Polycom
Poly Inc., formerly Polycom, is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Poly is a subsidiary of HP Inc. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 Polycom was acquired by Plantronics and in 2019 the name of the combined entity was changed to Poly. In 2022, it was sold to HP. History Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, who were colleagues at PictureTel Corp. The startup was based in San Francisco, California but soon moved to San Jose, California, with Hinman using $400,000 of his own money and $100,000 from friends as seed money. Oak Investment Partners and Accel Partners then contributed an additional $3 million in venture capital. Polycom's stated goal was to support all the major ways people communicate, specifically including audio, content such as documents, and video. Its first products to market were audio conferenc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Poly Inc
Poly Inc., formerly Polycom, is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Poly is a subsidiary of HP Inc. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 Polycom was acquired by Plantronics and in 2019 the name of the combined entity was changed to Poly. In 2022, it was sold to HP. History Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman, who were colleagues at PictureTel Corp. The startup was based in San Francisco, California but soon moved to San Jose, California, with Hinman using $400,000 of his own money and $100,000 from friends as seed money. Oak Investment Partners and Accel Partners then contributed an additional $3 million in venture capital. Polycom's stated goal was to support all the major ways people communicate, specifically including audio, content such as documents, and video. Its first products to market were audio conferencing sp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Obihai Technology
Obihai Technology was a company that manufactured analog telephone adapters, supporting Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), XMPP, and Google Voice compatible Internet telephony. Obihai was sold to Polycom in 2018, with Poly and Plantronics sold to HP in 2022. Most items in the former Obihai product line have been either rebranded as Poly or discontinued. History The company, based in California's Silicon Valley, was founded in 2010 by Jan Fandrianto and Sam Sin, the same people who introduced the first analog telephone adaptors as Komodo Technology in the 1990s and formed Sipura Technology in 2002. Both prior companies were acquired by Cisco Systems, in 2000 and 2005 respectively, and integrated into that company's Linksys division. Linksys was sold to Belkin in 2013. In January 2018, Polycom acquired Obihai. In 2022, Poly was sold onwards to HP. In December 2021, Obahai's consumer-oriented analogue telephone adapter line was discontinued, with support ended in December 202 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Plantronics
Plantronics, Inc. is an American electronics company producing audio communications equipment for business and consumers. Its products support unified communications, mobile use, gaming and music. Plantronics is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, and most of its products are produced in China and Mexico. On March 18, 2019, Plantronics announced that it would change its name to Poly following its acquisition of Polycom, although it continues to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as Plantronics, Inc. (POLY; listed as PLT until May 24, 2021). On March 28, 2022, HP Inc. announced its intent to acquire Poly for $1.7 billion in cash as it looks to bolster its hybrid work offerings, such as headsets and videoconferencing hardware. Including debt, the deal valued at $3.3 billion and closed in August 2022. History In the early 1960s, airline headsets were so large and cumbersome that many pilots had switched back to the use of handheld microphones for communications. The spee ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mitel Networks
Mitel Networks Corporation is a Canadian telecommunications company. The company previously produced TDM PBX systems and applications, but after a change in ownership in 2001, now focuses almost entirely on Voice-over-IP (VoIP), unified communications, collaboration and contact center products. Mitel is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, with offices, partners and resellers worldwide. In April 2018, the company announced it had been bought by an investor group led by Searchlight Capital Partners. History Founding Michael Cowpland and Terry Matthews founded Mitel in 1973 (officially on June 8, 1973). Conventionally, its name is regarded as a combination of the founders’ first names and their first product, ''Mike and Terry Lawnmowers.'' Michael Cowpland stated that the name stands for ''Mike and Terry Lawnmowers'', whereas Terry Matthews confirmed the lawnmower acronym during an interview on BBC Radio 4's ''The Bottom Line'' in May 2011. Cowpland and Matthews fo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Brian L Hinman
Brian L. Hinman (born August 22, 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland) is an entrepreneur and investor in high technology businesses, especially the computer-based communications industry. Hinman founded three successful (annual revenues greater than $500 million) high technology companies; PictureTel Corp. (Videoconferencing), Polycom (Conference call), and 2Wire (digital subscriber line). Both PictureTel Corp. and Polycom had initial public offerings. Hinman and his co-founders took PictureTel public in November 1984, three months after the company was founded, and two years before the first product was shipped. 2Wire was acquired by set-top box maker Pace in July, 2010. Hinman has been granted patents in video compression and conference calls. Early life and education Hinman, the son of Earl E Hinman, Jr and Roberta D. Hinman, grew up primarily in Wheaton, Maryland Brian received a BSEE from the University of Maryland, College Park in December 1982, and an MSEE from MIT in June 1984 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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PictureTel Corp
