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Video & Web Conferencing: How to Choose the System That is Best For You
Throughout the ages, we have seen technologies that have changed the course of history. There was the Stone Age, where primitive man learned to fashion crude tools that allowed him to evolve from a gatherer to a farmer. Then we see further improvements in technology when man discovered that he could use bronze to create more sophisticated tools. These technological improvements allowed civilizations such as the Greeks to grow and prosper. Then we see further improvements in technologies with the development of iron and steel.
After that we had the so-called Industrial Revolution, this was the turning point as we no longer were required to build our products manually and things changed much more rapidly from this point forward.
Now we jump to the early 1970s and we see the computer revolution create a shift in wealth, with the rise of such men as Bill Gates and corporations such as IBM. Who would believe that then having a personal computer in your office was considered being on the cutting edge, even fewer companies such as Xerox passed on the opportunity to join the early stages of deploying personal computer technology to the masses, believing that these devices would never be accepted by the general public. If you had invested $10,000 in a small company named Microsoft when it debuted, today you would be worth millions.
We continue to see further progress in technology during the 1980s with the cell phone revolution. At that time Ma Bell had a monopoly on traditional phone service, there was a rotary dial phone in most urban households and every city seemed to have a payphone on every other street corner. Even rural areas have seen great progress fueled by very high local and long-distance prices. Now a few visionaries see a future that was previewed in popular culture such as the comic strip Dick Tracy, where you can call using a small handheld device. The first generation of the future cellphone was not very portable and weighed more than 80 pounds. Some people speculated that this technology would not be accepted by the masses, saying things like “Who would want to carry around a phone with them when there’s one in every home and street corner”. Well, that type of thinking causes many of us to miss benefiting, financially that is, from the cellphone revolution.
Further on in our journey, although not that many years (or centuries) as we had seen in the past, we see the next opportunity. This was the Internet revolution of the 1990s. since 1995 we have seen companies like E-Bay and Amazon become global retail leaders, again having missed this revolution would cost us dearly. Today you can’t find any major retailer that doesn’t have an internet site dedicated to selling all of those items that we just can’t live without. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing) generate billions of dollars in revenue with just advertising alone. This is yet another example of the major technology shifts that have created some very rich entrepreneurs. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of any of these companies before they exploded.
Now we say goodbye to the twentieth century and yet again we see another revolution that took place, that’s the Social Networking Revolution. Just about anyone on the planet who’s been awake has heard of Facebook and Twitter. This shift in how we use the internet created an opportunity for budding entrepreneurs.
Finally, the most recent shift in technology brings us to the digital phone revolution. This is the next huge shift in technology as we no longer have to be restricted by outdated technology that was invented over a century ago. By shifting to digital phone service, we can send more information through the same infrastructure while using less of the resources available. Thus this brings down the cost significantly while allowing for more advanced features to be implemented. One of these features is the integration of the video phone with the traditional phone service. We now can see the person as well as hear the person we are communicating with. The FCC has estimated that by the end of 2012, there be over 212 million video phones sold. That kind of growth is truly a revolutionary shift.
I use and highly recommend GVO Conference Video Conferencing Software. Taking time when choosing a provider GVO Conference Video Conference Software is my recommendation.