The Webinar Blog

Latest News On Conferencing Patents

I continue the struggle to stay abreast of the web conferencing patent suits brought by ITUS (previously CopyTele and more specifically its subsidiary Secure Web Conference Corp). When last we visited the plaintiff, it had settled out of court on earlier suits against Logitech and Citrix. Suits against Microsoft (Skype) and Apple (FaceTime) are proceeding, with many more suits against web conferencing companies promised/threatened by ITUS in earlier public statements.

Today I saw an article on www.law360.com (free registration required), where Ryan Davis reported that Microsoft lost a bid to throw out the suit on first principles. Apparently this is a fairly standard gambit to see if a patent defendant can get the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to rule up front that the disputed patent was "anticipated or obvious" based on earlier patents and therefore should not be protected as a new creative invention. Now that the easy route is gone, the real wrangling can begin.

But it turns out there is another monkey wrench in the works that I hadn't been aware of. Mike Masnick at www.techdirt.com has been following developments in a US Supreme Court case known as Alice v. CLS Bank. I won't link to all his past columns on the subject, but today he added opinions from an interesting new study performed by ktMINE. Masnick says the report suggests that more than half of Google and Microsoft's patents are invalid under the Supreme Court's "Alice ruling." Oracle may have up to 76% of its patents nullified. IBM could have 49% of its massive patent portfolio at risk.

That may sound like a bad thing, but Masnick points out that it could be a blessing rather than a curse. For one thing, patent troll companies stand to lose the validity and legal/financial value of their libraries of purchased patents. And the patents owned by the giant vendors (and litigiously targeted by patent trolls) are often purely defensive in nature. With fewer court cases brought for purposes of financial harassment, real innovation can proceed in a simpler and less paranoid environment.

CopyTele/ITUS was not one of the patent companies listed on ktMINE's impact list, but if their patents are purely software related, this could slow down their campaign against web conferencing vendors.

As the TV news anchors always say, "Time will tell."

 

Technorati Tags: CopyTele,ITUS,patent troll,Alice ruling,patent law,web conferencing,webcasting,video conferencing

PGi Buys TalkPoint

On Monday, PGi announced their acquisition of TalkPoint. The terms of the acquisition were not stated in the press release, but since PGi is a public company, I would expect that they will have to disclose the terms in their regularly scheduled financial reports. According to the release, TalkPoint projects approximately $18 million (USD) in annual revenues this year.

I spoke with Sean O'Brien, the Executive Vice President of Strategy & Communications at PGi. As his biography puts it on the PGi site, "Mr. O'Brien is responsible for identifying, analyzing and completing corporate development opportunities, including strategic investments, mergers and acquisitions." So he was obviously a key player in making this deal happen.

According to Sean, there were some significant factors in choosing TalkPoint as the most attractive acquisition target. PGi was looking for a way to increase its reach into the enterprise webcasting market, and TalkPoint has a single-minded concentration on webcasting that is fairly unusual these days. Most web collaboration companies seem to split their efforts between peer-level small group conferencing, interactive webinars, and video webcasting. With TalkPoint, PGi gets an enterprise-ready webcasting solution that can scale to very large audience sizes.

PGi also wanted a company with a solid management and product team already in place. TalkPoint is going to continue operating as a self-contained, wholly-owned subsidiary. Existing TalkPoint customers will continue to work with the account manager, salesperson, or technical support people they are already familiar with. As Sean put it, "we don't want to introduce any new customer friction points for existing customers."

PGi plans to invest in the TalkPoint Convey technical platform, as well as adding to TalkPoint's headcount and expanding sales from TalkPoint's current heavy concentration on North America to PGi's much larger global audience of medium to large enterprise companies.

This acquisition makes sense to me. PGi already has solutions for small and mid-sized web meetings with its iMeet and GlobalMeet products. TalkPoint gives them a play in the substantially higher revenue potential of large enterprise webcasts. I wish both companies well.

 

Technorati Tags: PGi,TalkPoint,Sean O'Brien,Convey,webcast,webcasting,web conferencing,web collaboration,webinar,web seminar

Venstream Tries A Unique Marketing Proposition

I'm on the email distribution lists for so many web conferencing vendors that I have trouble keeping track of them all. But today I got an email from Venstream that succeeded in catching my eye. The subject line was "Webinar Data privacy, Who is using your registration data?"

Inside the body of the email I saw this:

Now how can you turn down a come-on like that? I had to click through to their page. I found that they were riffing on one aspect of something I ranted about back in 2012… Complex and over-reaching use agreements for web conferencing software. Venstream specifically pointed to a standard clause used by too many vendors, giving them the right to collect and market to any users who register for or attend your web meetings.

