The Webinar Blog

AnyMeeting Allows Ad-Free Webinar Revenue

Two weeks ago I wrote about AnyMeeting’s new payment processing option for webinars. I noticed that comments from users on the AnyMeeting blog were mostly positive, but many people expressed disappointment that there was no option (even at a premium price) to turn off the advertising display that lets AnyMeeting offer their webinar platform for free. It would put the audience in the position of having to pay an admission fee to see advertising. What do they think this is… A movie theater?

One cannot fault AnyMeeting for a lack of responsiveness. They have now turned off advertising displays on revenue-based events. There is no additional charge… The only revenues that AnyMeeting gets come from their skim of the webinar admission price.

I am impressed that AnyMeeting chose to stick with their philosophy of not becoming a “fremium” service with tiered product offerings. It’s a class move to unilaterally remove the ads from fee-based events. It removes another objection that might prevent prospective hosts from trying out the service. Well done.

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Lessons And Answers From A ConferencePlus Webinar

I acted as guest speaker at today’s “Ask The Expert” webinar hosted by ConferencePlus. It was a particularly interesting session for me, as my internet connection completely died shortly before the webinar. There I was with my primary and backup computer at my desk, both useless.

Because I always have a last-ditch fallback of my slides in hardcopy form, we did not have to cancel the webinar. I relied on my moderator to move the slides forward, display my poll and read off the results so I could comment on them, manage audience questions, and generally keep things running for the audience. I gave my presentation holding a standard desk phone handset next to my face (my headset was attached to an Internet-connected phone line).

There were some things that I obviously couldn’t do. I could not slip in references to attendee names and comments as I went along. I couldn’t ask for a lot of quick responses to little questions and challenges during my speech. I couldn’t even use my web conferencing annotation tools on a slide specifically talking about how to use them in live webinars!

Instead, I relied very heavily on visualizing my audience and making reference to them and their interests constantly. I posed my response challenges as mental exercises rather than requiring keyboard responses. I went over planning and content with my moderator during our pre-call so that he was comfortable with the tasks he would have to cover and how I planned to work them into my presentation. Consequently, it ran very smoothly.

I did not start my presentation with an apology or discussion of my technical problems. Instead I got straight into delivering the promised value points. Late in the presentation, I revealed the fact that I wasn’t even using the web conferencing platform because of the internet drop. By that point we could have fun with the fact and use it as a demonstration of proper backup planning and execution. It didn’t have to take focus away from my content.

We had quite a few questions from the audience, and while I answered most of them during the live session, there were a few that I couldn’t get to. I’m going to answer them here for everyone’s benefit, along with one or two that were interesting enough to share with my readers.

 

Linda: Is it acceptable to use more than one slide per minute?

Answer: Absolutely! I use “one minute per slide” as a rough starting point for planning how much content I will need. I know that some slides need more time and some less. But trying to stay somewhere near this average keeps me from clicking through slides more rapidly than the software can keep pace with and keeps me from losing audience focus by staying too long on a single slide.

 

Thomas: When using polling questions should I limit my answer choices?

Answer: Yes. If you present too many finely-differentiated choices it takes longer for people to read through them and decide on the best answer. You slow down your presentation flow, you frustrate attendees who are trying to do detailed reading and comprehension while you chatter in the background, and you will have a harder time interpreting and commenting on the results. I prefer five choices as a maximum in most cases. Of course the context matters. If you are doing technical training, testing, or a formal survey session where polling is expected to be a major component, you can afford to spend more time on complex polls. In a general interest context such as marketing, keep it simpler.

 

Stephen: I noticed that your slides have very different visuals and do not seem to have continuity. How do audiences seem to react to this?

Answer: This fascinated me, as it was the first time an audience member had brought up the question in this manner. I readily admit that I am not a graphic designer. I create many, many presentations all the time to cover a wide variety of webinar education topics. And as Stephen pointed out, the graphics I use come from different sources. Some have complete photographic backgrounds while others are starkly slapped onto a plain white slide background. I try to stay consistent with photographic images rather than a mix of photos and line drawings or clip art, but that’s about it.

