Free Web Conferencing
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There’s a great service I found for real-time web collaboration, web conferencing, and webinars. It’s called Vyew. I have used it a few times and found it to be fairly easy to use. Vyew makes sharing visual information very simple.
To use it, I can load up a few slides, layouts or photos and phone a client to discuss. I give them the link to get into the meeting and, presto, they can see the images I put up there for them to view. In addition, we can both make notes on these slides, draw, point, load more pictures and otherwise share visual information just as if we were in the same room. And the other real nifty bonus — I can either share my desktop if I want to give a presentation in another application, or I can view my client’s desktop to troubleshoot any problems. Pretty cool, huh?
Have I mentioned I can do all of this for FREE? For a small monthly fee I can upgrade to more features, but the free version is a fantastic tool to get started with!
What makes it great?
- The scaled-down version is FREE
- It uses Flash technology to share information so no need to download any special software
- Shared desktops
- Directly imports Powerpoint slides
- Annotate directly on slides, photos, or layouts
- Use a pointer tool to direct users attention to certain details
- Publish the presentation for use on web sites, MySpace, etc.
- Print to printer or to PDF
What’s not so great?
- I had a few times I couldn’t start a meeting, probably a bandwidth problem for the free users
- Not very speedy. I wouldn’t try to run any animation whatsoever through this. It’s a little slow.
- Unless I missed something, there’s no sound
- Might be nice to include VOIP with the tool, but maybe that’s asking too much considering it does just use Flash as its engine.
Overall I found this product very useful. I have used Webex in the past, which is somewhat pricey… and Vyew is pretty darn close to the performance I was used to with Webex. I think it works great to talk to clients about layouts. It would work well in many different industries where sharing visual information would improve sales, marketing, customer service, etc.
Check it out! vyew.com
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