Smart grid firm makes smart videoconferencing choice
Haroon Inam, chief technology officer at Smart Wires, a company that generates advanced technologies to improve the world’s electrical grids, is a hard worker. Working 14 to 16-hour days to manage the technology that supports hundreds of jobs at the company, he realised long ago that phone calls are inefficient for group meetings, and that every minute spent fidgeting with uncooperative systems — or wondering if participants are truly focused — is time and energy wasted. After mandating that all conference calls include video in 2006, it took Inam just two years to conclude that when people aren’t on the screen, they aren’t engaged.
“I’m on videoconference four to five hours every day,” Inam said. “By 2008 I decided that we needed better room coverage to engage every participant, so we developed an ad-hoc three-camera system with basic video stitching, based on open-source technology from Carnegie Mellon. Then a few years ago I wanted to upgrade to 4K cameras, and I discovered what I had really been looking for all along — the PanaCast 2 camera, which provides 180-degree coverage in Panoramic-4K with Intelligent Zoom and plug-and-play usability.”
Since learning about PanaCast, Smart Wires hasn’t looked back. The company relies so heavily on videoconferencing, it’s hard to imagine what their meetings were like when a camera could only provide a narrow view, especially for small rooms or full crowds in large rooms. Now, in a large meeting room at their headquarters in California, two PanaCast 2 camera systems provide whole-room coverage and zoomed-in motion tracking coverage of the current speaker.
“I even use a PanaCast 2 in my office, which has no desk and is set up like a collaboration area,” Inam said. “That way if I have five or six people in my office on call with other locations, the remote participants can see all of us and know we are all engaged. By the simple virtue of having every participant on camera, we’ve found our meetings are much more effective and efficient. When you consider how easily a PanaCast can be set up in any room and connected to any display, it really is a game-changing technology.”
Smart Wires’ main large-room collaboration system is quite complex, with each location housing multiple projectors or digital displays to show the speaker’s GoToMeeting feed, a realtime Slack feed, and a third showing meeting minutes, which are recorded at each location. Using the multiple screens and feeds allows participants to engage in supplemental conversations and have access to recent comments to generate questions. What’s more, the company records all the calls so they can be referenced later, exactly as they occurred. Through this system, every meeting participant can follow the speaker as PanaCast’s Intelligent Zoom focuses on the speaker and tracks their movement with up to 6x zoom at HD quality.
According to Inam, the process helps employees be as accurate as possible when working on post-meeting projects, even providing the context of facial expressions and group dynamics when viewing playback. This helps the mid-size company, which Inam describes as a start-up, to compete with much larger competitors that employ thousands of workers.
“We are competing with huge conglomerates, so our pace of innovation and development has to be faster than theirs, using far fewer resources,” Inam continued. “But when we host meetings with outside partners, they consistently remark that our teams are highly engaged, often noting that our techniques allow much greater development speed and agility than larger companies.”
All of this would be for naught, Inam says, if the technology wasn’t 100% reliable, simple, and ready to use every day. In particular, he noted that the flawless operation on both Windows 10 and Apple’s OSX was absolutely necessary, as the company uses both operating systems across many offices.
“We can host a meeting with 150 people across 12 times zones, and know that every camera will work every time,” Inam explained. “The undetectable video stitching was the first big wow moment when I purchased our first PanaCast 2, but since then it has impressed every person who’s used it and has performed without fail across a range of countries and meeting types. Nowadays, a good portion of our external partners end up asking, ‘How are you getting such a wide view?’, because they instantly recognise the difference when the entire room is on camera.
“Our goal at Smart Wires is to reinvent the electrical grid to provide better, more reliable energy transmission across the globe. We make smart devices that can alter the line’s impedance, allowing electric utilities to control where power flows on their grid. We also produce all the associated software and communications infrastructure, providing a true end-to-end system. Finding ways to increase our operational efficiency is as important to our success as increasing the efficiency of our products themselves, and PanaCast has certainly achieved that goal.”
Thanks to its tiny size and fast setup, the PanaCast camera system is actually portable as well, effectively turning any room into a full-view conference or huddle room.
Source: avinteractive
Industry: Unified communication news
Latest Jobs
-
- Data Privacy Lead. Client Facing London. Permanent.
- London
- N/A
-
Data Privacy Lead. Client Facing London. Permanent. London based client facing. Must be eligible to undergo UK Security Clearance (SC) Key Responsibilities: Lead and support client facing data privacy projects. Assess compliance, define and deliver strategic projects / implement privacy solutions. Manage project teams and develop business opportunities. Required Experience: Experience in data protection and privacy standards. Background in consulting. Skills and Qualifications: Business consulting experience IAPPPrivacy Manager / Privacy Technologist Location Greater London UK based role. Not able to provide VISA sponsorship.
-
- VOIP / SIP App Developer. Contract. SIP | VOIP experience needed. SC Cleared Outside IR35 Contract. London
- London
- OUTSIDE IR35
-
SIP | VOIP Developer. SC Cleared Contract. London Looking for a SC Cleared SIP / VOIP Developer to develop an application that interacts with a set of voice and video signalling API’s You will also work on developing in-house applications, browser plugins and automated tooling to support secure communication systems. Responsibilities Develop an application that will manage number mapping and associated identities using commercial SBC API’s. Develop new user-facing features using React.js or other modern JavaScript frameworks. Build reusable components and front-end libraries for future use. Collaborate with the design team to translate UI/UX design wireframes into code. Work closely with backend developers to integrate front-end code with server-side logic. Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members. Stay up-to-date on emerging technologies and industry trends to continuously improve our front-end development practices. Troubleshoot and debug issues that arise during development and in production environments. Maintain high coding standards and practices and ensure code is well-documented. Requirement Experience of developing specialist applications using REST API’s. Good knowledge of Go, Java and Python (open to alternative combinations of languages). Proficiency in front-end languages and frameworks such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React.js, etc. Strong understanding of web standards, responsive design, and cross-browser compatibility. Experience with version control systems such as Git. Knowledge of RESTful APIs and asynchronous request handling. Familiarity with UI/UX design principles and tools.
-
- Senior Data Privacy Consultant. Client Facing | London
- London
- N/A
-
Senior Data Privacy Consultant. Client Facing | London Senior Data Privacy Consultant needed for a key client facing opportunity. Must be willing to undergo SC Security Clearance. Hybrid role- onsite with customer / office 2-3 days a week. London Key Responsibilities: Lead and support client facing data privacy projects. Assess compliance, define and deliver strategic projects / implement privacy solutions. Manage project teams and develop business opportunities. Required Experience: Experience in data protection and privacy standards. Background in consulting. Skills and Qualifications: Business consulting experience IAPP Privacy Manager / Privacy Technologist Location Greater London UK based role. Not able to provide VISA sponsorship.
-
- Security Analyst - Internal role. London commutable. Permanent
- London
- N/A
-
Security Analyst - Internal role. London commutable opportunity. Operational Security - Investigate, escalate and proactively work to ensure household name remains protected. Project Security - Coordinate, log change requests with project delivery teams to meet security requirements Policy / compliance - work with team to aid in uplifting these as and where needed This role is role to investigate, escalate and proactively work to protect a globally recognised brand. You must have current hands on operational analytical security experience with Microsoft technology stack Someone with a SOC Analyst / security engineering background would be well suited. This position will join a small team and would suit someone that has broad experience across the security threat landscape. Experience / knowledge across industry GRC standards such NIST, ISO27001 etc very advantageous and a priority. You will work across multiple teams proactively working to secure the business. Must be able to commute to Central London 3 days a week. Visa sponsorship not available Apply today to find out more.