Professional graphic designers aim for a consistent “feel” between slides. They might adjust color palettes to favor a certain hue. They will tend to keep human models at a consistent size and within a given social/professional segment. They might overlay a graphic element such as a geometric border on each slide picture to create a sense of continuity. A presentation design of this sort can look gorgeous. I’m often envious of that kind of work. If you have a very important presentation that is likely to affect revenues or career advancement it may well be worth the time and expense to have a professional work on it. If I gave the same talk over and over (like Al Gore’s famous climate change presentation), I wouldn’t hesitate to hire someone to redesign my slides.

But given my less formal, more scattershot approach (which probably matches the priorities and budget/time constraints of many workers) I asked the webinar audience to type in their comments about the graphic design of the slides. Were they bothered by it? Had they even noticed the issue that Stephen pointed out? Did it detract from the effectiveness of the presentation? The answers we received indicated that most people are not put off by the diversity in the design. Some said they hadn’t even thought about it. Others said they rather liked the surprise of not knowing what might pop up next.

So even though your audience might appreciate the beauty of a fully designed graphic show, don’t be deterred from using graphics if you can’t get to that level. It turns out that holding visual interest and using evocative imagery that supports your speech are more important than creating a work of art for the ages.

 

Many thanks to our attendees today for sharing their interests, questions, and valuable time. And a big thanks to ConferencePlus for making it possible.

 

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

HubSpot Goes For Webinar Record

HubSpot has been offering educational webinars for years. One of their most popular series is “The Science of…” which takes an in-depth look at one particular aspect of marketing or interaction in each session. As a matter of fact, the webinar series has become so popular that the folks at HubSpot wondered whether they were breaking records in their registration and attendance numbers. Of course there is only one place to go for information on records… Guinness World Records (remember back when we would automatically include “The Book Of” in that title?).

It turns out that Guinness has no record established for this critically important category. So on Tuesday, August 23, HubSpot will host an official Guinness judge at their headquarters to monitor and authenticate the attendance at their webinar on “The Science of Social Media.”

I spoke with the two people most directly involved with the HubSpot webinars. Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist, and the presenter on the upcoming webinar. He told me that they have had past registrations in the ten thousands, and in March of this year they passed 20,000 registrants for a single session. So HubSpot is pulling the stops out and is aiming for registration numbers in the 30,000 range for next week. With attendance rates right at the overall cross-industry average of about 35%, that should get them more than 10,000 attendees.

Dan concedes that this may not equal attendance rates of public webcasts such as Victoria’s Secret online fashion shows, but he thinks it is likely to beat other marketing webinars involving direct audience participation and interaction.

HubSpot relies very strongly on social media to publicize their webinars. Dan is a heavy Twitter user, and both he and HubSpot have many followers who can help retweet relevant information out to much larger connection pools. Blogging is an important part of their strategy as well, both on internal HubSpot blogs and with guest posts on other blogs. And HubSpot’s own list of members and communication opt-ins lets them reach a large direct audience through email invitations and newsletters.

Dan let slip that they intend to include some big surprises for the audience early in the webinar. Part of this is a way of rewarding and thanking participants for being a part of the historical event, but it also helps to stimulate real-time Twittering that can boost attendance even more while the event is going on. In the past they have seen as many as 1000 registrants sign up AFTER the start of the event, pulled in by enthusiastic tweets from people already in the audience.

Maggie Georgieva is an Inbound Marketing Manager for HubSpot and handles production of their webinar series. She told me that they will be using Infinite Conferencing as their technology platform. They have run very large webinars with Infinite and feel confident that it will be able to handle the load. Just to be on the safe side, they do not use live video or polling features in their largest webinars. It is better to scale down the bells and whistles in favor of a reliable content delivery that everyone can see and hear. Maggie said that they offer attendees the choice of listening to an audio stream via computer or by telephone dial-in. The vast majority prefer computer audio, with telephone used as a backup.

