BridgeClimb adopts RingCentral’s cloud communications and contact centre offerings to enable multichannel communications

BridgeClimb, the operator of Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge experience, adopted RingCentral Australia to enable multichannel communications and customer service. Looking to replace its legacy on-premise infrastructure, BridgeClimb has deployed RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Centre solutions across its entire staff. The implementation and cutover took place in October this year.

The RingCentral Office solution provides voice, video, online meetings and team messaging to support the communications needs for all BridgeClimb’s staff members. With this solution, BridgeClimb has replaced at least five different internal systems that they had been running previously to provide these various capabilities. 

RingCentral Contact Centre provides BridgeClimb’s customer service team multichannel capabilities with email, phone and chat in a universal queue. It is integrated with RingCentral Office and provides extensive performance reporting and analytics across the entire platform.

RingCentral Australia, provider of global enterprise cloud communications, collaboration, and contact centre solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of RingCentral Inc. The RingCentral platform empowers employees to work better together, from any location, on any device, and via any mode to serve customers, improving business efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

It also features unified voice, video meetings, team messaging, digital customer engagement, and integrated contact centre solutions for enterprises globally. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with business apps and enables customers to customise business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.

RingCentral’s Professional Services team completed the design, configuration and implementation of the unified communications and contact centre solutions. It took just seven weeks from the initial meeting between RingCentral and BridgeClimb to complete the cutover of the new solution.

BridgeClimb no longer has any single points of communications failure and no reliance on any physical infrastructure. RingCentral has a high availability, fully-redundant cloud and telecommunications infrastructure, end-to-end performance monitoring and SLAs, and real-time disaster recovery.

As a people-first organisation, the employee experience is critical for BridgeClimb. RingCentral’s user interface is very intuitive with similar functionality to the consumer communications apps that are already very familiar to most users. This made the transition to RingCentral a very smooth experience for BridgeClimb’s staff, and also ensures easy onboarding and training for new employees.

With RingCentral’s subscription model and no communications hardware requirements or user onboarding constraints, BridgeClimb can continue to grow its business without any technology limitations.

With BridgeClimb currently undergoing an extensive digital transformation, RingCentral’s ability to integrate ‘out of the box’ with many other systems and applications was another critical decision factor. RingCentral is already integrated with BridgeClimb’s Microsoft Office 365 environment, and the company will be looking to other integrations in the future, including a new CRM solution.

“We’re delighted to be associated with the iconic Sydney tourism experience BridgeClimb, and really looking forward to seeing how the BridgeClimb team leverages RingCentral’s open platform for further innovation and business transformation as they roll out new digital applications and services,” said Peter Hughes, regional sales vice president for Asia Pacific, RingCentral.

Infortrend incorporates DaVinci Resolve project server into its scale-out shared storage offering

Infortrend Technology releases on Tuesday its highly scalable shared storage EonStor CS that supports NLE software, such as DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro to facilitate collaborative editing of 4K and above ultra-high resolution videos. EonStor CS supports over 100 GB/s performance and 100 PB capacity, making it an ideal storage solution for large-scale post-production studios with more than ten workstations. 

In a traditional architecture, the database project server, which contains reels, edited files and timeline, is deployed on a dedicated workstation and connects to other workstations in a peer-to-peer network for editors, colorists, and animators to work together on the same project. Any single point of failure, however, will pose a threat to the project. 

In light of this issue, Infortrend integrates DaVinci Resolve Project Server into the shared media storage and provides RAID protection to guarantee high data availability. The simplified network architecture also makes deployment and management easier for video professionals to focus more on content production.

EonStor CS is a scale-out shared storage solution that allows enterprises to address the sheer volume of data via its scalable capacity and linear-increasing performance. The scalability through a scale-out expansion offers an easier and more cost-effective way of managing growing data in the agile enterprises while reducing consequent performance bottlenecks. 

EonStor CS also improves data utilization and simplifies data management by integrating data from all nodes into one cluster system. The superior performance and scalability make CS suitable for a wide range of data-intensive industries and applications such as media and entertainment (M&E), high-performance computing (HPC), video surveillance, file sharing and backup. 

With EonStor CS, enterprises gain speedy process for storage expansion and data migration. EonStor CS can keep up as the business grows, making it the optimized data storage and management solution.

