Small Talk

I started my professional life in the Hi Tech industry in 1984, when a PC was an acronym for “Personal Care”, not for “Personal Computer”. There were Mainframe Computers and Mini Computers and beside some weird creatures like Osborn (that weight a ton) or the ridicules TRS-80 by Radio Shack/Kyocera , this was my computer world. If someone asked you then what’s your profession and you’d say “Computers”, they will  respond with “Ha, gotcha!”. Today, when you say “Computers” or “Hi Tech”, they say “Yes, but what exactly?”.

Today, after 32 years in this industry, I’m a world expert in Video Conferencing Technology. I’m an expert on technology and solutions where Video Conferencing can contribute added value to a service.

​

Early Days.

Short (and boring) curriculum of my early days in the Hi Tech industry: After graduated the collage with honors., i start as novice programmer in a private holding translation company and my job was to translate american computerized publishing system (Atex) from English to Hebrew. After 2 years i moved to a private holding software company dealing with Magic and DB2 databases serving in government offices. Due to my experience with the Atex publishing system, i was asked to be CTO of one of the biggest newspaper group in Israel, named “Ha’aretz Group“. After 7 years, i left the group and opened my own little venture of Multimedia Catalog engine which lead me to the project of my life: Video Conferencing. 

At the time i began my hands-on with Video Conferencing. I felt like Mr. Q from the James Bond movies. It was fascinating and be like in a science fiction movie. It was a state-of-the-art hardware solution that incorporate the most advanced technology at that time. It was the time of the H.320, the Video Conferencing standard for ADSL.

​

iMAGiNE Visual Dialog Ltd.

I started my Video Conferencing voyage at 1996 by joining a Startup named “iMAGiNE Ltd.” as General Manager of the Multimedia division. The mission was to build a Self Service Kiosk for banks where people can attend the Kiosk and do bank transactions while they can meet face-to-face with a banker. We launched a pilot in Australia with “City Bank” and it went very promising. We also build Kiosks for Israel Discount Bank which deployed in several Shopping Malls around Israel.

At that time, i was appointed to be VP R&D and become one of the company share holders. Many projects were listed, among them a Deutsche Telekom project in Berlin connecting elderly and disabled people to a Call Center, using special video phone,  for getting assistance or friendly chat with someone.  For this project, i developed a package named “T20” which was a very sophisticated yet very friendly for the Call Center agents.
We used ADSL lines due to the wide bandwidth Video Conferencing needs. It was a success story and Deutsche Telekom, as the solution owner, got a lot of applause when presenting this service.
At that time the Internet starts booming and the capability of streaming video over the internet was the hottest issue. When this technology starts to mature for commercial uses, and the legendary H.323 standard (Video Conferencing over IP) was the leading standard,  I developed a Video Conferencing, software only, endpoint and together with our existing servers, I developed the product named “Visual Meeting” which was selected at Cebit 1999, as “The Most Innovative Product of the Year” (from the press), a reward that led to investments and partnerships around the world (1),(2). It was a huge success and as a successful dotcom company, we tried to go public. We had  WestLB AG bank and Merrill Lynch as underwriters to place an Initial Public Offering (IPO) at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with the value of 400 million USD. It was a dream comes true. Unfortunately, 2 weeks before the IPO date, the stock markets around the world collapsed in the event known as the “dotcom crash” or the “dotcom collapse” and all our dreams to become rich went down the drain together with lots of other Hi Tech geeks around the world.

Due to the disappointment from the failed IPO and due to the turbulence in the industry, the directors of iMAGiNE Ltd. decided to change the management. Step by step, our position and influence on the company deteriorated and in 2002, we, the old management which include the former CEO, the CTO and me as the VP R&D, left the company and founded a new startup named iPoint-media Ltd. (meanwhile, after 2 years,  iMAGiNE ltd. was closed).

​

iPoint-media Ltd.

At iPoint-media Ltd. we focus on building a sophisticated server containing building blocks enabling us to build almost all kind of application which incorporated Video Conferencing. Some of the modules were such innovative that change the way customers thinks. We called it “Vitrage”. This server was constantly upgraded and updated following the market demand and follwo evolution of the Video Conferencing technology. It follows the first mobile phone that enable making a direct video call (based on the old H.324M standard), follow the SIP standard that become to be the de facto standard for Video Conferencing and VOIP till today and, of course, the emerge of the smart phones.

Our customers were some of the biggest corporate in the world, among them you can find “Ericsson” and “China Unicom”. We built projects around the world for cellular operators, commercial banks, TV stations and Call centers. We had projects in Turkey, Israel, Vietnam, Germany, Sweden, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Singapore and China.

At 2007, we went public on the London AIM Stock exchange with the value around 50 Million UK pounds. Stock went high and high but eventually collapsed and removed from the trade due to the fact that our sales was good but never boomed. Video Conferencing never become a main stream, as the world experts predicted, and stay as a niche market.

In 2012, we develop the “GoLive TV”, a  state-of-the-art application that was based on one of the modules of the Vitrage server, enable building TV formats where many audience simultaneously make a Video/Audio call from their smart phone to the studio and shown on the TV screen. This technology was shown at the main TV event at the Chinese new year and includes more then 100 callers on one screen.

We took the core from “GoLive TV” and build a product named “GoLive Command”. This application enables a commander to control his agents on the field by having continues Video/Audio call with all of them at the same time and constantly monitoring the location of each agent on the map. This application was targeted to the Chinese Police and secret service and used by other, non government companies.

At the end of 2014, we sold our technology to a Chinese company named CSS Group . We manage to transfer our code to Chinese developers in one year..

Meanwhile, we were seeking for new technologies, markets and projects. I developed a server and endpoint SDK based on the new Google WebRTC, which considered to be the next generation of Video Conferencing, allows users of Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and soon the Safari, to make Video and Audio calls without any download.

We aimed for a big project with a very large bank in Germany, but this project was postponed so, we left without projects and founding. We decided to closed the company.

​

​