The Webinar Blog

Is The LogMeIn Sale Significant?

My friend Mike just asked me for thoughts about today's announcement that LogMeIn is being acquired for $4.3 billion by a consortium of private equity firms.

It's certainly significant to anybody with a financial stake in the company! That's a huge chunk of change (it's an all-cash deal), which should set up the current management team for life. Stockholders make out well too, as the price per share includes a healthy premium over recent trading prices.

But this kind of deal is a different beast than Microsoft acquiring Placeware, or Cisco acquiring WebEx. In cases where software vendors take over other software vendors, they usually want to make sweeping changes as fast as possible. Either the product needs to be integrated into the acquirer's existing product suites, or it needs to be killed off so that the customer base can be transitioned to the acquirer's preferred products.

Customers in those situations can expect noticeable inconveniences, as knowledgeable employees leave the acquired company, sales and renewal terms get altered, and support staff struggle to come up to speed on the acquired technology.

In this case though, we are faced with a change of financial ownership that does not immediately impact operations. Sure, the new owners MAY elect to restrategize and change development, sales, or support priorities. But it's not inevitable, and it's not time-critical. For the moment, we can assume they see the potential for continued growth in the existing company and that they want to keep things expanding to keep driving up valuation to make their investment pay off.

There are other, less stable scenarios of course. The investment team could try to "flip" their new asset and sell it off to another vendor. Or the LogMeIn team could be following through on the sentence buried deep in the press release:

The definitive agreement for the transaction includes a customary 45-day "go-shop" period which permits LogMeIn and its advisors to actively solicit alternative acquisition proposals, and potentially enter negotiations with other parties that make alternative acquisition proposals. LogMeIn will have the right to terminate the definitive agreement to accept a superior proposal subject to the terms and conditions of the definitive agreement.

If they had seen prior interest from another acquirer, but not at an attractive enough price, this lets LogMeIn see if the interest is strong enough to stimulate a bidding war. That's a high stakes gamble, and not necessarily what's happening here.

So facing a lack of any other information, I'd tell existing customers not to panic. And congratulations to the current owners and shareholders!

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KUDO Offers Sign Language For Web Conferences

KUDO just put out a press release announcing another value-add for enhancing accessibility of web conferences for wider audiences. Webinar or webcast hosts can now elect to add sign language to their online event, giving hearing impaired attendees a way to benefit from the content.

I wrote about KUDO earlier this year, highlighting the company's focus on facilitating multilingual web events. KUDO takes a multi-pronged approach to helping their clients reach more diverse audiences. The conferencing software itself is fairly basic. Its distinguishing feature is a prominent language selection feature that participants can use to access real-time interpretation provided by a professional interpreter. It's like being at the United Nations, with a "choose your language" switch for your earphone.

The thing that makes it practical is KUDO's pool of certified interpreters, who can be hired to work on your web conference with the knowledge that they have already been trained on the software itself. And KUDO also maintains studios in major cities around the world, offering a hardware setup that takes the burden off webinar hosts when provisioning audio and video for presenters and support personnel.

The new sign language offering takes a similar approach. An event host can specify what sign languages they want to provide for audience members. You might offer a channel with someone signing in American Sign Language, another with a person signing in Australian Sign Language, and other people signing in Chinese, French, Spanish, and so on. The on-screen language selector works the same way as for spoken languages, but selecting a signed language adds a video overlay window to the display, showing the selected signer.

Each sign language interpreter can listen to a spoken translation channel offered through the KUDO interface rather than to the source speaker. So the signer does not have to be responsible for simultaneously translating the source language and signing the translated version.

As in my previous examination of KUDO's user interface, I found the implementation simple and functional. Attendees do not have the ability to resize or reposition the sign language window on their screen while watching. It shows up in whatever position the event host has specified in their setup planning with KUDO.

