standard pricing runs $49 per month or $468 per year. Businesses can take part in a free 30-day online trial.

Citrix has been looking for new ways to expand the widely used GoToMeeting this year. In April it launched web conferencing services for the iPad. GoToMeeting also recently launched an app for the Android platform. Citrix has said it plans to add video conferencing to its apps in the future.

Alternately, major GoToMeeting competitor WebEx (from Cisco) has offered video conferencing inside standard web browsers and its iPad app since last year.

Are you a current user of GoToMeeting? What do you think of the addition of video conferencing?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Video-calling app developer Tango announced today that it has raised $42 million in its second round of funding.

The Tango app lets tablet and smartphone users make video calls to other Tango users, much like Apple’s FaceTime app for the iPhone 4. The service works over 3G and 4G networks.

The company also announced that it is releasing a desktop version of the application. That will let individuals start video calls between multiple devices like the iPhone, a computer, an Android phone or an iPod Touch. It will work with any device running Android, Windows or the iPhone iOS operating system that has a camera. The service will also be free, the company said today.

An application for Mac users isn’t available yet, but it will probably come as the company rolls its software out to more platforms, said Eric Setton, chief technology officer of Tango.

Draper Fisher Jurveston led the funding round.

Tango plans to use most of the funds to ramp up its team in China. It opened an office in Beijing recently and plans to use that office to recruit more engineering talent, Setton told VentureBeat.

“Of all the great centers of engineering, Beijing and Silicon Valley stand out — particularly in our space,” he said. “And a lot of our team in the U.S. speaks Mandarin, so we have some strong ties over there.”

The service relies on peer-to-peer networking that most file-sharing applications rely on today. That means the technology doesn’t rely entirely on servers and can scale up quickly — as it already has, because the app turned out to be pretty popular. Smartphone and tablet users downloaded it around 1 million times in its first 10 days after release.

“The video and the audio, they go straight from the computer or phone to the people you’re speaking to,” Setton said. “That way there’s the shortest delay on the network, and great for us because we don’t need to scale that cost.”

Tango has 18 million members in 190 countries. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company raised $5 million in funding from individual investors including Bill Hambrecht, Michael Birch, Bill Tai, and Daniel Scheinman in its first round of funding. The company has raised $47 million in funding to date. The company was founded in September 2009.

That would give Facebook, which primarily makes money off advertising, a new and potentially huge source of revenue if the company starts charging for premium video-calling features with Skype on the website. It could also benefit Microsoft, which has announced its plans to acquire Skype, by giving it access to many potential customers.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social networking site has 750 million users, and new users join the site on a daily basis. That’s a huge audience that might be willing to pay for extra ways to communicate with their friends without leaving the main Facebook website, like starting group video chats or having virtual voicemail inboxes for the service.

“Remember what we did here — an easy, one-button click to call a friend that is on a social network that already has all your friends,” Zuckerberg said at an event to unveil the product in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday.

Right now Facebook has two sources of revenue — Facebook credit transactions with games like FarmVille and advertisements, the company’s largest source of revenue. The company is reported to be generating nearly as much revenue as companies like Yahoo off its advertising, to the tune of $4.05 billion this year, eMarketer predicts. Social games are also very popular, if social gaming company Zynga’s $1 billion IPO is any indication, and Facebook likely makes a lot of money off transactions within those games. Zynga sells nearly 38,000 virtual items every second, and those sales typically use Facebook credits.

Facebook games were largely successful because they rely on a “freemium” model. Here’s how it works: players are able to play online games for free but must pay for additional perks like becoming more powerful at a quicker pace. The model was so successful that it has since spread to virtually all types of services, ranging from music streaming to enterprise social networks like Yammer — where companies give out a number of features for free but charge for better, premium features.

Facebook’s video calling service only allows one-on-one video chats right now. There are other video conferencing services — Skype included, through its own desktop app — that allow multiple people to join the same video conference. It’s useful for business, but the existence of apps like ooVoo has shown that consumers enjoy starting multi-person video conferences too.

Video calling itself is also very popular. More than 50 percent of the calls going through Skype’s voice-over-Internet service are video calls, said Skype chief executive Tony Bates. The company also logs more than 300 million minutes of video calling every month, he said at the event today.

It’s popular enough to have even snared Google, which added a video conferencing feature to its newest social network, Google+. The Hangouts feature lets up to 10 people join a group video conference and talk amongst themselves. That service is free and works pretty well. VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar called the Google+ Hangouts feature the “killer feature” of Google+.