Venstream's marketing proposition was simple. Run your meetings on our product and we won't harass your attendees. At the bottom of the web page was a big link in bold text, inviting me to view the Venstream Terms and Conditions. I did. It is refreshingly short, simply-written, and reasonable. Clause #9 says in plain English:

All data collected through our platform in the course of running webcasts or webinars for clients will belong exclusively to the client. This includes all registration data, poll data, audience questions and exit surveys. Venstream NEVER uses client data for our marketing efforts and we NEVER sell our client data.

That's some refreshing customer-centric agreement language. I applaud them. Unfortunately I haven't used Venstream yet on a webinar, so I can't comment on the product itself. But this makes me want to check it out!

 

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

Latest Developments In Web Conference Patent Trolling

I have promised to stay on top of news related to our old friend CopyTele in their continuing efforts to suck money out of any web conferencing vendor with deep enough pockets to make it worth their while. Read to the end, because while this starts off dry and "newsy" it gets more fun!

You can catch up with my take on CopyTele patent infringement suits against Microsoft's Skype (May 2013), Citrix and Logitech (July 2013), and additional patent portfolio purchases (November 2013).

This week the company filed suit against Apple and its FaceTime conferencing solution, including every Apple hardware device that is capable of running FaceTime. The infringement suit is based on the same patent called out in the Microsoft litigation last year.

Perhaps CopyTele was getting tired of the negative publicity they have received in various press articles since starting their web conferencing patent push. At the start of this month, they formally changed their company name to ITUS Corporation (all caps is their official name branding).

The short press release announcing the name change has two sentences that caught my eye. The first is their boilerplate corporate identifier. This is a standard bit of marketingspeak that goes in the first sentence of most corporate press releases. It takes the form of:

DATELINE - XYZ Corporation (NYSE: XYZ), a leading provider of widgets and doohickeys for detection of bovine effluence, today announced…

In the case of CopyTele, they have gone with:

DATELINE - CopyTele, Inc. (OTCQB: COPY), a company that protects the rights of inventors through patent monetization and patent assertion, today announced…

That is awfully noble. I am all for protecting the rights of inventors. Honestly, I am. But I am more than cynical about CopyTele/ITUS doing much in the way of "protecting" John Q. Inventor. They pay him off (more commonly, they pay the company he worked for during the invention period) in a one-time fee and then see if they can make huge amounts through lawsuits that are easier to settle than fight in a protracted court case. The inventor is not really protected from harm, since his business no longer holds any stake in the invention anyway.

The second sentence of interest came in a quote from the company's president and CEO, Robert Berman: "In Greek mythology, ITUS was the God of Protection."

I took a course in Greek mythology in college. I didn't remember that god, but that is hardly surprising… There were a lot of them. More surprising to me was the entire concept of a "God of Protection." Ancient Greeks prayed to a lot of different gods, each charged with looking after specific areas of control. There was a god of love, god of light, god of dark, god of day and god of night, god of mountains and a god of the sea, and dozens more. You could pray to the sea god for protection before going on a voyage. You could pray to the goddess of home and hearth to keep you safe in your house. You could even pray to minor gods to protect your flocks of sheep. It just didn't seem right that there would be one overarching God that ran a general protection racket. Was he played by Marlon Brando?

So I did a little quick Google searching. There aren't many phrases you can search for that don't return hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of results. But "Greek god Itus" is one of them. The only results are hits on the CopyTele/ITUS name change, referencing the press release quote.

I then turned to Wikipedia. They have a master list of Greek mythological figures. No Itus in the bunch. 

After trying some various other search phrases, I finally hit pay dirt. Itus was a mortal made a god by Zeus at age 35, after having faithfully protected Apollo from other gods. You can read the story yourself… It is a fabrication created in November of 2007 by username Sorcerio on a fan fiction website. The site's title motto is "unleash your imagination," which Sorcerio did in his little 500-word short story, inventing the character and his history. It's cute, but hardly the stuff of ancient Greek mythology that has been handed down through the ages.

Interestingly, another company picked the same name and back story… Itus Defense is a small family owned and operated business in Sacramento, California dedicated to teaching personal defense and selling protective devices online. They were formed in January of this year and they feature a synopsis of Sorcerio's same short story on their web page, explaining the company's name as a nod to the ancient Greeks.

Perhaps CopyTele should pay something to www.fanfiction.net to "protect" the hard-working authors who contributed to the site's success and did not expect their work to be picked up and reused for the enrichment of other companies.

Technorati Tags: CopyTele,ITUS,web conferencing,webcasting,video conferencing,web conference,FaceTime

Top 50 Web Conference Blogs of 2014

The website GetVoIP.com just posted a list of "The Top 50 Web Conferencing Blogs of 2014" compiled by Charles Samuel. I am honored to be counted in the list (although I asked them if they could change the wording on my blog description, as they used the term "teleconferencing" which makes me think of telephone audio-only conferences).

Lots of good resources here, including plenty of vendor blogs that help you get updates directly from the software manufacturers driving the business.

