The Webinar Blog

Web Conferencing Companies Continue To Diversify

A few weeks ago I broke the big news that Webex had acquired the Isoten line of vacuum tension rolls, vacuum chill rolls, and vacuum belts for heavy manufacturing. This week my exclusive is that RainDance has raised $23.7 million to develop a NanoReactor for programmable handling of cells and fluid samples using microfluidics and nanotechnology.

I told you people that collaborative web conferencing was becoming a commodity and that the vendors would have to branch out to expand their value proposition. I just never thought it would happen like this!

Oh, all right... This RainDance is RainDance Technologies Inc., with a capital D in the middle of their name. You really have to watch the capitalization on these companies to tell who's who!

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Technorati Tags: Raindance, WebEx

HearMe On The Web

Before I start my review of HearMe web conferencing software, I'm going to try to figure out the tortured ownership and branding relationships involved in the company.

HearMe was originally a web-based chat service that competed with PalTalk. It went under in 2001 and PalTalk bought up its assets. PalTalk these days acts as the public-facing company name and the product name for a very large social chat network that combines webcam video and computer audio to do audio-visual instant messaging. At least one of their press releases refers to HearMe as being owned and operated by PalTalk. But at the bottom of the HearMe web pages is a copyright notice referring to AVM Software, which doesn't have a separate web presence but seems to be the formal corporate entity that owns both products. The About Us page says that HearMe is a division of AVM Software, Inc. I think that for the remainder of this piece, I'll simply refer to the company as PalTalk and the web conferencing product as HearMe, as they seem to do in most of their writing.

I spoke with Joel Smernoff, the President and COO of PalTalk, about the launch of HearMe. He said that while PalTalk has been serving the "socialcasting" market for some nine years with millions of registered users, they have only recently started a move into the small business web conferencing space. They "soft launched" HearMe towards the end of 2006 and just released version 2.4 as the first solid production version. According to Joel, they are testing it for traction in the marketplace, primarily targeting small and medium businesses who are concerned with keeping costs down and not having to involve IT experts in order to setup, configure, and host web meetings.

The technology base is all taken from PalTalk's field-tested audio/video chat capabilities. PalTalk simultaneously streams multi-directional webcam video and VoIP audio to multiple users. While PalTalk uses downloaded and installed client-side software to support its consumer chat interface, HearMe is completely hosted as a web application. Aside from approving some Active/X controls, there is no software installation needed for presenters or attendees of a meeting. HearMe also makes use of the same physical network that supports PalTalk. Joel told me the company owns in excess of 200 dedicated servers in three data centers spread around the United States.

The company owns patented multicasting technology and Joel is proud of their active load capacity. He says they regularly handle thousands of people in a single virtual room, all sharing voice and audio. He does point out that while they are concerned about keeping latency low, they don't attempt to do perfect synchronization of voice and audio. So an image of a person speaking may show the lips moving out of synch with the sound coming over the computer speakers.

I got a live demo of the software from Hannah Rothman, the Senior Director of Marketing for HearMe. Regular readers know that I have time and again expressed my bias against using webcams for business presentations, so they won't be surprised that I don't own or use one with my business computer. For our demo, Hannah sent me an Ezonics iContact Pro webcam so we could do a true two-way video meeting.

Getting into a pre-set meeting is as easy as clicking a URL link in an email message. If you don't have an active hyperlink, it's a bit trickier, as the identification ID tends to be a very long string of digits. The first time you join a meeting, your browser downloads a plug-in that takes less than one minute to set up. For most browser security configurations the user will have to manually approve the use of Active/X controls.

Once in the meeting room, the interface is very simple. You can share your video with others, choose to see other users' video streams, and use type-in chat. Each feature has additional controls. For instance, video streams are shown by default as a horizontal row of small windows (you can scroll forward and backward if there are too many to fit on a screen). You can select any of the small windows for focus, undocking it from the row and resizing it to get a larger image.

You can also control your audio to put it in one of several operational modes. Push to talk makes your microphone active only while you hold down a screen button with your mouse. Voice activation makes your microphone active whenever it hears an input on your end. And you can also set your microphone to always on so that it doesn't cut in and out (this is the best mode for one-way presentations to a crowd).

