The Webinar Blog

ViVu “Lyncs” With Microsoft

ViVu has announced that its video collaboration and presentation software now runs on Microsoft Lync (the latest version of Microsoft Office Communicator). This potentially makes the solution more attractive to medium and large enterprises who want to consolidate applications on the Microsoft platform.

The company says that VuRoom Multiparty Videoconferencing for Microsoft Lync lets up to eight participants simultaneously appear on camera in a web conference, using Lync as the underlying transport and communication platform. It also adds desktop sharing, file sharing, and PowerPoint slide display as features in the conference.

I talked to Sudha Valluru, the CEO of ViVu, about the new offering. He said that the functionality is essentially the same as in the version of VuRoom that has been available as a plug-in for Skype, but that enterprises can better control communications security aspects if they are a Microsoft shop, since users don’t have to install Skype or other third-party communication packages.

The announcement is purely about the ability to run on the Lync platform… There is no explicit partnership between Microsoft and ViVu, and licensing the VuRoom software is still direct through ViVu. Since this version is intended for use in managed enterprise scenarios, licensing is typically done via enterprise use agreements up to a certain number of users (for collaboration) or attendance seats (for broadcast events). An IT person would download the VuRoom software and distribute it within the enterprise to be installed on individual user computers as a plug-in for Lync.

I last wrote about ViVu in August. You can read the article by clicking here.

Technorati Tags: ViVu,VuRoom,webcast,webcasting,videoconference,videoconferencing,web meeting,web collaboration,online meeting,online collaboration,Lync,Microsoft Office Communicator

Peelon Updates Webinar Listing Service

My last post talked about the growth in directory services to help companies list their webinar offerings and to help potential attendees find webinars of interest. I did a little wrap-up of listing services and completely forgot about Peelon. Sorry about that! Volodymyr at Peelon informs me that the service has updated their interface, added many more events to the listings database, and has enhanced their category/industry choices.

I am happy to see that since I first reported on the service, they have added event times and time zone offsets to the search results. I think this is still the only webinar directory that lets you filter and see results in the language of your choice.

Here’s a helpful tip if you want to play with the search interface. It’s easy to add a search filter, but may not be intuitively obvious how to clear a search criterion. I finally realized that each criterion is clickable, which removes it from the selected filters. Easy to use, but not immediately apparent.

Technorati Tags: Peelon.com,Peelon,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing

More Webinar Search Services

Portals to discover webinars seem to be springing up like mushrooms. Two more have recently joined the field.

Free Webinar Directory (www.freewebinardirectory.com) is in Beta mode. It has the fascinating characteristic of starting off with a big legal disclaimer that covers the home page and won’t let you see any content until you click agreement to the rather generic text saying that content on the site may change, it contains links to other sites (Gasp! Imagine that!), and trademarks belong to trademark owners. As you may have gathered, I am not a fan of this kind of over-litigious nonsense and in the normal course of my web surfing, nothing would drive me away from a site faster than a “click agreement to see the site” barrier. My rather rudimentary legal knowledge (does one semester of Introductory Business Law count?) makes me think that nothing in this unsigned exculpatory language could possibly be enforceable as a contractual obligation if it ever came to a legal case, so why annoy your visitors straight out of the gate?

Be that as it may, I clicked the magic box and found myself on the home page. Before entering any search criteria, I was presented with a list of four webinars to choose from. Each showed summary information, including “Time” with no time zone indicated. Clicking on “Details” for a webinar showed an unusual number of specialized fields (including the time zone, by the way). Some of the things I am not used to seeing in other webinar directories included whether the audience would be muted, the attendee capacity, whether it was a product presentation, and something labeled “Question Available.” I’m guessing this last item indicates whether the presenter will answer audience questions.

There is a signup box to “Receive e-mails about upcoming webinars” but there is no indication of how often the emails will appear or whether you can filter your results based on your criteria.

You can add a webinar to the list by clicking a box in the upper right corner. Most of the information fields are self-explanatory, but I see a problem in having to pick a single category and subcategory for your webinar. People using category criteria to search may be missing webinars that could legitimately fall under two or more areas, since the provider has to pick just one slot.

I am also a bit puzzled by the fact that “Location” is one of the fields associated with the webinar information. Maybe this is meant to indicate a webinar targeted at viewers within a particular geographical region. Hard to say.

