Webware

Altadyn, a company that specializes in 3D virtual-world creation platforms, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new product that will turn business meetings into a living virtual world.

Dubbed Online Meeting, Altadyn's service aims to bridge the gap between 3D virtual worlds and Web conferencing. The service offers basic conferencing features like shared presentations, instant messaging, and live conversation through Skype, but it believes its main selling point is that it uses the company's 3DXplorer virtual platform to create a virtual world that resembles a conference room.

Companies can even build their own room to tailor it to their preferences. Each participant in the online environment is represented by an avatar that can sit at a table, walk around the room, and interact with other avatars that are close.

(Credit: Altadyn)

"In our experience, when users have more interactive options, the meeting is more entertaining, inclusive, and personal than the standard (teleconference), which participants might approach more passively," Altadyn President Darius Lahoutifard said in a statement. "Users pay more attention to the proceedings and feel more present in the animated context."

To enhance the experience, Online Meeting displays all user content on the projection screen in the virtual conference space, and presenter avatars can use a virtual laser-beam point to highlight important points during the presentation.

(Credit: Altadyn)

In order to deploy Online Meeting, companies will first need to use Altadyn's 3DXplorer solution, which powers the conference software. Once subscribed, companies will pay $41 per month for use of Online Meeting.

Adobe Systems plans by the end of May to unveil the latest version of Acrobat Connect Pro, which can handle Web conferencing as well as conduct corporate trainings and manage academic courses.

Web conferencing is increasingly being touted as a "green" tool that reduces the costs and carbon emissions of business travel.

Users of Connect can chat during online meetings, which can be recorded and archived with audio, video, and transcripts of chats intact. Among the unique features are whiteboarding tools and the capability for groups of users to separate into virtual breakout rooms. There's also integration with third-party IM applications.

Audio recording options allow precise controls for presentations.

(Credit: Adobe)

Connect can work in any Flash-enabled Web browser. There's no need, for instance, to enable Java or to monkey with administrator privileges.

Adobe AIR enables Flash presentations from Connect to be played on the desktop away from the browser, which could come in handy for business travelers who fly frequently. The files can also be viewed on Flash-enabled mobile phones.

Adobe Presenter, also receiving an update, adds a tab of functions to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. It lets users create presentations rich with audio, video, and animations, which can be integrated with Acrobat Connect.

Adobe says it has 72 percent of the market share for "eLearning". Among the competitors to Connect--which starts at $42 per month--are WebEx, which Cisco Systems bought last year, and LiveMeeting, which Microsoft is selling to direct retailers.

Since I first wrote about it in September, I've been eagerly awaiting the free, open-source Dimdim, a direct competitor to the arrogant old commercial applications Webex and GoToMeeting, as well as upstarts such as Vyew and Webhuddle. I finally got a demo of this important new application, which goes into public beta this week. We have exclusive invitations to the closed beta right now if you want to jump in ahead of everyone...read to the end of the story for access.

When Josh and I first fired up the product last week, we both walked away confused. It looked as if it did a lot, but simple things slowed us down. I could send him a stream from my Webcam, for example, but he couldn't send me his. The PowerPoint presentation-sharing feature showed a smaller-than-expected image on Josh's machine. And where the heck was the End Conference button? There are user interface bits of Dimdim everywhere, such as the dashboard of an over-optioned Citroen.

Mostly the interface is scattered all over the place, so this little wizard is a big help.

However, over the weekend--while not in so much of a rush--I had some time to explore the product a bit more and it impressed me with its capabilities and the technology. I found the End button, too.

Setting up a meeting in Dimdim is very easy. You can kick off a meeting immediately or schedule it for later (including recurring meetings). I didn't find a way to load up a future meeting with resources (PowerPoints, PDFs, and Web URLs) though. It's easy enough to bring these items into a meeting once it's in progress, but doing the preparation ahead of time would make things look better to the participants.

The product lets you conduct online slide shows using PowerPoints and PDFs. You can annotate as you go and let users mark up, too. You can also work on a shared, multipage whiteboard. Or you can share your screen, which is useful for demos.

