Highfive
Googlers call it “the VC” link.
Inside Google offices across the globe, company engineers and other employees communicate with distant colleagues via a multimillion-dollar video-conferencing system developed by the tech giant itself. At company headquarters in Mountain View, California, some engineers keep a VC link open all day long, chatting with colleagues in places like New York and Kirkland, Washington as they all collaborate on common projects.
Shan Sinha worked at Google for about two years, overseeing product management for the company’s suite of online office applications, Google Apps, and he saw how useful the VC link could be. “There was a pretty magical transformation at Google,” says Sinha, a veteran of Microsoft and the startup world. “My teams communicated differently than at any other company I’ve ever worked at.” So, in 2012, he left Google and founded a startup, Highfive, which seeks to bring this sort of video conferencing to the rest of the world, including the smallest of businesses.
Shan Sinha. Highfive
It so happens that Google is now trying to do much the same thing, selling a video conferencing device called Chromebox for Meetings, and yes, video conferencing tools are already available from a wide range of other outfits, including everything from the rather expensive conference-room hardware offered by the likes of Cisco and Polycom to internet services that run on ordinary PCs via a web browser. But Sinha and Highfive aim for something different: a high-definition system for conference rooms that’s much cheaper—and much easier to use—than gear from the Ciscos and the Polycoms.
On Tuesday, the startup unveiled its first product—a slim, $799 device that brings video to the conference room through flat-panel displays, but also lets you instantly move video feeds from such displays onto handheld devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. In this way, Highfive seeks to marry the convenience of a smartphone video-chat app with the more inclusive—and higher fidelity—experience of a dedicated conference-room video system, all while charging a price that small businesses can afford.
This aluminum-encased device includes an HD camera and a noise-canceling mic array. You mount it on the wall, plug it into a flat-panel display, and connect it to the internet, so it can tie into an online video conferencing service built and operated by Highfive. To navigate the service, you then install an app on your mobile phone.
In short, you use the app to create an online meeting and send invitations to others—as you would with a tool like WebEx/a>. When they open the invite, a video feed from your phone appears on theirs. But if any of you are in a conference room equipped with a Highfive device, the app will recognize this and let you instantly transfer the video to the flat-panel on the wall.
You can do this merely by swiping your finger across the smartphone app, and in much the same way, you can transfer the video feed back to your phone, as need be. When its not housing the video conference, the phone serves as a remote control for what’s being shown on the flat-panel. You can use also it to serve up PowerPoint presentations alongside video feeds.
Highfive
Phil Karcher, an analyst with the Massachusetts-based research outfit Forrester, who closely follows the video conferencing market, calls the Highfive setup “quite unique,” because you can plug it in and get it up and running so quickly, but also because it lets you transfer feeds so rapidly from device to device. For Doug Bohaboy—who has used an early version of the device as part of a trial at the online file-sharing company Memeo—the device-to-device thing is particularly interesting. “You can move meetings around,” he says. “With recent acquisitions and new team members, we can, at the end of a meeting, show them our corporate office. I can just move the meeting onto my phone and take a stroll around the office so they can see what it looks like.”
Bohaboy says that the every versions of the tool would occasionally drop video feeds—”there were hiccups,” he says—but these problems were fixed with subsequent versions of the hardware, and he believes that the technology can indeed provide an on-ramp to video conferencing for small businesses. Karcher agrees. Only about 5 percent of the country’s conference rooms include video conferencing technology, he says, and Highfive can help change that.
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