How much does Dialogic love video? This reporter isn't sure he can begin to count the ways.
Dialogic CEO Nick Jensen has been long-time (well, at least a year plus) bullish on mobile video. Last year, he was frustrated at the lack of progress in the U.S. for interoperable standards to exchange mobile video while Europe and Asia/Pacific rallied around GSM. State-side developers weren't moving fast enough to build cool applications and would get left behind by other parts of the world.
At this year's analyst event, Jensen started up on his "video everywhere/everything" soap box early during a presentation by Ascendant Systems. Since Dialogic's software stack already has support for video built into its products, Jensen quickly painted a scenario where video-enabled Blackberry phones could be used to record a video call between parties for archival or compliance purposes, then "intelligently" processed to identify the participants and turn the speech into text for further use. Dialogic's software is used by Ascendant and already has video capabilities already built in, so all Ascendant has to do is turn it on and *WHAM* Ascendant's application is video-enabled.
Dialogic is in the building block business for communications products at the network edge, not in the applications business. But Jensen wants to get the whole ecosystem of players working on video applications and incorporating video into everything. As Dialogic pushes the price point per port down, you can enable video conferencing, video gaming, video SMS, video ringtones, video IVR, and a whole bunch of other apps we haven't thought up yet.
Where voice is "free," and data is priced, video can be premium-priced. Jensen pointed to a CTIA demo of a video dating application. The carrier is getting 50 to 75 cents per minute on the application, so there's a ROI on equipment measured in months.
"In video gaming rooms, you can see the person you're playing," said Jensen. "In games like poker, where there's a psychological part of the game, you can see your opponent."
Dialogic acquired OpenMediaLabs in March and intends to leverage the acquired expertise to put more intelligence into video processing. "Turning bits into information" was the catch phrase recited by Dialogic VP/OpenMediaLabs founder Joe Mele, with the goals of being able to make video streams content aware, dig through the clutter of all the data being collected out there, and making it easier for end-users (and faster for processing boxes) to translate between video formats.
Once you turn bits into information, you can more easily enable all kinds of new applications, such as security and pattern recognition. Of course, it won't hurt to apply video functionality to UC applications, an area which Microsoft and Cisco are building.