Moreover, the shared media storage comes with user-friendly management software that is also designed to simplify the deployment. The EonOne software offers two accounts to separate different management roles. One account is for M&E User Administrator, who uses EonOne to set up user accounts and storage quota. The other account is for System Administrator, who is in charge of advanced configurations and maintenance.

In addition, Infortrend develops a client-based utility EonView, which is installed on Windows and macOS workstations to automatically detect the connected storage system and mount the assigned file folder according to the user credentials. This smart utility simplifies the complexities of storage system deployment and network setup, especially for video professionals who are not familiar with IT setting.  

“Infortrend offers comprehensive storage solutions for today’s M&E, no matter the business scale,” said Thomas Kao, senior director of Product Planning. “Besides its highly scalable performance and capacity for large workgroups to fulfill simultaneous workflows, CS supports high density 4U 60-bay form factor to deliver optimized size for massive data storage requirements. With the launch of CS, we aim to serve M&E customers with smarter, easier, and more flexible solutions,” 

Pivot3 improves resilience for large-scale HCI deployments with AI and automation capabilities

Pivot3 announced addition of  artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments. These capabilities provide resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to recover, while ensuring high-availability with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

At the core of Pivot3's Acuity software platform is the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine comprises many advanced data- and performance-management capabilities, including its market leading Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies. 

Pivot3 uses AI and machine learning to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine now includes a suite of new auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure. Pivot3 has also introduced a quick node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90 percent and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild, lowering the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to Pivot3’s Support Cloud. 

Proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to Pivot3 Support and provides daily status reports. New AI and machine learning techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

“Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics,” said Ben Bolles, vice president of product management, Pivot3. “The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data. Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.”

“With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation,” said Jeremiah Francis, director of information technology at Financial Advocates. “Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.”

Avigilon now adds appearance alerts to ACC 7.4 commercial video management software to provide AI-enabled user interface

Avigilon Corp., a Motorola Solutions company, announced on Monday its latest version of video management software, Avigilon Control Center (ACC) 7.4, which incorporates artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology.

The new “appearance alerts” capability will help commercial organizations, such as educational institutions and hospitals, accelerate response times by identifying people of interest in enterprise settings. For example, the technology can alert the security team at a local high school when a banned or flagged individual has entered the campus.

People of interest are identified based on a secure, controlled watch list created and maintained by authorized users at the commercial organization. For organizations that use the new ACC software and license their Avigilon cameras for facial recognition, cameras will seek to identify potential matches based on the watch list. If a potential match is found, the user is alerted within the ACC software, and security personnel can then determine whether further investigation or action is necessary.

Earlier this year, Motorola Solutions entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Avigilon in an all-cash transaction that will enhance Motorola Solutions’ portfolio of mission-critical communications technologies. Under the terms of the agreement, Motorola Solutions will acquire all of Avigilon’s outstanding shares for CAD$27.00 per share. The enterprise value of the transaction is approximately US$1.0 billion including Avigilon’s net debt.

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Avigilon designs, develops and manufactures advanced security surveillance solutions, including video analytics, network video management software and hardware, surveillance cameras, and access control solutions. 

Avigilon products are used by a range of commercial and government customers including critical infrastructure, airports, government facilities, public venues, healthcare centers and retail. The company holds more than 750 U.S. and international patents.

ACC’s new facial recognition capabilities reflect Motorola Solutions’ commitment to the responsible use of artificial intelligence as well as individual privacy rights. Data stewardship is integral to these new capabilities, and build compliance controls into products to support this. 

For example, user authentication is required for these capabilities, audit logs of user actions are generated, data retention periods for the watch list can be specified within the application, and records can be expunged or deleted on demand as well as verified through auditing and reporting. Data is locally hosted, owned and controlled by the business or school. The data used to train the AI algorithms is also thoroughly evaluated, ensuring sufficient quantity, quality and diversity to ensure high accuracy and consistent performance. 

“Our latest ACC software delivers substantial benefits to our commercial customers by offering facial recognition technology in a secure and controlled manner,” said John Kedzierski, senior vice president, Video Security Solutions, Motorola Solutions. “The appearance alerts capability enables our customers to move from a reactive approach – staring at a wall of video feeds where critical information can be easily missed – to a proactive approach that brings important information directly to authorized users so they can make better-informed decisions.”