HubSpot encourages heavy use of Twitter in conjunction with their webinars. They promote a hashtag associated with the event and have multiple staff members assigned to monitor and contribute to the Twitter feed. Dan presents from a dedicated “webinar room” that features large screen monitors on which he can see the presentation slides and the Twitter stream. They also encourage attendees to stay online after the webinar for a “Twitter After Party” in which the staff attempts to respond to questions and comments that weren’t addressed during the live event. Maggie said that this time there will be special promotions and prizes awarded to people who participate in the Twitter fun.

The marketing webinars have been extremely effective for HubSpot in growing their customer list and revenues. They are able to directly attribute large amounts of recurring monthly revenue to their webinars. While the webinars are recorded and are maintained on the site as a reusable asset, the highest interest is seen in the live event.

I am looking forward to seeing the final numbers from the HubSpot record-setting event and getting the word “webinar” into the Guinness pantheon of recognized categories. If you want to be a part of the action, you can register at http://www.hubspot.com/science-of-social-media/

UPDATE: The results are in. HubSpot got 30,247 registrants and 10,899 attendees. How's that for a prediction in the third paragraph above?  :)

Technorati Tags: HubSpot,Infinite Conferencing,Dan Zarrella,Maggie Georgieva,webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting,Guinness World Record,online seminar

AnyMeeting Adds Payment Processing For Webinars

AnyMeeting put out a press release this morning announcing that they now allow webinar hosts to charge attendees during the registration process. When setting up your webinar, you can click an option that lets you specify pricing information.

I like the fact that you can set one price for watching the live event and a separate price for watching the recording. If a person pays for access to the live event, they also automatically get access to the on-demand archive. You can also specify discount codes that allow registration at a lower price.

Payment processing is handled by PayPal, and the host must have a PayPal merchant account. Attendee funds go directly into your own PayPal account rather than having AnyMeeting collect the money and send you a check at the end of the month or after the webinar concludes.

Security is handled through a user-selected password. When a user pays, he or she selects a password that is used during access. The system does not allow the same login to be used twice during a live event, so you don’t have to worry about one person paying and sending their login info to all their friends.

Access to the recording also uses the user’s password. This allows users to come back and re-watch the recording as many times as they like. It does mean that there is the potential for evil-doers to forward their credentials to others, but the only way I know of for preventing this would be to implement a “pay before each view” strategy that might not suit your needs or your attendees’ preferences.

AnyMeeting and PayPal both take a cut of your admission price. PayPal’s standard charges are $0.30 + 2.9% of the transaction charge. AnyMeeting takes $1 + 20% of the transaction charge. I appreciate the fact that they don’t try to hide this fact. There is a calculator on your event setup page that shows exactly how much your income will be, based on a given user fee.

The 20% might seem a bit steep, especially since PayPal manages to do all the actual finance work for far less. But this is offset by the fact that AnyMeeting charges no additional fees for use of their web conferencing system. They are supported entirely through small advertising displays in the webinar console. So your total expenditures for putting on an event can still come out below what you might pay for use of an alternative webinar product. It’s a great way to test the waters for running a pay-to-play webinar. If nobody signs up, you are not out any up-front money.

The biggest potential downside I can think of is that your PayPal and AnyMeeting transaction charges are incurred immediately upon user payment. If you later have to refund your user, you lose that “skim money” out of your own pocket. This could be significant if you have to cancel a webinar because of a problem on your side.

I think the AnyMeeting payment feature will be very attractive to small businesses and independent trainers, consultants, and service providers who do not want to pay license fees ahead of time for running revenue-based webinars. Kudos to AnyMeeting for adding functionality that many of the big name, expensive providers have yet to incorporate.

