Alec Saunders SquawkBox

My family is heading to Denmark next summer for a family reunion.  As a consequence, we won't be spending our usual weeks in Mexico during March.  Today I've put our four spectacular time share villas at the Royal Sands in Cancun up for rent. Cancun resort rentals are in high demand, and even more so if you're planning to stay at the Royal Sands, which is one of the top rated time share resorts in the world. You can see the listing and some photographs here,if it interests you.

Andy is feeling his oats this morning in Madrid.  He cites Steve Adubato's piece in the Newark Star-Ledger on how to make video conferences more productive, and then takes the entire video conferencing industry to task for not understanding their customers' needs.  Andy sees web cam based solutions, like the excellent system from SightSpeed, as the key to successful conferencing.  Forget about the complication and expense of the Cisco Telepresence platform, HP's Halo, or older systems from Polycom, Tandberg and others!

He's right.

When Cisco announced the Telepresence platform, the biggest mystery was why they chose to dive into a dying industry.  Yes, dying.  The graph below was reproduced from Wainhouse founder Marc Beattie's slides from the Wainhouse CSP event last year at this time.  It shows video conferencing revenues since 2001.  The decline probably has a lot to do with the fact that the novelty of video conferencing installations which drove the market in 2001 in no way justifies the expense in 2006.

Andy's also right about the utility of personal video calls, such as those enabled by Sightspeed.  With virtually every laptop sold today incorporating a web cam, and the quality of those cameras steadily increasing, it's only a matter of time before the natural way to have a conversation will be by video.