As in KUDO's initial spoken language offerings, the real power behind the product is KUDO's infrastructure that brings together professionals and technology. KUDO is once again creating a pool of certified sign language interpreters who operate in a variety of languages and have been trained on the KUDO web conferencing system.

I spoke to CEO Fardad Zabetian about the new offering and he told me that KUDO's target is to have 600 signers onboarded by the end of January. If a signer uses their own home/office video setup, KUDO will certify it for meeting minimum operational requirements.

By the middle of 2020, KUDO wants to be able to provide a sign language interpreter for a web event on as little as one-hour notice. When I gasped at this, Mr. Zabetian pointed out that more lead time is always better, as it lets you work with the language professional ahead of time to prep them with jargon, abbreviations, names, and other specialized content that they might encounter.

Event hosts can choose to work through KUDO as a one-stop-shop to find, coordinate, and pay the signers for an event. This lets the host deal with a single "general contractor" and a single event invoice. Alternatively, they can use KUDO's database of professionals to find and negotiate directly with their desired signers, providing greater control over the process.

I continue to be impressed with KUDO's approach to inclusivity and universal access for web events. They understand that it is not just a technology issue, but a matter of bringing together the right people with the right tools. Making it easy to add sign language to web events is a great benefit for the online communications industry.

 

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Webinar Features - Announcements

Every so often, I write about a webinar feature that is less commonly found in webinar/webcast products. Today I'll focus on public announcements.

For the most part, vendors have not bothered adding special functionality to support visual announcements to webinar attendees. In the vast majority of cases, you can do what you need simply by writing some text in the public chat window or saying it out loud.

But there are cases where you might want specialized functionality, and a few vendors have attempted to address the need in their products.

First we need to think about potential use cases. I invite you to extend my personal brainstorming exercise with additional possibilities:

1. Helping newcomers and novice users find the chat window
2. Supporting speakers by showing web addresses or active links to online resources they mention in their talk
3. Showing emergency messages when audio is interrupted
4. Indicating when a break (or breakout session) is ending and people need to come back to the main conference
5. Reminding people to mute their microphones and not to put telephones on music hold
6. Making a big, obvious push for an action item such as registering for another webinar or ordering a product/service

An integrated chat window can handle most of these just fine. And in most cases, you don't want to interrupt the presenter's visual elements with distracting text. This is definitely an edge case. But in practical use, there are situations where it makes sense. Many web collaboration products hide the chat window and only show a subtle indication that a new message is available to read. I often run into users who aren't paying attention or don't know where to look to find text messages when they first join. There have been times when I wanted a way to make something very conspicuous to the online audience.

If we think about ways this could be implemented, the easiest is to imagine a little text input area that presenters and moderators can use. The text message is displayed in the main console of the webinar. If we want to get fancy, we give the author the ability to change font size and/or color, but those options are not critical. I would be more interested in an option box that lets me choose whether the text automatically disappears after x seconds, or if it remains on each person's screen until they manually dismiss it.

The next question is what happens if we add a second announcement before the first one is dismissed. Does it replace the previous message, or do they stack? Maybe they scroll horizontally or vertically?

The final question is whether we allow active hyperlinks in the announcement text. This makes me think of use case #6 above, and a unique feature I played with in BigMarker called "Offers." It isn't designed so much for ad-hoc text announcements, but it's very snazzy for preconfiguring a click-through pop-up graphic that takes users to a desired target page. Great for making a very obvious call to action enticement.

One potential way to add basic text announcements is to use "white board" or overlay annotations. In products that allow you to type text as an overlay annotation, it's a way to get some text on the screen in an obvious location. But depending on the product, it may disappear with a slide change and it certainly can't have timing, scrolling, or active links.

I don't consider this a critical feature. It would be easy to get carried away and overuse it to the detriment of a presentation. But on the rare occasions when you need it, it's a nice tool to have in your arsenal.

Sound interesting? Let your vendor know you'd like them to consider it. If they hear from enough users, it might make it into a development road map.

 

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