There are a lot of ways to interact with your viewers. You can send them Webcam video and audio (or make it a two-way conference if you like), chat with all attendees, or send private instant messages to individuals. I didn't see polling, quiz, or hand-raise features, though. I also expected an integrated way to set up a conference bridge over the phone, but didn't find that option.

One big benefit of this product is that viewers of a presentation do not have to download or install any applications, plug-ins, ActiveX controls, or Java giblets. That is sure to please viewers like me who don't like junking up their system just so they can get pitched.

The conference host can control what people see as well as what they can say. (click to enlarge)

However, at the moment the user interface itself is rather slow to respond to inputs. Also, the company neither guarantees speed nor high-quality audio or video transmission on this free service. If you pay for the professional version ($99 a year per presenter) or the enterprise edition (which you can install on your own servers), you can control the quality of service and get support from Dimdim. I do worry that free users will not be inclined to throw money at the product if they don't have a great experience to begin with.

So the product review summary is this: Dimdim is a very strong Web conferencing tool with a price you can't beat. It's definitely good enough to make one reconsider renewing a Webex contract.

But wait, there's more. As I said at the top of this story, Dimdim is open source. That means that it could become not just a Web meeting application, but a platform for real-time communications. For example, CEO DD Ganguly said, the Dimdim developer community is working on modules to add widgets to the service, support Open Social, improve chat, add presence, integrate better with e-mail, support documents (Google Docs?), and work on mobile devices. The open and free nature of the product means that other developers could patch their ideas into it in ways you'd never see happening on Webex. That's the potential, anyway. We'll see if the product gets enough traction to attract a vibrant developer community.

I recommend trying Dimdim. To get on before the application goes into open beta on April 10, visit here. There are only 1,000 invites set aside for Webware readers, so don't dawdle.

I'm looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It's CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for PCs, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I must say, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh's large-screen smartphone.

iVisit Teleport's feature-rich app manages to avoid distraction.

The simplest way to think about iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You sign up for an account and can start adding any contact who has also registered with the service. Conferencing starts when you enter a room, after which you have an array of controls to launch multimedia sharing functions with a one-button click; that is, tap or click the interface to chat, start a video conference using the phone's camera as the lens, send a file, and see a buddy's GPS location on a map.

I like the glossy black interface, which packs in a lot of features without making the app feel overcrowded. The video quality wasn't too shabby either, and definitely an improvement over other video software I've seen, but a lot of that input will depend on the capabilities of the phone itself. On mobile phones, iVisit Teleport supports 120x160, 320x240 video. It will be interesting to see how iVisit Teleport plays out on an actual conference call when the app's beta release goes live in April on Windows Mobile phones, and if the pricing will appeal more to consumers or small businesses. In the meantime, anyone can pre-register for the iVisit Teleport private beta or iVisit desktop for Windows and Mac.

Remember ooVoo, that iChat-like video conferencing and chat tool we took a look at back in June? Today they've launched a new version that has got a handful of useful, powerful tools that make it a viable alternative for small workgroups using conference calls and screen-sharing applications, such as WebEx.

First up is a new recording feature that lets users tape video chats with other participants. Since the video and audio are being recorded to the hard drive, the only time limit is how much free space the computer has. In testing, I managed to get a nearly 15 minute, four-way video conversation down to 95 MB file. The application took about 10 minutes to convert my conversation into workable FLV file that was at a full 1MB/S quality. It can also step it down to 256kb/s or 512kb/s if the file needs to be smaller.

Recorded video files can take up a surprisingly small amount of space. This one is just under 100MB and it's 15 minutes long at full quality. Setting the quality level down another two steps cuts down to just a quarter of the size.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The other really useful feature is a new conference calling tool that gives host and participants a landline number to call. Other ooVoo users who call this conference line get plugged right into the audio that's a part of the video chat, and just like the video recordings, this audio gets archived too. The new call in lines support up to six people, meaning users can have up to a dozen participants--including those on the video side. The call in service is free this month, but it is moving to a by-the-minute model in March.

