There's a new WebEx competitor hitting the market: CallWave's Fuze. Its advantages: No download required on either the viewing or the presenting side. It works with video and allows markup of video frames. And it has some nice call-handling features.
I used the tool briefly and although I found some bugs and performance issues in this early version, I like the design and found it simple to use. You can upload documents to share (images, text files, PowerPoint presentations, even videos), and once you're sharing them, use simple drawing tools to mark them up and illustrate points. On the shared video player, you can sketch over the top of a paused video, and the sketches stay attached to the particular frame; you can see which frames have markups by little icons on the player's progress bar.
Fuze also runs on some smartphones, like the Blackberry Bold, and includes support for video. I haven't had a chance to check that out but it's an important feature--you'll be able to participate in a Web meeting while you're sitting an airport waiting area with your laptop put away. On other phones, like the iPhone, you can monitor the chat room but not see the shared screens.
I like the feature in the program to call people into a conference bridge, instead of the usual procedure, which is to e-mail them a phone number and access code. It will save a lot of time in online meetings if you can pull in your participants.
On the downside, you can't (yet) use Fuze for screen or application sharing, since that would require a software install on the sender's side. The company is working on that, although the people I talked to there want to push the "no download required" pitch as long as they can, which explains the delay.
Fuze is a Flash app, and reminds me a bit of Adobe's own Acrobat Connect, with which it competes (it's a very good product, too). There are several other products in the space, too, including Vyew, which was recently updated, and the open-source DimDim.
Fuze is priced at $29.95 a month (much less with yearly commitment). That's a bit high, and I expect competition (and the growing popularity of free products) will steadily push the prices down on remote presentation apps. I'm glad about that. I can't stand WebEx.
Image sharing and markup, no download required.
Bonus: What's CallWave doing in this market?
Prior to releasing this product, CallWave made and sold an "Internet answering machine," that did speech-to-text summaries of your voicemail. The company is backing away from that product. CallWave CEO Jeffrey Cavins told me that while there was good uptake from techies, the service was too hard to configure for general consumers. If cellular carriers had gotten onboard to offer it to their subscribers, the product would still be supported. But they didn't.
Dashwire, a small Seattle start-up eleven employees strong, continues to impress with its growing service for managing and interacting with the contents of your cell phone online. To recap an earlier review, Dashwire synchronizes your cell phone to an online account, displaying on a flexible dashboard your call history, images, profile, texting history, photos, ring tones, videos, and contacts. You can roll up your sleeves and muck around with your phone from Dashwire, a much happier experience than crouching over your two-inch cell phone screen and tapping or clicking away through on-device management programs, particularly if you're not on the go and are sitting comfortably in front of a computer, thank you very much.
Since Dashwire is linked to your phone via a downloadable client, everything you do online also occurs on your phone, and vice versa. Therefore, you can view, tag, and share media, send text messages, listen to voice mail, and add bookmarks from the comfort of your online dashboard. It's cool. But in the last month, it's gotten cooler.
(Credit:
Dashwire)
There have been quiet roll-outs of tweaks, even a few big changes. For a start, Dashwire has drastically improved its search tool. Users can now push photos to friends' phones, e-mail addresses, and Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo. (In Twitter, most photos are converted to a TinyURL.com link. It doesn't work 100 percent of the time, and Dashwire's working on that.)
The service also now supports data transferring when users switch phones, which was the top request among private beta testers, and a great new feature for quickly assigning speed dial settings.
The big thing, though, is integration with CallWave, a service that transcribes voice messages to text. This is a smart move, and it makes perfect sense for Dashwire, which is all visual management, to provide visual voice mail.
Coming up
Dashwire will be introducing a few more additions in stages over the next six months. Starting Friday, text messages will be threaded by contact, in a manner much like the iPhone. In about four to six weeks, a new, dynamic phone client will replace the current app, which is currently limited to a few syncing options. The new, richer Dashwire client will peform all sorts of party tricks, like pulling in media when you switch to a new handset, push status updates to Facebook and Twitter, and pull in content from the Web.
