The Webinar Blog

iLinc and WebEx Financial Results

Both iLinc and WebEx announced their quarterly financial results today. You can see the press releases with summary financial statements at the following links:

• iLinc Second Quarter Results
• WebEx Third Quarter Results

I'm no financial analyst and I hated my college accounting courses back in the day. So don't expect any in-depth commentary on the financial health of the companies. But I was pleased to see that both companies showed year-to-year increases in revenues, gross profit, and income before taxes (although WebEx's net income decreased due to a significant rise in their income tax provision).

That tells me at a glance that the web conferencing market is healthy and growing and that the big companies are still able to make money in the game. Good news.

Technorati Tags: iLinc, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

WebEx's World View

I just noticed a cute little application accessible from WebEx's home page. It might have been there for a while... I don't visit their home page very often. They have a world map overlayed with "near real time" pushpins showing where clients are accessing the WebEx MediaTone Network.

I can't imagine any real utility of this for casual observers, but it's a nice graphic indicator of the international concentration of web conferencing if you use WebEx as a single representative of the total market (imperfect, but what're ya gonna do?). The US is surprisingly well covered, even in the farming and ranching areas of the plains. The UK and Central Europe is a solid mass, India is growing, and it looks like Brazil and Argentina are blossoming markets.

Cute marketing gimmick, WebEx!

Technorati Tags: web conferencing, web meeting, WebEx, webinar

Watch And Learn

I just attended an online event webcast from London. The event producer was kind enough to invite me and I'm not going to mention their name because this was one of those cases where things didn't go exceptionally smoothly. I'll give them another chance before descending into public excoriation. Still, I thought I'd go through some of my thoughts on the event and see if we can glean some lessons.

1) The online conferencing software loaded in a browser window very quickly without a client-side install. Kudos. As with many browser-based products, the initial launch window spawned a new viewing window. In this case, the original window did not tell the user whether they could safely close it, resize it, or navigate away from it. Vendors, if you are going to create several open windows on the user's desktop, give them some indication of what they can and can't do with them.

2) This conferencing software provided a single audience-wide chat window. When we logged in at event time, we could see messages from the pre-conference session, such as the fact that they were starting the live web stream a half hour before show time. It's nice to have the ability to clear the chat window to get rid of things that are no longer apropos for the audience. If you can't, try to remember that every message you type will be available to all audience members until the end of the event. Keep chitchat to a minimum.

3) Several users had technical problems seeing the event. Because it was an open chat session, other users started offering advice and comparing their connection problems. This pulled focus from the speakers and their content. I am a huge fan of moderated chat windows where the audience writes only to an event host. The host can then choose to keep the conversation private or display it to all.

4) The format of this particular event was audio-driven. The panelists engaged in a conversation with each other and the video display window just showed a couple of generic placeholder slides. That's okay... it makes for a good podcast recording later. But the audience should know that the content is mainly audio. At least one audience member publicly announced that he was leaving because he couldn't see the display window. That's a pity... He probably would have stayed if he had been told that the information value was contained in the audio stream (which he could still hear).

5) The company that hosted the discussion panel inserted prerecorded advertisements for their upcoming events at two points in the presentation. The switch from the live conversation to a professional recording was jarring and made it seem much more like an intrusive advertisement than if the panel host had mentioned the same information as part of his presentation. In this Tivo generation, people are programmed to tune out obvious breaks from program content for packaged advertisements.

6) With five panelists sharing the audio space, it becomes very important to identify them clearly as they speak. One audience member had to type in and ask who was speaking at one point. The host was pretty good about saying the name of the person he was calling on, but it was easy to forget their title or company. The visual space could have been well used to keep up a reminder of the panelists and perhaps an administrator could have highlighted the current speaker with a pointer or other visual indicator.

Your takeaway... If you produce or speak on web events, take a look at those from other companies and note what works and what doesn't. Seeing it from the audience perspective gives you excellent lessons on things you will want to concentrate on, and helps you choose or use your technology features more effectively.

Of course if you're looking for upcoming webinars and webcasts, don't forget to use the WebEventSearch.com webinar search engine!

