Chromebox for Meetings is a nice idea. It’s a tidy little bundle of goodies that delivers what is essentially an appliance for use with Hangouts. At $999 it’s even a pretty good value. What it isn’t is terribly flexible, largely…
A reader posed a question the other day. He asks;
I have a question for a friend. He has a smallish meeting room capable of accommodating 8 people. The problem is that some of the walls are made of glass.
When doing conference calls, the echo from his room is impossible to handle which leads to a crappy experience for others.
Which room microphone/speaker should he purchase? Ideally, it needs to be able to connect to a laptop that is brought into the room for meetings.
This is sort of question that I enjoy, so I thought it worth sharing my response.
If my first approach was too much for my desktop, then perhaps I could split the workload between my desktop and my laptop. This presents a different set of problems, but ultimately makes the process more robust.
In this arrangement my laptop joins the JVB session. It’s running VoiceMeeter, Chrome & Bria. It provides the audio mix-minus feeds.
InfoComm 2015 is next week, which has swayed the nature of press releases filling my in-box. While most are less than interesting, there was one from Phoenix Audio Technologies that piqued my interest. They have introduced an intriguing new device they call the Condor. Condor is not a typical SIP end-point.
Condor is an audio pickup appliance, essentially a microphone array with some sophisticated on-board DSP capability. With an on-board SIP client it’s one component of a huddle room conferencing solution. Add a large HDTV with built-in speakers and you have a complete solution for audio conferencing. You’re also well on your way to video conferencing.
According to a FierceTelecom article by Sean Buckley, “Verizon says fewer customers are purchasing battery backup for fiber home voice services.” The article describes how Verizon’s FiOS FTTH customers are tending to rely upon their mobile phones to stay on touch during a power outage.
This assertion comes right as the FCC is concerned about CPE remaining powered during an outage, something that cannot be done over fiber as it was over copper. Since customers were not buying traditional battery backup units Verizon has come up with its own solution called PowerReserve.
I love when things “just work.” This happens so rarely as to be noteworthy. What follows is a nice example with respect to my Polycom VVX-600 and a USB-attached headset.
This afternoon a plaintive beep in my ear told me that the battery on my Sennheiser DW Pro2 cordless DECT headset was nearly depleted. This when I still had a lot of my working day left. Looking across the room I saw a wired headset that I have been evaluating for some ZipDX applications. It was a Passport 21P Headset