PhoneTopp is a brand new startup (since March 2008) that just announced an alpha version of a smartphone support technology to make web conferences work better on mobile phones.
The concept is intriguing. Their software is supposed to put the user into the conference session with a minimum of fuss, optimize the data flow from the conference to the phone, provide specialized screen navigation functions for use on a tiny display, and let users independently rewind to review slides.
The company says its "market entry strategy is to embrace and extend the leading web meeting services and partner with service providers." So we can expect that they don't want to reinvent the basics of web conferencing themselves, but instead offer a new delivery vehicle for existing players in the space.
The press release mentions that PhoneTopp ran a web survey of 15,000 customers of Microsoft, WebEx, Adobe, and Citrix. There are no stats on how many people actually responded, but of the respondents, some interesting stats emerged:
- 62% said they desired or strongly desired to participate in a web conference from their smartphone
- 57% said they participated in at least one web conference per week
PhoneTopp says they will offload computing-intensive tasks to the Amazon cloud computing network. That keeps the phone's processor from having to burn cycles and power on reconstructing the web conference content.
Sam Diaz at ZDNet gave a few additional details in his blog. He says that the software is supposed to break the components of the web conference console into different data streams. Instead of seeing a chat window, attendee list, and presentation slides all at once, as the web conferencing company intended, the phone shows one at a time and lets you jump between them as desired. He also says that the technology is supposed to determine and send only changes in video information between slides, rather than downloading an entire slide at a time in a "dumb dump" technique. Sam also added another fun stat from the survey... More than 20% of respondents said they participate in a web conference at least once a day. Wow.
There's a lot still to prove from a business and technology standpoint. PhoneTopp is running on seed funding and is looking for Series A investors. That's a shaky time in a young company's life. The technology won't even be in Beta until next year. And they are going to have to work closely with established web conference providers, who are not always the easiest to deal with and who have a nasty habit of updating their technologies frequently.
The usability question will be a big one. Even though people say they want to watch web conferences on their mobile phones, will they be satisfied with the small displays and extra interaction needed to scroll and zoom bits and pieces of the picture? Will presenters be happy knowing that their audience may be off reviewing past slides rather than keeping up with their narration?
But if PhoneTopp can pull all the pieces together, this could be a big expansion of web conferencing to the mobile workforce. It will be interesting to watch developments over the next year.
