Karaoke has a new best friend, and its name is LTE. At CES, TouchTunes and Verizon Wireless unveiled its new digital jukebox with a networked karaoke feature, allowing bar and restaurant patrons to not only pull their favorite songs out of the airwaves but also sing along to them as well. No DJ necessary: You reserve your performance slots and pick your songs on a smartphone app, adding another mobile element to the mix. Verizon is not responsible for the heckling you receive when you miss the high notes (or the low and middle ones, for that matter).

Verizon had a few new LTE smartphones to show off at CES, but at the show it seemed absolutely determined to insert its new network’s tendrils into as many non-phone devices as possible. We already know about the connected car, but here are a few of the more interesting examples:

• Diebold showed off a concept ATM, which uses 4G connectivity not only to authorize transactions but also to send detailed diagnostic and trouble reports to the companies that maintain the cash machines. The enhanced connection even allows those companies to fix nonmechanical problems remotely. The ATM could be stuck anywhere, requiring only a power source to operate, and it could even call security if a suspicious character starts fiddling with it. Now if only Verizon could figure out a way to send the actual cash over the airwaves . . .
• In addition to the Karaoke jukebox, TouchTunes showed off its forthcoming LTE-connected photo booth, which allows you to not only capture your evening of drunken debauchery in still images but also to instantly share those images on Facebook and Twitter before the inevitable feelings of shame kick in.
• Alcatel-Lucent’s ng Connect and VisionMax demoed an LTE-connected shopping kiosk that will use near field communication to pull up a 3-D avatar loaded into your phone. You can then dress that avatar up in the different outfits and accessories available at that store. Assuming the avatar is a reasonable facsimile of your body type — sorry, no centaurs — you could get a general idea of what you would look like in the store’s clothes without actually trying them on. You can even use Vidyo’s HD video conferencing technology to connect to an on-call fashion consultant who will praise you on your impeccable fashion sense.
• Verizon embedded LTE into VGo robots, allowing its booth workers to talk up CES attendees remotely using VGo’s remote telepresence capabilities. Many of the robotic assistants available today link to the network through Wi-Fi, which works great if you happen to be in range of an access point. Verizon is betting that these remote physical avatars will want a broader range. Maybe they won’t go to lunch with the boss, but they can at least make it to the water cooler for office chitchat.

Microphone image courtesy of Flickr user LifeSupercharger
Avatar image courtesy of Flickr user Winter Jefferson

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This change also means Hangouts and Google Talk will be replacing the H.264 video codec with Google’s open-source WebM video format.

Google has been using proprietary technology licensed from Vidyo to facilitate voice and video chat within Google Talk as well as Google+ Hangouts until now. However, work has been underway for a while to replace the plugin with an open-source implementation based on WebRTC, a framework for real-time voice and video communications that Google open-sourced in May.

Now it looks like this work will soon pay off: WebRTC Group Product Manager Serge Lachapelle wrote Tuesday morning that his team is “heads down” working on Webkit patches to bring a WebRTC enabled version of Chrome to the public. He added: “You’ll notice the brilliant work by Ericsson, whom have [sic] been helping out a ton in driving this.”

The WebRTC group also recently announced its work to the wider Webkit developer community. The exact timing of the Chrome release with WebRTC is unclear, but Lachapelle hinted at more upcoming news in his post:

“Hopefully our next post will be soon, and will include a more useful URL :)”

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Vidyo has raised a $22.5 million Series D round of financing led by QuestMark Partners, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four River Group. Since being founded in 2005, the startup has raised a total of $97 million.

That funding comes as the startup has grown its sales and marketing team pretty aggressively. Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro told us in a phone interview that the company has doubled headcount over the past year, from 100 to more than 200 employees, as it attempts to snag new enterprise customers and OEM partners to license its technology.

Earlier this year it released its VidyoPanorama product, a telepresence system that enables up to 20 screens to conference with HD video quality. The telepresence system also boasts much lower cost than competing products, at as little as $4,500 per screen. That’s a huge discount from more traditional room-based video conferencing systems from Cisco or Polycom.

A lot of Vidyo’s business today comes through partnerships with third parties that resell its video conferencing services to their customers. For instance, telecom carriers such as Chunghwa, KDDI and Elisa are partners in providing its collaboration software to enterprises in their footprint. But it’s also expanding its efforts to provide teleconference technology to OEMs through an API that they can integrate into their own applications. It’s already seen a number of partners take advantage of this, particularly in the healthcare, education and finance fields.

That partner strategy has also helped it grow revenues pretty substantially. Without stating numbers, Shapiro said that the company’s sales have more than doubled over the past year. As more SMBs seek less expensive ways to collaborate, and more partners build applications based on its technology, Vidyo seems poised to continue that success into the future.

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Take today, for instance: A new startup called Blue Jeans Network came out of stealth mode today, with the promise to make video conferencing easy and more affordable than traditional telepresence solutions. The pitch is simple: one product to connect with video conferencing products that range from Cisco and Polycom  room-based solutions, all the way down to consumer products like Skype and Google Talk. And it’s got some serious backing: $23.5 million from Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Norwest Venture Partners.

Blue Jeans Network isn’t the only new video conferencing solution aimed at the mid-market. A few weeks ago, video conferencing startup Vidyo announced that it was coming to market with a software-based product priced well below traditional telepresence offerings from Cisco and Polycom. And Fuze Telepresence Connect, which is based on Vidyo technology, also aims to connect with multiple enterprise and consumer video conferencing services.

But while startups like Blue Jeans, Vidyo and Fuzebox today are aiming to capture the mid-market — small and medium-sized businesses that previously couldn’t afford enterprise-based solutions for video conferencing — consumer video conferencing technologies have already begun to take hold in those businesses.