Technorati Tags: presentations, search, WebEventSearch, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

It Went Downhill After "Hello"

Kathy Sierra over at "Creating Passionate Users" has written an incredibly important summary of the things that turn off your audience in the first ten minutes. She also gives you a number of options for alternative approaches that can give you a fighting chance of holding on to your audience's attention and enthusiasm. She only made one mistake... ten minutes is way too long a grace period for most listeners. I say they'll make up their mind about you in the first two or three minutes. So don't blow it! Read her article. Take notes. Change your presentations.

"Learn it. Know it. Live it."

Technorati Tags: presentations, presenter training, speaker training, Kathy Sierra, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar

Guide to Screen Sharing Available

Robin Good over at Kolabora has published an invaluable Mini-Guide to Screen Sharing Tools and Technology. Robin covers the vast web conferencing market for small and home office users of web conferencing, or those in larger businesses who need less expensive or simpler tools than the big enterprise webinar technologies.

This report concentrates on the issue of showing something on your desktop screen to your audience (and occasionally vice versa). Robin makes a few points in his introductory overview that bear repeating. I always mention these same things to my enterprise clients who seem to want to do everything through screen sharing.

1) Screen sharing uses a lot of bandwidth and requires quality, speedy internet connections.

2) If you can share your content another way, you probably should. Dedicated slide sharing, web touring, and co-browsing tools generally use bandwidth and often have other advantages such as scalability, better picture quality, and quicker response times.

But still, there are plenty of cases where it makes sense to share your screen with the audience. Software companies use this feature all the time to show product demos. Remember that there are special considerations as a presenter when you are showing live applications from your desktop. For a quality audience experience, you have to change the way you normally interact with the software yourself. Things like putting in long pauses when a pop-up menu displays its choice list so the audience has time to see it refresh. Or announcing each click that you make. And not wiggling your cursor as an attention-getter.

Robin's page lists 24 vendors with summary charts on the main features and list price of each one. Don't miss this list if you are in the market for less expensive application sharing or screen sharing technology!

Technorati Tags: application sharing, Kolabora, Robin Good, screen sharing, vendor selection, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

The Mysterious Case Of The WebEx Audio Dub

When you make a recording of an event in WebEx, you get a proprietary internal format with a file extension of WRF. I'm generally not a big fan of proprietary playback formats, but WebEx eases the pain by making a recording editor available. They are the only vendor I'm aware of that includes this functionality. You can cut and paste segments of the integrated audio/video stream to get rid of things like introductions, dead air, pauses for audience interaction, or speaker flubs.

The recording editor is not as sophisticated as dedicated applications devoted to editing digital media files, but it gets the basic job done. I have had difficulty getting fine timing divisions to come out correctly. You think you are cutting a segment right before someone says "ummmmmmm..." and find out after the edit that it cut off the preceding word as well. WebEx says they have been working on greater fine edit accuracy.

One of the things the editor lets you do is to export your recording to a Windows Media format (WMV file). The conversion process takes quite a while and generates a significantly larger file. I used this on a recent client engagement to create a standardized format and then strip out the audio. I ran the audio through an audio editing program to match volumes between the speakers, fix flubs, mute extraneous noises and so on. Then I planned to use the WebEx editor feature to overlay the audio stream back onto the video.

When I tried it, I received a popup error message, saying I had an invalid WAV format.

Fair enough... There are a lot of ways to encode a WAV audio stream. After checking the online documentation and finding no specifications, I called up WebEx tech support. A friendly rep went off to ask an engineer, then came back and told me the specs they wanted. I tried it again. No luck. Then I tried formatting the audio stream in six different formats. None of them would dub in.

So I called tech support again and started to describe my problem. My rep told me there was no such feature for audio dubbing, so I led him through the tool in his product. He tried it on his machine with a test file. It wouldn't dub for him either. He said he'd have to take it back to engineering. That was on October 4. On October 19 I finally got a response:

"I got clarification from the engineering and product management teams.  Because the Editor was originally an internal-only tool, there are some legacy features that are still included but aren’t useful for you as an end user.  The “external WAV” format we’re expecting is audio from a WebEx recording, but it’s something that can only be created by the engineering team, not a traditional .wav format.  We’re working on making that clarification in the client to prevent any confusion, but the only way to dub in audio is to play it through the mic input."

