Christine Perey

A sales engineer is at a customer site demonstrating a new release of a product. The customer's CTO asks a question the sales engineer can't answer, so he opens the presence-enabled corporate directory on his laptop and sees that the product manager and technical team leader are online and available.

Starbak Communications Inc.'s Torrent videoconferencing gateway converts a videoconference into streaming media. This would let a manager, for example, make an announcement by videoconference, while others not on the call could watch it later. We liked Torrent's architecture but the viewing experience needs refinement.

Low cost video stream delivery.

It isn't perfect, but desktop videoconferencing has come a long way from the techno wizardry research-and-development lab...