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Spoiling Your Webinar Presentation

The University of California at San Diego just released the results of “a study on spoilers.” The findings are surprising and counterintuitive. Readers were given any of three versions of a story. The versions either presented the story as written with the original surprise ending, or included a prefacing spoiler before the story started, or had a spoiler paragraph stuck in the middle as if it were a part of the work. The study tested ironic twist stories, mysteries, and straight literary works. In all three cases, readers preferred the “spoiled” version over the surprise version. Huh!

How does this relate to the world of business presentations?

The most common way to construct business presentations is to build them linearly. You start from background, add some facts, and then reach a conclusion as “the big reveal” at the end. The belief is that if you give away the conclusion at the beginning, there is no reason for people to stick around. You’ll lose their attention and probably their business.

But it turns out that your audience is not that shallow. You don’t need to surprise them to satisfy them. In most cases, you are better off establishing your main point right up front. Don’t start with “First the Earth cooled, then microorganisms emerged, then…” end up 60 minutes later with “Ecce homo! Modern man!” Instead try turning it around. “Modern man! The culmination of eons of evolution. How did we get here?” Now you have established your main thrust right up front. If an audience member gets an emergency call half way through the presentation and has to leave, they have still received the key message you wanted to convey.

In newspaper writing, this is known as The Inverted Pyramid. Start with the main point of the story. Then fill in supporting facts and background later. The news reporter does not start with the history of railroads in the U.S., the development of the automotive industry, and then in the last sentence work up to the fact that a train hit a car yesterday. That information is the lead (or lede in journalistic lingo).

Think about a prosecutor’s opening statement to a jury. The first thing he or she says is “This man is guilty. He committed a crime. You are going to hear the evidence over the next few days and when you do, there will be no doubt left in your mind that he needs to go to jail.” No prosecutor in his right mind would ever build up to a surprise ending that the defendant is… (gasp) GUILTY!

Don’t be afraid to tell your audience up front that your product or service solves a problem. Don’t be afraid to give away the results of your study in the first slide. A well-designed and well-delivered presentation will hold interest even without a surprise conclusion. According to UCSD, your audience is likely to prefer it that way.

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Answers to Q&A From ABN Webinar

We had more questions than time in my webinar for the Australian Businesswomen’s Network this week. I just received the unanswered questions and thought I would post answers for all to see.

Shan: If you have a home office, do you suggest doing your webinar from there, or going to a more professional environment – away from possible interruptions from kids or dogs barking?

Answer: A home office can work great as long as you can isolate yourself from those distractions. I am astonished at how many times I hear dogs barking on webinars these days! Put the dog in the garage or outside while you are presenting. You need to make it very clear that you are not to be disturbed by family members during your webinar. Now I realize that there are all kinds of practical considerations here and I’m not going to argue with caregivers. Taking care of the wellbeing and safety of your children is always the first priority for a parent... I’m not an idiot. The question only arises if there is leeway in your arrangements. Would you take your children into your boardroom or a client location while making a presentation to important audience members in person? If not, then your webinar audience deserves the same respect. Children, loud radios or TVs, and any other distracting noisemakers must be silent during your presentation. If you can’t guarantee this, you should consider looking for an alternate location. But don’t lock the kids in the garage.

Zakia: How can you find out about the composition of your audience? Are they skilled knowledge workers, trainees, etc.?

Answer: Ask them! This is a perfect use for web conference polling. There are two important things to remember, however. First, don’t make that poll the first thing your audience sees. Give them some piece of value they came for first. Once you have established that you are ready and able to provide what they came for, you can ask for response and input from them. Second, make sure you frame the question in terms that make responding valuable for THEM rather than for YOU. “Let’s find out together who is in the audience with you. That will help me frame my presentation and give you the information that will be of the most value for you.” Something along those lines so it doesn’t seem like a purely selfish demographic survey for your own benefit.

Steven: How do you handle age differences? I am 35 and some of my audiences are 50+ with twice the work knowledge.

