Table of Contents

Dedication vii

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

Part 1     The Death of Distance 3

1Shifting Cultures: A Ripe Time for New Tools 5
          Workers Without Time 6
Shifting priorities 7
Rethinking the Corporation 9
Corporate refugees and downsized professionals 10
Exit the Middleperson 11
The Mobile, Global Society 13
The pervasive, powerful PC 14
The convergence 14
Whatever happened to the paperless office? 15
Urban refugees and the rise of rural living 16
Urgency and the Web generation 17
Backdrop of the Video Age 17
Personal videoconferencing defined 18
The promise of personal videoconferencing 19
Managing the distributed workforce 20
Enriching lives 21
Before We Get Carried Away 21
The rise of collabication 22

2Collaborating Through Conferencing 25
With or Without Video 26
The Andersen Worldwide Study 28
The University of Michigan Study 30
The Sun Microsystems Laboratories Study 30
To See or Not To See: The Big Debate 31
Collaborative Meeting Tools 32
Application and File Sharing 33
Document Conferencing 33
Whiteboarding 33
Turning the Video On and Off 33
What is collaborating? 34
Learning to collaborate 34
The Collabicators 35
The shift 36
Changing how we work 37
Computer collaboration versus face-to-face 41
Collaborative security guidelines 43
Collaborating, now or later 43

3Communicating Through Conferencing 45
The Personal Videoconferencing Generation 46
The Value of Video 47
Perfecting the Virtual Meeting 49
The eye contact dilemma 50
Bridging the cultural gap 52
Keeping up with multipoint 53
Uniting the Distributed Work Group 54
The Xerox PARC media space 54
Bellcore's Cruiser 56
RAVE at Rank Xerox 57
CAVECAT and VOODOO 58
The Ontario Telepresence Project 59
Montage and finding the right time 60
Forum and desktop broadcasting 60
The Meaning of Facial Expressions 61
The Dilemma of Guidelines 64
Etiquette 65
Accountability through video 67
What works and what doesn't 68
Distractions: The enemy of personal videoconferencing 69
Turn that thing off 71
Clothes: Turn-ons and turn-offs 71

4Personal Videoconferencing in Action: So What's the Killer App? 75
Corporate Applications 77
Product development/manufacturing 77
Funrise Toy 77
Caterpillar 78
Ford Motor Company 78
Midwest Information Systems 79
NASA 81
Smith Micro Software 81
Mead Corporation 81
SEMCO 82
3M 82
Boeing 83
Recruitment 83
Viewnet 83
Citibank 83
Desktop Videoconferencing Consortium 84
Telecommuting 84
British Telecom 86
Ernst & Young 88
Bank of Boston 88
Novacor 89
Chromatic Research 89
Help desk 90
SAP Software 90
Training 90
NYNEX 90
Amoco 91
Project management 91
3M 91
Eisys 91
Lockheed Martin 92
Laidlaw Environmental Services 93
Remote expert/consulting 93
SAP Software 93
Andersen Worldwide 94
Telemaintenance 94
US Navy 94
Emergency management 95
Consolidated Edison 95
Duke Power Company 95
Relocation alternative 96
Amoco 96
Document production 96
Amoco 96
Specialized Applications 97
Distance education 97
The School of Visual Arts 97
Clarendon College 98
Northwestern University 98
The Exploratorium 99
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry 99
Strathclyde Regional School District 100
Astrophysical Research Consortium 101
The Open University 101
Telemedicine 101
RDS America 101
Bassett Healthcare 102
Maritime Health Services 102
Thomas Jefferson University Cancer Center 103
The Bowman Gray School of Medicine 103
Financial trading 104
Bank of Boston 104
Legal/judicial 104
Arnold, White & Durkee 105
Parnon & Pratt 106
3M 106
Manhattan District Attorney's Office 107
Fulton County, Georgia Courts 107
Banking and retail kiosks 108
US Bank 108
Best Buy 108
Consolidated Edison 109
Huntington Bancshares 111
Citibank 112
Real estate 112
Virtual Realty 112
Contempo Realty 113
Informedia Interactive 114
Film and video production 117
Mott 4 Productions 117
R/GA Digital Studios 117
Architecture 118
Stone Marraccini Patterson 118
Advertising 118
Netsurf 118
Media 119
CNN's "TalkBack Live" 119
Community service 120
Education First program 120
Project DIANE 121
Navajo Outreach Program 122
Specialized military 122
US Navy 122
Government 124
NASA 124
Department of Trade and Industry 124

Part 2     The Nuts and Bolts 125

5The Technology that makes Personal Videoconferencing Happen 127
Merged Applications On the Collaborative Desktop 128
How Desktop Videoconferencing Works 129
Compression: Understanding the technology 129
Mission impossible 130
Something lossy is something gained 131
Less than picture perfect 132
Compression is Power 133
Native signal processing 134
The power of MMX 134
The little camera that could 135
Riding the express bus 136
Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Fire Wire (IEEE 1394) 136
Multipurpose video capture cards 138
Standards: A Green Light to Worldwide Deployment 139
The H.320 family 141
T.120 for document conferencing 141
H.323 for the LAN and Internet 142
H.324 for POTS 143
MPEG and JPEG 144
The IMTC 145
Breaking barriers to interoperability 145

6Getting From Here to There: Bandwidth and Personal Videoconferencing 147
Gaining Access 148
Sorting out access options 148
Bandwidth and why it matters 149
The Evolution of ISDN 150
Some ISDN background 151
ISDN basic rate interface (BRI) 151
ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI), ISDN Multirate, and B-ISDN 152
Signaling 153
The SS7 signaling approach 154
Some ISDN snags 154
ISDN ordering codes 156
ISDN shopping list 156
The Analog Nature of the Local Loop 156
Converting analog to digital 157
Migrating to newer digital networks: T1 versus E1 157
Leased versus switched access 158
Switched 56: An older method 158
POTS via V.34 modems 159
Circuit-Switched versus Packet-Switched 159
ATM 160
Goodbye copper, hello fiber 161
SONET 162
Competing with cable TV 162
Cable modems 163
Turning copper to gold: ADSL, HDSL, and SDSL 163
Internet Videoconferencing: Democracy in Action? 167
The VDOphone approach 169
The evolution of CU-SeeMe 170
Intel Internet video phone 172
Issues in Internet videoconferencing 173
Web videoconferencing 174
Them bones, them bones, the MBONE 175
As networks evolve 175

7An Insider's History of Personal Videoconferencing 177
AT&T and The Roots of Personal Videoconferencing 178
Enter the Space Age with Picturephone 179
Pick Your Video Telephone 184
Bell Labs after Picturephone 185
Intel's early involvement 187
PictureTel's Desktop Moves 190
VTEL and personal videoconferencing 191
CLI and desktop videoconferencing 193
VIVO's software compression approach 194
Apple's videoconferencing initiative 195
A different approach from Target Technologies 196
Sprint's Conference Connections 197
MCI gets in the game 197
Groupware Meets Videoconferencing 198
The Computer Meets the Telephone 199

Part 3     Taking the Plunge 201

8Integrating Desktop Videoconferencing into Organizations 203
Planning for Success 204
The deployment plan 205
Deployment strategy 207
The implementation team 209
CEO buy-in 211
Developing department-specific applications 212
The Corporate Culture Shift 214
Senior management: Setting the right tone 216
Multicompany study of collaborative computing 216
Revisiting the Andersen Worldwide study 217
Internal marketing and education 218
Anticipating and Countering Resistance 220
Training 223
Establishing a user group 225
Put it in writing 225
Security issues 226
Personal Videoconferencing With Partners and Suppliers 226
Multipoint: Coping with the carriers 227
The Zen of Implementation 22

9Personal Videoconferencing Over the LAN 229
Ethernet and Token Ring 230
The Ethernet standard 231
Fast Ethernet 233
100VG-AnyLAN 234
Isochronous Ethernet 234
FDDI, CDDI, FDDI-II 235
Switched Ethernet 235
SONET and LANs 236
LAN solutions for personal videoconferencing 236
ATM and the LAN 238
First Virtual Corporation and ATM 241
Other ATM efforts 243
Intranets and videoconferencing 243
Media Servers and Multicasting 244
IP multicasting versus MAC-layer multicasting 245
RTP/RTCP 246
RSVP 247
The impact of desktop broadcasting and multicasting 247

Part 4     New Lives in a New Universe 249

10Telecommuting and Killer Apps at Home 251
Video Quality and Home Videoconferencing 254
Driving a mass market 255
Whetting Consumer Appetites 256
Home videoconferencing over cable 257
SIPC andl livingroom videoconferencing 258
Enhancing Virtual Communities 259
Impact on family and friends 262
Linking separated parent with children 264
Time for part-time 265
Telecommuting 266
Alternative delivery of services 269
Personal video banking 270
Boon to rural living 271
911 271
Surveillance 272
Video house calls 272
Enhanced home schooling 272
Video sex 273

11A New Way of Doing Business 275
Mobile Videoconferencing 276
Personal videoconferencing as standard equipment 279
The Virtual Corporation 280
Personal videoconferencing-enabled globalization 283
The changing business landscape 284
The corporate culture fallout 287
Warming Up to Telecommuting 289
A new type of speaking engagement 291
Building new networks 292
Competing for the new century 293
Lingering issues 293

12The Competitive Advantage of Personal Videoconferencing 295
A Shift in Skills 296
Desktop video: The midas touch? 297
Coming up short 299
The edge changes 302
Learning to listen 303
Appearance matters 304
Striving to become Clark Kent?r Dan Rather 305
Access and exposure 305
Manipulating your environment 307
Leveling the playing field 308
The Remote Management Edge 309
Power Players 310
Fighting fear and winning 311

Appendix 313

Index 381