Wednesday, June 4, 2003

Voice2Video.net

This is an ASP (Application Service Provider) offering a suite of hosted applications for live, online meetings with increasingly broader feature sets, from a relatively simple voice-and-text chat, to a full-featured virtual meeting room with: multipoint VoIP, live or pre-recorded video, Web tours, hand raising, voting/polling, moderation, whiteboard, etc. These applications, with descriptive but slightly pretentious names like: VoiceMaster, SalesMaster, ClassMaster, TourMaster, SupportMaster, OfficeMaster, and VideoMaster, are not terribly innovative or cutting-edge, but the array of features is fairly comprehensive, able to satisfy most online conferencing needs.

We've signed up for a live demo of the ClassMaster and will report or impressions, but at this point we can safely say that this service is worth giving a try. We're particularly impressed with the reasonable pricing of the aforementioned applications. The monthly charges vary, but not greatly, depending on the application being used and the total number of "seats". Here are a few examples:

• VoiceMaster: 10 seats - $30; 25 seats - $65; 50 seats - $130
• ClassMaster: $125 for a block of 25 seats
• VideoMaster9: 10 seats - $75; 25 seats - $110; 50 seats - $180

(There is also a small, one-time setup fee ranging from $15 to $25).
Unfortunately, experience tells us to be very cautious when looking at the pricing schemes of new software or online services. Many software companies have a penchant for alienating paying customers, by luring them with very low pricing or generous initial licensing terms, and then, once the customer becomes dependent on the service or software, increasing the price severalfold. (There is a grain of truth in this old joke comparing software companies to drug dealers, isn't there?) Hopefully, this won't be the case with Voice2Video.net.

Tuesday, June 3, 2003

Nonprofit Sector Slow to Join Internet Revolution

That's the title of the May 31 story from the PND News. This item is based on an NY Times article, which in turn refers to a report published by the Harvard Business Review. Unfortunately, neither the article, nor the report are available for free, but the PND News offers a pretty good synopsis of the major points of criticism leveled at nonprofits, so do go and read at least that.

Monday, June 2, 2003

Virtual Teamwork

That's the theme of the May issue of Stanford Business. The first two feature articles are particularly worth reading.

• Priming the Pump for Better Classroom Performance by Kathleen O'Toole:
  • Synopsis: Professor Paul Romer has launched Aplia, a company that provides Web-based teaching tools that allow students to more thoroughly prepare for class via the Internet
• Teams That Span Time Zones Face New Work Rules by Bill Snyder
  • Synopsis: As global virtual teams become more of a reality, so do the corresponding logistic and cultural barriers. Managers are tackling these challenges out of necessity

Sunday, June 1, 2003

Teaching OntheNet 2003

• Fourth Annual Conference
• Held online, June 24-26, 2003
• The content of this asynchronous conference is geared to those in higher education and includes strategies for: Teaching online — Developing online courses — Administering online courses
• Who should attend: Faculty in higher education experienced with teaching online — Administrators who want to stay current with education and online learning — Continuing education teachers, K-12 teachers and anyone else interested in staying current with teaching online. Previous participants have come from Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

vClass

I am very happy to announce that another magnificent conferencing tool has been added to the trio of our perennial favorites: Centra, Placeware, and Webex. Its name is vClass and it is a product of a company we haven't heard before: Elluminate. We saw it in action (in an online meeting) just a few days ago and were duly impressed. Its rich set of features resembles that of Centra and includes: multipoint audio communication (VoIP); whiteboards; application and desktop sharing; instant messaging; slide display; Web tours; recording and playback of sessions; breakout rooms; virtual hand raising; polling; support for multiple presenters. Installation of the client was smooth, automatic, nearly invisible. All aspects of the meeting, including audio, worked fine, without glitches. We even uttered a few "wow!"s seeing as the subcomponents of the client (e.g. list of participants; chat window, whiteboard) could be detached from the rest and expanded to full screen. Finally, the availability of vClass for in-house installations (as well as in hosted mode) won our hearts. The only crack in this nearly perfect picture was the lack of any pricing information on the site... Without it, we can only put a cautious stamp of approval on vClass.

P.S. Oh, I almost forgot: the vClass client, apparently written in Java, is available for Windows and for the MacOS! This is very unusual in this exclusive, "Windows only" club of high-end, Web conferencing software.