The typed chat lets you send messages to the entire audience or to a single named individual (it basically opens up a one-to-one instant messaging window with your selected user). There is no concept of role-based activities, so if you have three speakers the audience cannot choose to send a message to "All Presenters."

You can send a file to an individual or to an entire audience. I was unable to confirm whether the file transfer is peer-to-peer or goes through a central server as an upload and download.

You can also share a document (including PowerPoint slides) or your entire desktop with others. This feature works best with fairly static displays of information. We tested some PowerPoint slide animations and transition effects and they didn't redraw very smoothly. It looked like the presenter side took a snapshot of the screen every half second to second and sent over an entire screen redraw to the receiving end. So a transition effect that showed a slide wiping down over the preceding slide tended to show up as two freeze-frames... one with the slide halfway down the screen and the next one with the animation complete, showing the new slide. Colors and pattern fills were rendered perfectly on the viewing side and I had no trouble seeing detail on the slide content. Desktop sharing always shows the entire desktop... there is no selection of a region to share with your audience.

Audio was clear and understandable during our meeting, but the system often dropped into half-duplex operation. That means that if one person was talking and the other person said something, the first person's voice would cut out. I found this to be mildly annoying in a two-person meeting and I shudder to think what would happen if you had a lot of people in a collaborative session all fighting to be heard at the same time. Hannah said the effect was a known problem in the new HearMe implementation and didn't exist in their PalTalk product. They are working on fixing the audio to allow full duplex operation in an upcoming release.

One of the interface features that concerned me for broadcast events (one-to-many presentations) was that the audience had to take proactive measures to see things the presenter was showing. For instance, if I choose to share my slides the audience has to click on a small icon next to my name in order to see them. I can't force a change of display on their machine. Similarly, after sharing ends, they need to reselect my video to see me again (the video stream stops when you share a document or desktop). I have found that communications can easily break down when you rely on your audience to follow specific directions at a specific time.

I let Hannah and her team know about my dislike for webcam video right up front and asked them how they were seeing adoption by business customers. She said they found video usage to be very high, including applications such as selling stock tips and giving sales presentations. She did say that although they have customers using the software for broadcast events such as training, it was getting more use in small group collaborative applications.

There is no integration of a registration system or attendance reporting, there is no interactive polling (other than the chat window), and there are no overlay white boards for annotating slides or screen shares. When you couple this with a lack of role-based permissions and chat controls, I cannot recommend the system for lead generation or public sign-up webinars.

But I could easily see the use of the software for educational applications as well as internal workgroup sessions where everyone is more casual and willing to be seen on camera. I asked Hannah if the software could accept more professional external video inputs from a studio camera and she said that they had the capability, although it required some configuration support from their team. Currently you need a separate computer for each video window, but a future release might add the ability to run several video feeds into a single presenter's machine. This would be great for a flip chart session where one camera could have a tight focus on the writing surface while another showed the presenter's face. The audience could see both views and concentrate on the appropriate one at any time.

HearMe is designed to compete on a price basis with Citrix GoToMeeting and WebEx MeetMeNow. Everybody seems to have settled on an entry point price of $49/month for a limited number of participants in unlimited numbers of meetings.

If sharing video is a priority for your meeting needs and you don't want to worry about the cost, inconvenience, and technical overhead of setting up a common-room videoconferencing solution, HearMe could be an inexpensive way to get into the game.

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Technorati Tags: audio conferencing, AVM Software, business meetings, collaboration, HearMe, Joel Smernoff, PalTalk, screen sharing, Hannah Rothman, videoconferencing, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcam, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Online Presentation Tips Webinar

My most popular free webinar is back for another appearance! "Improving Your Online Presentation Skills" covers ways to prepare as a speaker, tips and tricks to hold and engage your audience, how to spot bad habits that plague many speakers, and how you can improve your presentation style while becoming more comfortable speaking online.

iLinc Communications is sponsoring the May 8 presentation, and this will give you a great chance to check out their web conferencing software and see how it works. We're trying an experiment and planning the event for just 45 minutes, rather than a full hour. That way you can easily make your subsequent meeting or business call.