Answer: This is usually more of an issue in our own minds than in the audience’s. The quality of the information you provide and the quality of your presentation skills in making it clear and engaging are the keys to audience satisfaction. As a matter of fact, a webinar can be easier than in-room presentations for young presenters. Your physical age is not apparent and doesn’t cause “bias on sight” in your audience’s minds. The key thing to remember with audiences of varying ages is to watch out for references to cultural touchstones that are not relevant to all. Illustrating a point with lyrics from a Lady Gaga song is unlikely to work for people with more connections to lyrics from an Elvis Presley song (and vice versa). By the way, don’t overlook the collaborative possibilities of web conferences. Ask your audience members to contribute examples and solution strategies from their experiences. You can make that extra work knowledge out there a vital part of YOUR presentation!

Barbara: Where is a good place to get graphics from?

Answer: Use a search engine and type in “Stock Photography.” You will get plenty of sites with photographs and illustrations that can be purchased for a few dollars and used without further royalties in commercial presentations. This is the safest route to avoid potential legal problems with photo reuse. istockphoto.com is the oldest and largest repository, but it is one of the most expensive as well. My current favorite is dreamstime.com for their advanced search features. Flickr.com has a Creative Commons area that offers many user-contributed photos for free if you give attribution in your presentation. Microsoft also has an image repository online for photos and clip art. I know I’ll get comments from people who are angry that I didn’t mention their personal favorite source. There are a lot of sites. You can use Google Images to look for photos on existing web sites, but this should only be done to help stimulate your thinking about possible types of photos related to a concept. If you steal a picture from someone else’s web page, you are setting yourself up for trouble down the road! SpiderPic is an interesting new site that helps you find out whether the same stock photo is available on different sites, so you can find the lowest cost.

Thanks for your questions and participation!

Technorati Tags: Australian Businesswomen's Network,stock photography,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcast,webcasting

Microsoft Bids Adieu To Live Meeting

One of my contacts asked me whether Live Meeting is being officially sunsetted. I had to admit that I didn’t have any official information on the subject, so I thought I would try to get an interview with somebody at Microsoft. I went through their PR firm, which is the only officially supported way to get press information or a request for an interview. I included a couple of key questions I wanted to cover, in order to help them find the right person for the subject. After a few days, I received the following reply, which I reprint here in its entirety:

Thank you for your patience here while I looked into your request. I have connected with my colleagues and they have provided the following information:

Will Live Meeting continue to be sold and supported as a standalone web conferencing solution outside of the business productivity suites?

· Live Meeting is being replaced by Microsoft Lync – the new business communications technology solution from Microsoft. Customers who have a Live Meeting Volume Licensing contract (either from Microsoft or via a partner) can stay on Live Meeting through the remainder of their contract. Transition for BPOS-S customers will be based on the transition from BPOS to Office 365, with some planned overlap of Live Meeting and Lync Online to allow for a smoother end user experience.

Is Lync envisioned as being able to support structured webinar events, or is it intended purely for small team collaboration?

· Lync is Microsoft’s new web conferencing solution, and can support audio and video conferencing with many participants. For more information about how to use Lync for webconferencing, please visit: http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Product/Workloads/Pages/conferencing-software.aspx

 

So there it is… As much information as Microsoft is willing to share. No named contact, nobody willing to put their name on a statement, nobody in the product group interested in talking to a lowly industry blogger about the topic. Fair enough – I’m not exactly ZDNet. But I am one of the few people who writes regularly about webinar software. Here’s my take on the statement and additional things I can glean from their various web resources.

It’s obvious that Live Meeting is dead. Say goodnight, stick a fork in it, this… is an ex-parrot. Finish up your existing contract period and decide whether you want to use Lync for your web meetings.

Now, how does Microsoft view Lync’s purpose in life? You can navigate to the web page in the italicized text above, or you can visit the main page for Lync on the Microsoft web site. There you can download the Lync datasheet and the Lync Product Guide in PDF format. I did, and spent some time going over them. It seems clear that while Lync web meetings may be able to handle “many participants” (I can find nothing stating representative capacity limits), there seems to be no attempt to create an infrastructure that would support registration and attendee management (such as confirmation, reminder, and thank you emails or public registration pages).

