The Webinar Blog

Infinite Conferencing Introduces QuickCast

Infinite Conferencing has finally announced availability of a new product called QuickCast. The software lets you record presentations with slides and narration for viewing on demand over the Internet.

I had a conversation with Joe Buz, the Director of Product Development at Infinite Conferencing, a few weeks ago and got a preview of QuickCast. I haven't seen the formal press release yet, but it may be on the wires by the time you read this. I decided it was ethical to break the news after I received a product announcement email from the company.

QuickCast serves a particular niche in the conferencing market. It is designed for companies that want to create presentations designed from the get-go for later viewing upon request. Many web conferencing technologies will let you record a live meeting and archive it for additional views, but QuickCast gives you several advantages. You can record and edit narration for a single slide at a time. This in itself is a huge benefit when trying to create smooth, professional sounding recordings. It is impossible to record 20-60 minutes of monologue without making a flub somewhere. You can then assemble and reuse slides to form complete presentations. You can also create registration pages and get reports on who has watched your presentation and the answers to registration questions. A unique value-add service mentioned on the website is the ability to hire Infinite Conferencing to arrange for professional narration using your script, or translation and re-dubbing in another language.

You can watch an overview presentation of the product features (hosted by Joe himself) by using this link. The viewer is offered for Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. For some reason, my computer had hiccups in the playback when watching with WMP, but it ran smoothly with Real.

Infinite is offering a free trial of QuickCast from their website. I tried out the software by creating a small recorded presentation from a few slides. Uploading the slides to the QuickCast server was fast. The player does not retain PowerPoint animations or slide transitions. All slides are converted to static images. There are a number of configuration options for your QuickCast presentation. You can upload a logo for your landing page, a picture of the presenter, and documents that you want your audience to be able to download. You can set required and optional registration fields for your viewing audience, contact information for your company (as interactive links), and so forth. I found myself missing a few user conveniences. You can't easily see the images you have uploaded for logo and presenter. There is no indication of the proper scale or pixel size for these images on the screen, although the available PDF instruction manual has this information (it is unusually complete and well written). While your logo is presented on the initial landing page, the QuickCast player prominently displays Onstream logos in two places and leaves yours off. I would think the company would want to offer branding of the player as a paid option if nothing else. By the way, Onstream is the parent company of Infinite Conferencing and makes the underlying conferencing platform.

You record your narration for each slide over the telephone, using a dial-in number and identifier code associated with your slide presentation. Enter this code correctly the first time or else the system hangs up on you without a second chance for re-entry. An automated system steps you through the commands to record, review, or discard narration for each slide. I had several instances where the software did not recognize a pressed number and simply hung up on me. Not the friendliest or most forgiving user interface I've seen for an automated entry system. I would recommend a change to the recording interface as well. When you hit a button signaling that you are ready to begin recording, you hear a message telling you to start after the tone and how to press the # key to end. Then you get that tone whether you are ready for it or not. I would rather push a button when I am ready to start talking. Sometimes during that informational message I find that I'm in the middle of a breath or a swallow when they play the go-tone. And the message gets rather repetitive and annoying after you have recorded a few slides and know the process.

During playback, the audio transitions from one slide recording to the next were very smooth and seamless. It is important to make your recordings over the same telephone in the same location so that differences in microphone response and room acoustics don't vary your sound from one slide to the next. I have a very good headset, but I still found that the sound on my recording was significantly better when I used the phone's handset for recording. Audio purists might appreciate the addition of a feature somewhere down the road that would let them upload a digital audio file to use as the narration for each slide. This would allow an engineer to balance sound levels between slide recordings and would allow the narrator to make the recording in a more professional environment with better equipment than the standard office telephone.

Pricing for the product is $99.95 per month, with no contracted commitment to long term use. This gives you the right to make an unlimited number of QuickCast presentations, with up to 500 audience views per month.

QuickCast addresses a very real need for the business marketplace. Recorded presentations should be viewed as distinct entities from live webinars. QuickCast's extra features for creating, editing, assembling, and tracking usage of your recordings offers serious benefits over trying to get the same functionality out of web conferencing products designed for real-time collaboration. The only other player I know of in this space is BrainShark. I think the competition between the two companies should be positive for both products and certainly for us as users.

