I don’t know what is different about this summer, but I am seeing absolutely no slowing in client webinars. I used to notice a significant drop-off during “the vacation months.” Maybe everybody is so scared of losing their job that nobody takes vacations anymore! Consequently I am totally overwhelmed with client activities and I’m just going to jot down a few random observations of late. These certainly don’t represent well researched or substantiated reporting. Let’s call it a stream of consciousness post.
- I found out that Adobe Connect can experience difficulties when uploading and converting PowerPoints in the PPTX format. You may see a warning/informational message stating that some effects might not translate correctly. Follow a link to their help system and it recommends re-saving your work into the older PPT format. I had a situation where my PPTX uploaded with significant cosmetic errors… Text inside shapes was shown flipped 180 degrees, text spacing was incorrect, and a “peek in” animation came out as a “fly in.”
- omNovia has been experiencing problems lately with playback of “Recast” recordings (their proprietary recording format, stored on their servers). One symptom I noted today was loss of all audio on playback. Their engineers are working on a fix, but no timeline is available.
- The recent Cisco layoffs announcement seems to be focused on divisions other than WebEx. I had reported on speculation a month ago that Cisco might sell off WebEx, but CEO John Chambers said last week that “Collaboration will be the driver of productivity. Data center/virtualization/cloud is the most network-centric architecture. Architectures are the way you tie products together. And video is the next voice.” He said there are 20 million meetings per month hosted on WebEx and that Cisco is “putting video into everything we do architecturally.”
Still, George Notter (an industry analyst with Jefferies & Company) said today “We’d argue that M&A deals and new product initiatives like umi, WebEx, the Cius tablet, Andiamo/MDS 9000 and UCS are similarly misguided. We would be surprised if Cisco – over the long term – can make these businesses generate interesting returns for shareholders.” [ed: So plenty of pressure and intrigue still remains!]
- PresenterNet issued a press release announcing the ability to store presentation materials on their servers for shared access by multiple presenters in web conferences or webinars. They went a little far in saying they are “the only web conferencing vendor to enable this capability,” since other vendors do have this feature, but it’s a good thing to offer and quite handy.
Do you have an item the world should know about? Send me an email!
