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Ojo – The Face of the New Telephone

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“One Ringy Dingy, Two Ringy Dingy. A gracious good morning to you. Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

What do Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) and Alexander Graham Bell have in common? The amazing invention called the phone. Technology certainly has advanced since the day those words spoken on March 10, 1876 when Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson heard the first ever spoken sentence transmitted via electricity. Flash forward to Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh-In” where Ernestine, the irreverent telephone operator could connect people or not.

Back in the days when the “Telephone Company” owned the phones, if you were a home or business, you rented your phone. And the phones all looked pretty much the same- any color you wanted as long as it was black. To make a call, one would pick up the phone and you would hear the operator say, “Number please…”  In towns where no one had a dial phone, you placed your call through a live operator, like Ernestine, who might have a message for you or let you know, “Don’t bother calling Judy, she’s at the grocery store.” That is when towns were towns, not cities and where people actually knew each other. 

Years later, with the fast growing demand for the telephone, the operators could not handle the volume of calls and the “Telephone Company” had to change the system. Your phone number went from say a number like 600 to a seven digit number. To get people used to the longer number, the first two or three digits of the phone number represented the city you lived in. If you lived in Murray Hill area, the phone number would begin with “MU.” The next change, to accommodate a non-language based system so people could dial internationally, meant changing the phone number to all digits.

In 1955, the first three minutes of a long distance call, from Boston to LA, was $2. Adjusting for inflation, in today’s dollars that would be over $13 dollars. In the Sixties push-button phones replaced the rotary dial. The change to tone dialing and the use of chip technology transformed the phone from “that clunky black thing on my father’s desk” to a “social status icon.” With phones are now razors that surf the internet. In Finland SMS (Short Messaging System) is the most popular cell phone tool. For what? Men use it to ask women out without risking face-to-face embarrassment. The phone, that black clunky things has become an entire personal communication system.

Despite all the technology innovations, the phone is really about connecting with one another. And connecting today has a whole new twist: video phones.  With that new twist came the challenge I gave video phone CEO and Chairman, Hal Krisbergh at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year. “If it works, I will tell everyone and I will buy it!”  However, having used the videos phones of the past, I was not so sure this time would be any different.

I have a unique outlook on technology – I am a user not a tweeker- so I don’t care as much about learning about the spec until I understand if it is going to help me in my life and how. As an analyst, with the hundreds of products I test each year, I decided I don’t want my reviews just to be my experience of the technology… I think it is important as a journalist and analyst to know what other people think and for me to learn through their experiences.

So the plan to do that? To set-up a test right in the Ojo CES booth. My test subjects? My nephews Nick and Alex Koons, ages 9 and 6. Since they live in Michigan, I don’t get to see them as often as I wish. And I love every chance I get to connect with them. Would this be the answer to times when we missed seeing each other? To share stories about Nick being in the robot contest at school? Or to hear about the number of bugs Alex caught that day? And seeing as they both love technology and gadgets, it seemed like a perfect scenario to test the phone in a real live situation.  Jay Morakis, who headed up the PR for Ojo sent a phone to their dad, my brother-in-law Glen in Michigan. And if it worked, the video just might get the Dr. Nat Pink Glove Seal of Approval… (My seal of approval is kinda like the traditional White Glove Test meets the Good HouseKeeping Seal of Approval)

So when I got to the Ojo booth in Las Vegas, we dialed up my family in Michigan — and with film crew there to capture the challenge…here is what we found:
DR. NAT’S YOU TUBE VIDEO FROM CES 2007: THE OJO PHONE TEST

When I asked Glen (my brother-in-law) about setting up the Ojo phone he said, “It was really easy to set up.  All I had to do was connect the phone to a DSL or cable connection. Not only was this product was much easier to set-up than other video phones I had sent them to test over the years, it was easier to use than any video phone we’ve tried…”

Below a picture of the CEO of Ojo! It is always interesting to see the actual person behind the company, learn about their passions and what drives the technology and the company. Was it just a profit motive? Was it just another big corporation trying to get consumers to buy yet another product? In this case, I was profoundly surprised to meet a CEO who realized that this wasn’t just a videophone with a video screen with a resolution of 176 x 144 (QCIF), a frame rate of 30fps with a primary compression of H.26. It was a device of love and devotion.

If you are like most people, you are probably wondering what all of that techno speak means, right?  Often times companies focus their marketing on the specs, the features and the functions. And while those are very important but only mean something to someone educated in the technical aspects, what we as consumers care about is, “Does the technology actually deliver on the promise? “Does it work and how will it make my life better?” 

It is only recently that a shift in how products are marketed has come to shift. The notation that women buy $55 Billion dollars worth a year has been part of that shift. Their reasons for buying are not always centered on the latest and greatest specs. But until the whole industry shifts, technology companies will still market their products in “techno jargon!” But the industry be surprised that there is a technology adoption curve… My 2 cents? Because the marketing and product information requires that consumers learn a whole new vocabulary to make any sense of what the marketing materials are saying. And then they must figure out how that applies to them and their life to decide if they want or should buy it. Most people are so overwhelmed with information on a daily basis, they would rather say, “Fo’ get-a’bout it” before they read a techno-jargon manual that could put a tree to sleep.

In contrast to the techno-jaron, what I found at Ojo was refreshing. When I asked Hal about what the Ojo phone meant to him, he told me a story of a young father that had gone to IRAQ to fight in the war. His wife was pregnant when he left for the war. Without this video phone, this solider and his daughter would not have met for 2 years! As Hal was telling this story, you could see the tears weld up in his eyes… Hal is a man with a huge heart and truly dedicated to making life better for everyone – and technology is his way of connecting people.

The videophone is not new and has been a dream for many years. Picture 1964, World’s Fair in New York City where the first videophone was demonstrated. Then in 1970 the first videophone service was unveiled in Pittsburgh. The Picturephone, as it was called then, was big, expensive and intrusive. It did not make it.

In the 1990’s four new factors made videoconferencing a more realistic proposition the:
• Growing use of the PC, with a screen on most desktops
• Falling prices for image capture devices connected to PCs making digital photography and video affordable
• Use of the internet providing a low-cost means of connecting voice, images and people in real time and
• International standards in 1996 and 1998 that ensured the compatibility of all equipment.

The first video phones of 25 years ago did not work very well. The technology of the phone was good, but the network’s bandwidth wasn’t broad enough to carry all the pictures, colors and sounds at once. The caller could see the person, but the image would jerk from one frame to another. 

Enter Worldgate (Ojo), who’s mission is to be at the forefront of making it possible to connect via personal video telephones. Their goals were to solve the issues of the video phone industry. Ojo uses industry standards to communicate over the nation’s existing internet networks, the video and audio on a call is synchronized and provides full color, jitter-free video.

(Note: the quality of what you see via the YouTube video is less than what you would get if you used the phone yourself. The quality of our video was reduced so that the file would be easily seen by all via YouTube.)

From our visit at CES, the Ojo Company really cares about what people think. So much so, they have set up an email address so that you can share your story about this new telephone that allows you to talk face-to-face with friends and family. Feel the warmth of a smile. Catch the twinkle of any eye. It’s just like being there.  To write to Ojo: [email protected]

And what did was my family’s final vote?  “Two thumbs up!” Even TK (Tanya – my sister….) says…

PICTURE OF DR. NAT’S FAMILY GIVING THE THUMBS UP ON THE OJO VIDEO PHONE

If you want more info on the phone, go to https://www.ojophone.com/ and as always, check out where Dr. Nat the Technocat will be heading next at www.drnatthetechnocat.com

About the author

Jane Emery