LifeSize
Encyclopedia
LifeSize, a division of Logitech, is a video and audio communications company that provides high definition
video conferencing endpoints and accessories, infrastructure
products and a cloud-based video collaboration platform. LifeSize's worldwide headquarters is located in Austin
, Texas
. Its EMEA regional office is located in Munich
, Germany
and its APAC regional office is located in Singapore
.
In 2009, Logitech
acquired LifeSize for $405 million in cash. LifeSize is now "LifeSize, a division of Logitech," but it will continue to operate as a separate division led by Craig Malloy, chief executive officer
.
at LifeSize, was a product manager at VTEL Corporation in Austin
until 1996, when he left and founded ViaVideo. ViaVideo was acquired by Polycom
in 1998. Malloy was the senior vice president and general manager of the Video Communication Division of Polycom through 2002, when he left to found his own HD video communications company.
LifeSize was founded by Craig Malloy and Michael Kenoyer in January 2003. It operated in “stealth mode” under the name KMV Technologies from 2003 to 2005. Investors in LifeSize included Redpoint Ventures
, Sutter Hill Ventures
, Pinnacle Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners
and Tenaya Capital
. The company name change to LifeSize Communications was unveiled at the Interop
trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada
in May 2005. This is also when LifeSize announced its first product, LifeSize Room, which was the first high definition video conferencing endpoint brought to market.
video conferencing, often called "telepresence." LifeSize has products that include high definition
endpoints and accessories, NAT
\Firewall (computing)
traversal, audio phones, ISDN gateways, Multipoint Control Unit
s and management systems, as well as mobile video conferencing software and a cloud-based IaaS offering for video conferencing. LifeSize also offers a streaming, recording, and auto-publishing server called LifeSize Video Center.
LifeSize has partnered with technology companies including Alcatel-Lucent
, Avaya
, Inc., BroadSoft, Inc., Microsoft
Corporation, ShoreTel, Inc., Siemens
Corporation, Skype
Technologies S.A. and VBrick Systems.
system, which uses a single or multiple codec video system. Each member/party of the meeting uses a telepresence room to "dial in" and can see/talk to every other member on a screen
/screens as if they were in the same room. This brings enormous time and cost benefits. It is also superior to phone conferencing, as the visual aspect greatly enhances communications, allowing for perceptions of facial expressions and other body language.
Some LifeSize customers are:
High-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
video conferencing endpoints and accessories, infrastructure
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...
products and a cloud-based video collaboration platform. LifeSize's worldwide headquarters is located in Austin
Austin
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas.Austin may also refer to:-In the United States:*Austin, Arkansas*Austin, Colorado*Austin, Chicago, Illinois*Austin, Indiana*Austin, Minnesota*Austin, Nevada*Austin, Oregon...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
. Its EMEA regional office is located in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and its APAC regional office is located in Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
.
In 2009, Logitech
Logitech
Logitech International S.A. is a global provider of personal peripherals for computers and other digital platforms headquartered in Romanel-sur-Morges, Switzerland. The company develops and markets products like peripheral devices for PCs, including keyboards, mice, microphones, game controllers...
acquired LifeSize for $405 million in cash. LifeSize is now "LifeSize, a division of Logitech," but it will continue to operate as a separate division led by Craig Malloy, chief executive officer
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
.
Company History
Craig Malloy, current chief executive officerChief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
at LifeSize, was a product manager at VTEL Corporation in Austin
Austin
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas.Austin may also refer to:-In the United States:*Austin, Arkansas*Austin, Colorado*Austin, Chicago, Illinois*Austin, Indiana*Austin, Minnesota*Austin, Nevada*Austin, Oregon...
until 1996, when he left and founded ViaVideo. ViaVideo was acquired by Polycom
Polycom
Polycom is a multinational corporation with approximately 3,200 employees worldwide and an annual revenue of approximately $1.2 billion in 2010. The company manufactures and sells telepresence and voice communications solutions.-Company History 1990:...
in 1998. Malloy was the senior vice president and general manager of the Video Communication Division of Polycom through 2002, when he left to found his own HD video communications company.