This is obviously early days for the site, so feel free to explore and offer feedback and comments on their contact form. I did not see any information on the site about who runs it or what country it originates from. Not that this is all that important, but I like to know who I’m entering into a legal agreement with!

The second directory site (also indicated as a Beta version) is called Webinar Bucket (www.webinarbucket.com). It uses the ambitious tag line “Your source to all webinars and webcasts across the web.” Ahh, if only ‘twere true.

The search page features a time zone selector that automatically converts all webinar time listings into your local equivalent. Kudos for this convenience feature.

There are quick lists of Featured Webinars, Popular Webinars and Most Recent Webinars. I also stumbled across a date range filter by clicking on a button that said “Open Listing.” By expanding the range to cover several years, it looks like there are currently 176 webinars in the database, which intimates that these are hand-entered rather than automatically searched and entered programmatically.

Submitting a webinar is done through the usual set of field entries. A unique feature is the ability to specify a recurring webinar, including the frequency and end date. As with the previous site, you’ll need to choose category identifiers for your event. Webinar Bucket lets you assign up to three categories, but suffers from the fact that you can’t choose a generic high-level category. So instead of choosing “Technical,” I have to choose three lower-level categories, which seem to be rather arbitrary. For instance, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are listed as categories, but no other tech companies are listed. Why not? Under “Industry” you have eight choices, and it’s easy to think of dozens of industries that would not be served by this list. Fortunately you have the ability to enter your own arbitrary free-form tags, but this does not ease the problem of category searches missing your event because of the choice limitations.

Webinar Bucket is an Indian business venture and the text on the Beta site would benefit from a careful proofreading.

These newcomers join sites I have previously reported on: EventSpan, Finervista, WebinarBase, Webinar-Directory, WebinarHero and WebinarListings. Although I notice that Webinar-Directory is currently showing an “unknown domain” placeholder, so it may be down or out of business.

Technorati Tags: Webinar Bucket,Free Webinar Directory,webinar,web seminar,web event,online seminar,online event,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Does Your Webinar Audience Hate You?

Here are some random tweets showing up right now on a filter search for “Webinar”:

• Waiting, waiting, waiting for webinar to begin… [ed: Written at 11 minutes after the hour]
• Shiny objects are distracting me during this webinar… SQUIRREL! BIRD!
• BS detection mode on. Another webinar…
• Why didn't they invent a web2.0inar? Webinar just sounds sooooooooo one-way. Consumers want conversations :-(
• "Going" to another Webinar today. Turns out these things are pretty informative

Are your attendees among the 20% writing something positive? Or are they among the 80% expressing their frustration?

You can help improve your odds by standing out from the crowd with a webinar that doesn’t suck. Most of the negative tweets above could have been avoided by making a commitment to addressing the audience’s expectations and needs rather than the host’s.

• If audience members make the effort to show up on time, couldn’t you reward them by starting when you said you would? Or do you choose to reward the latecomers?


• Are you droning on and declaiming a bunch of bullet points? Or are you inviting your participants to actually participate? Are you encouraging and acknowledging their questions and comments? Are you challenging them mentally and getting them to actively think about the material? Are you radiating interest in your own subject matter? Are you using presentation “tricks” to constantly recapture attention?


• Are you promising one thing and delivering another? Are you advertising informational content and training, but actually presenting a pitch for your products and services? Is it obvious that the webinar is for your benefit rather than your audience’s?


• Are you using interactive features to stimulate two-way conversations? Are you speaking to audience members as individuals rather than as a nameless, faceless crowd? Are you using polls as a jumping off point for discussion, or are you just adding them because someone told you to?

If you develop a reputation for respecting your audience and providing value, you just might make people want to attend more of your “pretty informative” webinars. The choice is entirely yours.

 

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Get Your Webinar Questions Answered

As a reminder (primarily for time zones in the Americas), this Thursday is your chance to get almost any webinar question answered. The only things I won’t answer are questions that are specific to individual products and vendors (it wouldn’t be fair to Adobe, who is hosting the session).

I have been pre-loading slides with the questions submitted so far, and they include some real head-scratchers! Your chance of getting your question addressed during the session goes WAYYYY up if you submit it ahead of time. Once we are in the live webinar, you will be fighting for attention along with all the other attendees.