By the way, the tech savvy among you (and who else would still be reading at this point?) should be asking why I bothered trying to go back to the original WRF format. Just take my edited audio file and overlay it on the WMV video. I did this. The file size shot up from the original 12.8 MB of the WRF file to an astonishing and unmanageable 1.05 GB for the assembled WMV file! I don't have a good explanation for that, but it got to the point where I was unwilling to continue my experiments.

I'm rather peeved about the chain of events here. First I got a response indicating the feature would work, given the right format. Then I had to show a rep what I was talking about, since he had never heard of it. Then it took 15 days to tell me there is no practical way to use the feature. I wasted a lot of time and effort on a dead end, which is why I'm letting my readers know about it in case they might be thinking of trying to edit their audio on a WRF recording.

Technorati Tags: web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

A Detailed Look At ReadyTalk

After my brief mention the other day of ReadyTalk's new release announcement, I got a note from Mike McKinnon, their Social Media Director (Don't look at me like that... That's the job title on his email signature!)

Mike offered to take me on a pre-release tour of the new features. We met using the ReadyTalk software and integrated telephone conferencing. You join a meeting as an audience member by going to the company's website in your favorite web browser and entering the meeting number your host has sent you. The meeting page loads a Java application within the browser window and all actions occur within that space. There is no client software installed on your PC hard drive. Because of this web-based approach, all the major operating systems and browsers are supported (anything that can handle Java, which is just about universal these days). Mike proudly pointed out that their development staff includes people using Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers.

One of the weaknesses of the browser implementation is that you get a big empty launch page in your browser that has to stay open throughout the meeting (although you can minimize that window to your task bar). There is a message telling attendees that "Your meeting will end if you close this window, refresh this page, or click Back or Forward." Unfortunately, in any meeting of a reasonable size, Murphy's Law says that someone will mess with that window either by accident or to test the truth of the message. (There is a confirmation window popup if you try to navigate away from the launch page.)

ReadyTalk is still primarily a collaborative meeting room product that sometimes gets used for auditorium-style events. Its roots came from a desire for a product without a lot of bells and whistles that would let people meet online quickly and easily, without connection problems or installs requiring administrator-level authority. For this reason, the product doesn't contain features such as integrated registration pages for scheduled events or fancy audience feedback indicators. A standard use license lets you hold a conference with up to 96 participants, although you can make arrangements with ReadyTalk if you need to host a larger event and they'll provision more ports.

I find the ReadyTalk presenter and attendee interface to be intuitive and easy to work with. I can't imagine people would need much in the way of formal training, although if you've never worked with things such as online annotation tools, you might want a pointer on how to use the pointer. Speaking of annotations, they don't have all of the features I like (such as being able to drag a box around an item), but the ones that are there are designed well. Pointers point to the right so you can place them next to text without covering up the content (Seems obvious until you run across a company with big left-facing pointers!) You can drag and drop an annotation around the screen. You can erase a single annotation or all annotations with a single mouse click, instead of requiring you to go through multiple selections and confirmation messages. They also didn't implement a "laser pointer" (drag a red dot around the screen), which makes me happy. It's the most overused annotation tool by presenters and usually doesn't look good on audience screens.

Highlights of the new feature set (due for public release at the end of October) include:

• Single sign on login for an event "chairperson" (their name for a host or event administrator). The previous interface for doing administrative activities was disjointed and involved logging on to separate web pages, each asking for authentication. They've fixed that design with more logical tabs and access to all functions from a single interface.



