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SightSpeed Acquired By Logitech

What an interesting piece of news to wake up to this morning! SightSpeed is to be acquired by Logitech!
Written by J.A. Watson, Contributor

What an interesting piece of news to wake up to this morning! SightSpeed is to be acquired by Logitech! Not a lot of information available yet, but Peter Csathy, SightSpeed CEO, who has posted comments to my blog here on ZDNet U.K. several times, said that the deal will give SightSpeed the resources to move into new areas of video communications. Considering the resourcefulness and quality of the people at SightSpeed, that could prove to be very interesting.

One has to wonder what this says about Skype. There was obviously a very large cooperation arrangement made between Logitech and Skype about a year ago, when Skype brought out their vastly over-hyped "High Quality Video" which was tied exclusively to three specific Logitech cameras (and still is, as far as I know). I heard unofficially that Logitech even sent an engineer to Estonia for quite some time, to help Skype work out the HQ VIdeo code. Logitech started a fairly large promotional effort for their cameras with Skype. However, I noticed that promotion was changed to include MS Live Messenger about six months ago, and I wondered then if Logitech was falling out of love with Skype... Now this comes along, and I would be reasonably sure that Logitech looked pretty hard at Skype, and from all that has been said recently I'm equally sure that eBay would love to unload Skype. But as I have said before, their problem is going to be finding someone foolish enough to buy Skype from them.

There is one other potentially interesting side effect of this deal. Until now, in the Logitech User Forums, anyone who posted about a video IM problem was basically told, if the camera works with the Logitech QuickCam software, it's not our problem, go talk to the IM software provider. I suppose that becomes a lot more difficult to say, in the case where they actually own the IM provider as well. Of course, now that I think about it, I can't recall anyone ever posting there about a problem with SightSpeed, virtually all of the problems are with Skype or MS Live.

In any case, I am pleased for the people at SightSpeed, and I hope that this will lead to even better things from them in the future.

jw 29/10/2008

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