Webinar Wire

New Release of Podium Announced by ConnectSolutions

This morning the California based collaboration company, ConnectSolutions announced the launch of its new webcasting product, Podium 2. I had the privilege of meeting with ConnectSolutions CEO, Michael Fitzpatrick last week and getting a sneak peek at the new release.

One thing I like about ConnectSolutions is that they are not trying to be all things to all people. Podium 2 is aimed at enterprise and government customers who need a one to many broadcast solution. Small to medium firms, or firms interested in highly collaborative solutions should look at other products. Basically Podium 2 is an alternative to ON24.

There are a number of interesting features. The application is hosted on a "private cloud" which is great for companies who don't want to host the software in-house but also want air-tight security. The private cloud is akin to a dedicated secure server.

The presentation space is quite elegant. I think ConnectSolutions long association with Adobe has paid off because you don't get the stodgy Webex user interface model with this product. Screen sharing panels and video panels can be sized to the presenter's needs. Screen real estate is optimized using pop-up announcement panels. These panels are similar to the announcement pod in Adobe Connect but they don't stay permanently on the screen. The presenter can pop them up at will to augment information being relayed elsewhere. (Think of it as the webcast equivalent of VH-1's "Pop-up Video".)

Another really neat feature is the ability of the attendee to take notes on the presentation without leaving the product. These notes get saved as "sticky notes" on the side of the presentation space and can be either converted to a PDF or emailed out of the system at any time. Also found on the side panel of the screen are social media buttons for Twitter and Facebook, which allow you to alert your followers that you are attending a particular meeting. The result is that folks on Twitter can then click the link and join the meeting thereby increasing attendance. In addition Podium 2 webcasts can be simulcast and replayed within your Facebook page where other Facebook users can then join the webcast and chat about it within Facebook.

ConnectSolutions says the product scales from 50 to 50,000 attendees with optimization in place to deliver the best picture possible to all users regardless of bandwidth. This optimization is very important because presentations within Podium 2 are webcast via screen sharing, as opposed to the usual webinar model of uploading your presentation in advance. Since my major objection to GoToWebinar is its reliance on screen sharing, this approach by ConnectSolutions worries me but the demo that I viewed last week went off without a hitch. The video only buffered once but was otherwise smooth as silk.

Functions normally found in webinar solutions but conspicuous by their absence in Podium 2 are white board and polling. Both functions were low priorities among the user base that ConnectSolutions queried. However, according to their public relations arm, polling will likely appear in a future release. It is also important to remember that this product is aimed at large audiences where white boarding is not very practical.

Webcasts can be recorded and accessed later. This is where ConnectSolutions came up with another interesting idea: video feedback. After watching a webcast, the user can fire up his webcam and leave video feedback on the webcast just seen. This feedback can then be viewed by other replay watchers as well as the organizers of the event.

Overall I was impressed by Podium 2 as a solution for major corporate announcements and presentations or any high volume audience event. The folks at ConnectSolutions promise a pricing plan that is both straightforward and affordable. I was not able to get a look at pricing as of this writing.

For more info on Podium 2 you can read the press release here.

Comment »

Adobe Connect Pro Mobile iPhone App Works (When it Works)

My friend and colleague, Ken Molay once wrote an amusing blog article about a person who claimed she could run a webinar while on an airplane. Assuming the claim was on the up-and-up, who would ever want to attend such a webinar, with babies crying in the background and pilots announcing over the PA system, "On your left is the Grand Canyon"?

Well, producing a "mobile webinar" is one thing but attending a webinar on the go is quite another and is a lot more plausible. That's where Adobe's Connect Pro Mobile application for the iPhone comes in. I wish I could give the application a rave review but I just can't. Here was my experience.

First, I tried to attend a webinar from Adobe's e-Seminar series. Typing the long URL into the iPhone app's entry field was like defusing a bomb. One wrong character and boom, the experience blows up in your face. First suggestion: allow the Mobile app to be launched from a hyperlink within an email. Alas, after carefully entering the URL into the app, I was greeted with a message to the effect of "server not found". I tried multiple times, not trusting my reading nor typing skills, to no avail.

Time for test two. I launched my own meeting and then tried to join as a guest from the iPhone. Success! I actually got in this time. In this test, the application performed as promised but there is one important warning for webinar presenters. Because the iPhone does not afford much presentation real estate, slides display quite small. One can "maximize" the presentation screen to achieve slightly better fidelity but text intensive slides are quite hard to read. If you expect multiple mobile attendees to your webinar, the old maxim of less text, more pictures, is extra important. (Adobe advertises one feature which I did not test where you can use the typical iPhone finger "pinching" controls to zoom in on parts of a presentation slide. Of course, the trick here is zooming before the presenter advances to the next slide.)

