Lot of work is going on to make Video Chat/Calls ubiquitous as phone calls. Recently Google announced that they are opening Google+ Hangouts for developers to build apps on it. Lot many other companies are trying to build and incorporate video chat/talk much simpler.
Question is.. is there that much potential for these video chats/talks. Do customers really want video calls to be that much. Let me know your experience if any.
In my view, it will still take long time for us to start using video, if et all it really kicks off. I may be wrong as well. But currently my understanding is based on couple of facts/observations I have noticed.
- Most of the folks are still not ready for video calls. many times they may not be in situation or place where they can really use it.
- Secondly, we are yet to see really good video quality and really easy to use devices.
Best candidates are Portable/touch devices like iPhone/iPad/etc.. They have great potential to be part of our life. They are becoming good part of our life already and soon Laptop will have status of what currently desktops have. Even these devices needs some more improvements. Like better (HD) front camera. Apple's facetime is one good example of ease of use but it has limitations about apple device. But it is really good and works great when you have decent wi-fi signal. To solve this, another app which came was Tango which works across the board on iPhone and Android devices. It also has some cool features but I found it more problematic than Facetime. Still in time to come, it will get better. These apps (facetime/Tango) works more on devices' address book looking for phone numbers and emails where counterparts of these apps is already there. So it is great and easy to use.
There is no doubt that video chats are better in terms of overall user experience. However, they are complex to use and mostly many times people can't do. I remember that once our office conferencing system started turning on video by default and people started taping the camera of laptop as it was sometimes embarrassing. Even now, I barely see anyone turning on webcam during our work meetings. Again, it is just my view or experience. But the fact is that you really need to be intimate with the person whom you are doing video chat. We are accustomed to voice and are happy with it mostly.
Don't know if the hype around video will really turn into reality ever.. I would really like it to.. I do enjoy doing video conferences with good friends and family members. In fact next generation type of video conference should include 3D chat where they can project other person's hologram and make it more closer to reality. That would be really nice!!
Here is the story which stimulated all the ideas and thoughts..
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_20273524/google-hangouts-video-chat-app
KAREN T. BORCHERS/STAFF PHOTOS
Christine Egy Rose, right, CEO and co-founder of Scoot & Doodle, shows her children Cate, 8, and Jackson, 3, her new Hangouts app.
“It’s really the starting gun,” Vic Gundotra, the executive who heads the development of Google+, said of Wednesday’s platform launch. “No one has ever done a multiuser video service for the whole world for free, let alone open it up to developers and see where they take it. It takes a company like Google, at Google’s scale, to do something like this, and let’s see what happens.”
In opening Google+ Hangouts to independent developers such as Scoot & Doodle, Google is cribbing a page from Facebook. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook’s platform to independent developers in 2007, no one knew it would trigger a revolution in social games that spawned successful companies such as Zynga. More recently, Facebook also has offered shared-experience services, such as a feature launched in January that allows friends to listen to the same song at that same time. Facebook has also partnered with Skype to provide video chat.
Engaging users
At more than 100 million users, Google+ is still a fraction of the size of Facebook’s 845 million users. But an even bigger issue for Google+ is poor engagement, with recent data from comScore showing users average just three minutes a month on Google+, compared with seven hours a month on Facebook. The Hangouts feature is “one of the four or five pillars that we have that really drive engagement,”Gundotra said. “It fundamentally changes the interaction when you can see somebody’s eyes, which is why we said social is much more than just status updates. That’s why we invested so much in video technology.”
Among the other Hangout apps launching on Google+ Wednesday will be “Aces Hangout,” a virtual deck of cards, allowing a person in the Bay Area, for example, to play a game of poker through a video chat with a cousin in Denmark and an aunt in Denver, as well as other apps to play games or share documents.
“Google is really hoping to drive engagement with its network, and getting people to stay online and use its services more is absolutely something it wants to do,” said Irene Berlinsky, an analyst with IDC who follows video chat. Along with Skype, Google is emerging as “really the two big gorillas” of video chat, she said.
Egy Rose, Chang and Waters don’t fit the stock profile of Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs — they are not 20-something men, and they are not engineers. Egy Rose and Chang are former NBC television news producers — Egy Rose with “Meet the Press” and Chang with “Dateline” — while Waters was a designer for clothing companies such as Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch, but had never designed for the Web.
All three, however, are the mothers of young children and what ultimately became Scoot & Doodle (The company got its name from the nicknames for Egy Rose’s two kids.) started out as an attempt to solve a social problem — the difficulty of staying close to children and adults separated by geography or divorce.
“We knew the problem was enormous,” Egy Rose said. “Everyone we talked to was experiencing that.”
The three founders worked early on with educators and scientists from the MIT Media Lab, San Francisco’s Exploratorium and the Stanford Institute of Design K-12 Lab to gain insights about how to connect children and adults, and they began to focus on shared activities such as drawing and
art. One early idea was to create a kit, including arts and games, to help busy parents or distant grandparents connect with children. But around this time, Egy Rose and Chang, who were partners in a Silicon Valley video consulting business that did corporate videos for large Silicon Valley companies, got advice from a mentor who suggested they focus on the Internet as the way to bring families together.
