As usual when I try to skip out for a few days of vacation, interesting news stories pile up. Here are a few things that caught my eye this week. Full stories are available from my portal page at www.webinarnews.info
1) If you have $5000 lying around, you might want to purchase the latest update to the Web Conferencing Global Strategic Business Report. I wish I could afford to take a look and tell you whether the analysis feels authoritative and trustworthy, but I have no such insight. I attempted to contact the distributor via their US Toll Free and East Coast phone numbers. Neither one was answered. The strategic market estimates they tease are fascinating. I'm going to try sending an email to see if I can get a successful contact.
2) ReadyTalk announced a new product offering focusing on small team video collaboration. Called FoxDen, the software is currently being offered as a public beta. It relies on WebRTC, which limits usage to modern browsers that support the new protocol (Chrome is an example). The big advantage is that it should work equally well on mobile devices. I'm a bit surprised to see ReadyTalk moving "downstream" from their support of larger, more structured web events to the world of ad hoc web meetings. There is enormous need for the latter, but so many low-cost/no-cost options that it creates a very different kind of marketing and support requirement for the vendor. I'm wondering if FoxDen might act as a technology proving ground before applying the WebRTC design to their webinar/webcast products in the future?
3) AnyMeeting announced a cooperative arrangement with an integration platform called Zapier. Somehow their press release completely missed any play on "going from A to Z" - which I have to count as a missed opportunity! Zapier seems to act as something of a meta-API, allowing integrations between the webinar data and functions in AnyMeeting and those in third-party products like CRM, SFM, Event Planning, and Emailing services. This is an interesting approach I have not seen before… Most of the webinar vendors build their own tight integrations to select external products. Using Zapier could open up use of AnyMeeting with a much wider range of vendors and services. I'll need to spend some time looking into this one. If you have experience with Zapier, I would love to hear from you.
4) Onstream Media released results from a survey they ran asking about usage, priorities, and preferences for webcasting software and services. Fascinating tidbit: Attendees still like logging into live webcasts from laptops and desktops more than mobile devices. The mobile revolution has not completely taken over yet! Unsurprising tidbit: Price matters a lot when choosing a vendor. Survey results are available for free download without registration. Nice.
5) INXPO announced a new competitive pricing and incentive program to drive greater enterprise adoption of their web event solutions. Included in the program is a guarantee to beat the current price you are paying or give you a free webcast. Maybe they read the results of the aforementioned webcasting survey!
I will try to follow up on these stories in more detail soon. Have yourself a fine Friday and a wonderful weekend.