Technorati Tags: Brainshark, Infinite Conferencing, Onstream, Onstream Media, QuickCast, webcast, webcasting

Raindance Support Still Impresses

Back when Raindance was its own company, I wrote up some kudos for the tech support department there. Now it has been acquired by InterCall (part of West Corporation) and I wondered about how it would affect the support I had enjoyed in the past. I'm happy to report that accolades are still in order.

On Saturday they pulled the system offline for some upgrades to the software. Today (Sunday) I got online bright and early to add a few user names to an event for a client. Something wasn't working right. It wouldn't accept the passwords for the new users. I called tech support at 10am Eastern, which is 7am where they are. The phone was answered after a single ring by Mike, who was finishing up his all-night shift. No automated recordings, no "press a number for help." I described the problem I was having and Mike tried it out on his side to verify that it wasn't my fault. He started to write up a problem ticket and I asked him if he could escalate it since the client event was the next day and we had to get these accounts entered and invitations sent out. He said that he would send it over to the engineering team right away. 45 minutes later, I got a call back from Mike asking me to try it again. They had fixed the problem.

That's some kind of service for a Sunday morning. I wish all the web conferencing vendors were so responsive. Nice work InterCall / Raindance team / tech support / engineering. And thank you, Mike!

Technorati Tags: InterCall, Raindance, tech support, web conference, web conferencing, webcasting, webinar, West Corporation

Webinars About Webinars

You have two chances to score some free tips about making your webinar efforts better and more effective. The first is scheduled for Wednesday, January 31 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. Citrix Systems is hosting Michael Osterman of Osterman Research and Bob Hanson of Quantum Leap Marketing for an event called "How To Unleash The Power Of Lead-Generation Webinars." They will discuss tips, techniques, and strategies focused on finding new sales prospects through public webinars. You can register at this link.

The second event is an encore presentation by yours truly on techniques for becoming a better speaker on webinars and webcasts. My audiences seem to love this one and it gets very high ratings. I cover a lot of practical suggestions for things you can practice on your own and with the help of friends. Adobe is hosting this event on Thursday, February 8 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. You can register by visiting my web page for upcoming events: www.effectivewebinars.com

Take advantage of the free education. Others charge you cash for this kind of information!

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Citrix, presenter training, Quantum Leap Marketing, Osterman Research, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

A Look At Learn.com WebRoom

Learn.com has been around since 1998, mainly offering software and services to support online learning. They recently announced a new software product called WebRoom, which is designed to enable web conferencing in conjunction with, or independent of, formal coursework. Yesterday I had a discussion and demo with JW Ray, the COO of Learn.com and Dave Castella, the Director of WebRoom Sales.

I started by asking for some context. Is WebRoom intended for collaborative group meetings or for public "one-to-many" events? They told me that the goal is for the product to support both needs equally well. My tour through this first release left me feeling that customers would be better off using it for collaborative meetings at this point. An upgrade release is scheduled for Spring of 2007, promising to add some of the features I feel are important for public webinars. JW says that Learn.com sees itself as a one-vendor resource for enterprise employee management "from pre-hire to retire." They want companies to use the software for initial candidate screening, employee training, employee meetings and development, external communications, and so on. He repeated a phrase I had just heard earlier in the day from a Wainhouse Research analyst... "One throat to choke," meaning that customers shouldn't be subjected to a round-robin of finger pointing between different vendors if software or services are not delivering.

WebRoom was developed in-house as an offshoot of the larger LearnCenter software that has been the company's bread and butter. They have not OEM'd any other conferencing software as part of the package, giving them complete control over release schedules, enhancement priorities, and support.

WebRoom currently requires both presenters and attendees to be on Windows-based PC's. It loads an EXE installation file the first time you attempt to join a meeting and my Internet Explorer 7 browser made me go through about three separate Active/X confirmations to get into the meeting. These were particularly frustrating, as each confirmation threw me back to a previous step, where I had to re-enter the meeting password to continue. Learn.com needs to make this load-and-go process smoother and quicker for attendees.

The main meeting interface is simple and familiar to any web conferencing user. There is a main display area for sharing whiteboard content or live desktop applications. There is an attendee names list with a few controls. And there is a chat box that allows typing messages back and forth. The annotation interface for marking up whiteboards is icon-based and straightforward. You can change the color for your annotations and you can add filled or hollow rectangles and circles, straight lines, freeform pen strokes, text, or a pointing arrow. I made a suggestion that Learn.com change the arrow so it points to the right instead of pointing left. This lets you highlight a bullet point without covering up the text. The arrow also always shows the username of the person who puts it on the screen. A useful feature for collaborative sessions where a number of people may be making points, but distracting in a single-presenter public event.