Microsoft is obviously concentrating on the full Unified Communication/Collaboration package, where the priorities are ad hoc meetings and peer-level collaboration in enterprise environments. Presence, video conferences, instant messaging, texting, and audio conferences are the focus, with web conferences supporting the mix in cases where you need to show some visual information. There’s definitely a good market there, and Microsoft has the size and strength to work through the things that enterprise IT managers care about, like integration of LDAP directories and secure employee use management.

But by removing functionality for structured registration, scheduled attendee communications, tracking and reporting on registration vs. attendance, and other webinar necessities, it means that departments and groups within those enterprises are going to be forced to look elsewhere for a supplemental technology when they need to schedule an external webinar. Marketing and lead generation are likely to be the most prominent enterprise candidates, with potential needs from customer training and public outreach programs as well. It may well create an easy entry point for existing competitors to Live Meeting.

This is not a surprising or shocking story. People in our industry will likely nod their heads and say “well, that’s that then.” Microsoft never really wanted to be in the business of “here and there” product licenses. Their business model is about massive volume sales of software products that are embedded everywhere. Webinars don’t have that kind of usage model. Microsoft hasn’t marketed or promoted Live Meeting as a standalone webinar solution for years now. It has faded into the background of their various office productivity suites (which change names every two years). It’s a wistful end for the once-mighty Placeware product that went head to head with WebEx as the dominant webinar solution in the early adoption phase of this business. And now it goes out not with a bang, but a whimper. Requiat in pace.

Unless I hear about webinar-specific functionality being introduced in Lync, I don’t plan to cover it. There are too many dozens of collaborative web conferencing products on the market, and I will try to retain my narrow focus on technologies and practices specifically meant for public webinars.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Live Meeting,Lync,Placeware,webinar,web seminar,online seminar,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting

Does Twitter Help Or Hinder A Webinar?

I just finished presenting a webinar to several hundred attendees, mostly in the South Pacific. The host was the Australian Businesswomen’s Network, and the technology sponsor was Citrix (GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar).

The ABN heavily promoted the event to its members and mailing lists and also used Twitter to spread the word. They set up a hashtag for the webinar and gave my Twitter handle along with theirs at the beginning.

I never look at Twitter feeds while presenting… It’s far too distracting. I want to concentrate on comments and questions in the room from my audience. But I took a look immediately afterwards to see if it generated any Twitter action. If you want to scan the history, you can look at tag #abnvirtual or you can search my feed at @klmonline (which has many, but not all of the comments).

I was impressed and somewhat surprised to see that people were tweeting many of my tips and pointers from the presentation out to the Twitterverse. I think one of the reasons for the heavy coverage was the way I organized my slide content. Most of my slides have a quick title that expresses a single, short concept to get across. I elucidate a bit and then move on to the next short value point. The slide titles are custom-made for sharing. People don’t have to pick one bullet out of a dense text-filled slide to tweet.

One of the questions asked (and retweeted) under the event’s hashtag was “Does having a Twitter reference assist or detract from the presentation?”

I think there is a double-edged sword to associating a Twitter stream with your online event. It certainly worked spectacularly for reaching out and helping to spread awareness of me, Citrix, and the Australian Businesswomen’s Network. From a marketing and promotion standpoint, topnotch (as long as they are saying nice things, and in this case they generally were).

It also aided at least one person who said he had technical difficulties and couldn’t watch the webinar, but was able to follow along based on the Twitter summaries. That’s nice!

However I can’t help but think that all those people tweeting my words of wisdom out to the masses might not have been as fully involved in the webinar itself as they otherwise might have been. While they were deciding how to phrase their short compositions, were they missing the beginning of my next point? I certainly have to incorporate more of my “engagement tricks” to pull people back to the webinar screen and get them to refocus their attention on me. And this needs to be done constantly and repeatedly.