Technologies like Skype and Google Talk, while aimed at the consumer market, have long been used by small businesses to connect workers. There’s a growing number of mobile video chat services — like Tango, Fring and ooVoo — that enable users to chat with users across a wide range of devices. Those services, which were mostly focused on one-to-one communication between users, are steadily adding multiuser video chat features.

For heavy enterprise users, those solutions might be lacking some important collaboration features. But increasingly, the consumer video chat services are beginning to look business-ready. The difference between consumer-grade video conferencing applications and those used by businesses continues to narrow, which brings into doubt the future of “in-between” products being launched today.

The improving capabilities of video conferencing technologies are only part of the story. More importantly, those consumer grade products are free, or close to it — and that’s the real draw to their usage in the enterprise. Today, Skype is free for single-user connections, but group video calling is less than $10 a month — which for business use, might as well be free. And the upcoming availability of Google’s Hangout group video conferencing solution has the potential to make distributed workforce collaboration available to the masses at no fee.

It’s what Om likes to call “The Economics of Good Enough,” i.e. why pay a premium for a full-featured product when you can get by on something else free, or inexpensive?

While today there’s surely a market for a mid-grade video conferencing products that have inserted themselves in between heavy enterprise offerings and consumer products, in the future that spot will likely be filled with cheap or free “good enough” products that just keep getting better.

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The white labeling of Vidyo’s technology is nothing new: after all, it provides the secret sauce behind Google’s video chat service. And it’s working with other companies, like Ricoh, to extend its unified communications reach beyond just its own hardware-based solutions. It also powers the recently announced FuzeBox telepresence solution, which seeks to create interoperability between different video conferencing vendors and platforms.

Vidyo hopes to go even further in the near future, by enabling its customers and partners to build third-party apps based on its technology, which can then be shared and implemented by others. In a phone conversation, Vidyo CMO Ashish Gupta said the startup was working on an application portal program that would enable white label service providers to develop and reuse code created by other service providers.

Because Vidyo’s technology is cloud-based and works with multiple platforms, it gives partners flexibility to more easily reach users on devices that they otherwise would have had to otherwise spend expensive resources developing for. While several Vidyo customers fall under the traditional telepresence customer bracket, several more are service providers that have built Vidyo-enabled conferencing services on top of their legacy business.

This is especially true in vertical industries like healthcare or finance, where partners are creating consumer-facing applications based on the Vidyo technology. Take, for example, the case of a service provider in the Nordic states, which has built a video chat app for seniors that has a simple one-touch remote to initiate chats. Or a partner in the financial services field that has built an application to enable its clients to video chat with questions if they need to.

Right now, these are one-off opportunities. But by creating an app exchange, Vidyo can leverage existing code to make it easier for partners to build these types of business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) applications. Partners get an easy on-ramp to build new services, and Vidyo gets a transparent way to sell more licenses. While service providers ultimately handle all the billing and operations for any platforms they build on Vidyo technology, the startup gets a license fee for any end users actually conferencing on apps enabled by it.

In that way, Vidyo hopes to leverage the network effect of making its technology more widely available. “If ten people use a Vidyo service, and they connect to ten people, then we’ve gained 100 users,” Gupta said.

Vidyo has raised a total of $73.5 million since being founded in 2005. That includes a $25 million financing round last spring led by Four Rivers Group and including Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures, as well as an $11.5 million round raised earlier this year.

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Vidyo first came to market with plans to take on industry giants like Cisco and Polycom in the telepresence market, with a high-quality, desktop-based video conferencing solution based on H.264/SVC video compression technology. By pricing its desktop, touch-screen video conferencing products under $1,000, the startup hoped to beat the competition on price while retaining the same video quality that they offer for telepresence solutions.

Now Vidyo is extending that same technology to the media world, with an IP-based product that seeks to undercut the cost of delivering broadcast-quality video streams via satellite. VidyoCast can take in video feeds from any source, whether it be from a remote camera crew, affiliate studio or even a desktop or laptop video camera, and enable the production team to assemble those feeds with a central control panel and distribute them to affiliates — all from one cloud-based product suite. The startup says VidyoCast can do all this at one-tenth the cost of satellite.

To lead the new initiative, Vidyo has hired broadcast veteran Jim O’Brien as general manager of the new business unit.

Vidyo has raised a total of $63 million since being founded in 2005, including a $25 million Series C round of financing announced in April. The startup was recently awarded a patent on its VidyoRouter architecture, which it says can be used over any IP network, including the broader Internet as well as LTE, 3G or 4G mobile networks. While enterprise telepresence may be its key focus, the company also licenses its video compression technology to Google for its Google Talk video chat application.

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The Executive offering is meant to complement Vidyo’s full-room HD systems, which are positioned against competing telepresence systems from the likes of Cisco and Polycom. The product can be run on Mac or Windows operating systems, and since it’s based on software it can be used as either a dedicated video conferencing endpoint, or just as an application available on a user’s personal computer. With built-in application sharing, Vidyo users can use simple graphics tools as whiteboard applications, or they can share presentations or documents that are available on the desktop.

The new desktop product builds on the company’s VidyoRouter architecture, which was awarded a patent in October. The technology uses H.264/SVC video compression, which allows Vidyo videoconferencing software to be used over any IP network, whether it be over the Internet, or on LTE, 3G or 4G networks.

The launch the Executive comes not long after Vidyo raised a monster $25 million round of financing led by Four Rivers Group, with participation from all existing investors. That money will be used to ramp up personnel, particularly in sales and marketing, as Vidyo attempts to take on the (much) larger incumbents in the video conferencing space. Altogether, it has raised a total of $63 million over three financing rounds.

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