Vidyo Touts 'Personal Telepresence' Without the Room System at Interop

By Marisa Torrieri, TMCnet Editor

I recently tried out Cisco's (News - Alert) telepresence system for the first time in a meeting about the company's sports-stadium technology, and I have to say, it's pretty awesome.

But getting telepresence up and running is a costly investment in time and money.

Marty Hollander, SVP, marketing of Vidyo (News - Alert), chatted with Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMCnet, at Interop about a more personal option: Live video conferencing.

While "videoconferencing today has been largely room to room based," Vidyo offers a more "personal telepresence" experience that's "a natural interaction you can do with people," Hollander told Tehrani. "You can do it on your laptop, on conference systems, but the point is you can do it wherever you want."

Currently, "telepresence gives you a high-quality experience, but it's really room-based," he said. "The next step of what we've seen .. lot of people are coming along and saying 'we need to do this at our desks.'"

At Interop (News - Alert), Vidyo announced that its VidyoDesktop Executive was recognized by InformationWeek Analytics, a service for peer-based IT research and analysis, and Interop as the Collaboration award winner for the 2010 Best of Interop Awards.

The Best of Interop Award ceremony was held Wednesday at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center during this year's Interop Las Vegas. The finalists for the 2010 Best of Interop Awards were hand-selected by award-winning editors and analysts from InformationWeek Analytics. There were over 100 candidates for Best of Interop consideration in nine different categories.

"We are honored to be the recipient of a Best of Interop award for the second time," said Ofer Shapiro (News - Alert), Vidyo CEO and co-founder. "Two years ago we received the Best of Interop 'Best Start-Up' award for a technology promise to shake-up the videoconferencing market with a novel architecture."

(source: http://small-business-voip.tmcnet.com/topics/smb-voip/articles/86048-vidyo-touts-personal-telepresence-without-room-system-interop.htm)