In a training/education class, I would discourage the use of Twitter in order to focus more attention on absorbing the factual material. In a promotional or marketing-based event, I would recommend it as long as you have a trusted representative monitoring the hashtag in realtime, and can quickly respond to negative comments and antagonistic posts. Not necessarily to deny or defend against them, but just to acknowledge that your organization takes them seriously and is aware that there are issues needing attention. That in itself can go a long way in building positive perception.

The best resource on this whole subject remains Cliff Atkinson’s book “The Backchannel,” which I recommend heartily.

Thank you to the attendees and twitterites on this event. I thought it was a blast, and I’m enjoying reading through the summaries of my information. It’s a great way to double-check yourself and see if you are expressing yourself clearly.

Technorati Tags: Australian Businesswomen's Network,Twitter,backchannel,Cliff Atkinson,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online seminar,online meeting,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing

Citrix Finally Releases HDFaces Video Conferencing

It had to happen eventually. Citrix first announced that they were planning to add live video capabilities to their web conferencing products on October 6 of 2010 (as faithfully covered by yours truly). At that time they said they were shooting for availability in Q1 of 2011.

By late May of this year, they had the beta version available for testing. Naturally your dedicated correspondent tried that out and reported early findings.

And now at last we have the production version released to the public. But proving that there is much more to incorporation of video than meets the eye (ha!), it is only available in GoToMeeting. Availability in GoToWebinar and GoToTraining is now targeted for the end of 2011 or beginning of 2012 according to Bernardo de Albergaria, the VP and GM of Collaboration at Citrix Online.

I had a video conference with Bernardo and two other Citrix representatives last week to take a look at the production version. Honestly, there isn’t too much more to tell than there was in my beta review. It just works. Image quality is excellent, video lag is practically nonexistent (but I have a very high speed internet connection and a fast new computer), and usage is simplicity itself.

Citrix decided to forego many options for messing with the video image in favor of the “join and go” approach used in GoToMeeting as a whole. So you don’t set frame rates or image sizes or any other technical settings. You don’t get the choice to incrementally resize a video window (although you can choose between full screen and windowed modes). You can move video windows to any side of your screen, but you can’t change from a strip view to grid view when there are multiple presenters. You also can’t choose to expand or focus on one image out of the full set of video participants. This may annoy power users, but it will make life much easier for the average web conference participant who doesn’t want to fiddle with things.

This time around I did not see any problems with recognizing my webcam and I asked Bernardo to try unplugging his camera and replugging it during our session. GoToMeeting was able to adapt to the changes in connection status without a hiccup. So kudos there.

I asked Bernardo what took so long in finishing the production version. He said one of the biggest hurdles was programming the video on how to react to and cope with different participant bandwidths. The video stream and display continuously adjusts to match the bandwidth of each viewer. It goes through a combination of image quality step-downs as needed. This may result in lower frame rates, lower resolution, and in the worst cases, pixelation or stop/start of the image. Priority is given to the audio stream, so video will suffer on an extremely poor connection. But in a high bandwidth scenario, it looks great.

The video capabilities are standard with both the Windows and Mac versions of GoToMeeting at no additional charge over the standard use license. I asked about use on mobile devices and Bernardo said that HDFaces support for the iPad is targeted for Q1 of 2012, while other devices may be supported later.

I don’t always think that video is such a great idea for large public webinars, but it can be a marvelous addition to collaborative sessions with people you know and work with. So the addition of the feature for all GoToMeeting users is a welcome enhancement. You should definitely check it out.

Technorati Tags: HDFaces,GoToMeeting,Citrix,Bernardo de Albergaria,video conferencing,videoconference,web meeting,online meeting,web conference,web conferencing

Tekiki Introduces New Webinar Utilities

Tekiki is a startup company working on web-based applications to complement webinars and webcasts. They have two primary utilities currently in beta: Ticketing and social networking. Stay with this article, because I think the second half is better than the first!