Facebook has been diversifying its revenue streams outside of just advertising and transactions. The company recently unveiled Facebook Deals, a competitor for group-buying site Groupon. Video calling could serve as another large source of revenue if it proves as popular on Facebook as it is on other apps and in other ecosystems. The company also incorporated “Facebook Payments,” a company based in Florida, in December last year.

The company has not laid out the exact financial details about its deal with Skype yet, but it does seem like a bigger boon for Skype, which will be able to tap into Facebook’s massive audience. Skype has around 170 million users compared to Facebook’s 750 million users.

“What was once an elite boardroom technology has moved to the cloud,” said Krish Ramakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Blue Jeans Network in a press release. Alagu Periyannan, another co-founder is the company’s Chief Technical Officer.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Blue Jeans Network lets remote family members, friends, employees and clients participate in video meetings using Skype and a video-enabled desktop or mobile device.

Here’s how it works: Blue Jeans users each get a private “meeting room” where they can schedule, host and manage meetings through a simple web interface. Participants join meetings by dialing a number or clicking on a link. Since this is cloud technology, there’s no software to download. Users without access to video can still participate in a Blue Jeans meeting over audio from their phone. See it in action here.

I tried it out, and the video quality was great. The latest version of Skype must be installed to connect to the Blue Jeans Network. I even managed to get the user name “Regina,” an indication that not too many people are using the service yet (or my name is just really rare). The user interface is very straightforward and my test dummies, er, friends had no problem joining in the conversation.

Funded mainly by Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Norwest Venture Partners, Blue Jeans Network has raised $23.5 million. Blue Jeans also announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies.

The video conferencing market has struggled to keep up with audio conferencing. According to Wainhouse Research, there were 200 million video-conferencing service minutes used worldwide in 2010, compared to 80 billion minutes for audio conferencing services.

The Blue Jeans service has been in field trials since the beginning of 2011. Since mid-April, when the trials were opened to the public, the subscriber base has grown through word of mouth. Blue Jeans claims almost 4,000 subscribers with more than 500 companies represented in 100 countries. Current customers include Facebook, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar, Heidrick and Struggles, Internet2 and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The company’s Board of Directors is composed of  Matthew Howard, Norwest Venture Partners; Ping Li, Accel Partners; Scott Sandell, New Enterprise Associates; and independent board members Peter Wagner and Charlie Giancarlo.

The system could help disrupt existing telepresence rooms that make it seem like you’re in the same room with the person you’re talking to. Companies have bought those systems in order to save on the costs, hassles and risks that come with airline travel.

Ofer Shapiro, chief executive of Hackensack, N.J.-based Vidyo, said during a video conference interview that the company can provide the telepresence solution at about 10 percent of the cost of current telepresence solutions from rivals such as Cisco. Shapiro showed how nine people could use the system at once with crystal clear voice and picture quality. The video runs at 60 frames per second in the 1080p HD video format.

And users can log into a wide variety of platforms, including 1080p 60 frames per second multi-screen telepresence rooms, video conferencing rooms, desktops, iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets, (including the iPhone, iPad 2, Xoom, Galaxy, Nexus S and others).

Shapiro said the support for more platforms allows enterprises to deal with the communications needs of a distributed and mobile workforce that is increasingly common in corporate America.

Vidyo Panorama works with off-the-shelf hardware and allows users to create their own applications on top of the video conferencing system. The upfront investment is 90 percent lower than the usual telepresence system and ongoing expenses are also dramatically lower, Shapiro said. At the same time, the system offers much better quality and multi-person connectivity than low-cost alternatives such as Skype. The system works better than others because, rather than transcode video from one form to another, Vidyo adapts to the video format at hand.

Shapiro noted that high-end systems have their own problems, like when the number of remote cameras exceeds the number of screens. If someone coughs, they may disappear from the screen.

The system works with nine people at HD quality now and will work with 20 screens in the future. The solution consists of a primary control unit for the room, a decoder per screen, an executive tablet, an off-the-shelf high-definition camera and an audio system.

Vidyo says it can lower costs because its solution uses less bandwidth than other systems, delivering HD video at 500 kilobits per second per screen. The company foresees customers using it for supply chain management, command centers for disaster recovery or military uses, patient monitoring, distance learning, financial services apps and others.

The cost ranges from under $40,000 for four screens at 720p HD quality and 60 frames per second. And it goes up to $60,000 for nine screens at 1080p quality and 60 frames per second. The cost is around $6,000 per screen for nine screens and $4,500 per screen for 20 screens. The systems will be in beta tests with customers in August and will debut in the fourth quarter. Shapiro says the cost comes out to around 2 cents per minute compared to $6 per minute with other systems.

The company was founded in 2005 and has 150 employees. It has raised $75 million in venture funding from SevinRosen, Rho Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers. Shapiro said the company has eight granted patents and 28 pending. Vidyo’s partners include Google, Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, and Ricoh. Rivals include Microsoft-Skype and Cisco.

The company wants to become a hybrid of Skype and YouTube; a service that will give users a more debate-like experience, as opposed to  a strictly two-way conversation, TechCrunch reports.

In 2010, Nyoombl launched a small device that connected to your TV, and enabled you to video chat with other users, as well as Gmail users on PCs and Macs who had Google voice and video chat installed.

Unfortunately, the market became very crowded, with Cisco, IBM, and Polycom entering. As Cisco CEO John Chambers said after his purchase of Linksys, a maker of home-networking routers, “We think the time has come for Cisco to make a huge play in the home.”

Founder Oladayo Olagunju is being advised by Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, and venture capitalist Lara Druyan. The company, which is based out of Palo Alto, has received funding from one ex-Facebook executive.

Nyoombl will be inviting users to try out the service here shortly.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Skype, a provider of voice and video calling services over the Internet, might be poised to release video calling for mobile devices equipped with a front-facing camera and running Skype at the Consumer Electronics Show next year, according to a number of reports.

The service already has video conferencing built into its PC and Mac applications. The application uses webcams and can connect to other Skype users. But video calling isn’t available on Skype’s mobile app. Mobile users instead have to use applications like Tango and Apple’s Facetime for video calling. That’s largely because mobile video calling wasn’t that big of a deal a few years ago when front-facing cameras weren’t standard.

But most mobile phones have front-facing cameras for video calling today. The next generation of tablets will include them as well. The Samsung Galaxy S and Research in Motion’s upcoming BlackBerry Playbook tablet feature front-facing cameras, and the new iPad probably will as well. The software to execute video calling today is rather fragmented, and right now it seems like little more than a novelty application. Having a single application that works across multiple devices would do wonders to take video calling on mobile devices mainstream.

That is, if Skype can keep its network up and running. Skype recently suffered a widespread and lengthy outage with its Internet calling service that affected tens of millions of people. The company said in a post that problems with the Skype network’s “supernodes” are responsible and could take hours more to fix. Skype apologized to users, particularly some businesses that began to rely on Skype for their calling needs. Based on that reaction, it’s clear that Skype has widespread placement in the voice-over-Internet market.

If Skype decides to release video calling for all of its existing applications, it could significantly stretch its market share. But, as usual, this is the Internet — so take all these rumors with a grain of salt.

Think of Mingleverse as Skype meets Second Life: You get voice over IP with a silly avatar. Mingleverse users can chop their faces out of an old photo and duct tape it to any randomly generated avatar. The video conferencing service then drops all those avatars into one of a number of rooms.

Those rooms can be either 2D or 3D environment, and Mingleverse provides users with “3D voice chat.” This means that the sound coming out of a user’s computer is similar to what they would hear if they were actually standing in the room with other users. The pitch and intensity of the sound is dependent on where their avatars are standing in the mingle room with respect to other Mingleverse users.

Mingleverse lets users then display a number of things on the walls of the room. They can switch to a live webcam feed and plaster it on one of the walls. They can also display things from their computer, like photos and videos from YouTube and Justin.tv. If a business is using Mingleverse for its services, it can even slap advertising on the walls to generate a little bit of extra revenue.

It’s a little surprising to see new entrants in the consumer video conferencing sector right now given that there are a large number of powerhouses. The obvious competitor is Skype, which allows free Skype-to-Skype video calls and conferencing. But companies like Cisco and Microsoft are also making a play to enter the consumer-facing video conferencing segment.

Then there’s the obvious enterprise play here. For business users that are looking for a newer teleconferencing service, there’s a premium version that allows for a greater number of people to be present in one room and enables desktop sharing. The service is free for up to 5 people in a chat room, and then costs $5 a month for up to 25 people in one room. The cost goes up to $9 a month for up to 50 people in a video conferencing room. It’s still relatively cheap for a web service, but this is a space that Cisco has all but dominated for several years, and it will be difficult to crack into.

This is the second round of seed funding the company’s been able to secure since it was founded in 2008. The Canadian company has raised $1.84 million to date, and this round of seed funding was led by Yaletown Venture Partners and a number of angel investors. Mingleverse’s co-founder, Ron Stevens, also invested a chunk of the $1.4 seed round — although the company wouldn’t specify how much.