Dadamotive: Human value Archives

Why a videocall is pointless and videoconferencing is great

Posted by Herman | July 12 | 2010 3:04 PM | permalink

Lately I have been experimenting with Vidyo (www.vidyo.com), a videoconferencing tool designed for the professional SOHO/SMB/Roadwarrior market. And the tests showed why a 2 person video call is a gimmick, and 3 or more is a major difference.

The promise of videoconferencing is that you save a lot of time, money and carbon emissions. Or act as a fallback option, as the recent volcano eruptions in Iceland have showed.

Nevertheless so far my practical experience has been with high-end systems (like the wonderful roomsized conference facilities of Cisco) or Skype with video.

The highend systems are impressive, but its like going to a jobinterview: not a casual thing, you make an appointment and dress up, prepare yourself. Skype on the other hand is great for the sound quality of the wideband codec (if the connection is OK), but I fail to see the added value of a moving picture of my face : as many others, I am disappointed by how I look when viewed through a webcam.

So, is there a market for something in the middle? Even when it lacks (as of now) chatting, recording voice and video?

The first impressions were OK but nothing convincing. Ok, the image quality is quite good when you have a good camera and connection, the synchronisation between sound and image is better than Skype. Big deal?

When we started to have multiperson conversations the difference became serious and obvious. And its not so much the product as the experience of seeing all the faces simultaneously while having a conversation. It makes a LOT of difference between having a conference call by phone or a multiperson videoconference. But why?

The difference acording to psychologists s that when you have a conversation between 2 persons, you always know who is talking and who is responding. A good voice quality is enough to sense the reactions and emotions of the other person.

This changes completely when there is a multiperson conversation. We as humans have an uncanny subliminal capability to read instantaneously the emotions in a group from the non-verbal communication as expressed by bodylanguage and facial expressions. So being able to see the reactions of people NOT speaking, and them being able to see your reactions adds a lot to the richness and depth of the conversation. And as I can tell from my experience, it does.

Vidyo has a good product, as far as I can see. It works on your laptop, is interoperable with highend systems like Polycom and Tandberg. Tandberg apears to have a similar product and others will follow most likely. Great, competition works.

The key take away from these tests is that videocalling is a gimmick which does not really add value. Videoconferencing with multiple persons however has a lot of value.

The fun of stairs

Posted by Herman | October 13 | 2009 8:01 AM | permalink

Creative minds. How to transform a stairway to a thing of joy.

Public debate

Posted by Herman | September 18 | 2009 4:13 PM | permalink

The Internet has given us the power to express ourself. And boy, are we using it in creative ways. Just look at this video about the health care system debate in the USA.

(Listen to the last line.." I want my country back").

Tech-support cheat sheet

Posted by Willem | August 24 | 2009 5:06 PM | permalink

xkcd.com once more has a funny one: a tech-cheat sheet that shows how we usually help our (grand)parents, neighbours, co-workers and other 'non-computer people'. I find it to be very accurate!

via boingboing.net

Here comes the bride (2009 version)

Posted by Herman | July 24 | 2009 12:57 AM | permalink

A very, very untraditional entry of friends, groom and bride. Turn op the volume and enjoy !

(This one is for Marjolein and David)

(Source : BoingBoing)

Jeffersons Warning and Macaulays Evil

Posted by Herman | May 17 | 2009 12:45 PM | permalink

"The Public Domain" by James Boyle is undoubtedly one of the best introductions to the origins, concepts and dangers of copyright law you can find. Not only available in print but also online.

One of the gems in his book is what great minds in the past have said and written about copyright, such as Thomas Jefferson. (see this page).

"Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."

The Jefferson Warning boils down to 5 cautions.

• First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given to encourage further innovation.

• Second, there is no "entitlement" to have an intellectual property right. Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social "will and convenience" without "claim or complaint from any body."

• Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place.

• Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers--they may well produce more "embarrassment than advantage." In fact, since intellectual property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of "ideas . . . [to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man," they may in some cases actually hinder rather than encourage innovation.

• Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series.¹³ Even if one believes that intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are "worth to the public the embarrassment" of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits of that right.

Thomas Macaulay repeated this position in England 30 years later:

"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

I wonder if any politician who is discussing copyright extensions to 99 years or "three strikes you are out" proposals has ever bothered to read what great minds have thought and said...

- 4,5 %

Posted by Herman | May 17 | 2009 10:07 AM | permalink

That is the reduction in our GDP according to the statistics in Q1 2009. People who rely on extrapolation see doom and gloom, others think the bottom is near.

But what is the right interpretation? The source of the crisis is quite extraordinary so looking for precedents may not be the right approach , logic and observation are better tools.

Everything started with a lack of cash and credit, combined with a sharp fall of the stockprices. The crisis was dominating the news, experts (or people who were paraded as experts) predicted catastrophies. If you have a business and credit is tight you start optimizing your cashflow: sell your stock, reduce inventories of raw materials, cut cash-out (reduce the flexible workforce, delay investments). As a family you do more or less the same if the future is uncertain: improve your cash at hand, delay expenditures which are "nice-too-have". The new furniture: it can wait. A new car: todays cars are excellent if you keep on maintaining them. The combination leads to a quick and sharp reduction in activity in some sectors but not in all: food is doing fine.

At some point in time you have to start buying raw materials, stock up again. At some point you need the extra staff again (fill up vacancies, balance workforce). At some point people have saved enough and start to spend again on capital goods (slowly and carefully).

And these signs are there.

One of my friends has a recruitment agency and he reports an increase in demand for temporary staff and interim staff, longer projects.

My mother has an apartment on the banks of the river the Maas. She saw a sharp decline in shipping activity after the summer of 2008. In early 2009 the bulk transport ships came back and now the containerships are reappearing.

My bet is that we have bottomed out.

Thriving Norway

Posted by Willem | May 16 | 2009 4:15 PM | permalink

The NY Times, but especially its commenters tell us a story about Norway and why it's doing so well, even in these times of financial crisis. Major lessons are that of course the oil wealth helps, but that also smart use of the money, low inequality of wages and good education are key. The oil we cannot copy, but a lot of the other aspects we can.

multiculti google

Posted by Willem | May 16 | 2009 4:00 PM | permalink

An interesting slideshow by the NY Times gives an insight into Google's multicultural workforce. Dit you know half of the engineers working in Silicon Valley were born overseas. Google clearly is a great example that diversity works and may even be necessary to compete in the business world of the future.

Disability is in the mind

Posted by Herman | May 15 | 2009 4:01 PM | permalink

The first time I have seen him: no arms, no legs, no worries. Being disabled is a mental state...

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