We'll be starting at 11am US Pacific time, or 2pm Eastern time. If you are somewhere else in the world, you can use this link to check the local equivalent in your time zone.

As always, this webinar is completely free and is designed as an educational activity rather than a sales pitch. Whenever I give this talk I receive lots of enthusiastic feedback, so I feel comfortable in telling you it will be well worth your time.

Register today at the iLinc website. If you are reading this in a format that doesn't include hyperlinks, the easiest way to get to the registration page is to type in: www.effectivewebinars.com

I hope to see you there. Bring plenty of questions!

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Technorati Tags: iLinc, presentations, presenter training, public speaking, speaker training, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success

Would You Give A Webinar At A Trade Show?

What if you organized a trade show and sold booth space to vendors, advertised the event, got a few thousand people to register... And then nobody showed up? If you were using Unisfair Virtual Events, you'd be perfectly happy.

Unisfair is a California company that sells software enabling a virtual re-creation of a live conference. An event organizer rents a virtual "hall" from Unisfair. The hall consists of auditorium space, exhibitor booths, a media library, professional networking lounges, and a decorated lobby for visitors to enter. The organizer can then sell booth space to exhibitors, charge for sponsorship and signage, charge a registration fee to attendees,and so on. It's very much like a live show, but everything takes place on the computer.

Participating exhibitors can create a complete booth layout, choosing their colors, signage, demo spaces, and available documentation for visitors. But instead of paying for electric drops, plant rental, garbage pickup, carpeting, and setup/tear-down labor, they create their space using software wizards. They can assign salespeople, marketing reps, engineers, and executives to "booth duty" from each person's office. As visitors arrive, they engage in chat sessions with the right people to address their questions. If they happen to show up after hours (when the exhibit hall is "closed") they can browse through the company's documentation or leave a message for later follow-up.

That's all very cool and an interesting take on business collaboration in a familiar context that echoes a real world experience. But this column concentrates on web conferencing and webinars... What's the connection?

Any good public conference is going to feature speakers talking about subjects that the audience wants to hear about. In an online environment, the analogy is a webinar. So the audience can enter the public auditorium and listen to speakers at their scheduled times - with reminders for upcoming presentations broadcast throughout the event "hall" to prompt attendees to stop in. A large conference might organize presentations into topic-specific tracks, with several different presentations going on simultaneously. Of course the advantage to the online version is that each presentation can be recorded and made available very quickly for people who want to catch a subject they missed during its live presentation.

When I talked to Brent Arslaner, the Vice President of Marketing at Unisfair, he told me that another big advantage to giving presentations online is that speakers can pre-record the bulk of their presentation to avoid live session jitters. They can then run the recording of their speech as if they were live, answering audience questions through chat as they go and switching over to a live Q&A session at the end of the canned portion.

I took a look at the webcasting portion of the software and I got a kick out of the big-screen theater motif they used to frame the available presentations. The presentation functionality is fairly simple, by design. You can upload a PowerPoint slide deck, advance through the slides, and chat through text messaging with audience members. The audience can see pictures and biographies of the speakers. Brent says that the software supports PowerPoint animations and slide transitions, although I didn't have a chance to test the implementation myself.

There is no support for live annotation ("whiteboarding") over slides, there is no desktop/application sharing, and there is no support for interactive audience polling. What you do get is field-tested capacity for very large audiences. Brent said they had run a real-world event with 6000 simultaneous participants.

While we're talking about figures and statistics, Brent also impressed me with some studies Unisfair had run on audience behavior patterns. He says they found that customer virtual events tended to average 3000 registrants and 1500 attendees, with the average visit lasting for 2.45 hours. That long attendance span surprised me. Brent allowed that people may leave the event up and running in a browser window, checking back to see when the next presentation of interest is scheduled to start.

Unisfair provides complete event production assistance, including hall design, exhibitor assistance, promotion and marketing, and production and recording of webcasts used in the auditorium. They also provide reports on attendee behaviors and they can put together lead scoring based on a client's indicators of "significant" activities. The majority of business to date has come from the publishing industry, with the big magazines putting on trade shows and conferences in the subject area of their publications.