The attendee list allows some simple audience feedback. An audience member can right-click on his or her name in the list and select from a fixed (non-customizable) list of choices. Currently these are Speed Up/Slow Down and Yes/No. The interface is not apparent, and a latecomer who doesn't get instructions about using the right click would probably never discover the feature. Presenters can see the individual responses in the attendee list and a percentage summary at the bottom of the screen. You cannot display cumulative results to the audience. The upcoming Spring release is supposed to add support for more formal audience polling. It will also add the ability to do private person-to-person chat. Currently, messages are always seen by all attendees. Synchronized web/audio recording will also be added at that time. Right now you can only record the telephone audio. The product does not support VOIP (internet-delivered audio) for meeting attendees. That is scheduled for addition by the end of 2007. Telephone audio may be purchased from Learn.com's partnership with InterCall or you can use your own teleconferencing service. The end of year release should also add support for videoconferencing. There is no live video window in the interface at this time (a fact that doesn't bother me in the least, as I feel this feature gets overused to the detriment of most meetings).

PowerPoint presentations can be imported and saved for use in a meeting, but they are converted to a succession of static images and are shown in sequence in the whiteboard. As such, they may be marked up with annotations, but obviously do not support slide transitions or animations. You can display a PowerPoint slide show from your desktop, but the full-screen scrape and transmit algorithm updates the image every half-second to second, meaning that you lose slide transitions and many smooth-motion animations. I found the screen sharing to work smoothly for most standard applications, with transitions rapidly updated, browser windows scrolled in synch with the presenter's actions, and drop down menus appearing quickly when selected by the presenter. The poll-and-draw mechanism couldn't quite keep up with rapid cursor movements, so as an attendee I saw the cursor jump between different points on the screen. Don't try to make a point by wiggling your cursor next to your subject! As a presenter sharing your desktop you have several options, including show entire desktop, show a particular application, or show everything except a named application. There is no facility for showing anything that appears within a defined rectangle on your screen.

So far it all sounds rather conventional and unexciting, but I haven't come to the sweet spot for Learn.com. WebRoom really shines on all the activities that occur outside the meeting itself. The company's emphasis on portal management for communications activities gives WebRoom an amount of flexibility and user customization that is nothing short of superb. You can customize almost everything that would impact your attendees' use of a meeting room: before, during, and after the live meeting itself.

This starts with defining the information you want to capture about attendees. Learn.com offers a long list of demographic information fields you can elect to use or omit. But you can add any number of custom fields, either as fill-in-the-blank or dropdown answer lists. You can pick and choose from these as required or optional fields to get into a lobby area, preregister for a meeting, attend a meeting, download materials, and so on. If you charge for your events, Learn.com offers a complete payment processing system integrated with the product, using the standard VeriSign gateway for credit card processing.

Scheduling meetings is done through a point and click interface and you can customize notification and reminder emails, choosing embeddable fields to be used in your messages with your choice of text content and delivery schedule.

Reporting is also highly configurable. If you don't see the attendance/registration report you want in the preconfigured list of report options, you can create and store your own report by selecting from all the standard and custom defined fields for users and events.

One of the most distinctive features is the ability to create separate WebRooms for different uses. Each can be configured with its own look and feel, authentication, meeting schedule, and so on. This is like getting multiple licensed accounts from most of the other web conferencing vendors. It's great for parent corporations that want a single license to cover separate use by their children companies. Each company could have its own meeting rooms with appropriate branding. Or you could create a specially branded and authorized WebRoom for a particular client or partner.

WebRooms stay active and available outside of a scheduled meeting time, so authorized users can visit them to check out documents and materials you post on the site, to take tests or answer questions, or even to work with interactive forums and chat rooms using technology supplied by and hosted by Learn.com. That's a huge additional feature that most conferencing providers can't match.

The software can be licensed for on-site installation at your facility behind your firewall or it can be used as a hosted service offering from Learn.com's servers. The licensing models include annual contracts for unlimited use up to a contracted number of total users or simultaneous attendees per meeting. You can also try it out for a single event on a one-month use contract. Learn.com does charge a one-time setup fee that includes integration with your Outlook client (if you choose not to use the internal mail facility in the product).

