Let small and medium-sized companies also can organize video conferencing anytime, HIGHFIV

of highfive

Do you think it is dedicated to the large multinational companies to provide video conferencing system? Wrong, the idea is to make the world's conference rooms, especially small and medium-sized companies, can easily and quickly and cheaply use videoconferencing.

This "sentiment" comes from Highfive founder Shan Sinha. When the company he founded was docverse by Google in 2010, he was "lurking" in Google for a while. He found that every meeting room in Google had a built-in video conferencing system so that every Google employee could communicate "face-to-face", even if they were not in the same room. Video conferencing allows Google team members to be more closely connected, decision-making more quickly, but also to make the meeting more humane, profound changes in the work of the culture and atmosphere. So in 2012, Shan Sinha with partners from Google and Apple co-founded the Highfive, so small to the start-up companies to the top 500 companies can be smooth and easy to use video conferencing direct communication.

Then the problem comes, do video conferencing system company very early, highfive what is different?

First of all, the price is of course. Like Google's video system, a conference room installation price of up to 20,000 dollars, if you want to install in each conference room, for small and medium-sized enterprises is too expensive. And highfive a set of equipment prices, guess how much money? 799 dollars.

Second, it's the device. The 799-dollar highfive device includes a 1080p high-definition video camera, wireless chipset and a high-fidelity microphone array (focusing speakers, eliminating background noise). Connecting highfive devices to televisions, power supplies, and local area networks provides high-quality video based on cloud services, lower cloud processing costs, low latency, and compatibility with smartphones. Say goodbye to the cable, remote control and phone dialing that you must have in a traditional video conference.

And finally, and most importantly, how it works. When the person in charge of the video conference enters the meeting room, the highfive device is automatically identified and the TV is connected within 2 minutes. At the same time, the Highfive app, which downloads on a tablet or smartphone, initiates a "call" request, and the device automatically projects the running screen onto the TV. At this point the app is the same as the Bluetooth remote. The user gets a link address provided by the system to open a video conferencing invitation on a Web page of a mobile phone, tablet, or installed plugin. If some participants are not in the conference room, the user can send the link directly to the remote people, through the mobile app to bring them in. In addition, the user can also send the link to those who can not participate in the meeting but to watch the company's people, directly omitted the "meeting minutes" and "Conference spirit of Communication" this process, but also to make employees more participatory sense.

Highfive Customer company domain name as its registered account, once the company purchased equipment and use domain name registration, all employees can obtain a highfive cloud account, can launch video conferencing anytime, anywhere. In the first 6 months of the company's product line, Highfive has more than 1 million minutes of video streaming per week.

Highfive before the two rounds of financing: 2012 of the 4 million dollar seed round financing and 2013 of the 9.5 million dollar a round of financing. Recently, Highfive has just won a 32 million-dollar B-round investment, the total financing reached 45.4 million U.S. dollars. The B-round investment by the United States famous VC company Lightspeed Venture, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and other organizations with a number of institutions. This round of financing will be used to expand the size of the company, especially the number of engineers, and strengthen its marketing and sales team.

Boast so much, also should say highfive limitations. Highfive is a closed-loop video system. Its devices can be connected to televisions, computers, tablets, and smartphones, but are not compatible with traditional H.264 video conferencing systems and are not compatible with Skype or Lync. Because all video streams will be transmitted to the cloud, the company's network bandwidth requirements are higher.

Compared with the traditional video conferencing system, Highfive does provide another simple, convenient and economical choice. Shan Sinha hope that through this seemingly simple equipment, change the world's many enterprises within the way of communication and even culture.