Cisco readies new products

Cisco has a couple of new products in the pipeline for the next year. The company plans to unveil a version of its Telepresence virtual conferencing capability for the home. This will emerge over the next 12 months, CEO John Chambers said during his keynote address at the Cisco Live! customer conference in Orlando this morning.

Telepresence begand as a virtual conference room costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cisco has since scaled the product up and down, with versions designed to handle larger conferences and others for individual offices.

Cisco also plans to roll out WebEx Connect later this year. Built on Cisco's multibillion dollar acquisition of Internet conferencing company WebEx, WebEx Connect allows users to establish multiple collaborative workspaces within an instant messaging-type interface, which dynamically changes the buddy list as the user moves between those workspaces.

Applications within WebEx Connect can also be shared with a mobile device, such as the Apple iPhone. In a demo during Chamber's keynote, a Cisco Unify application on the iPhone was allowing a WebEx Connect collaboration participant to be moved from the PC to the iPhone, and then passed back and forth between two iPhones.

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