Persony Announces Breakthrough in Reducing Web and Video Conferencing Hosting Costs with Amazon Web Services

Telepresence and Holography / Holograms - November 2008

Editor’s viewpoint on their differences, likenesses and future...

We all just recently viewed an historic CNN holographic interview on an historic Election Night. CNN stated this type of imaging has never been done before on National TV and I believe that. I haven’t seen anything like it. The live interview caught me by surprise and sure had the “wow” factor attached to it didn’t it? Here’s a link to the actual interview.

CNN Hologram Video

The question now has to be asked. Is it Telepresence?

I’m no expert on the subject but I’m going to throw my hat into the ring, go out on a limb and say yes, I believe it is. Although I know many video conferencing purists are rolling their eyes and grabbing their guns right about now with my statement.

While I do know that Telepresence still hasn’t been universally defined (Houston, we have a problem), here’s how I see it…. Broken down to its simplest form - “tele” (through electronic means) and “presence” (present). This is how I’m justifying my opinion by lumping holography and Telepresence together. Just as Telepresence is surely an offshoot of video conferencing, holographic imaging (like we viewed on CNN) surely has to be considered an offshoot of Telepresence. The interviewer was “telepresent” from Chicago and beamed into the CNN Election Headquarters. She was most assuredly - “telepresent”. There was negligible latency, the imaging was fantastic and both interviewers were rehearsed on what they would say. I’ve just recently read that CNN actually “downgraded” the experience to make it “movie” quality and not as good as it could have been. Maybe they thought us mere mortals would be shocked if they showed their complete hand. I have a feeling it was so big to them, they didn’t want it to get upstaged by the historic election. I’m willing to bet we’ll see the “true” power of this technology in the upcoming weeks and months when they can put the pedal to the medal and show it off without having it sidetracked.

What an amazing time for this technology (all differences and opinions aside). Telepresence Doctors, nurses, teachers, schools and healthcare (healthpresence) will benefit from the recent gains in this state-of-the-art industry whether holograms, Telepresence or holography. Airlines also have to see the threat to a portion of their business travel. Hell, who wants go through security and fly to Miami for a two-hour conference when you can look them in the eye via Telepresence?

Beam me up Scotty! Simply amazing…!

Visit the free Telepresence Forum for more information and discussion

Your Editor and Administrator - L II
"Ride on the Next Plane of Existence" TM

Los Gatos, CA (PRWEB) October 17, 2007 -- Persony, Inc. a leading developer of Flash®-based web and video conferencing software, today announced a dramatic breakthrough in reducing the hosting costs of web and video conferencing by 1000-fold using Amazon Web Services. Most web conferencing services, such as Adobe® Connect Professional, Microsoft® Office Live Meeting, or WebEx®, need to be hosted by specialized service providers, which charge expensive usage fees. Persony has created a solution that uses open-source web and video servers, such as Apache and Red5, which can be hosted on Amazon Web Services at a cost of 1 penny per participant hour or $1 per hour for 100 participants. In comparison, a hosted Adobe Connect Professional meeting costs $0.32 per participant minute or $1,920 for one hour with 100 participants. The Persony cost does not include a one-time software license fee*.

Persony Web Conferencing 2.0 allows meeting participants to share their desktop, webcams, photos, presentation slides, whiteboard, streaming video, and audio, all from an easy-to-use web interface, and without downloading special software. Persony licenses software to customers or service providers that host it using their own web servers.

With the addition of Amazon Web Services, a Persony Web Conferencing 2.0 customer can dynamically launch a pre-configured "virtual server" running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to host Persony meetings in minutes. Each Amazon EC2 server is equivalent to a 1.7GHz server with 250Mbps of bandwidth and can handle hundreds of concurrent users. The cost of running an Amazon EC2 server is $0.10 per hour, plus $0.18 per GB of data transfer. A typical Persony web conference with video and voice over IP transfers around 60MB of data per participant hour, which costs 1 penny with Amazon EC2. A Persony web conferencing site can deploy multiple Amazon EC2 servers to scale to thousands of users. Persony Web Conferencing 2.0 includes an administration control panel to manage multiple Amazon EC2 servers and increase or decrease capacity on-the-fly.

"We're excited about the types of innovation made possible by Amazon Web Services" said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. "Amazon EC2 removes a lot of the cost associated with having to acquire hardware and allows you to just pay for what you need, when you need it".

"Every once in a while someone comes up with an innovation that takes us all to a new level of productivity," said David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. "Persony has found a clever way to leverage Amazon Web Services to make web and video conferencing far less expensive than making a phone call."

"Our vision of making web conferencing as easy to use and as inexpensive as email is coming to fruition especially with our new ability to utilize the extremely low-cost Amazon Web Services," said Eric Chen, CEO of Persony. "Service providers and corporate clients are realizing that web conferencing is a very powerful productivity tool. Now that the cost and scalability issues are resolved, we expect a rapid adoption of Persony Web Conferencing 2.0 and Amazon Web Services," added Herb Levitin, vice president of business development of Persony.

*The above cost comparison is based on published Adobe Connect Professional Pay-Per-Use pricing. The Persony cost does not include the software license fee, which starts at $199 one-time for a single-host license with unlimited 10-person meetings. A single-host license for 100 participants is $699 one-time. Minimum purchase is 5 licenses and includes a branded Web conferencing site hosted by the customer. Persony Web Conferencing 2.0 is available for free trials at http://www.persony.com

About Persony, Inc.

Persony's solution already enables many service providers to offer fully branded, feature-rich, and easy-to-use web collaboration services at very affordable pricing. Persony's patent-pending "smart-client" technology puts the intelligence of a collaborative application on the client side and uses standard web servers to connect remote users. By leveraging the millions of web servers in existence, Persony's solution can be deployed anywhere and at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. The smart-client approach is a disruptive technology that allows individuals and small businesses to afford applications that were once only available to larger corporations. For more information about the company, visit http://www.persony.com

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To learn more about Telepresence, the revolutionary new style of immersive video conferencing; visit these websites:

Telepresence - "Ride on the Next Plane of Existence" - Telepresence
Telepresence Web Portal - Telepresence Internet web portal
Telepresence Report - 24/7 breaking Telepresence related news and information
Via Telepresence - Video conferencing via Telepresence
Telepresence Forum - Free user discussion forum for everything Telepresence related
Telepresence Today - Telepresence information and editor qualified headline news
Telepresence Resource Directory - Telepresence web resource directory
Telepresence Tube - Telepresence videos, pictures and more