But Unisfair introduced a new product offering last week designed to serve the needs of single enterprise customers. Virtual events in this space might encompass user conferences, partner shows, or educational summits, as well as general lead generation. I tried out a virtual event that Tibco had put together as an enterprise conference and I liked the way that it felt more interesting and "seductive" than simply posting a list of available webinars and marketing documents on a web page.

This is a fun and potentially lucrative application of some established functionality in a new and appealing context. The business world can use more of these unique ways to make remote collaboration more friendly and familiar. Kudos to Unisfair.

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Technorati Tags: business meetings, collaboration, Event Center, lead generation, marketing, presentations, publishing, Unisfair, Virtual Event, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Google's Riding On The Marratech Express

Several people have asked me why I didn't write something about Friday's much-covered news on Google's acquisition of web conferencing software from Sweden's Marratech AB. I have been somewhat amused by the brief flurry of articles that came out on Friday talking about the deal. You can get links to many of the articles on my Webinar Success Industry News page.

Almost all the articles compared Google's acquisition to that of WebEx by Cisco, and many of the authors attempted to build up the acquisition as a direct competitive shot at WebEx. Sorry, but that just doesn't fly.

Firstly, there's not much hard news available on the subject. The entire public statement is limited to a two-paragraph entry on the Google corporate blog. There is no press release and no statement for investors or analysts. So we can assume that this is not a material event affecting Google's business outlook, plans, or financial status.

The limited nature of the deal is highlighted by the phrasing (which the Google blog authors felt they had to clarify in an update to their entry). Google didn't acquire Marratech, they got some of the company's conferencing software. And while Marratech works in the fields of audio, video, and web conferencing, the Google blog says that it acquired "Marratech's videoconferencing software." So it is unclear as to whether the web conferencing piece is even involved.

The Google blog is worded to make it sound like the videoconferencing software was purchased for their employees' own internal use in meeting remotely. There is no mention of public availability of a new Google product offering, nor any announcement of plans in that direction.

And for the people trying to build this up as analogous to the Cisco/WebEx deal, you're simply comparing apples and oranges. WebEx was the market share leader in the field of web-based conferencing. It had massive resources (both technical and human) around the globe. It had widespread public awareness and business penetration fueled by years of massive spending on sales and marketing. It had a wide-ranging set of products covering specific application niches. And it had a strong partner technologybase that made it attractive as a "hook" for further integrations and market expansion. Marratech is not in the same ballpark.

Mind you, this is no condemnation of Marratech's software. I haven't seen it in action at all and I have no opinion about it - positive or negative. They have had some nice reviews in a couple of published software evaluations.

If I had to guess, I'd put my money on Google being shocked and surprised at the attention and reactions they stirred up from their little blog entry. They probably thought of it as a sideline item -- interesting to some techies and to their employees who meet remotely. If Google wants to publish something more substantive about product plans or enterprise software availability I'll be interested to read it. But in the meantime, this little purchase -- whatever it really entails between the two companies -- simply makes me shrug and wish them luck with their collaborative infrastructure.

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Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, Google, Marratech, videoconferencing, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcasting, WebEx

Scheduling International Events

Americans have among the fewest national work holidays in the international community. It's pretty easy for us to schedule events targeted at an American demographic and know that we aren't trying to attract a business audience on a national holiday. But if you are trying to reach an international audience things get much trickier.

Many American companies think in terms of regions. "We'll target this at EMEA" or "We'll target that at APAC." For those of you not familiar with those acronyms, EMEA stands for Europe/Middle East/Africa and APAC stands for Asia/Pacific. They are standard ways of grouping responsibilities for worldwide sales in many US companies.

Unfortunately, companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa don't exactly think of themselves as one big happy family, all bound by the same work customs. Even if you take a more compact area such as continental Europe, you will find that work schedules may vary significantly from country to country.