The registration link for Thursday’s event is http://bit.ly/9S9Qow. There is a click-through on that page to submit your question. If you thought of a question after registration and want to go directly to the question page, you can use this link to ask your puzzler: http://bit.ly/cdIcPK

By the way, the registration page that Adobe set up indicates the time as “10:00 a.m. PT”. That stands for USA Pacific Time. If you want to see how that translates to your local time zone, look it up in this table: http://bit.ly/cjThBZ

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

The @KLMonline Twitter Feed

The Twitter dashboard tells me I have 120 followers. That somewhat surprises me, as I have never really promoted my Twitter account and I keep my postings very sparse.

The overwhelming majority of my tweets are automatic notifications when I post a new blog entry. So if you don’t want to wait for the daily summary of The Webinar Blog in your feed reader and feel a need to instantly see my blog updates (where I do the majority of my communicating), Twitter is a convenient way to get a link to the latest content.

Every so often I see a blog posting by someone else or a brief news story that wouldn’t benefit from additional personal analysis or commentary on my blog. It’s just good stuff of interest to people who give webinars. In those cases I’ll shoot a link on my Twitter account so you can read it for yourself.

I just posted two such links:

• WebEx has started a service to retweet announcements of web events that use WebEx. I think that’s brilliant. Access to a much larger follower list for event producers and evidence of real-world utility of their platform for WebEx. More web conferencing vendors should offer this service to their customers. Details at http://tinyurl.com/32zkduv


• George Page at AccuConference summarized a clever acronym (ICEPAC) that can help you organize the construction of a business presentation. It’s not his creation, but he explains it succinctly and clearly. Details at http://tinyurl.com/37w3uuc

If you want to follow me on Twitter, the account name is @KLMonline. I promise you one thing… The tweets may not be frequent, but they will always be specific to webinar news, views, and information. No updates on my location, no updates on how I’m feeling, no updates on what I had for dinner.

Technorati Tags: Ken Molay,Twitter,@KLMonline,WebEx,George Page,AccuConference,ICEPAC,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Webinar Guidance For the Americas, Europe, Asia/Pacific

Next week I am making a virtual “World Tour” of speaking engagements, all without leaving my office. In just two days I will present to audiences in multiple time zones around the globe. Can you ask for a better demonstration of the power of webinars to reach a wide audience conveniently and cost effectively? This is a great opportunity for my readers around the world to join me live, ask questions, and interact.

All the webinars are listed on www.effectivewebinars.com with complete descriptions, time zone conversions, and links to let you register.

If you live in the UK or Europe, you will probably want to join my webinar with Citrix Online scheduled for Wednesday, November 10. Local times are 2pm for the UK and 3pm for Central Europe. I will present tips on ways to make your webinars more effective. This covers planning, production, delivery, and attendee communications.

For residents of Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Japan, Singapore, and Hawaii we have another Citrix Online opportunity on Thursday, November 11. Local times include 10am in Tokyo, noon in Sydney, 2pm in Auckland, and 3pm in Honolulu. This webinar will focus on tips for creating content for marketing presentations. I will cover organization and creation of PowerPoint presentations that you can present in marketing webinars.

And for those of you closer to my own time zone in North and South America, Adobe is sponsoring a webinar on Thursday, November 11. Local times include 10am in California, noon in Mexico City, 1pm in Toronto, and 3pm in Buenos Aires. This presentation is 100% interactive. I will spend the entire hour answering audience questions about webinars. You can submit questions ahead of time from the webinar information page for a higher likelihood of getting them on the air, or you can ask them live during the session.

Wherever you live, I hope you will take advantage of a session convenient to you and join us to get some free webinar advice and best practices. My thanks to Adobe and Citrix for making these global events available for free.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Citrix Online,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting,online seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Will Salesforce.com Buy Dimdim?

Two online reports from India suggest that Salesforce.com is interested in acquiring web conferencing company Dimdim (which is based in Massachusetts, but has a development center and investors in India). Neither company has confirmed or commented on the story.

SiliconIndia has an unattributed short write up which may simply be referencing a longer article by Shrija Agrawal on VCCircle. Agrawal says that Salesforce representatives were seen at Dimdim’s development center in Hyderabad to carry out due diligence.

If the rumors turn out to be accurate and the deal goes through, I have a hard time seeing the business value to Salesforce.com in continuing to prominently market Dimdim as a standalone web conferencing solution. It seems to me (and I stress that this is pure personal speculation) that the costs and overhead of running a pure-play web conferencing company competing against so many other large players in the space would be a distraction from Salesforce.com’s primary business of CRM, where they have primacy in their industry.

