The Webinar Blog

A Look At Current ON24 Lawsuits

I’m going to write about ongoing lawsuits involving webinar software vendors. I should start with a disclaimer that I have ZERO legal training and no firsthand knowledge of the case specifics. I am an unbiased external observer interested in what’s going on in our industry. I should also point out that I have no fiscal or business relationship with the vendors mentioned in this article and no investments in any companies involved.

ON24 is a long-established major player in the webinar/webcast space. Its history stretches back to 1998, starting with streaming news content over the web and morphing to a DIY platform for hosting web events. The company went public roughly one year ago.

The stock price has not had the explosive growth that investors were hoping would mirror the financial success of Zoom. It briefly hit $81.98/share on opening day and has been on a downward trajectory ever since, now trading under $17/share.

This has spurred a class action lawsuit against the company alleging that “representations made in the registration statement and prospectus used to effectuate the Company's IPO were materially inaccurate, misleading, and/or incomplete because they failed to disclose, among other things, that the surge in COVID-19 customers observed in the lead up to the IPO consisted of a significant number that did not fit ON24's traditional customer profile, and, as a result, were significantly less likely to renew their contracts.”

I don’t really have anything to say about that. We’ll see what happens. My cynical side says that when the dust settles the lawyers will get richer and the common investor won’t see much benefit from the lawsuit either way.

I’m much more interested in a lawsuit that ON24 has filed against webinar.net (Yes, the latter is one of those company names that includes a period and no capital letter. It makes sentences look very strange).

Part of the suit claims that webinar.net infringed on a technical patent held by ON24. The rest of the suit alleges “intentional interference with contractual relations, unfair competition, and false advertising.”

Technical patents get challenged all the time in our high tech world. I’m pleasantly surprised to see a suit pitting first-party developers against each other rather than the usual “patent troll” harassment suits that are brought purely as a financial gambit.

The current stage in the rather standard process for such things is that webinar.net has challenged the validity of ON24’s patent. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board will do a review of the merit of the original patent itself and then decide whether the suit can proceed to look at whether webinar.net infringed it in their software code. These things tend to play out over a protracted timespan.

At issue is the user-controllable webinar console that I have praised on my blog in the past. ON24 originated a unique way for webinar attendees to have their own control over size, placement, and expanded/collapsed status of different content windows on their own screens. It effectively makes the entire webinar window work like a modern operating system GUI, where users can dynamically view whatever content pieces they want in any way they want.

I was so impressed with the design concept and execution that I wondered why other vendors weren’t going with the idea. It is instantly intuitive. Now I know why… ON24 patented it under US-9148480-B2: “Communication Console with Component Aggregation.” 

webinar.net started up in 2018 and introduced their software platform in November of 2019. The key executives had previous work experience with other companies in the industry, as might be expected. Most germane to the suit, co-founders Mike Nelson and Michael Henry both have LinkedIn profiles listing 11 years acting as Sales VPs at ON24 through the first decade of the 2000s. That makes the interference and competition parts of ON24’s suit more interesting. Could they have used previous familiarity and relationships with ON24 customers as an entry point to getting their new product into those companies? I have no idea and no insights into this part of the suit.

From a technical perspective, webinar.net certainly took the same conceptual approach as ON24 in creating a user-controllable webinar console. They let webinar administrators select which content pieces should be present as windows in the console. You might elect to show slides, webcam videos, public chat, private (moderated) Q&A, presenter bios, headshots, or something else. Then attendees can expand, collapse, resize, and move those content windows independently.

There is no question that the operational end result for users is similar in the two products. The question is whether the implementation in code violates a protected methodology. That’s not anything that we can see from the outside. If the Patent Office decides that the patent itself is valid, the investigation into the specifics of the coding will be quite a challenge.

There’s little else to report at this point. Things need to play out and we’ll see how all parts of the cases progress. I’ll try to check in from time to time with updates as I see them. I think it’s an interesting glimpse into a world where webinars are increasingly significant from a business and financial perspective.

Technorati Tags: ON24,webinar.net,patent infringement,webinar,webinars,web conferencing,webcasting,web collaboration,online collaboration

Is Presenter Training Biased Against Females?

I am an old, white, cisgender male. A product of my culture, my upbringing, and my practical work/life experiences. Why start with an introduction like that? Because I am going to delve into a controversial topic and my identity is naturally going to color the way I think about it.