LifeSize was founded by Craig Malloy and Michael Kenoyer in January 2003. It operated in “stealth mode” under the name KMV Technologies from 2003 to 2005. Investors in LifeSize included Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures
Redpoint Ventures is a prominent venture capital firm focused on investments in early stage technology companies. The firm's partners include Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Nety Krishna, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, John Walecka, Geoff...
, Sutter Hill Ventures
Sutter Hill Ventures
Sutter Hill Ventures is a private equity firm focused on venture capital investments in technology-based start-up companies. The firm is based in Palo Alto, CA....
, Pinnacle Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest venture partners
Norwest Venture Partners is a global, multi-stage investment firm focused on investments in early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S...
and Tenaya Capital
Tenaya Capital
Tenaya Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya spun out to become an independent firm in 2009 following Lehman's bankruptcy. To date, Tenaya has raised five funds representing...
. The company name change to LifeSize Communications was unveiled at the Interop
Interop
Interop is an annual trade fair for information technology organised by UBM TechWeb. It takes place at four different locations at various times of the year: Mumbai , New York , Tokyo, and Las Vegas...
trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...
in May 2005. This is also when LifeSize announced its first product, LifeSize Room, which was the first high definition video conferencing endpoint brought to market.
Technology
LifeSize focuses its technology on replicating face-to-face communications through high definitionHigh-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
video conferencing, often called "telepresence." LifeSize has products that include high definition
High-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
endpoints and accessories, NAT
Nat
Nat or NAT may refer to:* Nat., an abbreviation for Natural* Nat , a Burmese spirit worshipped in Myanmar in conjunction with Buddhism...
\Firewall (computing)
Firewall (computing)
A firewall is a device or set of devices designed to permit or deny network transmissions based upon a set of rules and is frequently used to protect networks from unauthorized access while permitting legitimate communications to pass....
traversal, audio phones, ISDN gateways, Multipoint Control Unit
Multipoint Control Unit
A Multipoint Control Unit is a device commonly used to bridge videoconferencing connections.The Multipoint Control Unit is an endpoint on the LAN that provides the capability for 3 or more terminals and gateways to participate in a multipoint conference...
s and management systems, as well as mobile video conferencing software and a cloud-based IaaS offering for video conferencing. LifeSize also offers a streaming, recording, and auto-publishing server called LifeSize Video Center.
LifeSize has partnered with technology companies including Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is a global telecommunications corporation, headquartered in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services...
, Avaya
Avaya
Avaya Inc. is a privately held computer networking, information technology and telecommunications company that is a global provider of business communications systems. The international head quarters is in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, United States...
, Inc., BroadSoft, Inc., Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Corporation, ShoreTel, Inc., Siemens
Siemens
Siemens may refer toSiemens, a German family name carried by generations of telecommunications industrialists, including:* Werner von Siemens , inventor, founder of Siemens AG...
Corporation, Skype
Skype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...
Technologies S.A. and VBrick Systems.
Telepresence
Rather than traveling great distances in order to have a meeting, it is now commonplace to instead use a telepresenceTelepresence
Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to have an effect, via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location....
system, which uses a single or multiple codec video system. Each member/party of the meeting uses a telepresence room to "dial in" and can see/talk to every other member on a screen
Display device
A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form...
/screens as if they were in the same room. This brings enormous time and cost benefits. It is also superior to phone conferencing, as the visual aspect greatly enhances communications, allowing for perceptions of facial expressions and other body language.
Product Features
LifeSize video conferencing codecs have the following features:- True HD at 720p30 and 720p60, Full HD at 1080p30
- ResolutionDisplay resolutionThe display resolution of a digital television or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by all different factors in cathode ray tube , flat panel or projection...
: 1280x720 at 30fps, 1280x720 at 60fps, 1920x1080 at 30 fps - Single/dual HD display support
- Integrated multipoint control units
- H.261H.261H.261 is a ITU-T video coding standard, ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group , and was the first video codec that was useful in practical terms.H.261 was originally designed for...
, H.263H.263H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...
, H.263+, H.264 and H.239H.239H.239 is an ITU-T recommendation from the H.32x Multimedia Communications macrofamily of standards for multimedia communications over various networks....
compliant - Session Initiation ProtocolSession Initiation ProtocolThe Session Initiation Protocol is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol . The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party or multiparty sessions...
