Mar 25 2009 12:52PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Cisco,
Padmasree Warrior,
CTO,
visual networking
 |
One of the things we see happening is combining video communications with social networking–what we call “visual networking,” which will change the way we do business and how we communicate with our families.
Padmasree Warrior, as quoted in America’s First CTO? |
I guess we’ll have to define ‘visual networking.’
David Talbot at MIT Technology Review has an entertaining nterview with Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO. Rumor has it that she’ll be President Obama’s pick for America’s CTO.
As you probably know by now, Cisco has acquired Pure Digital (makers of the popular Flip video camera) for $159 million.
I’m not surprised by the acquisition, but I am confused that Cisco said they were adding Flip to the ‘Cisco Consumer Business Group.’ What’s up with that name? If your group is named Consumer Business Group, doesn’t that account for ummmm….everyone?
According to Cisco:
Upon the close of the acquisition, the Pure Digital team will become part of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group, which includes Linksys® by Cisco® home networking, audio and media-storage products. Jonathan Kaplan, chairman and CEO of Pure Digital, will become general manager of the combined organization, reporting to Ned Hooper, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Corporate Development and Consumer Groups.
Dec 9 2008 2:51PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Cisco,
MPLS,
Technology
I’m keeping an eye on the Cisco Media Processing platform. The takeaway is that Cisco is taking another step to position themselves as the company that’s going to help network administrators handle video traffic better.
Cisco marketing is pushing the idea of “Medianet.” The idea is that an intelligent network will understand what format to convert the video and then the hardware will transcode the video so it can play on any device, including digital signage (another area Cisco has been positioning themselves as Number 1). Video transcoding converts the content into different formats so it can be viewed on different types of devices. It’s key to managing bandwidth and storage and it’s been a real brick wall for video.
The first product for Medianet is called the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3000, otherwise known as MXE. It’s expensive — $50k — and I’m not quite sure yet who the customer is. Cisco also introduced the Cisco Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM). It’s part of the Cisco ASR 9000 edge router. The literature says AVSM enables “terabytes of streaming capacity at the aggregation edge while simultaneously offering content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change and error correction.”
Dec 3 2008 10:43PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Cisco,
Infiniband,
HPC
Product manager Robert Stromer demos Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand server switches.
Brock, from Saint Paul, MN shows off a new cluster from Penguin Computing - including the storage controller and the InfiniBand switch.
Aug 12 2008 5:51AM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Cisco,
Video,
Frank Rose
 |
Sure, the YouTube explosion was fueled by amateurs, but it will be showbiz professionals who cash in on Web video. That’s because most big corporate advertisers want a safe, predictable environment — not the latest YouTube one-off, no matter how viral.
Frank Rose, Hollywood Has Finally Figured Out How to Make Web Video Pay |
Frank Rose put together an interesting look at the scramble to monetize web video. I hadn’t realized that some TV execs were looking at Web video as the farm team for the big league. It also hadn’t occurred to me that product placement in web video could be big business.
On a sunny afternoon in March, Rogow pulls his black Porsche SUV to the curb, collects a ticket from the valet, and walks briskly into the Creative Artists Agency building on LA’s Avenue of the Stars. Perfectly framed in an enormous glass wall is the Hollywood sign, 8 miles away. Rogow is here to meet with Anita Lawhon, the Cisco executive in charge of entertainment partnerships. This is crunch time for Gemini Division, the weeks when everything — advertising, distribution, financing, production — must come together. On a table in the vast marble reception zone sits this morning’s Daily Variety. “Changes to Biz Give Town the Jitters,” reads the front-page headline.
Today, Rogow is focused on how to get that business model working. It’s going well — so well that Herskovitz recently met with his CAA agents to learn how Electric Farm is doing it. Cisco is key. Those Gemini Division agents are going to wield some pretty cool tech, much of it — thanks to a deal brokered by CAA — actual products from Cisco: a video surveillance system that sends an alert when someone penetrates the wrong sector; digital billboards that can be reprogrammed on the fly; TelePresence, a teleconferencing system with life-size video so hi-def it makes virtual meetings seem almost real. In the past few weeks, similar deals have been cut with Acura, Intel, Microsoft, and UPS. “In a cold business sense,” Rogow confides, “this show is a self-financing marketing vehicle.”
Another quote from this article got me thinking: “In 1908, movies were 10 minutes long because that’s all you could get on a reel of film, and the actors who appeared in them were anonymous. ” Sound familiar?