Extra points to the first person who can explain the description attached to the first blog in the list (3CX). Have you ever wanted a how-to video covering how to ladle web conferencing for soft phones?

By the way, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of their page stating that the site monetizes from advertisers and affiliates. I would like to confirm that I did not pay for my blog listing, nor was I aware of it until they sent me a courtesy notification.

I appreciate the recognition and encourage you to bookmark the blogs you find the most interesting. I hope mine makes your short list!

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

Deals On Stock Photography

The stock photography wars seem to be heating up. I have seen a number of pricing changes and special offers announced recently.

Kozzi just sent out an email offering new pricing for images on a per-download basis. Now when you buy a pack of credits (minimum order is 10 credits for $10 USD) you can download any image at any size for half a credit… $0.50 per image. That is a spectacular rate for low-volume users who only need an occasional image. For people who use lots of photos, Kozzi retains its subscription plan, allowing 5 photos a day for $15/month.

Meanwhile Depositphotos has been advertising a special limited-time offer through various deal sites. It gives you a voucher credit for 100 images at a one-time price of $99. The best way to find this is to do a search on "Depositphotos 90%" -- I can't find the deal on Depositphotos' own website. The deal usually shows up listed as "90% Off" or "$1000 Worth of Images."  Click here to see one site that is currently offering the deal.

And the 800-pound gorilla of stock photography is also making changes. iStockPhoto has a banner on their website announcing major changes coming up on September 13. They will switch to a single price for any file size/resolution on their images. They are also segmenting their stock into two categories… Lower priced "Essentials Collection" and higher priced "Signature Collection." They are raising the price of credits and lowering the number of credits per photo… Now credits will cost between $8 and $15 (depending on number purchased), but each image will cost a consistent one credit in the Essentials Collection or three credits in the Signature Collection. You can see that the pricing is much higher than the previous two sites I mentioned.

Two years ago I wrote up several blog articles covering some of the important factors in using stock photography websites. Click here for the master article with links to the others. The higher priced sites typically offer better search engines to find an appropriate image faster. They also may contain larger libraries with more diversity in human models featured in the photographs. I have heard rumblings on some forums that several low-price sites have stolen the images from other sites and do not give proper payment to the creators of the work. I don't know if that's true and I am not going to run the risk of a defamation suit by calling out any companies by name.

Of course there are always free image sources such as Flickr Creative Commons and morgueFile. These typically require attribution and have more limited libraries and search functionality. Whatever you do, don't rely on copying graphics found with a Google Image search… You'll eventually get yourself in trouble with a copyright holder.

Technorati Tags: stock photography,stock photographs,Kozzi,Depositphotos,iStockPhoto,morgueFile,Flickr,stock images

ReadyTalk Enhances Screen Sharing

ReadyTalk put up a blog post today announcing some new features.

If you run multiple monitors on your computer, you can now choose which screen to share in a screen share mode:

The second enhancement allows the presenter to pause screen sharing, leaving the last image frozen on attendees' screens while the presenter takes care of distracting actions behind the scenes. I have used this in other products and it's a great way to minimize the break in concentration caused by switching or resizing windows between parts of a demonstration (as one example).

The third enhancement is for Apple Macintosh users. Mac presenters can share a named application rather than the full desktop. They can also give control of the application to an attendee, letting them drive the keyboard and cursor, but only within the shared application. 

Those are all good things. Now go back and look more closely at the image above (copied from their original blog post). Does it seem strange to anyone else that ReadyTalk is using an example that shows two instances of a directly competing product in the list of applications running on their computer?  ;->

Technorati Tags: ReadyTalk,web conference,web conferencing,online conference,webinar,web seminar,web meeting,online meeting

Tips For Webinars And Presentations - Sep/Oct

You have the chance to catch several educational webcasts on how to produce and deliver more effective webinars. As a matter of fact, not only webinars but presentations in general.

If you are reading this on Tuesday, September 9, you have one last chance to register for today's free presentation on Best Practices For Content Marketing Webinars. At 10am California (1pm New York) I will cover pointers such as what types of webinars work best for content marketing and what types of presenters audiences respond to.

You have a little more time to plan ahead and register for my September 24 presentation on Best Practices for Incorporating Multimedia in Webinars. I plan to discuss things such as the impact of multimedia on attendee interaction and engagement, as well as more academic issues such as fair use copyright considerations and technical concerns including mobile devices and internet bandwidth.

And finally, you can catch me on October 7 covering techniques for creating and delivering nonlinear presentations. This is part of the 5th Annual Outstanding Presentations Workshop, hosted by PowerPoint MVP Ellen Finkelstein. The workshop starts on September 9 and continues weekly through October 28. There is a small charge (only $17), which covers the entire set of 7 presenters and topics, including access to the archived recordings.

I hope to see you online!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web conference,web conferencing,presentation tips