The other limitation is that all your fancy slide transitions get lost on the iPhone. Slides simply "pop" into place. As far as slide builds are concerned, I found that they also pop into place on the iPhone without any animation. Honestly, I wasn't the least bit surprised by this. I think it was reasonable for the developer to have modest goals in release 1.0 of the product.

Again, because of limited real estate, the application dedicates separate screens to the video, chat and presentation pods. In this test, I used telephone audio integration and the voice came over the iPhone via VOIP perfectly well. Contrary to the Adobe demo, the application did not prompt me to join the phone portion of the webinar, even though phone integration was enabled. The chat feature worked fine. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to test my web-cam video feed, which brings us to test 3.

In test 3, I enabled my web-cam, fired up my meeting room and excitedly executed my iPhone app, only to be greeted by the message, "The entered room does not exist". Now this might have been true in some alternate universe, but since I launched the room myself and was in the room as a presenter, I knew the room did "exist". I Googled my error message and followed some hints by fellow users. I played with access settings. I changed the "http://" in the URL to "https://" which worked for one user. It did not work for me. I changed the start time of my meeting room on the off chance that the iPhone app was looking for a "new" meeting. Nothing worked.

So there you have it. When the application works, it works with reasonable quality for a cutting edge application in its first release. The problem is that it doesn't always work. Its failure is, as far as I can tell, unpredictable. Therefore I cannot recommend the application to anyone who must attend a mission critical webinar while on the road.

The application shows so much potential that I sincerely hope Adobe devotes some more development time to it. While conducting a webinar from a plane, train or airport waiting room is pretty preposterous, attending one is quite reasonable in this mobile computing age.

Comment »

Engaging Registrants in Dialogue After the Webinar

Comment »

Webinars Go Mobile

Having conquered the PC space and made a good stab at the MAC space, the webinar industry is now going where no man has gone before: the mobile space.

A few months ago, Adobe Connect introduced its mobile application for the iPhone. It allows audience members to attend a webinar on their iPhone. It looks pretty slick. I have not had an opportunity to test it yet so the jury is out for me. Look for a review of it here as soon as I get a chance to kick the tires.

What I have tested is an interesting application by Premiere Global Services (alternatively branding themselves as PGi). The application is called PGi Mobile. It enables the user to moderate a teleseminar (or the audio portion of a webinar) from one’s iPhone.

What is at first disconcerting is understanding that you are NOT calling into the teleconference when you use this application. You are using your login credentials (provided by PGi) to administer the teleconference. Hence you can mute and unmute attendees, kick attendees off the call, establish “breakout rooms” (called sidebar sessions), record your teleconference and dial new participants into the teleconference. Using this last option you can have PGi call your iPhone and bring you into the teleconference and even though you are the moderator you can just as easily enter the conference as a participant because all your moderator controls are in the application itself. If you want to control your behavior as the moderator, then you do need to dial in as a moderator.

Continued »

The Webinar Minute - 4 Keys to Creating Your Webinar Title

Comment »

Show Me The Money: A Review of Lee Salz's "Stop Speaking for Free!"

Anyone who even lightly peruses my blog knows that I am a big fan of "The Webinar Minute", a video series hosted by Lee Salz, CEO of Business Expert Webinars. Lee bases this series on the ideas presented in his new book "Stop Speaking for Free! The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with Webinars", co-written with Jenny Hamby.

Now I thought I was quite knowledgeable about webinars and I always viewed the production process as pretty straightforward. Lee's book at once daunted me and comforted me. On the daunting side is just how much one has to think about when launching an AFW (an acronym coined by Lee that stands for Attendee Funded Webinar).

Continued »

The Webinar Minute - "What Should I Charge For My Webinars?"

Comment »

A Brief Look at omNovia

Today I completed my free trial of omNovia, a Flash based webinar platform. Here's the good, the bad and the ugly (well really no ugly) from what I experienced.

Before my trial, I had an enjoyable session with an omNovia technician who showed me the ins and outs of the system. What first peaked my interested in omNovia was its screen sharing capability. I attended an omNovia hosted webinar a few weeks ago and was surprised at the quality of the application sharing. During my meeting with the technician, he shared with me that application sharing was how omNovia got its start. Clients in the financial sector who needed to screen share in a dynamic environment were omNovia's first customers and that is why the initial development effort was devoted to excellent screen sharing. The effort clearly paid off.

Pros:
The interface for the webinar producer is relatively straight forward. At first glance, you wonder, "where are all my controls?" but the Tools pop-up at the bottom of the screen reveals some of what you might have been looking for, such as polling and webinar recording.

The responsiveness of the system is impressive.

Continued »

The Webinar Minute - "Select The Right Webinar Provider"

Comment »

Reputable Contact Data + Social Media = Optimal Webinar Registration

Comment »