Recently in conferencing Category

In VoIP news, M5 Networks, a Genband based hosted PBX company out of NYC, has partnered up with eXpresso, as its collaboration and file-sharing platform. The eXpresso platform is a value-add to the M5 On-Demand conferencing platform.

"The M5 Network phone system has an extensive portfolio of capabilities, but one in particular is especially harmonized with eXpresso: On-Demand Conferencing. That feature enables users to instantly host or attend conference calls on the fly, anytime, from anywhere. In combination with eXpresso, it enables live collaborative meetings where a real work-product is generated. Conventional "Web meetings" don't allow participants to contribute to documents."

It's the next evolution in VoIP -- SAAS.  But I have to ask, Shouldn't Hosted Email be the first App you host with the Voice App? Unified messaging starts with email, chat, and voice. Google Voice has done that by combining the Gmail Inbox with the Google Voicemail box (and the voicemail-to-text feature).

At the IT Expo West, WBS Connect had a great booth that was a Tele-presence suite - fully tricked out. I interviewed Scott Charter, managing partner of WBS Connect, at the show, but after reading IP Business magazine's write-up, I thought that mine would look like a rip-off. 

The key component of the WBS TelePresence offering is that WBS is working on being vendor agnostic or the translator. Right now, Tangberg talks to Tandberg and Cisco to Cisco, but how does Tangberg talk to Cisco's rooms? Using H.264-SVC and WBS Connect as the translator.  It's a great way to put all that transit to work.

I am on quite a few committees that meet mainly by email and the occasional  conference call. Neither email nor conference call are highly effective collaboration tools for an ongoing committee. So I have been looking at other ways to work.

One idea that comes up is Yahoo! Groups (and Google Groups). It's basically email but with the message archive. It also has a file upload area; polling; and who's online. But you have to register (using a Y! account).

I have had a cursory look at Stixy. It has notes and to-do lists, which makes it like a wiki only better. (Most committees I work with don't like wikis and have tried to use Google docs instead). We may try this one.

Another one that looks good is Genius Room.  It has a good review here.

If you have other ideas, please let me know. Thanks!

Conferencing is growing and there are so many players in the field. Not much differentiation that I can see. But Gaboogie has at least one differentiator: It calls the participants!

Another differentiator is Dimdim, which states that "When they wanted to share what was on their computer screens they discovered that existing web conferencing products were all either too expensive or too complicated (or both)." Dimdim is free for up to 20 attendees.

I use Freeconference.com and pay for the recording ability. I handed 2 calls off to my podcast folks and it turns out that the call quality was too low. Not good because you can't re-do a call.  Skype is good for one to one call recording (or podcasting) but I don't have an inexpensive fix for this. Do you?

SightSpeed is a great video conferencing tool. No software to download. Just plug in your webcam and go. It is based on SIP and offers 30 frame-per-second video with an integrated IM service.

Logitech makes webcams. Apparently to sell more of them, they need people to actually use them. (To use them for more than amateur porn that is). So Logitech bought SightSpeed.

Logitech, a Swiss maker of computer peripherals has acquired video conferencing software maker SightSpeed of Berkeley, Calif. for approximately $30 million in cash. The deal is expected to close sometime in November. [NY Times]

Congrats to