Logitech, a maker of Webcams and other peripherals, said Tuesday it will acquire LifeSize Communications for $405 million in cash. The move puts Logitech into the video conferencing market.
LifeSize offers high-definition video-conferencing systems. LifeSize's customers range from small and medium-size businesses to large companies. I've tested out a few LifeSize systems and found them to be solid systems for the money.
The move by Logitech means that most of the standalone video conferencing players have been acquired. Cisco is planning to buy Tandberg but is having some trouble. And once LifeSize is off the board, Polycom will be the last player standing.
Read more of "Logitech gobbles up LifeSize; Enters video conferencing" at ZDNet.
HP Skyroom software
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)SAN FRANCISCO--Looking to take advantage of tightened corporate travel budgets, Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday showed the latest tech to come out of its labs, called Skyroom.
Unveiled together with Intel at the start of the Intel Developer Forum here, Skyroom is a real-time collaborative video conferencing and whiteboarding tool. HP CEO Mark Hurd hinted at the product when he spoke at Fortune's Brainstorm conference in July.
Skyroom allows colleagues in separate locations to make video calls and share videos, 3D applications, documents, and more in real time. Using an advanced video codec, rich applications and video are compressed and shared over a standard network, and intended to run as smoothly as if they were hosted on the user's local desktop. Cisco offers similar software with its WebEx brand.
Some of the more advanced teleconferencing software used now requires special equipment and often a specific room. Skyroom is supposed to work "more like a phone call or IM," Jeff Woods, the head of marketing for HP's workstation division said Tuesday.
At $149, and no subscription fee, it costs less than a round-trip airplane ticket from pretty much anywhere, as Woods noted. It's available immediately to both business users and consumers as a download on HP.com. But customers who buy an HP workstation notebook or desktop will get the software included for free. Commercial notebook buyers will get a 90-day free trial version.
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