When deciding on dates for your webinars, get in touch with your regional sales or support managers responsible for the countries you are targeting. They ought to know about the events from the start, as they may be able to offer help with content or issues that are important to their prospects and customers in the region. But they can also help you avoid scheduling disasters, when you choose a date that is a work holiday in their area.

If you don't have access to "feet on the ground" in a country, you can turn to the Web for help. One of the most useful utilities I have found is a pop-up Internet application that lets you enter a date and see an alphabetical list of countries that observe that date as a "Bank Holiday" (the common term for a nationally-recognized holiday that has a good chance of being observed by businesses). The application is available at http://www.ddi.co.uk/International_Holidays-new.htm

Another approach is to enter a specific country and see a list of bank holidays they observe. One utility I found for this is available at the Q++ Holidays Portal. This site seems to be tremendously authoritative on the subject of international holidays. It has a lot of ways to check all bank holidays for a country or all countries observing a date. They include footnotes for people who need detailed information.

I wish I had known about these sites earlier. They might have helped me avoid some low turnouts for international events.

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Technorati Tags: bank holiday, business meetings, holidays, lead generation, marketing, scheduling, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, web event, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar

Using Informz With WebEx

A press release crossed the wires the other day about Informz joining the WebEx Connect Developer Network. WebEx has been actively touting the many companies signing up to be a part of its "mashup" networkdesigned to foster better collaborative and communications-oriented business processes.

I hadn't heard of Informz, but I was intrigued by the description of their services, so I called and talked to Meghan Curtin in their Channel Sales group. She explained that Informz has been around since 1997 and over the past seven years has been helping companies with email marketing and promotion. In 2005 they started working with WebEx to tie in the email design, delivery, and tracking services they offer with WebEx Event Center webinars.

Informz has a three-pronged approach to assisting companies with their email campaigns. A professional services group will work with the client on graphics, layout, and copy to attract attendees to an event. Their delivery network will push the emails out to the client's recipient list and track delivery. Then the software tracks delivery success, mail opens, and link-throughs to the promoted event. The delivery side of things is said to be more effective than many self-service models used by companies, as Informzis "white listed" on major ISPs such as AOL to allow messages to go through that might otherwise be blocked as spam.

This is in some ways a turbo-charging of the facilities already available in WebEx Event Center, since that software lets you build email templates and schedule invitations, reminders, and follow-up messages. But integrating with Informz gives you more control over the email content (I have had troubles with HTML layouts in the WebEx templates) and adds the benefits mentioned on the tracking and delivery side.

The big caveat on using Informz is that they do not work with external list vendors. They assume that the names on the recipient list are owned and vetted by the client. That effectively means that you can't use them to drum up new leads in big outbound marketing pushes. Meghan confirmed this, saying that they were used mainly for events related to customer training and communications or fee-based seminar offerings to selected audiences. Although Informz has worked out an integration with VeriSign to processpayments for events on behalf of their clients, they haven't used it in action yet.

I asked Meghan about their relationship with WebEx as a vendor partner and how the Cisco takeover had affected them. She told me that they haven't had any communications from Cisco or WebEx related to the deal, so she has to assume it's business as usual. But she did admit that some words of comfort would be welcome at this point! She also said that development on tying into the Connect Network was in the earliest stages, so she couldn't comment on how the new application platform would affect their services.

I had hoped for more utility with outbound marketing campaigns to the general public, as my clients tend to work in that space. But I can see how this integration could be useful for companies using Event Center primarily for client-based communications or those with large internal email lists.

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Technorati Tags: email invitations, Event Center, Informz, marketing, Meghan Curtin, web conference, web conferencing, web event, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, WebEx Connect, webinar

Using Numbers To Punch Up Presentations

My friend Darcy at Fair Isaac Corporation shared a fascinating tip with me for making more effective presentations. This is something I had never really thought about. He says that publishers have long been aware of the power of numbers in grabbing people's attention. Think about titles of popular books such as "1,000 Places To See Before You Die" and "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

Television does it with their countdown shows and websites do it with lists: "AFI's 100 Greatest American Movies" or "VH1's 100 Greatest Kid Stars."

And Darcy offers evidence that he spends too much time in supermarket checkout aisles by demonstrating that popular mass market magazines use the trick on their covers all the time.