I'm looking forward to seeing the Spring enhancements that will make WebRoom more useful for public broadcast events. In the meantime, the flexibility for customization, ability to create multiple branded rooms, and pre/post event functionality make WebRoom a serious contender for enterprise conferencing use.

Technorati Tags: Learn.com, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webinar, WebRoom

The Old Blue And Green

I definitely owe Yugma an apology. I was teasing them for using blue and green in their logo, pointing out that WebEx also uses blue and green:

Yugma 

WebEx 

But once the subject caught my attention, I started to notice that blue and green seem to have turned into the de facto colors of web conferencing! If your logo isn't made up of those colors, there's a good chance your website uses them. To wit:

ReadyTalk 

Convoq ASAP 

Learn.com WebRoom 

Infinite Conferencing 

WebcastGroup 

Live Conference PRO 

ConferenceNow 

Stretching a bit to make the point, but there they are on the Citrix GoToWebinar site too!

And who takes the award as ultimate champion of the blue and green? Why, it's CatwalkConference.com!

The various vendors may never agree on a complete set of standards for conferencing, but if it ever comes down to a majority vote on a standardized color scheme, we've got it covered.

Technorati Tags: CatwalkConference, Citrix, Convoq, Infinite Conferencing, Learn.com, Live Conference PRO, logo design, ReadyTalk, ConferenceNow, web conferencing, WebcastGroup, webcasting, WebEx, WebRoom, yugma

The Yugma Look

In a previous entry, I wrote a snippy little analysis of Yugma's company logo as perhaps a bit... derivative of a competitor's. Karel Lukas, the COO of Yugma, wrote me a very nice email in which he completely resisted the urge to call me a sniveling little hack, filling space by denigrating the efforts of others. Instead, he took the high road and simply shared with me the thoughts behind the logo design. I'll quote Karel:

The logo consists of four elements tied together by an overlaying circle. This is intended to symbolize the Sanskrit meaning of the company's name. Yugma means confluence, or a coming together. The graphical elements also suggest a more literal description of what Yugma is, a service that allows users to collaborate in a single space. Think rivers coming together, birds flying together, people being together, etc. The significance of the four leaves was to emphasize that we are more than just two things getting together. That, plus the fact that our actual colors are different, has never left us thinking about the connection between the two logos.

Now that's what I get for sleeping through my college class on Sanskrit. I had pulled a logo from a button on their site, which cropped the aforementioned extending leaves to produce a green and blue circle image. Here is the full logo, uncropped:

Thank you, Karel!

Technorati Tags: LetsPowwow, logo design, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, yugma

ON24 Tracks Webcast Use By Publishers

ON24 has put together a report on statistics culled from webcasting usage among their customers in the B2B publishing industry. I had a chance to see an early copy of the report and I talked to Cece Lee, ON24's marketing communications manager, about the findings.

The data was based on information collected from around 2,200 webcasts given by 35 different publishing companies in the first six months of 2005 and the first six months of 2006. The companies were all customers of ON24 and the data was collected automatically from the registration and attendance data that is stored on ON24's servers when an event is produced. The customers did not have to collect, filter, or supply any of the data manually. The report concentrates on cumulative summary data... there are no breakdowns for individual webcasts or customers. I asked Cece about the makeup of the customer base that was used and she said it included big national portal sites that sponsor events for their clients as part of a revenue generating approach as well as company-specific events from smaller publishers. ON24's press release mentions Penton Media and CMP Technology, which are examples of the very large electronic publishers using ON24's webcasting technology.

ON24 elected to simply publish the results and not make any comments or predictions based on the findings. I'm not as reticent about forming opinions, so let's see what juicy tidbits we can find.

The report's first statistic is a nice one for ON24. There was a 33.3% increase in the number of webcasts included in the study between 1st half 2005 and 1st half 2006. Of course that doesn't say anything about the industry at large, but it means that at least this set of publishers got more use out of the technology. That's a trend I'd like to see reflected across all industry segments and all vendors!

The number of live webcasts (scheduled for a particular date and time) increased year to year, while the number of webcasts offered only on-demand (for viewing at the audience's convenience) decreased. There are a few things that come to mind when looking at this statistic. First is that these publishers may well be responding to a widespread belief... The impact of webcast content is much greater when the audience is watching a live event. Audience response is better when they know they are interacting with someone else on the other end of the broadcast line (even when that interaction is passive). If you get better results from live shows, you might as well do more of those.

But there are other potential causal factors. For one thing, I noticed that the numbers for 2006 didn't add up to 100% when looking at the categories for "Live Events" and "On Demand Events." I asked Cece what happened to an extra 2% of events and she said they were ones that couldn't be classified as strictly live or on-demand. Special cases that straddled the definition boundaries were apparently not statistically significant in the 2005 group. That might show better reuse of events by the producers to continue getting more benefit from them after the initial showing. This is something I always recommend for my clients. As a matter of fact, another statistic in the report showed that offering an on-demand archive of a live event results in a significant increase in the total number of audience views.

This statistic could also show a preference for use of the ON24 webcasting technology for live events. Different products are best at different things, and the publishers might be responding to a "fitness for use" issue where they felt more comfortable with the technology for live webcasts. Pure supposition on my part.

One of the sections of the report that really caused me to sit up and take notice was the numbers for event registration and attendance. The average for the study group was over 500 registrants per event with conversion rates (registrants who attended) declining from 61% in 2005 to 56% in 2006. Wow! The general consensus for public events such as marketing lead generators is that you can count on a mass market conversion rate of about 33% from registrants to attendees. These publishers are doing something extremely right!

My guess is that they have a huge advantage with targeted subscriber lists and opt-ins from readers self-selected for interest in a particular subject area. The publishers have a legitimate, authorized communication channel to their list base, where people are more likely to open, read, and act on an email invitation than you can get with mass market email lists. Something to think about when you are considering how to push a lead generation webinar. The big publishers can charge a lot of money to co-sponsor an event, but if they include promotion and marketing to a receptive audience with result rates like this, it can definitely be worth it.

When looking at audience behavior, I was not surprised to see that attendees tended to stay connected significantly longer for live events than for on-demand webcasts. If you are producing events for on-demand use, you need to cut down the content and cut down the length. Attention spans and patience are both shorter when watching pre-recorded material. It is worth the effort to repackage content specifically for on-demand considerations.

A section of the report dealing with type of content completely baffles me. ON24 segmented webcasts into those containing live video versus those using only slides and voice narration. They said that webcasts with video saw significant increases in the number of registrants and the number of attendees from 2005 to 2006. At the same time, registrations and attendance for slide/audio webcasts decreased slightly. I don't know what to say about this. I have not seen many (any?) advertisements or promotions for webcasts that mention whether speaker video will be included. I can't imagine that this is significantly affecting the decision of potential attendees. I wonder if it is a non-causal relationship of independent factors. If the big publishers with better promotion and marketing machines also happen to be the ones that use video, it might look like video performs better, when in actuality it is just the marketing and list quality that is better. I'd love to see more study on this.

The use of polls, surveys, and Q&A text interaction is very high across the study groups. There were slight decreases from 2005 to 2006 on an overall basis, but I'm guessing this is probably because producers got smarter about not including them in recorded or on-demand events. Still, over 85% of all events include these kinds of interactivity features. At the same time, audience response levels dropped when looking at polls and surveys year to year. Event producers are not helping the situation by including more and more self-serving polls, rather than ones pitched as beneficial to the audience. I have talked about this in past posts. Don't treat your audience as lab rats for the benefit of your marketing department!

You can request a copy of the report at the ON24 website or by emailing [email protected].

Forrester Report On Webcasting Available

Forrester Research just released a new report by Claire Schooley on the use of webcasts in large organizations. It's a rather high level introduction to the topic, going all the way back to the differences between a webcast and a collaborative web conference.

Forrester interviewed 13 vendors for the report: Accordent Technoloies, Adobe Systems, Avacast, Interactive Video Technologies (IVT), Media Publisher, ON24, Online Video Service, Reflect Systems, Sonic Foundry, Streamlogics, TalkPoint Communications, Vcall, and Vodium.

The report costs $380 if you don't already have a Forrester contract covering this research area. It is 13 pages long. I obviously can't go into too much detail about the content, as I would be violating copyright and giving away information they are selling. A lot of the content concerns definitions and basic background, such as a simplified example of what a webcast interface might look like to a viewer. That seems like something you could get pretty quickly by simply attending any random webcast promoted on the Internet!