“It’s important to note that we view facial recognition as an aid that can improve the decision-making of the user – it does not make consequential decisions or initiate actions on its own. We refer to this approach as ‘human in the loop,’ and it is foundational to the way we apply AI,” added Kedzierski.

  

ACC 7.4 software is now available for download. 

Samsung is developing AI ScaleNet capability, enabling seamless, high-resolution 8K streaming

As the world enters the era of 8K TVs with sales of 8K displays steadily increasing, TV manufacturers are constantly adding more offerings to the mix, the 8K market is expected to continue to grow. 

There are, however, a few challenges that need to be addressed before viewers around the world will be able to enjoy 8K’s stunning visuals in their entirety. First, more 8K content will need to be produced, and second, network connections need to be made capable of supporting the seamless streaming of 8K movies and shows.

To address these issues, researchers from Samsung Research, an advanced R&D hub within Samsung Electronics’ SET Business, have developed an AI Codec known as AI ScaleNet. First introduced at SDC19, this capability enables delivery of 8K content on networks that typically support only 4K speeds, without the need for additional infrastructure.

To learn more about AI ScaleNet’s development process and potential applications, Samsung Newsroom interviewed Kwangpyo Choi and Youngo Park – researchers from Samsung Research’s Visual Technology team, and the first individuals to suggest and develop this type of innovative technology.

AI ScaleNet utilizes deep learning technology to minimize data loss during compression and enable 8K content to be streamed on networks with lower bandwidth capabilities.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell: 8K content is compressed to 4K quality using an AI downscaler and transmitted to the user’s TV, which utilizes AI to upscale the content back to 8K quality. When asked to describe the inspiration for the technology, Kwangpyo Choi, a researcher from Samsung Research’s Visual Technology, specified a need for a new video compression and transmission technology in order to accommodate the evolving media landscape, and to address related technical challenges.

“Multimedia content is rapidly moving online, so figuring out how to overcome bandwidth limitations for UHD content transmission has become a major task,” said Choi.

“With AI ScaleNet, users will be able to enjoy 8K-quality content, even at lower bandwidths,” added Youngo Park, another Samsung researcher. “In fact, during periods of high network traffic, when speeds tend to drop, viewers can still expect content to be presented at a relatively higher quality.”

AI ScaleNet addresses bandwidth limitations within modern network infrastructures with what’s known as an adaptive AI Codec. “AI Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming refers to AI technology that adapts to various bandwidths and adjusts the resolution to enable seamless streaming,” said Choi.

The difference the technology makes is especially clear when using over-the-top (OTT) services, where viewers typically notice changes in picture quality. As Choi explained, however, Samsung’s AI Codec and AI ScaleNet technology utilize AI that adapts to changes in bandwidth and optimizes quality, so users enjoy the highest-quality streaming experience possible.

Apple expands Everyone Can Code curriculum to bring more coding resources to teachers and students

Apple unveiled completely redesigned Everyone Can Code curriculum to help introduce more elementary and middle school students to the world of coding. Now available, the new curriculum includes even more resources for teachers, a brand new guide for students and updated Swift Coding Club materials. 

Currently millions of students in more than 5,000 schools worldwide already use Everyone Can Code curriculum to bring their ideas to life and develop important skills including creativity, collaboration and problem solving. Additionally, learners around the world can register for thousands of free Today at Apple coding sessions taking place in December at Apple Stores to learn to write their first lines of code to celebrate Computer Science Education Week.

The Everyone Can Code curriculum builds on existing interactive puzzles, guides and activities to make learning to code even more approachable and connected to students’ everyday lives. Everyone Can Code Puzzles is an all-new student guide to Swift Playgrounds where each chapter helps students build on what they already know, experiment with new coding concepts and creatively communicate how coding impacts their lives. 

A companion teacher guide supports educators in bringing coding into their classrooms with helpful ways to facilitate, deepen and assess student learning. Designed to support all students, the new Everyone Can Code curriculum is optimized for VoiceOver and includes closed-captioned videos and audio descriptions as well as videos in American Sign Language.

The Everyone Can Code curriculum integrates Apple’s Everyone Can Create project guides to help students express what they learn through drawing, music, video and photos. Designed to help unleash kids’ creativity throughout their school day, Everyone Can Create gives teachers fun and meaningful tools to easily fold creativity skills into their existing lesson plans in any subject from coding to chemistry.