• Email invitations for attendees. Mike says they have consciously broken their dependence on using a Microsoft Outlook plugin for email activities. Now any user with an email system can get invitations sent out with easy to configure combinations of selectable content templates and freeform text. I mentioned their strong international telephone network in my last entry, and the email feature lets you select audience countries at will, as it automatically fills in the appropriate local toll free dial-in number from that country for your conference. Another great feature of their telephone service is that international rates are flat fee from any country. Many of the big name telephone conferencing providers make you estimate how many callers you'll have from each specific country and then charge you different rates for each calling country. Icch! Recipients get a link in their email message allowing them to load an iCal appointment for the meeting directly into their email calendar.



• Since there is no formal pre-event registration in ReadyTalk, they gather attendee information as each person joins the meeting. The new release lets you add up to five configurable information fields in addition to "Name" (which is always there and required). I suggested that they might want to increase the flexibility on the name field as well so that customers downloading attendance information into databases or sales management systems can use separate first and last name fields if desired.



• One of the fanciest new features attempts to bridge the gap between web meetings and the booming medium of audio podcasts. You can generate an MP3 audio podcast file of the audio stream from your meeting and even assign it a category and keywords so it's ready for listing on a service such as iTunes. They'll even create a URL for an RSS feed so subscribers see the new content in their feed reader. Of course you also have the option to record the combined web and audio together in a video file.

You can upload slides to your meeting room and they'll stay there, ready for you the next time you open the room. But slides are converted to static images, so you lose animations and slide transitions. You can insert and delete individual slides, which is useful for small changes without redoing the whole deck. Slides will scale down to fit a smaller application window, but they won't scale up past a preset limit. Small text doesn't survive the conversion process too well, but color gradients are retained smoothly. The company generally advises users to rely on application sharing to show any complex slide shows involving movement features.

Application sharing allows you to display your entire desktop or a named application, but not everything within a user-defined frame on the desktop. There is an option setting that lets the chairperson adjust the bandwidth and quality used for app sharing. You can slide it towards fast transmission or high quality graphics.

You do get a type-in "chat" interface that lets the chairperson send replies to an individual or to all, but it's not as complex and feature rich as some other products. There is no whiteboard for scribbling (something I have still never used in a real conference)

Because the telephone conference is integrated with the web controls, you have the ability to control options for the call from the web application. This includes muting and unmuting lines and managing recording. There's a bit of a delay between the time you hit the record button and the time you get confirmation that the recording has started. The recording is stored as a Flash file and is hosted on ReadyTalk's servers. Their playback application lets users directly jump to any slide from a thumbnail navigation bar and the audio stays nicely synched. It's fast direct access and the audio compression is very limited. In other words it sounds like the speakers, not a tinny recording of them. You can download your recording and receive an entire directory full of files for coordinated playback. It's easy to change the clearly labeled logo jpg files to brand it under your company instead of ReadyTalk.

Although ReadyTalk is a relatively small private company, they have some major industry partnerships that let them offer 24/7 technical support (they don't use an Indian outsourced support line!). During their office hours, you get a live person in their own offices, with easy access to the development engineers should that be necessary.

ReadyTalk is an interesting option for companies who want a simple interface, very flexible access from different computers, and especially for those who work with an international audience. The new release will add some easier management functionality, but the big seller is likely to be easy podcast creation from a webcast. Mike shared some long range plans for 2007 that also piqued my interest, but the time is not yet ripe for sharing those. I'll just say that it's worth keeping an eye on the company, since this October release is by no means the culmination of their development path.

Technorati Tags: podcast, podcasting, ReadyTalk, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Live Meeting Needs CPR

There's a news story just starting to make the rounds. No doubt you'll soon see it trumpeted by most of Microsoft's competitors (look for it to appear in David Chao's WebEx blog in big bold type!). Microsoft hosted a web conference today with several of its partners in the security arena talking about their interaction with the new Vista operating system. Of course Microsoft used their Live Meeting web conferencing software for the event. Unfortunately the meeting crashed and reps from Symantec and McAfee said they could never get back in to the conference.

CNET initially reported the story and followed up with Microsoft's explanation that they accidentally sent out invitations to all participants that let them log in as presenters. That happened to me once (not when I was acting as administrator and moderator of course!) and it's not a pretty sight. Everybody manipulates the slides and display and options simultaneously... I'm not surprised it locked up.