The report goes into more detail on the subject of hosted versus on-premise installed software for producing webcasts, but doesn't get into the nitty gritty of associated costs and technical considerations when going the on-premise route. There are some large matrix tables of features and services offered by various technology vendors.

Interestingly (and refreshingly), Forrester offers a money-back guarantee on the order page. If you are not completely satisfied with your research document for any reason, you can return it for a full refund within three weeks of your online purchase. That's risky business practice for a product that can be read for the information value and then returned with no loss to the customer, but it shows good integrity by Forreseter.

Technorati Tags: Claire Schooley, Forrester, vendor selection, webcast, webcasting

How To Discourage Event Attendance

Ephraim Schwartz has an entry in his Reality Check blog for InfoWorld in which he expresses dissatisfaction with registration and attendance requirements for a recent IBM/Lotus web conference. He quotes the registration notice for the Lotus product announcement webinar:

"To participate in the Web conference you will need an IBM ID and password. If you already have an IBM ID and password you may proceed directly to the Web conference. If you do not have an IBM ID... [he paraphrases the rest] setting one up is quick and easy and will only take 10 minutes, after which it will be activated within another ten minutes."

Schwartz says that as a busy reporter on deadline, he doesn't have 20 minutes "to play games with passwords and user IDs."

It would be easy to get all snippy at this point and call Ephraim a whiner, but he accurately represents a huge proportion of your potential audience for any event. Every extra step you force prospects to take and every extra minute of their time they have to spend pre-event reduces the likelihood that they will sign up and attend your webcast.

People who use the Internet for research and communication expect things to be available on demand at their request. Putting delays and barriers to fulfillment frustrates your audience before you even get a chance to start communicating with them.

Think carefully about what you really need from your audience to fulfill your own goals. If you follow up events with an email, just ask for their name and email address at registration. Everything else is gravy. Add a poll or survey or web page to get additional information once you have them hooked. A great way to get this additional information is to send out a pre-event email and ask your registrants what is of interest to them and what they want to hear about on event day. Now that you are offering them something of benefit for their efforts and engaging in a two-way communication, they are more likely to tell you more about themselves without getting frustrated.

Naturally, the ground rules change for events that require additional security. If registrants have to pay to attend, they should expect to provide information about themselves as they would for any type of electronic payment transaction. If the webinar information is confidential and is only being offered to a select group of qualified participants, they should expect to have to identify themselves as part of that group. In both cases it is important to remind your audience why you are asking for the additional information and to make them feel special (and unthreatened).

I'm aware that the idea of setting up IDs and passwords on a site basis has a legitimate rationale behind it. If people have a unique identifier, they can avoid having to reenter all their personal details every time they want to view one of your events. This is a convenience they should appreciate! Unfortunately, the psychology of event attendance doesn't work that way. People don't assume they will be coming back and viewing many different shows from you. Their decision to attend an event is based on an impulse spurred by the specific content offered for that webcast and their availability at the time and date it is offered. Giving them an additional ID and password for yet another website (with yet another potential for hacking and loss of personal information) is seen as an imposition, not a benefit.

[Disclaimer... I'm talking almost exclusively about public marketing and informational events. Not remote training and coursework that has an expectation of continuity and multiple sessions.]

With all that said, I have to point out that if you register to attend my webinar with Adobe covering tips for online speakers, you're going to go through the same kind of ID/Password request I've just been arguing against. Sorry. I have no control over this, as I'm just a humble guest speaker and not in charge of the Adobe site. Adobe puts on lots of web events, and somebody at corporate decided to make life easier for the stalwarts who come back time and again. So for a simple one-off visit to my webinar, you will be asked to create an Adobe visitor ID and you'll get a password. It takes a little extra time. I hope you'll go ahead and jump through the extra hoop. My audiences for this topic have been very complimentary about the content and presentation, and I think you'll find it was worth the extra effort.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Ephraim Schwartz, Lotus, presentations, presenter training, IBM, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

The First Taste Was Free...

Now you have to pay for it.

Adobe announced "Commercial Availability" of Acrobat Connect today. That means that the free trial period they had been running, allowing all those Adobe Acrobat users to try out personal web conferencing meeting rooms, is over. It costs $39/month or $395/year. This is where the rubber meets the road. Will Acrobat lead enough new customers to the web conferencing product? Will they pay for the privilege? Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: Acrobat Connect, Adobe, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting