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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| PictureTel Corporation | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Public |
| Industry | Telepresence & Videotelephony |
| Founded | August 1984 |
| Founders |
|
| Defunct | October 2001 |
| Headquarters | Danvers, Massachusetts, United States |
| Products |
|
PictureTel Corporation was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom[1] in October 2001.
PictureTel was founded in August 1984 as PicTel by MIT students Brian L Hinman, Jeffrey G. Bernstein and MIT Professor David H. Staelin.
The team was also assisted initially by MIT Professor Michael Dertouzos and two of his grad students Greg Papadopoulos and Richard Soley. The founding CEO was Ronald S. Posner Ph.D.
While at MIT Hinman and Bernstein were motivated by the video compression work by UC Davis Professor Anil K. Jain (1946–1988) and his colleague Jaswani R. Jain who published an important research paper[2] combining block-based motion compensation and transform coding in December 1981. The result was PictureTel, creating one of the first real-time systems[3] to implement motion compensation and transform coding in July 1986.
PictureTel was funded as "PicTel" by an initial public offering in November 1984, becoming a public company on virtually its first day of business. Product development started at this point. Its name was changed to PictureTel in 1987,[4] due to concern about potential name conflict with another communications company, Pacific Telephone Co., also known as PacTel. While the company demonstrated its first product in 1986, the company did not have meaningful product sales until 1987.
PictureTel's first product, the C-2000 codec (compressor/decompressor) was the first commercial implementation of this computationally intensive technology. By analyzing the motion between successive frames rather than treating the frames as a sequence of unrelated images, this algorithm was significantly more data-efficient (required the transmission of much less data) than existing techniques. Requiring less data also meant that it was compatible with emerging dial-up data networks such as ISDN, making its use less expensive and more flexible than the leased, fixed-location lines normally used for high-speed data transmission at the time.
Subsequently, most of the video compression standards for two-way communications and video broadcast applications have been based upon motion compensation and transform coding, including those most widely used today such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. PictureTel played a strong role in developing the industry standards for video, audio, and data communications, and released much of its technology for use free of charge.
In October 2001, PictureTel was purchased by Polycom, a company that was co-founded in 1990 by Brian Hinman and another early PictureTel employee, Jeffrey Rodman. Hinman and Bernstein would later be instrumental in creating 2Wire.[5]
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PictureTel Corporation was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October 2001.
G.722.1 is a licensed royalty-free ITU-T standard audio codec providing high quality, moderate bit rate (24 and 32 kbit/s) wideband (50 Hz – 7 kHz audio bandwidth, 16 ksps (kilo-samples per second) audio coding. It is a partial implementation of Siren 7 audio coding format (which offers bit rates 16, 24, 32 kbit/s) developed by PictureTel Corp. (now Polycom, Inc.). Its official name is Low-complexity coding at 24 and 32 kbit/s for hands-free operation in systems with low frame loss. It uses a modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression algorithm. G.722.1 Annex C (or G.722.1C) is a low-complexity extension mode to G.722.1, which doubles the algorithm to permit 14 kHz audio bandwidth using a 32 kHz audio sample rate, at 24, 32, and 48 kbit/s. It is included in the official ITU-T Recommendation G.722.1. The name of this annex is Annex C – 14 kHz mode at 24, 32, and 48 kbit/s. It is an implementation of the mono version of Polycom's Siren 14 audio coding format. G.722.1 is the successor to PT716plus developed by PictureTel Corp. (now Polycom, Inc.), which has been used in videoconferencing systems for many years. As ITU-T Recommendation G.722.1, it was approved on September 30, 1999 after a four-year selection process involving extensive testing. G.722.1/Annex C was approved by ITU-T on May 14, 2005. G.722.1 is a transform-based compressor that is optimized for both speech and music. The G.722.1 algorithm is based on lapped transform technology, using a Modulated Lapped Transform (MLT), a type of MDCT. The computational complexity is quite low (5.5 floating-point MIPS) for an efficient high-quality compressor, and the algorithmic delay end-to-end is 40 ms. The numbering of the wideband ITU audio codecs is sometimes confusing. There are three principal codecs, which are unrelated, but all carrying the G.722 label. G.722 is the original 7 kHz codec, using ADPCM and operating at 48–64 kbit/s. G.722.1, another 7 kHz codec, operates at half the data rate while delivering comparable or better quality than G.722, but is a transform-based codec. G.722.1 Annex C is very similar to G.722.1, but provides twice the audio bandwidth, 14 kHz. And G.722.2, which operates on wideband speech and delivers very low bitrates, is an ACELP-based algorithm.
Siren is a family of patented, transform-based, wideband audio coding formats and their audio codec implementations developed and licensed by PictureTel Corporation (acquired by Polycom, Inc. in 2001). There are three Siren codecs: Siren 7, Siren 14 and Siren 22.
Starlight Networks was founded in 1991 by Charlie Bass, Jim Long and Mark Gang with backing from investors Accel Partners and Interwest Partners. The company created some of the first commercial video-on-demand and video streaming products. The first Starlight Networks product was named StarWorks and enabled on-demand MPEG1 full motion videos to be randomly accessed on corporate IP networks. Later a version was released for Novell named Starware. Originally, the press to networked video as "store & forward video" but that changed after Starlight Networks began describing it as "streaming video". In late 1996 as Starlight added support for live presentations integrating live streaming video with slides and chat, they referred to such solutions as "InterMedia Networking". The 'live' streaming product was named StarLive. In 1995, Starlight introduced streaming video over satellites with Hughes Network Systems. In February 1998 Starlight introduced one of the first full motion video Web conferencing products, StarLive! (the exclamation point was part of the product name). Technology analyst Om Malik wrote in May 1998 how Starlight software helped power Bloomberg Television and Starlight partnered with RealNetworks to enable Web conferencing at Smith Barney. General Electric also tapped Starlight Products for corporate communications and training. Starlight streaming VOD products were also used for media applications such as powering all the video kiosks in the brand new at the time Cleveland Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame or Universal Studios using a networked Starlight video server to serve up 'dailies' to employees rather than using video-tapes copied for all and distributed manually. Other investors included: Sequoia Capital, and Merrill, Pickard, Anderson, and Eyre Ventures. Starlight was acquired by PictureTel Corp. in 1998. Website: https://StarlightNetworks.net
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.