Only two weeks to go

And in these two weeks we have to make sure that we get everything ready.

I guess that is mostly my task. And I have started by getting a couple of nice webcams that we will be using.

In 4 weeks we have to develop a complete architecture for multimedia communications (video+audio+text+anything else)... What is the big deal? Skype and others seem to do that!! Well, guess what? Skype does not do multiparty teleconferencing, and the latest product that was using such a platform for multiparty videconference (Festoon) seems to have gone out of business.

I admit that there exist several products on the market that, in exchange of a reasonable amount of money, give multipoint video streaming... but it is not our purpose to pay for a product that we do not even know it will fit our needs. So we will probably create our own platform exploiting those services that already other free commercial products provide. So multiparty audio and text from Skype will be good enough, and for the video... we will most likely rely on streaming from IP cameras... We just want to build a proof of concept. We will not reinvent the wheel.

What will this platform allow us to do? It will be the backbone of a series of services for enhanced interaction in multimedia communications for remote meetings. For our brief project we will develop a vote registration system that will manage, count votes and summarize the complete voting procedure regardless of the medium a specific participant is using to connect to the meeting.

It is going to be very challenging to have all this done in only four weeks!!! I fully trust our team...

C U in two weeks.