Vidtel

Since last week's piece on videoconferencing, I've come across another company with big plans for personal video communications, Vidtel, Inc.  Founded by Broadsoft veteran Scott Wharton and communication industry veteran Wayne Willis, Vidtel has plans to make video calling (a term they prefer to videoconferencing to describe one-to-one conversations) as easy and ubiquitous as the telephone is today.

In a manifesto Wharton penned shortly before founding the company,  he observed that the falling of the traditional barriers to video calling: bandwidth, technology, price, and usability.  What is missing is someone to put all the ingredients together into a service that's as simple to use as the telephone.  Given Wharton's previous stint as VP of Marketing at a VoIP platform company he must have a pretty good idea of how to do that.

Now all they need is a way to get over people's inherent shyness in front of the camera.  We take the phone for granted today, but when it was first introduced no one knew what to do with it either. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison even debated the proper word to use when answering the phone, which for the first time enabled conversations between people who may never have been properly introduced, or even met in person.   Bell favored "ahoy" but Edison won out with "hello."  We may need to develop similar practices around video calling.

Comments

[Nathan Stratton]

I respect Scott a lot, but BlinkMind http://www.blinkmind.com was offering the same service before his company was founded. Not only are we offering the same base service, but we also have our own patent pending technologies around quality and added features such as our Video Conferencing system.

-Nathan