I just finished a presentation training session with a wonderful client. We ran through some practice presentations and group feedback discussions. In this particular session, all the participants were female.

One of them exhibited a common speaking habit… Frequent upward inflections at the ends of conceptual phrases or complete sentences. Linguists refer to this under a variety of labels. You might see references to High Rising Terminal (HRT), upspeak, uptalk, rising inflection, upward inflection, or High Rising Intonation (HRI).

The woman in question was preparing to speak on stage at an industry professional conference. I had a choice to make… Should I mention her intonation tendency and recommend modifying it for a more declarative tonality, or should I let it slide?

Several years ago, I would have recommended a more declarative style without another thought. I was trained to believe (and thus DO believe) that upward inflections can result in a perceived lack of confidence and authority from a speaker. The perception can be exacerbated (unfair as it may be) when males listen to female speakers.

But nowadays the issue is not so cut and dry. Linguistics professional Amanda Montell is among a group of people working to “decriminalize” upspeak and other increasingly common speech patterns that have long been labeled as incorrect, especially for female speakers. Ms. Montell wrote a deliberately confrontational book called “Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language” in which she effectively says that men should stop trying to make younger women speak in a more traditional older male style. She particularly calls out attempts to stop upspeak, vocal fry, and “like” as a conversational filler.

This one’s tough for me. If I argue the point, is that another piece of evidence pointing to a knee-jerk age/gender bias that refuses to recognize a different, valid style from people who fall into a different demographic than mine? Possibly. I may not be able to break myself out of that viewpoint.

But I think it’s worth at least considering “the reality of perception.” Presentation is not just simple transmittal of facts. White papers, charts, and reference books can take care of that. A significant component of effective presentation is performative. You make choices designed to influence an audience’s attention, agreement, and action. So many things contribute: vocabulary, facial expressions, body language, tempo, tonality, supporting visuals, and more. Experienced presenters don’t just think about what they want to say – They think about how the audience will perceive them and emotionally or intellectually take in the message.

Your audience may be unjustified in their perceptions. But that doesn’t mean the perceptions don’t exist. If your presentation style introduces doubt in the minds of your audience or distracts them from listening to and assimilating the message you want to deliver, they may be in the wrong. But that’s small consolation after your presentation fails to achieve its desired goals.

You can’t change all those perceptions at once. You don’t have control over all those accumulated biases and backgrounds out there. You only have control over one person… YOU. Which puts the onus back on you to understand how you are perceived and work on eliminating the things making you less effective at your task.

There is a glib piece of advice given to marketers, salespeople, authors, and speakers… “Know your audience.” We may not agree with the way they think. We may not like the way they think. But if we can UNDERSTAND the way they think, we can communicate with and influence them more effectively.

For now, I will leave it to Ms. Montell and others to change public perceptions across the populace at large. In the meantime, watch out for rising terminal intonation as something that could potentially undermine your effectiveness. If this is even more important for females presenting to males, let’s acknowledge the unfairness but still account for the reality.

As with all presentation habits, the goal is not to eliminate them completely and sound robotic. The goal is to reduce their frequency and prominence to the point where audiences ignore them and concentrate on your message rather than your behavior patterns. I believe in this for all presenters – male and female, young and old.

Technorati Tags: presenter training,speaker training,presentation tips,presentation training,vocal habits

A Special Webinar Review Offer For 2022

2021 was another busy year for webinars as the pandemic plodded on and remote collaboration continued to be the norm. My busy season went later than usual, with webinars booked right up through Christmas week!

But now we’re into the traditional slow season as companies concentrate on webinar planning for the new year. That gives me some much-appreciated down time, and also gives me the opportunity to bring back last year’s special winter offer for two months only.

During January and February, I am offering a reduced rate flat-fee webinar review. Details are available at https://www.wsuccess.com/winterspecial.html

I will review your webinar emails (invitations, confirmations, reminders, follow ups), promotional materials, webinar content, moderating, and delivery. You get a written report telling you where things are in good shape and where you could benefit from making improvements. What you will NOT get is a pitch to use my services.

By the way, this is a lovely way to delicately indicate to a company that you weren’t completely satisfied with the webinars you attended as an audience member. Maybe just pass along a link to the page with a note saying “Thought you might be interested in this!”

Here’s wishing you a bright and bountiful new year, filled with webinars that are worthwhile and effective for both hosts and attendees.

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