I got a quick look at the keynote at Sun’s SunNetworking conference in San Francisco this morning, from my desk here in Baltimore. The view was courtesy of Simon Phipps and his PowerBook and iSight camera, via a wireless LAN connection at Moscone, to me on Apple’s iChat A/V.
This convergence of wireless networking and audio-video realtime conferencing is waaaay cool. It is portentous, in the same classs of developments as camera/phones and moblogging. It’s like peer-to-peer TV news.
I had been in doubt about how well my iSight camera was working with my old reliable G4 Cube; despite being able to conference within my LAN, my attempts to conferene with an old colleague had been discouraging. I was convinced the problem was the speed of the G4’s bus, or processing speed, or (worse yet) its cable modem connection being too slow.
It turns out, however, that it’s his problem.