posted 13 March 2005 10:39 AM            

I hear sometimes that people in the industry say that the industry is small and niche.

I think that all of us in the industy is not satisfied with the fact that the industry is small and niche and wants to grow it to be a much bigger industry.

We hear a lot about forecasts for the market growth for the next several years, but none is talking about "industry wide action plan" to realize the forecasted numbers or even surpass the numbers.

I think that this is very important thing to have "industry wide action plan" put in place because conferencing industry may be completely swallowed up by what it is generally said "IP communication" and may become a just component of it.

Is conferencing industry becoming just a component of IP communication or proud industry with raison d'etre? I know that all of us are proud of our industry. But we want bigger one for us.

I think that we definately need to gather forces in the industry to work together to have the conferencing industry with strong autonomous raison d'etre because efforts are scattered as far as I look around the globe.

I think that we are just to tired to see people busy trying to get a share in the small pie that is slow to grow. All of them should find a way to work together to really grow it substantially.

Otherwise, what can we do to expand the market?

posted 28 December 2005 04:56 PM            

quote:

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Anyone trying to gather all of us in the industry to turn that into a collective effort to expand the conferencing market as a whole?
[...]
Is conferencing industry becoming just a component of IP communication or proud industry with raison d'etre?

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How would you exactly define "conferencing market"?
We can maybe restrict the term 'conferencing' to 'real-time remote collaboration'. However, the whole telecommunication industry is inter alia about remote collaboration.

I remember that some years ago several types of small consumer equipment was launched. Almost all new things included web or wap browser, e-mail possibility, a small notepad or calendar. Mobile phones had all these features, also PDA-s, set-top boxes, video cameras, etc. Whatever thing you bought you had the same basic features. Now it seems that all communication programs are going to have features of sending text messages, transmitting files, speaking and showing webcam. Though screen sharing is not so common yet, it seems you are going to have similar features no matter whether you use a "phone software", an "IM software", a "web conferencing software" or a 3G / wifi phone. As WR has predicted - conferencing change from application to featrue. I think that personal video will gain much more popularity when laptops and desktop monitors are going to have built-in cameras (like Sony Vaio). Right now laptop is a really portable conferencing endpoint but connecting a camera is often too uncomfortable.

Of course, there will be situations where quality and reliability offered by group vc systems is required. Thinking about it, a story about lamp (vacuum tube triode is maybe the correct term in English) and transistor leaps to my mind. I may be totally wrong about details.
There was a time when radios included lamps, they were big nice things. When transistor was invented, one company (Sony?) started to produce small cheap radio receivers that made not very good sound. However, there were many people, for who this was much better than nothing. So this affordable and small radio receiver had a new big market. Later, the technology improved and the new type of radio became a strong competitor for the old lamp-radios.

Back to topic. Most people agree that number of personal video "endpoints" will soon be much higher that number of group vc endpoints. The question for me is what about multipoint? Will it be like phone calls: most PBX-s can handle 3...5-way phone conferences, for bigger conference you need to order a service from a CSP. Most video communication programs will have capability for making a conference between 3...5 participants; for bigger number there will be a market for CSPs?

posted 30 December 2005 10:35 PM            

Thanks for your reply.

What I meant was traditional sense of conferencing market or industry.

We can first start the efforts from the scope and then we can expand it to other areas done by other people such as what you mentioned if they would like to join.

posted 04 January 2006 07:04 AM            

In other words, the former is less risky than the latter in terms of revenue generation for companies. However, this latter marketing activity is also important because the former is like "harvesting crops" and the latter is like "planting seeds. We need both of them to effectively do marketing.

One of reasons why our industry is not growing more than we expect is that we are not doing enough in "planting seeds". But companies are busier "harvesting hard-to-find-crops."

If harvesting is something hard to do, why don't we spend more time planting seeds?

If only a single company is doing "planting seeds", that is risky businesswise.

Why don't we gather forces in the industry to do "planting seeds". That way, it is less risky if all of us do it together that requires minimum commitment but could generate more benefits to the industry than otherwise we do respectively.

Growing the pie of the market is our common interest in our industry. Is that wrong?

My two Japanese yen,(=two US cents)
Keisuke
20:20 January 4th,2006 Japan Time