Besides the video recording, the other new feature that I think people are going to like is an optional piece of software that's a companion for ooVoo's video player. The companion has two main uses. The first is a screen sharing application that lets users show off an entire screen, or certain zoom levels, to other video chat participants. Users can also drop media files, such as music, pictures, or video into the stream for other users to view. Secondly, it's got a built-in facial overlay tool, like Fix8, that applies digital overlays either to users faces or to replace backgrounds. It's great fun.

I've been playing around with a pretty cool service this afternoon called SeeToo. It's targeted toward people who want to share a private video with someone else but don't want the rest of the world to see it or for it to sit on some server farm out of their control. Unlike other services that have played around with the idea of multiple users watching the same video at the same time (see Lycos Mix, YouTube Streams, and Meebo's rooms) SeeToo handles video links like one-time conference sessions. You can only get in if the video holder has their browser window open and has given you a private URL. SeeToo then streams the content to one person only, who can interact with the host using a simplified chat window that sits just below the player.

Baby mind control is a powerful drug. Using SeeToo you can share this video with one person, and one person only.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

SeeToo doesn't rely on server farms to transcode and optimize the video streams. Instead, it works entirely on the client side, requiring the video host to download and install a small desktop plug-in that sits in the Windows taskbar. It's essentially like Orb, which lets you stream and repurpose desktop data to other devices. There are positives and negatives to this. The good is that your viewers don't need to install anything (assuming they have Flash), and videos begin playing almost instantly. There's also a pretty big cap on video sizes (500 MB), which means you're probably not going to have to shrink down a video before you share. The bad is that you're going to need a capable (Windows) machine to both host and crunch the data. On my month-old Core 2 Duo machine, playing a video was sucking up about half of my processing power, which is about what I expected considering the files were large and encoded in H.264.

The service has some pretty basic upload requirements at 100kb/s, which should be fine for anyone with a cable modem or decent DSL package. Users who have good speeds on both ends get the added benefit of improved quality. SeeToo's creators tell me they'd like to move toward providing higher resolutions almost to the quality of the original video. I'm giving SeeToo a bit of a pass in this department since they're brand-new, but just with interoffice testing, the video got a little choppy and pixelated from time to time.

SeeToo is currently in private beta with plans to open up its doors to everyone soon. You can sign up to be a beta tester here.

[Originally spotted on the Museum of Modern Betas]

Webex's core product MeetMeNow was quietly updated last night with some new features. New on the list is support for Webcams (both PC and Mac), which will automatically be detected and let the conference host know who's got video-conferencing capabilities. They've also condensed all video into one area of the interface, where the host can choose which cameras get broadcasted to others in the meeting. It's a quirky system, and not nearly as advanced as some of the collaborative services that offer up multiple user Webcams at the same time like Octopz (review), or even chat service ooVoo (review) to a degree, but it's fully capable of serving up video with audio to everyone in your meeting, which the company hopes will give them an edge over some of their competitors.

As host you can control everyone's video feeds through a drop-down menu.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Surprisingly, video chat is not a mainstay for many of these SMB business conferencing services. While Adobe's Acrobat Connect service offers multi-user video conferencing as part of the package, Citrix's GoToMeeting, Yugma, and Vyew do not. The one thing that really sticks out with Webex's implementation of video is that as a host you can't preview someone's Webcam before switching them live for everyone to see. It's a business-friendly feature that could help avoid awkward nose-picking incidents, but is sorely missing. We also found that in order to share your cam with everyone else, and begin transmitting, the host first needs to pick you out from the drop-down menu of folks with Webcams (which incidentally is separate from the general user list) that queues up that oh-so-familiar Adobe Flash Webcam security message--a process that would be nice to be initiated by attendee and not the host.

With the update, Microsoft Office users are also getting new quick-launch buttons to start conferences from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that show up in the add-ins section. While this is just a quick launcher, it doesn't tie down the conference to just that app, or even set it to automatically share the application.