The more interesting question is why the two companies couldn't rejoin when the meeting resumed. A problem is a problem... But it should be resolvable. This one still has open questions.

If you follow that CNET link above, take the time to read some of the user comments. In addition to the usual nonspecific griping and potshots about Microsoft, there are some interesting additional tidbits of information. One contributor said that he and a friend were unable to connect because of apparent security conflicts with both Symantec and McAfee fighting the Live Meeting app install.

In general, I prefer the Live Meeting interface for multiple presenters that gives everyone control of the presentation space at the same time. It removes a layer of management that WebEx includes, requiring the host to pass control to each presenter in turn. I like the "simpler is better" version of the former. But this is an example of how that can backfire. In a WebEx meeting, even if everybody mistakenly logged on as a presenter, they couldn't mess with the display unless the host let them. And the host could then calmly change their authority level back down to attendee status. Something to think about!

Technorati Tags: Live Meeting, Microsoft, web conferencing, web meeting, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

Unqualified Repudiation Of Qualifiers

You all know I read Seth Godin's blog about marketing concepts and execution. Today he added a quick entry exhorting writers of advertising and marketing materials to eliminate "weasel words" from their copy. I offer the same advice in my speaker training to online presenters. You take a huge amount of power away from your message when you add qualifiers such as "kind of", "sort of", "a little like" and so on. George Bush said "Read my lips. No new taxes." It was a remarkably successful sound bite and clearly encapsulated a clear, powerful message. We can leave it to historians and analysts to gauge the followthrough and accuracy of execution. That's not my job. I'll just point out that George didn't say "Read my lips. There will pretty much be no completely new, what you might call taxes."

Figure out the message you want to convey. Develop the evidentiary points that support your message. Then deliver them in concise and unambiguous terms. Kruschev did not get global coverage for his incendiary statement: "We will sort of bury you, after a fashion!"

Technorati Tags: marketing, presentations, presenter training, Seth Godin, speaker training, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar

The Importance Of A Green Room

Many of my clients are keen to save money by using automated telephone conferencing in conjunction with their web seminars. Large enterprises often have a company-standard phone conferencing system in place with pre-assigned phone numbers and access codes for each employee. Using an automated system is probably not a good idea if you are planning to take questions over the telephone. An operator-assisted call lets the operator get caller information, check their volume, queue them up, and announce each questioner in turn.

But if you are taking your questions via a type-in panel on the web conferencing vendor's technology, the use of a live telephone operator is probably overkill. You can just let your listeners dial in with an access code and listen to your voice broadcast while watching your presentation online. (By the way, always find out how to mute listeners' lines so that you don't hear them talking over you while you are presenting. Or worse, have one of them put you on hold, playing music to the rest of the audience!)

There is one serious drawback to using an automated call-in system though. I'm not aware of any such system that gives you a "green room" capability. For those unfamiliar with the term, it comes from the entertainment world and indicates an offstage area where performers can prepare without being seen and heard by the audience. For a web conference, it gives the presenters and administrator(s) a chance to talk and prepare for the session without the telephone audience hearing them. Most operator-assisted meetings have this feature. The operator simply joins the two sessions when the presenters are ready to go live.

Talking to each other before the presentation ensures that everyone is present, lets you cover pre-show reminders, allows you to solve last-minute crises, gives you a chance to check relative volume levels between presenters, and generally eases tension and nerves. All presenters know exactly when you are going on the air.

It doesn't seem to this phone technology layman like a difficult feature to provide. Almost all automated conferencing systems have a way to distinguish between presenters/hosts and audience members already. Simply block the receiving line for audience members until the host punches in a code connecting them with the presenters' audio stream. Voila.

If you are a vendor that allows such a feature on your automated phone conferencing system, please let me know so I can recommend you to my clients. If you are a user of such a system, clue me in. And if you are a phone conferencing vendor looking for a way to introduce a useful differentiating feature, I humbly suggest you add this one before your competitors do.

Technorati Tags: audio conferencing, green room, telephone conferencing, teleconferencing, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar