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 "PicTel" by an initial public offering in November 1984, becoming a public company on virtually its first day of business. Product development started at this point. Its name was changed to PictureTel in 1987, du