What do the Truman Show, Face Off, and The Terminator have in common? Besides being hit movies, these films portrayed a fantasy for their time that in many ways is now becoming reality. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview between a father and son, two technologists separated by a generation, these men discussed the future of technology and how the wonders of sci-fi may not be far off.

Their comments leave you feeling that the human race is on a precipice of enormous change. They call it the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” in which technology advances exponentially. Think about that. Because of technology, more digital content is being created, consumed, shared, and stored in a single day around the world, than in all of an entire year just several years ago. That may make some of us uncomfortable,  but like so many new advancements, the initial resistance wears down to acceptance, and then finally wide-scale adoption. More...

There really isn't much debate about whether videoconferencing can save an enterprise money, paying for itself through travel replacement and increased productivity. Sure, there are people in the organization who resist video meetings, such as salespersons who insist on meeting in person with a key customer (and if that's the customer's preference, it trumps everything else) or some old-school types who doubt video's effectiveness, or those who feel self-conscious with a camera pointed at them. But video's march continues on. More...

It used to be that web videos were short. Many believed that was because of shorter attention spans. But we are finding that just isn't true. The truth is that short videos were just a technology and financial limitation. I personally no longer have a TV and my kids watch only web-based video content (a TV dial would be as foreign to them as a rotary dial telephone). All this has implications for the enterprise network. More...

Did you see the movie The Truman Show? Released in 1998, this movie depicted the televising of the entire life of the lead character every moment of every day. In a sense, it foretold the future we are experiencing today.

Consider Facebook and how parents post picture after picture of their families. Like Truman – who was unaware he was constantly being filmed – the younger children don't realize their images are being shared with the world. Teenagers, on the other hand, happily post photos, including ones that not so many years ago would have been considered shocking. More...

There may not be any such thing as a free lunch, but there just may be such a thing as free bandwidth.

Sound too good to be true? We can’t blame you for being suspicious, but Marty Parker over at NoJitter makes his case for leveraging Unified Communications to modify your mix of traffic in order to accommodate video with no need to add capacity. More...

We’re calling this meeting of the technology-of-the-year skeptics to order, and our first item of new business is what to call 2012. We need to fill in the blank on “2012: Year of _____” in order to allow for lots of heavy marketing throughout the remaining 49 weeks of the year.

Now, some of you attendees have made a good case for not declaring the technology of the year until the year is over. You say that only by reflecting on what was hot in, say, 2011, can we really make the judgment. But this is a January tradition, and the marketers depend on it. So can we just proceed?More...

We talked the other day about how we disagreed with an analyst’s blog headline that suggested Unified Communications was “failing.” Now we offer Exhibit B, a survey of enterprise IT organizations that reveals some pretty ambitious plans to implement various UC applications not only on desktop and notebook computers, but on mobile devices as well. More...

OK, we’ve all had those dreams right? I still remember my nightmares as a six-year-old about getting on the school bus only to realize that I was still wearing my pajamas. This week, a host of companies in Silicon Valley hosted a series of events that I have dubbed “National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Week.”More...

Videoconferencing on an everyday basis has been something that has been “just around the corner” for close to four decades now, and an interesting piece on why it isn’t more common can be found over at InformationWeek.

Writer Kurt Marko poses the question of “why aren’t we all saying ‘can you see me now?’” and comes up with two answers as to why videoconferencing is still a niche technology. One answer is technological, the other cultural. More...

The changing role of video in the enterprise is reflected in a recent white paper that shows how conferencing technology has evolved, and fairly quickly, from an option primarily for travel cost avoidance to a real collaborative tool.

The Aberdeen Group white paper, titled From Niche to Mainstream: The Evolution of Video Collaboration, is available through Webtorials (registration required). It looks at how some companies are taking the lead on leveraging video in a Unified Communications and collaboration environment, as well as how other enterprises stack up against these leaders and the “best practices” standards they are setting. More...