- H.323H.323H.323 is a recommendation from the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector that defines the protocols to provide audio-visual communication sessions on any packet network...
- Low-latencyLatency (engineering)Latency is a measure of time delay experienced in a system, the precise definition of which depends on the system and the time being measured. Latencies may have different meaning in different contexts.-Packet-switched networks:...
architecture and low bandwidthBandwidth (computing)In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
utilization - Wideband advanced audio coding with low delayLatency (audio)Latency refers to a short period of delay between when an audio signal enters and when it emerges from a system...
(AAC-LDAAC-LDThe MPEG-4 Low Delay Audio Coder is audio compression format designed to combine the advantages of perceptual audio coding with the low delay necessary for two-way communication. It is closely derived from the MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding format...
) - Multichannel spatial audio with echo cancellationEcho cancellation'The term echo cancellation is used in telephony to describe the process of removing echo from a voice communication in order to improve voice quality on a telephone call...
and interference filters to eliminate feedback from mobile devices - Interoperability with legacy video conferencing both SD and HD.
- Interoperability with other vendor video conferencing (i.e. PolycomPolycomPolycom is a multinational corporation with approximately 3,200 employees worldwide and an annual revenue of approximately $1.2 billion in 2010. The company manufactures and sells telepresence and voice communications solutions.-Company History 1990:...
, Siemens Enterprise CommunicationsSiemens Enterprise CommunicationsSiemens Enterprise Communications is a joint venture between the American private equity firm The Gores Group and German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG.The joint venture was announced on July 29, 2008, and was launched on October 1, 2008...
, CiscoCiscoCisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...
, TandbergTandbergThis article is about the video-conferencing vendor, a Cisco company. Other companies with the same name such as Tandberg Television or Tandberg Data for data storage: see here and here...
)
Partners
LifeSize operates through channel partners, with more than 1,500 partners in over 100 countries worldwide. Potential customers find a local partner through the LifeSize website's "Find a Partner" section, and any purchases of LifeSize systems is made through the channel.Customers
LifeSize video conferencing is used by a wide array of customers, from worldwide enterprises down to small businesses, and across several industries (education, financial services, manufacturing, design, government, technology, retail, health care, construction, real estate, public utilities, legal services, arts organizations, nonprofits, transportation, media and entertainment).Some LifeSize customers are:
- ActivisionActivisionActivision is an American publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. Its current CEO is Robert Kotick. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles...
- Aviat Networks (formerly Harris Stratex Networks)
- Barnardo'sBarnardo'sBarnardo's is a British charity founded by Thomas John Barnardo in 1866, to care for vulnerable children and young people. As of 2010, it spends over £190 million each year on more than 400 local services aimed at helping these same groups...
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
- Goodbaby Group
- Grossman Burn Centers
- Hyundai Motor CompanyHyundai Motor CompanyHyundai Motor Company is a Korean multinational automaker based in Seoul, South Korea which, along with Kia, comprises the Hyundai Kia Automotive Group, the world's fourth largest automaker as of 2009. As of 2011, it is the world's fastest growing automaker for two years running...
- Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD)
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- National Geographic SocietyNational Geographic SocietyThe National Geographic Society , headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its interests include geography, archaeology and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical...
- Olympus CorporationOlympus Corporationis a Japan-based manufacturer of optics and reprography products. Olympus was established on 12 October 1919, initially specializing in microscope and thermometer businesses. Its global headquarters are in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, while its USA operations are based in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,...
- Seattle Science Foundation
- Virgin Mobile IndiaVirgin Mobile IndiaVirgin Mobile India Limited is a cellular telephone service provider company which is a joint venture between Tata Teleservices and Richard Branson's Virgin Group. Currently, the company uses Tata's CDMA network to offer its services under the brand name Virgin Mobile, and it has also started GSM...
See also
- Video Conferencing
- TelepresenceTelepresenceTelepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to have an effect, via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location....
, for high-end video conferencing - TelecollaborationTelecollaborationTelecollaboration refers to a set of software technologies that enable the integration and extension of personal desktop collaboration into high definition videoconferencing solutions....
- TeleconferenceTeleconferenceA teleconference or teleseminar is the live exchange and mass articulation of information among several persons and machines remote from one another but linked by a telecommunications system...