Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Video: BoomTown Gets a Taste of Umi and Chomps into Cisco Execs Too!

Yesterday, BoomTown dragged my weary bag of bones to downtown San Francisco for the unboxing of a new consumer telepresence product from Cisco called Umi.

The networking giant is making yet another big foray into the competitive space for, well, space in the living room with the device, which will cost $599 with a $24.99 monthly fee.

The Cisco (CSCO) brand name Umi is a variation on “you-me.”

The Umi unit works with your existing high-definition television and high-speed broadband. It’s in three parts: A camera, a remote control and a set-top box. It will work with Google (GOOG) Voice Chat–but not Skype and Apple (AAPL) iChat yet.

Here’s a video I did–using Cisco’s Flip video camera, natch!–to capture the proceedings at the launch event and demo, as well as to interview Umi head honcho Gina Clark about the effort, competition and more:


comments so far. Add yours.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SILQLFJAOB77IUIP46JIC4OYCY Fdmsfjsdjk Kgkfdk

    Google in the input: www. tradeone.us you can find many brand names, even more surprising is that he will sell you the unexpected o(?_?)o

  • http://twitter.com/murphymac MurphyMac

    I don’t understand what they’re going for here at all. $25 a month? That’s insane. I’ve GOT to be missing something…

  • http://allthingsd.com/boomtown Kara Swisher

    It is pricey

  • http://twitter.com/catlike1 Ed Liu

    It is definitely pricey. I wonder whether it actually might be adopted more by small business, independent contractors, etc., who use skype now but want a higher quality video chat experience. For that purpose, $25 a month isn’t much at all.

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