Selling the idea
But as they made the rounds looking for investors in Silicon Valley to talk about using video chat to create “a collaborative playspace,” it was tough to get traction.
“We knew we had a big problem: We’re all women, we’re all close to 40, we all have children, and we don’t have technical backgrounds,” Chang said. As they met with potential investors, “we had people say things like, ‘You girls are cute, but it’s not going to work.’” Ultimately, they signed on engineers Brian Ng and Kenji Morrow to create a five-person startup that is now based in San Francisco. And, by chance, a mutual acquaintance introduced them to the Google+ team. While a beta version of the product is also on the Scoot & Doodle website at scootdoodle.com, it’s not yet open to full public use. Which means that the Google+ launch Wednesday marked the coming out party for the three founders in front of a potential audience of millions.
The startup is still exploring revenue models, but wants to build audience for its product first. “We are committed to learning from the people using the product,” Egy Rose said. “We will land on the right solution.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories or facebook.com/mike.swift3.
KAREN T. BORCHERS/STAFF
Christine Egy Rose, from left, Patty Chang and Sarah Stone Waters are co-founders of Scoot & Doodle. The startup has made an app for Google+ Hangouts.
Question is.. is there that much potential for these video chats/talks. Do customers really want video calls to be that much. Let me know your experience if any.
In my view, it will still take long time for us to start using video, if et all it really kicks off. I may be wrong as well. But currently my understanding is based on couple of facts/observations I have noticed.
- Most of the folks are still not ready for video calls. many times they may not be in situation or place where they can really use it.
- Secondly, we are yet to see really good video quality and really easy to use devices.
Best candidates are Portable/touch devices like iPhone/iPad/etc.. They have great potential to be part of our life. They are becoming good part of our life already and soon Laptop will have status of what currently desktops have. Even these devices needs some more improvements. Like better (HD) front camera. Apple's facetime is one good example of ease of use but it has limitations about apple device. But it is really good and works great when you have decent wi-fi signal. To solve this, another app which came was Tango which works across the board on iPhone and Android devices. It also has some cool features but I found it more problematic than Facetime. Still in time to come, it will get better. These apps (facetime/Tango) works more on devices' address book looking for phone numbers and emails where counterparts of these apps is already there. So it is great and easy to use.
There is no doubt that video chats are better in terms of overall user experience. However, they are complex to use and mostly many times people can't do. I remember that once our office conferencing system started turning on video by default and people started taping the camera of laptop as it was sometimes embarrassing. Even now, I barely see anyone turning on webcam during our work meetings. Again, it is just my view or experience. But the fact is that you really need to be intimate with the person whom you are doing video chat. We are accustomed to voice and are happy with it mostly.
Don't know if the hype around video will really turn into reality ever.. I would really like it to.. I do enjoy doing video conferences with good friends and family members. In fact next generation type of video conference should include 3D chat where they can project other person's hologram and make it more closer to reality. That would be really nice!!
Here is the story which stimulated all the ideas and thoughts..
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_20273524/google-hangouts-video-chat-app
DEVELOPING VIDEO CHAT
Focused on making connections
Google+ Hangouts opens to developers’ apps in hopes of engaging users on social network
By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com
Christine Egy Rose realized she was on to something powerful. Instead of the awkward monosyllabic two-minute exchange her 3-year-old son Jackson typically had over a video chat link with relatives, he spent a full 50 minutes happily working on a shared drawing with his grandmother in Florida, using the video chat’s embedded drawing feature that Egy Rose was developing.
Egy Rose’s mother-in-law, feeling so much closer to the little boy in California, was almost in tears by the end of the chat.
“We don’t have the Sunday night dining room table anymore — at least a lot of families don’t — and the three of us didn’t,” Egy Rose, CEO of the video chat and collaborative play startup Scoot & Doodle, said in an interview with fellow co-founders Patty Chang and Sarah Stone Waters. “We wanted to re-create that for our families.”
With Google on Wednesday launching the first half-dozen apps from independent developers for the “Hangouts” video chat feature of Google+, the Internet giant hopes to increase the time people spend on the social network and create a popular platform that will ultimately grow to hundreds of video apps, or more. Hangouts allows up to 10 people to connect on a video chat.
By adding software apps to Hangouts, independent developers like Scoot & Doodle hope to make video chats more like an inperson, shared social experience, allowing apps to transform video chats, just as they revolutionized cellphones.
Focused on making connections
Google+ Hangouts opens to developers’ apps in hopes of engaging users on social network
By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com
Christine Egy Rose realized she was on to something powerful. Instead of the awkward monosyllabic two-minute exchange her 3-year-old son Jackson typically had over a video chat link with relatives, he spent a full 50 minutes happily working on a shared drawing with his grandmother in Florida, using the video chat’s embedded drawing feature that Egy Rose was developing.
Egy Rose’s mother-in-law, feeling so much closer to the little boy in California, was almost in tears by the end of the chat.
