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Trekkie Communicators Now a Reality
SolFire writes "Forbes is carrying an article about Vocera Communications and their little internal communication system that they have working at their office that functions like the badge communicators from ST:TNG. The employees wear the system as a badge and touch it to start the connection. Then they speak the name of the person they want to talk to and the system connects them using VOIP for one-on-one communication." We mentioned these in 2002.
We evaluated Vocera last year. Really nice tech, but it wasn't - buzzword warning - enterprise ready. While it may work in one building, the server-side of it isn't scalable (or wasn't - I haven't looked at them since). It didn't help their case that it was Windows-based (get a virus/worm, lose communications *:^).
The lanyard-attached phone was pretty nice (since I can easily lose my cell phone as well) and I believe you can get a headset if you need to keep the receiving end private. I can still see those annoying/loud conversations popping up much more with these units, tho.
The routing capabilities worked well and it would be great for our help desk and emergency incident response teams. Being able to say "Where's Bill?" and get a response was also pretty cool. It's only as accurate as the nearest associated access point, but it's still better then not knowing which side of the building some is on.
Once they get more enterprise features (integration, scalability, global functionality) we'll probably adopt it in key areas.
Mind the gap...