The first offering is a way to sell tickets for an event. Honestly, it could be used with a physical on-site event or a web event. This is straightforward and if you have ever used a service such as EventBrite, you will be familiar with the concept. Tekiki creates a page with event overview information and pricing. A registrant can click a button to register and pay. Tekiki links to your own PayPal merchant account and funds are deposited directly into your account, with no skim by Tekiki.

I talked to Tekiki founder Clarence Hu. He said they initially wanted to differentiate themselves by providing a complete turnkey service. You give them your event details and they create the event page for you. I thought that some people would want to do the work themselves in order to do incremental design tests or make changes on the fly. They have been adding more do-it-yourself features lately, and customers don’t have to rely as completely upon the Tekiki staff.

They also recently added the ability to specify discount codes, letting you create tiered pricing for your event. Unfortunately (as with EventBrite), all registrants get the same confirmation email (customized for each event to your preferences) and as of now there are no integrations with any webinar products. This means that your webinar registration and communications are completely separate from the ticketing side of things. If you want registrants to get personalized login links, if you want to use your webinar software to send automated reminders and follow up emails, or if you want to track registration vs. attendance, you will have to load the names from the Tekiki system into your webinar registration system. This is an area that is ripe for integration via public webinar APIs (ReadyTalk and omNovia are two products that have these available… There are probably other products as well, but I can’t think of them at the moment.)

The ticketing program is in a private charter mode at the moment so they can pay close attention to problems, feature requests, and service needs. Clarence said that I can offer my readers a special invitation to participate in the charter program. Go to their signup page and request entry into the charter program. They will send you a confirmation message and at that time you can use code WSUCCESS to say that you read The Webinar Blog and thus know a thing or two about web events. This code is good for the next 30 days. The nicest thing about trying out this utility is that there are no overhead costs… Tekiki is running in a zero-cost “build awareness” mode now. I don’t know how they will transition to a revenue-generating model in the future.

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I am actually more intrigued by the second Tekiki offering. This gives you a way to build a “disposable community” associated with an event. At first I didn’t understand the concept and shrugged it off as yet another unnecessary social networking alternative to Facebook or LinkedIn. But it’s very different.

Instead of replacing other networks, it lets you create a web page that allows people to “see and be seen” among the other attendees at an event. Your guests (such as registrants for an upcoming webinar) can add their public LinkedIn or Twitter profile to the page (Facebook doesn’t seem to link the account profile properly). There is a simple public scrolling chat box where participants can write comments to the crowd. It’s like choosing to wear an attendee badge at a physical event with your name, title, and company. You can see who else is in attendance and if it looks like they might be good to schmooze with, you can start up a conversation or an invitation to share contact details.

The community of people associated with the page is designed to be temporary. Once the event is over, the page is deleted and nobody is stuck with being associated with yet another permanent group in Yahoo or LinkedIn. They also have not had to create yet another profile on yet another social networking product. All they did was connect their existing profile, which remains unchanged.

Creating a room is ridiculously fast and easy. You just click a button. The service is again free, at least during this startup phase. There is a small revenue generating option included, which is the ability to let people place a “Spotlight Announcement” on the group page. This is effectively a banner ad. The group owner can choose whether to approve or decline the Spotlight submission. Currently it costs the submitter $10 to add one.

After my initial skeptical dismissal, I came around to really liking this concept. It’s a great way to create a virtual pre-show area where your registrants can “mill around” and meet each other and share ideas. They have no permanent affinity other than their shared interest in whatever your topic happens to be. When the event is over, they drift home without any new obligations other than contacting people they met and mutually agreed to talk with. The public chat area lets the host and guests talk about subjects they want to address in the webinar or ask questions ahead of time.

You can see a sample of an existing social page at http://bit.ly/sampleportal. If you want to create your own room, just click the big blue button at the upper right. All you need to do is sign in with an existing social networking account.

 

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