Having a collaboration component built in to the CRM platform obviously has value, and the acquisition would make perfect sense as a way to bolster that aspect of the Salesforce.com functionality layers. Indeed, Salesforce.com already offers a “Collaboration Platform” featuring Chatter as part of its Force.com suite of web-based hosted applications. But like that current “cloud platform for business apps,” it feels as though this is an afterthought to Salesforce.com’s main business and is available mainly because they already have the applications on hand to support the CRM products and because they didn’t want to abandon existing customers when Salesforce.com bought the other applications.

It’s hard for me to envision Salesforce.com truly going head-to-head with the likes of Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft as a one-stop software shop for many different types of applications. I may be wrong… I have no particular connections or insights into the Salesforce business model. But I think we may see the same type of gradual fold-in that we saw after Microsoft acquired Placeware and relabeled it as Live Meeting. First a reduction in standalone product advertising and marketing, then technical developments targeted only at supporting internal integration into the main product suite, and finally, complete roll up into the parent suite, with single-application licensing of the collaboration product tolerated but not encouraged.

Opposing opinions and predictions are welcomed in the comments section.

Technorati Tags: Salesforce.com,Dimdim,web conferencing,web conference,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,online meeting,Shrija Agrawal

Learn How To Run Lead Gen Webinars

This week’s free public educational webinar is brought to you by ConferencePlus. I will be discussing all the many things you need to think about when creating and delivering a public marketing webinar for lead generation purposes.

The one hour webinar is free to attend. It is scheduled for this Thursday, November 4. The start time is 10am US Pacific / 1pm US Eastern. To see the start time converted to your local time zone, use this link: http://bit.ly/dl7i4I

You can register for the session using this link: http://bit.ly/9Jj1qe

I hope to see you online this Thursday!

 

Technorati Tags: lead generation,marketing,webinar,web seminar,web conferencing,web conference,webcast,webcasting,ConferencePlus

Web Conferencing News Of The Day

A few interesting news items came up today in the world of web conferencing. As always, full press releases and relevant articles are available on www.WebinarNews.info.

My first item is most relevant for what it does NOT signify. I saw a press release that Global Crossing has acquired Genesis Networks. For a moment, I thought this was a major consolidation story in the webinar industry. Then I settled down and realized that the web conferencing product is spelled “Genesys” and is already owned by InterCall. So stand down from alert. This acquisition is all about video services for a full range of broadcast applications – not just web conferencing (although the new capabilities won’t hurt Global Crossing as video becomes more important in webcasts and hybrid local/remote events).

The second item comes to us thanks to Curtiss Grymala, writing about a change in Adobe’s service terms that has not hit the official wires yet. Curtiss has a free ConnectNow account from Adobe, allowing three people to meet in the Adobe Connect conferencing service. He received a note from Adobe that as of November 4, the free service will allow only two people in a meeting room, not three. This affects all current account holders. Tough luck if you had already scheduled a meeting for the end of the week with two business partners or colleagues.

The official news from Adobe today is the announcement of Adobe Connect 8, the next major release of their full-featured large-audience webinar product. Availability will be on a staggered schedule for hosted and premise-installed accounts, starting in November for North American customers and February for the rest of the world.

Christopher Dawson used a ZDNet blog to write up a rather breathless love poem to the new release. I have also worked with the pre-release version and would temper my enthusiasm with some practical details that Christopher glosses over. I’ve provided feedback to Adobe and I know they are still working on last-minute refinements. A few things I didn’t like are already fixed, and there may be more changes still to come. So I will withhold my commentary until General Availability of the final release.

I’m not giving anything away, however, when I tell you that the cosmetics of the interface are significantly different from previous versions. You can see screen shot examples in the formal Adobe press release and in Christopher’s article. The general look has changed from smooth, rounded, and flowing to sharp rectangular divisions between content areas.

And finally, I’ll just remind you that www.WebinarDowntime.com continues to be available as a reporting tool and resource to track hosted web conferencing service interruptions. In less than two weeks since making it available, we have four reports of system access problems, split among Adobe, Citrix, and Microsoft.  Interesting! If you happen to get hit with product downtime, make sure to report it so we can build up a database of reliability.

And that’s the news!

Technorati Tags: Adobe Connect,Global Crossing,ConnectNow,Curtiss Grymala,Christopher Dawson,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,webcast,webcasting,web seminar,online seminar,web meeting,online meeting