“We don’t have the Sunday night dining room table anymore — at least a lot of families don’t — and the three of us didn’t,” Egy Rose, CEO of the video chat and collaborative play startup Scoot & Doodle, said in an interview with fellow co-founders Patty Chang and Sarah Stone Waters. “We wanted to re-create that for our families.”
With Google on Wednesday launching the first half-dozen apps from independent developers for the “Hangouts” video chat feature of Google+, the Internet giant hopes to increase the time people spend on the social network and create a popular platform that will ultimately grow to hundreds of video apps, or more. Hangouts allows up to 10 people to connect on a video chat.
By adding software apps to Hangouts, independent developers like Scoot & Doodle hope to make video chats more like an inperson, shared social experience, allowing apps to transform video chats, just as they revolutionized cellphones.
KAREN T. BORCHERS/STAFF PHOTOS
Christine Egy Rose, right, CEO and co-founder of Scoot & Doodle, shows her children Cate, 8, and Jackson, 3, her new Hangouts app.
“It’s really the starting gun,” Vic Gundotra, the executive who heads the development of Google+, said of Wednesday’s platform launch. “No one has ever done a multiuser video service for the whole world for free, let alone open it up to developers and see where they take it. It takes a company like Google, at Google’s scale, to do something like this, and let’s see what happens.”
In opening Google+ Hangouts to independent developers such as Scoot & Doodle, Google is cribbing a page from Facebook. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook’s platform to independent developers in 2007, no one knew it would trigger a revolution in social games that spawned successful companies such as Zynga. More recently, Facebook also has offered shared-experience services, such as a feature launched in January that allows friends to listen to the same song at that same time. Facebook has also partnered with Skype to provide video chat.
Engaging users
At more than 100 million users, Google+ is still a fraction of the size of Facebook’s 845 million users. But an even bigger issue for Google+ is poor engagement, with recent data from comScore showing users average just three minutes a month on Google+, compared with seven hours a month on Facebook. The Hangouts feature is “one of the four or five pillars that we have that really drive engagement,”Gundotra said. “It fundamentally changes the interaction when you can see somebody’s eyes, which is why we said social is much more than just status updates. That’s why we invested so much in video technology.”
Among the other Hangout apps launching on Google+ Wednesday will be “Aces Hangout,” a virtual deck of cards, allowing a person in the Bay Area, for example, to play a game of poker through a video chat with a cousin in Denmark and an aunt in Denver, as well as other apps to play games or share documents.
“Google is really hoping to drive engagement with its network, and getting people to stay online and use its services more is absolutely something it wants to do,” said Irene Berlinsky, an analyst with IDC who follows video chat. Along with Skype, Google is emerging as “really the two big gorillas” of video chat, she said.
Egy Rose, Chang and Waters don’t fit the stock profile of Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs — they are not 20-something men, and they are not engineers. Egy Rose and Chang are former NBC television news producers — Egy Rose with “Meet the Press” and Chang with “Dateline” — while Waters was a designer for clothing companies such as Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch, but had never designed for the Web.
All three, however, are the mothers of young children and what ultimately became Scoot & Doodle (The company got its name from the nicknames for Egy Rose’s two kids.) started out as an attempt to solve a social problem — the difficulty of staying close to children and adults separated by geography or divorce.
“We knew the problem was enormous,” Egy Rose said. “Everyone we talked to was experiencing that.”
The three founders worked early on with educators and scientists from the MIT Media Lab, San Francisco’s Exploratorium and the Stanford Institute of Design K-12 Lab to gain insights about how to connect children and adults, and they began to focus on shared activities such as drawing and
art. One early idea was to create a kit, including arts and games, to help busy parents or distant grandparents connect with children. But around this time, Egy Rose and Chang, who were partners in a Silicon Valley video consulting business that did corporate videos for large Silicon Valley companies, got advice from a mentor who suggested they focus on the Internet as the way to bring families together.
Selling the idea
But as they made the rounds looking for investors in Silicon Valley to talk about using video chat to create “a collaborative playspace,” it was tough to get traction.
“We knew we had a big problem: We’re all women, we’re all close to 40, we all have children, and we don’t have technical backgrounds,” Chang said. As they met with potential investors, “we had people say things like, ‘You girls are cute, but it’s not going to work.’” Ultimately, they signed on engineers Brian Ng and Kenji Morrow to create a five-person startup that is now based in San Francisco. And, by chance, a mutual acquaintance introduced them to the Google+ team. While a beta version of the product is also on the Scoot & Doodle website at scootdoodle.com, it’s not yet open to full public use. Which means that the Google+ launch Wednesday marked the coming out party for the three founders in front of a potential audience of millions.
The startup is still exploring revenue models, but wants to build audience for its product first. “We are committed to learning from the people using the product,” Egy Rose said. “We will land on the right solution.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories or facebook.com/mike.swift3.
KAREN T. BORCHERS/STAFF
Christine Egy Rose, from left, Patty Chang and Sarah Stone Waters are co-founders of Scoot & Doodle. The startup has made an app for Google+ Hangouts.
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