From Dec. 1 to Dec. 15, Apple Stores will increase Today at Apple coding sessions to offer thousands of opportunities to celebrate Computer Science Education Week. The free interactive sessions provide opportunities for participants at a variety of skill levels to get started with coding. Sessions help aspiring coders explore block-based coding with robots, while those with more experience can get started using Swift Playgrounds to learn coding concepts or code an augmented reality experience.

Select stores will also offer special sessions for coders of all ages. Preschool-age kids can try creative pre-coding activities in the new Coding Lab with the Helpsters, a team of vibrant monsters who love to solve problems and are featured in the new live-action preschool series, available now on Apple TV+, from the makers of “Sesame Street.” 

Participants of all ages can also learn from Apple Distinguished Educators, Apple Entrepreneur Camp innovators, developers and artists. Customers can register for Code with Apple sessions starting today.

For the seventh year, Apple will also support Hour of Code with a new Hour of Code Facilitator Guide to help educators and parents host sessions using Swift Playgrounds and some of the more than 200,000 educational apps available from the App Store.

For more advanced learners, including high school and college students preparing for the workforce, the Develop in Swift curriculum continues to give students the practical tools and techniques they need to qualify for high-demand and high-skill jobs. 

Develop in Swift is great for students new to coding as well as advancing those with previous experience — and even helps prepare them for a career in programming with a free AP Computer Science Principles course and the opportunity to earn industry recognized certification.

Liberty Global announces details of its electric vehicle charging consortium

Liberty Global has released details of a new project that utilizes the network infrastructure of its UK subsidiary, Virgin Media, to help revolutionise on-street electric vehicle charging.

Leveraging Virgin Media’s 40,000 powered street cabinets and 170,000 km of ducts, Liberty Global’s project has been created in partnership with Innovate UK, the UK government’s research and innovation department, to help local authorities find a solution to limited on-street electric vehicle charging points and thereby encourage more people to use electric vehicles. 

In addition to tapping Virgin Media’s powered network infrastructure, the project utilises the UK operator’s construction and deployment capabilities and its trusted relationships with local authority partners.

Over the next 18 months, Liberty Global aims to deploy and operate 1,200 charging sockets across the country through the project. The rollout of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations using Virgin Media’s connectivity will build a fully scalable electric vehicle charging network, helping the UK government move closer to its goal of reducing net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

Liberty Global offers converged video, broadband and communications companies, with operations in six European countries under the consumer brands Virgin Media, Telenet and UPC. The company has invested in  the infrastructure and digital platforms that empower users to make the most of the digital revolution. 

Its substantial scale and commitment to innovation has led to key products delivered through next-generation networks that connect 11 million customers subscribing to 25 million TV, broadband internet and telephony services. Liberty Global also serves 6 million mobile subscribers and offer WiFi service through millions of access points across its footprint.

In addition, Liberty Global owns 50 percent of VodafoneZiggo, a joint venture in the Netherlands with 4 million customers subscribing to 10 million fixed-line and 5 million mobile services, as well as significant investments in ITV, All3Media, ITI Neovision, LionsGate, the Formula E racing series and several regional sports networks.

Liberty Global is taking part in the project as part of a 19-strong consortium working under the project name Virgin Media Park & Charge. The consortium includes delivery partners Vattenfall and SMS plc and specialist technology partners Cenex, Ginger Town, Fully Charged, Connected Kerb, DETA and Loughborough University. 

This is in addition to several local authorities including the West Midlands Combined Authority as well as Councils in Oxfordshire, Liverpool, Southend on Sea, Worcestershire, Wandsworth, Croydon, Northamptonshire, Hammersmith & Fulham and Belfast.

“Leveraging street cabinets allows Liberty Global to look beyond traditional uses of telecom infrastructure and make a positive impact on the environment and in communities throughout the UK,” said Jason Simpson, Vice President Global Energy and Utilities for Liberty Global. “By bringing more electric vehicle chargers and associated connectivity to Britain’s streets, we are making a significant contribution to Innovate UK’s ambition to encourage more people to buy electric cars. We’re excited to be working with a wide array of partners who each bring their own areas of expertise to this exciting and innovative project.”