After giving this a spin a few times, I'll echo what Rafe has said in numerous posts about Webex being less friendly to users than desired. Both of us run dual monitors in the office, and for some reason the service just can't handle it. Trying to move it over simply makes the conference manger disappear. Furthermore, separating the user chat and the video feeds (which it does) is splitting the focus of people in your meeting and forcing them to switch back and forth while trying to keep up with whatever you're sharing on the screen. While there's a "pop-out" option for the video module, why complicate the basics and clutter up people's screens with one more floating window?

Start Webex meetings from right inside MS Office apps with the new plug-in.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What this product needs is a nice and simple UI overhaul. The core technologies are still there, and screen sharing works great and as advertised. Adding video is definitely a nice start, but as mentioned above, putting everything into one communication tab and tightening up the host controls a little more would really make things shine.

With the new features the service remains $49 a month, with annual subscribers paying $39 instead. To give it a spin, the service offers a 14-day trial that only requires your e-mail address. You can sign up for it here.

We saw a lot of work and business tools for conferencing and collaboration come out of Under the Radar last week, but what about when you want to have fun? YouCams is a slick little embeddable video, voice, and text-chatting tool that's a mix of fun and business. The entire app runs in Flash, and users can jump in and join a discussion without the need for registration. The tool is aimed at social network users (mainly the MySpace crowd) as a way to communicate and interact with one another. Something that will likely get them blocked from the service, like what happened to competitor Stickam.

If you've used Stickam before, the Webcam functionality is a little similar. And by a little I'm being generous, because YouCams is much more full featured. There are two tiers of service, both free and paid. Basic registration is fairly generous, giving you voice, text, and video broadcasting privileges. Upgrading to the premium level turns YouCams into a full-on conferencing tool, allowing you to video chat with three other users at the same time, and own a personalized URL with the option to host your own conferencing room.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

An interesting addition to YouCams is integration with YouTube, and a large variety of widgets. These float around on the interface, and require no extra installation. It feels a little bit like YourMinis. The Space Invaders widget in particular nearly kept me from finishing this post. Likewise the YouTube integration is well done. Video links pop up in a conversation bubble, and won't start until you click on them. Like the widgets, they float around and can be resized on an ad-hoc basis.

There's also a social networking component integrated in the service. Users trade 'stars,' which act as credits to buy into various features. It's an interesting take on user involvement, although I'm not sure it'll catch on until users have a real reason to get involved. Maybe giving them access to premium content like music or movie downloads would be a good hook. In the meantime, casual chatters will likely get a kick out of YouCams for its slick interface and ease of use.

I've embedded a YouCams module after the jump. It might not run if you're using Firefox. We've been in contact with the YouCams team about this, and they're on it.

I normally don't comment on industry financial dealings, but this morning I was surprised by the news that Cisco is acquiring the remote meeting services company WebEx, for $3.2 billion (official news release). When I first read this, I thought I was reading a news story that had gotten stuck in the tubes for five years and was only now surfacing on the Web. In the online market five years ago, before the Web 2.0 hype bubble began--and in the wake of crumbling airline finances--it would have made a lot of sense. Today, it's less clear.

While it makes sense for Cisco to add to its collection of communication tools, and Web conferencing certainly fits that bill, WebEx's main Web-conferencing offering is an old-fashioned product that's in serious danger of being technically eclipsed by products from Web 2.0 start-ups such as Vyew, Yugma, SlideShare (writeup coming soon), and others. WebEx is overpriced and awkward to use. Like other busy Web 2.0 bloggers, I get a lot of WebEx meeting requests--and in fact just finished with one--with the presenter and me cursing WebEx the whole way through.

WebEx does generate nice revenues (although not enough to justify this purchase price) and it does have a solid customer base. These assets are worth acquiring. But the main product itself is creaky, cumbersome, and overpriced. Cisco, if it's smart, will rewrite and reprice the offering soon.