The tech industry has been percolating and I have noticed a few transactions based on intellectual property (IP) portfolios recently — most notably:

• Nortel sold about 6,000 patents to a consortium of Apple, RIM, Ericsson, EMC, Microsoft, and Sony for $4.5 billion (outbidding Google, the stalking horse bidder in the auction) in July.
• Google bought Motorola Mobility — with its 17,000-patent portfolio — for $12.5 billion in August.
• Google acquired 2,053 patents from IBM for an undisclosed amount in two separate transactions in July and August.

LifeSize, a division of Logitech, has made an interesting set of announcements this morning. The three main points are:

• LifeSize Connections, a service that enables cloud-based videoconferencing.
• LifeSize Passport Connect, a very small codec/camera to video-enable remote/home offices.
• LifeSize has acquired Mirial,a developer of PC/smartphone mobile videoconferencing solutions.

What does this mean? Mobile, video-communicating, iWorkers will be able stay connected easily and affordably later this quarter when all of these components are generally available. Using the PC client, a very portable codec (about the size of a half-notebook at 8” x 5” x 1”) and camera, and a hosted bridging service, these iWorkers can connect to many standards-based, open video endpoints at HD resolutions. The required components are:

• LifeSize Connections service - $360/year.
• LifeSize Passport Connect codec and camera - $1,000 up front.
• Mirial ClearSea client account - $480/year (this is available today, and it worked well when I tried it).

I am starting a report looking at the social capabilities that will be of use to business and how those integrate (or don’t) with existing unified communications and collaborations solutions (UC&C). One truism that I am incorporating into my thinking is that engagement — users want to come back and use a tool because it was easy, useful, and (gasp) fun — will drive adoption, and thus penetration and ultimately business value. This seems to be the way that Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about Facebook growth as well. In his discussion of the integration with Skype yesterday, he posited that user volume is not the metric to watch for Facebook right now — despite its attainment of 750 million users. So what does Facebook see as its strategic imperative, and how does Skype help it attain that?

• It’s not the absolute number — it’s the ubiquity. If it is reasonable for people to find information or people on Skype, it will accelerate the momentum of adoption. Something Forrester has been saying since 2008.
• It’s not the people — it’s the activities you do jointly with the people. “Farmville,” “Friend,” “Group,” “Like,” “Stalk,” “Status,” and “Wall” are all words with new or special meaning to users because they describe what they do on Facebook. This is the engagement point from above — it’s not who you connect with, but what that connection enables you to do with them.

Whenever vendors talk about videoconferencing today, they use the term telepresence.  Come on guys – do yourself and your potential customers a favor – let’s be more careful with our terminology.  Immersive telepresence should only be used to describe a meeting experience that leaves participants believing they were really in a live meeting – similar to the suspension of disbelief that occurs when watching a Pixar movie like “Toy Story” where viewers willingly forget the technology and become immersed in the experience.

• Telepresence: When Cisco launched their initial telepresence offers in 2006 (was it that long ago, really?) they were adamant that it only referred to solutions that replicated life-like meeting experience with multiple screens, dedicated rooms, and high-speed connections.  Existing vendors like Teliris were all too happy to agree and reinforce that definition.  Today, most clients I talk to think that telepresence refers to the classic 3-screen configuration but are willing to include larger deployments like Polycom’s RPX, which can accommodate up to 28 participants in 3 rows – and I think that should be the definition of a telepresence endpoint. 
• Personal telepresence: At first blush, this seems like a non sequitor, but I call a dedicated videoconferencing screen that is roughly equal to the size of a human head and shoulders (so that the remote participant appears near life-size on the desk/table where the endpoint is positioned) a personal telepresence unit.  Distance from the camera, lighting, and alignment must be managed carefully by the participants on both ends to maintain the meeting continuity. 

The acquisition of Skype puts Microsoft into a commanding position in the consumer UC as a service market. To date, Microsoft has had little to say when Skype, Yahoo, AIM and others talked about enabling IM and adding voice and video. Their Microsoft Messenger voice services were less well known and less widely adopted. Today, Microsoft turned the tables, paying $8.5 billion to acquire Skype and its 170 million customers who value the “free” in free voice/video services so highly that they are willing to accept variability in quality of service and a service level agreement that specifically spells out, “Skype cannot guarantee that You will always be able to communicate with other Skype Software users, nor can Skype guarantee that You can communicate without disruptions, delays or communication-related flaws or that all Your communication shall always be delivered to other Skype Software users. Skype will not be liable for any such disruptions, delays or other omissions in any communication experienced when using Skype Software.” So, what did Microsoft get?

·         170 million customers whose online communications connections were one of the first social communications communities, and who are loyal to the Skype experience

·         A worldwide peer-to-peer network that is proving increasingly able to deliver usable voice and video streams to PCs and increasingly mobile devices

·         A portfolio of P2P technology media encoding algorithms with proprietary, non-public specifications