The final announcement in this cascade of upgrades is that Symbian S60 users will be able to get their hands on Dashwire if they can hold their horses until late August or early September.
Dashwire runs equally well from your phone memory and storage card, and it's now in public beta for Windows Mobile users. Get out there and try it.
>>See all the latest news in cell phones and mobile software coming out of CTIA Wireless 2008.
Share photos via SMS, e-mail, or post online.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
We've told you about Callwave already, but now we've had the opportunity to put the company's Vtxt application through its paces. Vtxt takes spoken voice mail messages and converts them into text. When someone calls and leaves you a voice mail, Vtxt will send you a text message and an e-mail with a transcript. You don't get the message word-for-word; rather, Vtxt gives you the gist of the message so you can understand what the person said.
The result is a useful and user-friendly service. Both the text message and e-mail arrive within seconds, so you have ample time to decide if the message is urgent enough for you respond straightaway. The gist transcription isn't always perfect--but that's sort of the point, in a way. And in any case, we were pleased with the results overall. Read more.
I've gushed already about CallWave, the free cellular voice mail replacement service. Today the service got even better--the company has just taken the wraps off Vtxt, its automated speech-to-text service.
Vtxt converts voice mail into text. When someone leaves you a message, the service e-mails or SMSes you the transcription. The conversion is far from perfect, but more than good enough to get the gist of the message. You'll still have to listen to the recording to get the message's full meaning and nuance, but with Vtxt you can very quickly scan your voice mails to find the important ones. This service saves a ton of time and reduces the anxiety of having un-listened to voice mails in your in-box.
Vtxt isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be. I now know I don't have to listen to this message right away.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I've been using CallWave since January and I highly recommend it--with Vtxt, even more now than before. You do have follow CallWave's instructions carefully to replace your carrier-provided voice mail with this free service, but it's worth the effort.
Read my previous coverage for CallWave's other useful features.
See also SimulSays, which offers a similar service specifically for Blackberry users. It looks like it integrates tightly with Blackberry phones, and costs $9.99 a month.
CallWave sends voice mails to your phone
(Credit: CallWave)Speech recognition technologies had a moderate presence at CTIA, and CallWave had one of the biggest announcements with its new Vtxt service. Designed for busy, on-the-go types, Vtxt eliminates the need to scan through long, dull voice mails by sending them to your cell phone. After someone leaves you a voice mail, you'll receive a text message containing the person's name and phone number as well as a summary of the voice mail. The summary is composed using a CallWave-developed algorithm that scans for what it deems as important words, while leaving out any pauses or words like "uh." At present, Vtxt doesn't use live operators to transcribe messages in full but CallWave said that option will be available in the future.
Though we didn't get a live demonstration of Vtxt, we did see an example of a message summary sent to a cell phone. When we compared the summary to the original voice mail, Vtxt did get the important details correct but it had more trouble with proper names. The service still is in a beta testing phase but customers of CallWave's existing products can sign up to try it out. There's nothing to download, instead you just go to the company's Web site and enter your phone number and other information.
We're eager to try Vtxt, especially after CNET's own Rafe Needleman raved about CallWave earlier this year.
I've been using the GotVoice (review) voicemail retrieval service for almost a year, and for the most part I've been happy with it. The free system retrieves voicemails that go to my home phone's message box and sends me e-mail links to them. Handy. On Monday, the company is releasing a major update to the service that fixes a few usability snags and adds outbound message utilities.
GotVoice now sends messages in addition to receiving them.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Current users should like the new interface. It's easier to use, and there's finally a "delete" button on each individual message.
The real action is on the outbound side. Now you can record messages on GotVoice and have them sent to any other phone, either as a regular phone call or a "stealth message" (my term for a voice message that goes straight to voicemail without making the phone ring). You can send messages to multiple users at once, even if they're on different phone networks--GotVoice understands how different networks operate. (See also: Pinger.)
