Round the table

The emergence of the latest generation of internet applications, dubbed Web 2.0, has meant a renaissance for many technologies that never quite made it. Social networking, with sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and the huge rise of instant messaging and the near cult status of the Blackberry, have all meant we now consider online communication as the norm.
One industry that has been quietly but effectively growing in this area has been video-conferencing – a technique that was once a bit of a black art, with kit that was complex to set up and dodgy video quality, something even industry experts have been forced to admit.
"The legacy of the first wave of video-conferencing is that many firms invested in expensive end-point video equipment and due to various reasons the investment failed to deliver the expected returns," admits Steve Frost of networking company Cisco. "The systems used to be far too complex. People used to step into a room and be given a remote control and told 'set it up, then' – it was never going to work."