PictureTel Corporation was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October 2001. History PictureTel was founded in August 1984 as PicTel by MIT students Brian L Hinman, Jeffrey G. Bernstein and MIT Professor David H. Staelin. The team was also assisted initially by MIT Professor Michael Dertouzos and two of his grad students Greg Papadopoulos and Richard Soley. The founding CEO was Ronald S. Posner Ph.D. While at MIT Hinman and Bernstein were motivated by the video compression work by UC Davis Professor Anil K. Jain (1946–1988) and his colleague Jaswani R. Jain who published an important research paper combining block-based motion compensation and transform coding in December 1981. The result was PictureTel, creating one of the first real-time systems to implement motion compensation and transform coding in July 1986. PictureTel was funded as ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Accel Partners
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, and India. History In 1983, Accel was founded by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. The co-founders developed the firm's "prepared mind" investment philosophy based on the Louis Pasteur quote "chance favors the prepared mind", which they say requires "deep focus" and a disciplined and informed approach to investing. In 2005, Accel Partners under the leadership of Jim Breyer, invested $12.7 million in Facebook, valuing the company at $98 million. This investment became one of the most lucrative in venture capital history with Accel’s stake increasing to $8 billion by 2012. Investments and fundraises In January 2025, Accel raised $650 million early stage fund for startups in India and South East Asia Accel focuses ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States asserts sovereignty over five Territories of the United States, major island territories and United States Minor Outlying Islands, various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean. It is a megadiverse country, with the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, third-largest land area and List of countries and dependencies by population, third-largest population, exceeding 340 million. Its three Metropolitan statistical areas by population, largest metropolitan areas are New York metropolitan area, New York, Greater Los Angeles, Los Angel ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, second-largest country by total area, with the List of countries by length of coastline, world's longest coastline. Its Canada–United States border, border with the United States is the world's longest international land border. The country is characterized by a wide range of both Temperature in Canada, meteorologic and Geography of Canada, geological regions. With Population of Canada, a population of over 41million people, it has widely varying population densities, with the majority residing in List of the largest population centres in Canada, urban areas and large areas of the country being sparsely populated. Canada's capital is Ottawa and List of census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spatial Audio
3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that manipulate the sound produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones. This frequently involves the virtual placement of sound sources anywhere in three-dimensional space, including behind, above or below the listener. 3-D audio (processing) is the spatial domain convolution of sound waves using head-related transfer functions. It is the phenomenon of transforming sound waves (using head-related transfer function or HRTF filters and cross talk cancellation techniques) to mimic natural sounds waves, which emanate from a point in a 3-D space. It allows trickery of the brain using the ears and auditory nerves, pretending to place different sounds in different 3-D locations upon hearing the sounds, even though the sounds may just be produced from only two speakers (dissimilar to surround sound). Complete 3D positional audio Using head-related transfer functions and reverberation, the changes ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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AAC-LD
The MPEG-4 Low Delay Audio Coder (a.k.a. AAC Low Delay, or AAC-LD) is audio compression standard designed to combine the advantages of perceptual audio coding with the low delay necessary for two-way communication. It is closely derived from the MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) standard. It was published in MPEG-4 Audio Version 2 (ISO/ IEC 14496-3:1999/Amd 1:2000) and in its later revisions. AAC-LD uses a version of the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio coding technique called the LD-MDCT. AAC-LD is widely used by Apple as the voice-over-IP (VoIP) speech codec in FaceTime. Real time CODEC requirements The most stringent requirements are a maximum algorithmic delay of only 20 ms and a good audio quality for all kind of audio signals including speech and music. * The AAC-LD coding scheme bridges the gap between speech coding schemes and high quality audio coding schemes. Two-way communication with AAC-LD is possible on usual analog telephone lines and via I ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Latency (audio)
Latency refers to a short period of delay (usually measured in milliseconds) between when an audio signal enters a system, and when it emerges. Potential contributors to latency in an audio system include analog-to-digital conversion, buffering, digital signal processing, transmission time, digital-to-analog conversion, and the speed of sound in the transmission medium. Latency can be a critical performance metric in professional audio including sound reinforcement systems, foldback systems (especially those using in-ear monitors) live radio and television. Excessive audio latency has the potential to degrade call quality in telecommunications applications. Low latency audio in computers is important for interactivity. Telephone calls In all systems, latency can be said to consist of three elements: codec delay, playout delay and network delay. Latency in telephone calls is sometimes referred to as delay; the telecommunications industry also uses the term ''quality of exp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |