Logitech to Acquire SightSpeed. Questions Arise.
According to Tech Crunch and GigaOm posts late last night Logitech is about to spend $30 million to acquire SightSpeed, the video messaging and video conferencing service that recently was selected ot provide the infrastructure for Dell's Video Chat. Congratulations to Peter Csathy and his team. And to Andy Abramson and his team; another Comunicano client achieves success.
Seems like the video calling and video conferencing market is about to heat up. There will be another post later this morning involving an announcement that can bring video conferencing to a much broader user audience than Skype's (though it's not exactly insignificant) and SightSpeed's.
Questions that arise from this acquisition:
- How is Logitech able to continue to partner with services such as Skype when they are now entering the desktop video services market? Logitech's co-operation was vital to Skype's ability to provide High Quality Video.
- Or is it a produce marketing acquisition? Is Logitech acquiring SightSpeed simply to have additional collateral software to provide with their webcam offerings? Will we start to see Logitech's Carl-Zeiss optics in embedded webcams on Dell PC's?
Logitech Press Release
Update: Alec Saunders comments on the same theme here.
Tags: Logitech, SightSpeed, Skype, Peter Csathy, Tech Crunc, GigaOm, HiDef Conferencing, Calliflower
Powered by Qumana
Labels: AlecSaunders, CalliFlower, canada, competition, conferencing, Dell, jcourtney, partners, skype, video
Join the Skype 5.X Text Chat Room
1 Comments:
After all these years I am still a skeptic and have a hard time getting excited about market nuances in this segment. I find there is still a 1964 World's Fair element to it all. Obviously there is some kind of a market here. Selling cameras is not a bad business, but the fact that this very nice product/technology sold for $30M says enough maybe. I lived close to the front line through what I call the great video conferencing scare when Windows 95 was introduced. Later I worked on software and semiconductor imaging, but I could never get excited about this. This may be a nice piece for Logitech, but I doubt they are interested in creating much exclusivity with it. I am sure they want to sell cameras to anyone. I may be missing some generational issue here, but we continually sell short the value of a quality voice conversation because we imagine some value associated with video. Buck Rogers can only sell so many video conversations. Naked women sell a lot more.
Post a Comment
We've started to moderate comments to avoid spam. Please excuse the short delay. We'll get your post online a quickly as possible.
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home