Efficient real-time networked documents conversion for distance meeting environments

Abstract

As millions of computers sold every year into the consumer and corporate market and over hundreds of millions of PCs connected to the Internet, whose users and exchanged data grew by orders of magnitude in last 5 years. Even though traditional telephone and mobile phone will still provide effective point-to-point audio-only communications, it will be PCs (desktops and laptops) and handheld devices in the near future that provide real-time multipoint multimedia communication over the emerging IP network. In addition to the exchange of audio/video and textchat data from distance sites, more and more services allow joint viewing and annotating of documents, which bear different kinds of formats varying from PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Postscript, Text, and various image formats (bitmap, gif, and jpeg). This calls for a new development effort by HomeMeeting to design and implement a new unified document converter for real-time meeting/conferencing applications.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.