With rising gas prices and cheap airfare getting more difficult to find, companies and individuals are having to find different methods of holding meetings with business partners in other locations. Although Web meeting software has existed for quite some time, there seems to be more now than ever before.
We’ve put together a collection of twelve online meeting options for every budget, whether you’re running a small business or a large corporation. These tools will let you do everything from sharing your desktop to showing demos with integrated VoIP teleconferencing and more.
AIM Pro – A professional version of AIM that allows for web meetings powered by WebEx that can also incorporate video conferencing.
BeamYourScreen – Show your screen to one or many with the ability to hide portions of your screen, switch presenters, use a pointer, remote control of other systems and more.
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(Via Mashable!.)
Attention all lifecasters: Ustream is set to start displaying advertisements in the streams. The popular live video chat service has partnered up with YuMe and Yahoo to show advertising in the form of text overlays.
Here’s an example of what it will look like:
According to Patrick Ross of UstreamTV, the overlays will be able to be closed by viewers and they are semi-transparent. The goal, according to UStream ‘is to develop a system of advertising that works technically [and] is acceptable to our viewers and broadcasters while helping us build a sustainable community.’
Ustream will slowly implement this big change by choosing a dozen early testers. Ustream hopes to potentially expand the ads and try out several different formats including flash overlays and rolls.
This move is definitely going to help Ustream monetize its community, but could it potentially anger their users and audience? What do you think?
(Via Mashable!.)
The acquisition of Skype has been something of an albatross around eBay’s neck — what, exactly, does an auction site need voice-over-IP and chat software for? With the new release, it’s starting to make a bit more sense. Not as a chat client for early-adopter technology fetishists, but as a telemarketing tool. Here’s how!
With video and text chat allowing managers to check in on employees and feed them scripts, as well as cheap international calling and archiving conversations, it can work as a cheap and easy tool for managing remote customer-service centers to close those deals made on eBay and keep the credit card charges flowing into PayPal. In other words, it’s about lubricating ‘transaction friction’ by increasing buyer confidence and decreasing credit card charge-backs and complaints. Now if only there was a country with lots of English speakers and really low wages.
(Via Valleywag.)
Thursday Movie Night, featuring "Monster Thursday" live on Ustream TV (Broadcasting live at