Is 2010 – Year of the iChat, video Skype, Ustream… (video conferencing) ?
Is 2010 – Year of the iChat, video Skype, Ustream… (video conferencing) ? Maybe for us! One of the important goals for us this year at Adafruit is using some of the great video technology out there to do more things with more people (and less going to airports, and talking on speaker phones) – It would be impossible to do an engineering conference each week with up to 500 people, but we do a weekly online video chat called “Ask an Engineer” 10pm ET every Saturday night. Last week we had Mitch Altman on the show, inventor of TV-B-Gone, a 3 camera set up and played clips from MAKE TV of Mitch and Ladyada – it’s really a great way to reach the electronics community and we answer engineering questions for a full hour each week. We also give away a kit, have a discount code and MOSFET the cat shows up.
What else? The screen shot above is from our video chat today with Jay, inventor of Drawdio – with Ladyada and PT. We’re working on all sorts of great things with Jay this year along with doing more with one of our favorite kits, the Drawdio kit (and assembled Fun Pack).
We use iChat and for some upcoming LIVE video chats we’ll use Skype, while also broadcasting over Ustream. We have some work to do to get this all working, but so far so good. As we get stuff cooking we’ll post what hardware and software we’re using and hopefully that will help others who want to do similar things.
This Friday we’re going to have dinner over Skype with the Instructables folks. We’ll see how it goes and if our USB grill works 🙂
So – are any of you out there using video conferencing? Post in the comments, we’re curious how many people *actually* do this on a regular basis!
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Speaking as a military husband, I can tell you that the husbands and wives of the military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan and other overseas locations use videoconferencing extensively. When my wife was in Afghanistan it was really the ONLY reliable way to talk with her, and when we were stationed in Japan we used videoconferencing to talk to both her family and mine.
Speaking as a military husband, I can tell you that the husbands and wives of the military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan and other overseas locations use videoconferencing extensively. When my wife was in Afghanistan it was really the ONLY reliable way to talk with her, and when we were stationed in Japan we used videoconferencing to talk to both her family and mine.
So, in that arena at least it’s used a LOT.
I’m not much of a smiler for photo ops, but PT always looks like someone sh*t in his mess kit.