Additionally, GotVoice has a nice interface for creating the greeting for your voicemail in-box. You can record a message from your computer's microphone or upload an MP3, or for a fee, construct a "celebrity greeting" from impersonated phrases. The technology is from Veritalk and is not new, but GotVoice's capability to interface with your voicemail systems and install greetings for you is pretty neat.
The company also is building a "visual voicemail" service that will let users manage all their messages from a WAP interface on a mobile phone; in other words, a poor man's iPhone. Carriers (other than Cingular, Apple's reseller for its phone) are interested in this, GotVoice CEO Curt Blake told me.
And now a message from the American president.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I like GotVoice because setting it up and using it requires very little work and no reconfiguring of phones. You just give it your phone numbers and PINs; and it gets to work for you. If you can stand putting in a small effort, though, I highly recommend CallWave (review) as a replacement voicemail system. I'm using it, instead of GotVoice, on my mobile phone and find it to be a better and more complete experience.
If you want to go to the next step and really get your voicemail and e-mail working together, and tie all your phones into one integrated system, then check out Grand Central (CNET.com's review; The New York Times review). It gives you a new phone number that you then have to give to all your contacts, but its capabilities are amazing.
P.S. to CallWave users: GotVoice and CallWave do not play well together. When GotVoice sends a direct message to a cellular phone that's signed up for CallWave, it goes directly to the phone's old voicemail service, not the CallWave message store.
CallWave is about the coolest free cell-phone utility I have ever seen, and it goes a long way toward making me not care so much about the "visual voice mail" that Steve Jobs touted for the upcoming iPhone. The CallWave service, which is live now, replaces your standard carrier-provided voice mail with a much better system, and it lets you pick up incoming cell-phone calls on any other phone or even your PC.
My voice mails now come as e-mail attachments.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I've been using the competing GotVoice service since I first wrote about it in May to get my cellular and home voice mail messages via PC. But CallWave goes well beyond GotVoice. Both can alert you via e-mail when you receive a new message and then play the message over the Web. But while GotVoice is a hack--it periodically has to dial your voice mail to collect the messages, which introduces an unpredictable delay into the alerts--CallWave is a replacement voice mail service. Once you program your phone to use CallWave instead of your carrier's voice mail (instructions are provided when you sign up, and they're simple), CallWave intercepts all calls you don't answer. When you get a message, it sends your cell phone a detailed SMS with the name and number of the caller, and the duration of the call. It also sends you an e-mail with a Web link to play the message; optionally, it can send messages to you as e-mail attachments.
The only disadvantage when compared with GotVoice is that CallWave only works on cell-phone voice mail, and only supports one number per free account; GotVoice will also handle landline voice mail, and it can handle multiple systems per account. I'm still using it for my home phone voice mail. In addition, with CallWave, you lose the use of your phone's message indicator.
There's a CallWave Windows application with additional powers. When a caller leaves you a message, one option is to have the application play it immediately on your PC. If you want to call the person back, CallWave will call one of your phones (landline or cell) and then connect you to the caller. It can also turn your PC into a VoIP phone and return the call that way (this feature is in beta, but it worked great for me). You can also send the caller an SMS directly from the application.
The CallWave Windows application.
(Credit: CNET Networks)You can even use the application to answer a call while someone is leaving a message. If you press the "take call" button while the caller is either listening to your greeting or recording their message, CallWave will tell them you want to talk to them and then call the phone of your choice (or your PC) and connect it to the incoming call. This feature makes it easy to continue to use your cell-phone account when your cell phone is turned off or out of reach.
Though I doubt that CallWave was designed for it, you can use its call-connection service to make free long-distance calls (I couldn't get it to work for international calls, though; for that see TechCrunch coverage of AllFreeCalls.net). CallWave acts as the middleman, placing calls to your phone or PC and to the person you're calling. If you're on a landline, the call is essentially free. I look forward to the day when CallWave also interoperates with Skype.
CallWave is full of other well-thought-out features, and it genuinely makes your cellular account more useful. The fact that it's free blows my mind. There's a paid version as well ($9.95 a month) that lets you listen to voice mails as they are being left. The company also offers other paid telephony services.
Did I mention how cool CallWave is? OK then.
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