The idea of an enumerated list of pointers seems to appeal to us as audiences. We know that there is a finite limit to the information we'll be receiving and that it has been structured and organized, giving us hope that it will be more informative and useful. We also seem to enjoy the challenge of guessing what might be on the list and comparing our ideas with those of the presenter.

Why not give this a try the next time you need to promote a webinar? Instead of a title like "Xycomeginy Software Release 5.0 - New Features," you could make it sing by combining an audience perspective with a list: "8 Ways The New Xycomeginy Release Benefits You."

New Webex Acquisition Announced!

Yes, it's absolutely true. Webex just announced that they are buying a new line of products from CCR. Webex will take over all brand rights, products, proprietary designs, and technical documentation.

Does it seem strange that a company that just got acquired should be buying up other companies' products? Not really... This Webex doesn't capitalize the second E in their name. This one is Webex, Inc. - not WebEx Communications. This Webex is "a leading manufacturer of precision rollers for the web handling and converting industry."

I have no idea what that means, but I'm fairly sure it is not directly involved with collaborative internet-based communications. File this one away the next time you want to win a bar bet among computer geeks. Happy Friday!

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Is IBM Shopping For Webinar Technology?

I just heard such a juicy piece of gossip that I simply must share it with you. Mind you, this is all unsubstantiated rumors and I claim no inside knowledge of any undisclosed business dealings whatsoever. But come along with me on a flight of fancy if you will...

My unnamed source says that the recent Cisco acquisition of WebEx came as an eleventh-hour shock to IBM, which had gone through a complete due-diligence process on WebEx and was already drafting press releases about their purchase of the company. Suddenly, whammo... Cisco pulled the rug out from under them.

If that's true, then we can suppose that IBM would still be hungry for an established web conferencing technology they could take over. Of course IBM already has Lotus web conferencing (aka: Sametime), but it's never made a big splash in the general business/consumer market. For one thing, it is designed for on-premise deployment, rather than hosted use ina SaaS (Software as a Service) mode. Companies that use a Lotus platform for instant messaging have the software for internal communications, but I have to say that I have never been invited to a Lotus web conference as an external participant. Ever. And in my former life as a product marketer and product manager for high tech software I participated in a lot of web conferences with a lot of companies. Including IBM.

This started me thinking about who's left as an independent player in the web conferencing space. I did a quick rumination on the subject back when Cisco first announced the WebEx buyout. I could only come up with iLinc, ON24, and Citrix Online as viable candidates. Citrix seems unlikely, as it is such a huge and well capitalized company and buying one business division and itsproducts from them would be a major hassle. ON24 has a good base of webcasting services and products, but it seems to me that the most attractive target would be iLinc. Its stock is incredibly cheap right now, trading in the neighborhood of 64 cents per share. Early investors there watched the stock drop from near $9 to less than $2 in the first year alone and it's never recovered. I would imagine there are people who would be delightedto get a buyout boost on their stock and would quickly approve such a deal.

iLinc also has a product model that is similar to WebEx's successful separation of web conferencing product versions for interactive group meetings, one-to-many presentations, training applications, and support applications.

But before any of my readers go running off to buy iLinc stock in anticipation of an imminent run-up, I should also point out that the company is unlike WebEx in many significant ways. It doesn't have the massive market share and public awareness that WebEx had built up through years of big marketing expenditures. It doesn't have the associated collaborative products and partnerships that WebEx had developed to incorporate instant messaging, shared workspaces, and office applications. And it hasn't created atechnical platform analogous to WebEx Connect for integrating third party SaaS "mashups."

So the question is, would IBM be interested in supplementing or replacing its pure-play web conferencing solution with another one more targeted at the general (non IBM enterprise) business market? Or was WebEx a unique opportunity because of the associated benefits it had beyond the web conferencing technology alone?

I'm looking forward to seeing the new 9.0 release of iLinc's web conferencing software this summer. I wonder if anyone else out there is looking forward to it for other reasons?

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Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, IBM, iLinc, Sametime, web collaboration, web conference, web conferencing, webcasting, WebEx, webinar