Tag Archives: video call

VSee – The Next Breakthrough For Online Sales!

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

online Sales leadership and management

A couple of days ago, Milton got to share VSee with sales guru and SalesOpShop CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner.  He was quite impressed with VSee’s

1. Smooth video
2. One click desktop screen sharing
3. Window to window file sharing
4. Recording function with great audio/video sync.

Check out Mr. Gschwandtner’s VSee interview with Milton on how VSee “could be the next big breakthrough for online sales presentations.”

Milton talks about how VSee allows for

  • rapid sharing of desktop items during a sales call
  • better screening of job candidates (seeing vs. resume)
  • providing feedback on a novice sales call
  • recording a master salesperson for training purposes
  • shortening the sales cycle by bringing in remote expertise during a sales presentation and avoiding delays

online sales guru Gerhard GschwandtnerGerhard Gschwandtner is the CEO of SalesOpShop, as well as the founder of Selling Power magazine, the host of the Sales 2.0 conference series, and the author of 14 books on selling, sales management, and sales psychology.  He has trained over 10,000 salespeople and managers and loves exploring the use of new technology and new approaches to selling.  His most recent project, SalesOpShop strives “To be the world’s most dynamic sales improvement site, where members help shape the future of selling and sales technology.

Follow us on Twitter (@VSee) and Like us on Facebook to hear about the latest from VSee!


Airtime Launch Demo Nightmares – due to Flash

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Airtime was launched on Tuesday by the founders of Napster – Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. This Chatroulette-inspired random video chat service seems to have piqued the curiosity of even Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The event was filled with celebrities, but with so much fanfare, 2 years of work, and $40M of investment, the actual Airtime video demo was a disaster. The video calls failed so badly that comedian and star of show “Community”, Joel McHale, asked who needs to be fired.

Airtime chose Flash for their video calling service. For folks with Flash experience, their call failures was not surprising.

Device dependence
Flash video requires some form of acceleration from your graphics card, hence, the experience varies for everyone. Let’s not forget that many mobile devices are unable to render Flash, such as the iPad, iPhone and PDAs.

Reliability & Security
Do you really want someone to be listening in to your conversations online and watching how you behave? Well, the thing about Flash video is that it has to go through a server, which exposes the content of the entire conversation to the service provider. In fact, Airplay “captures screen images during conversations and relies on a team of moderators located overseas to keep tabs on any inappropriate exchanges.”

Read our VSee vs. Flash article here .

Related Articles

Follow us on Twitter (@VSee) and Like us on Facebook to hear about the latest from VSee! By the way, we are hiring too.

Video Chat A Must-Have Tool For Remote Managers

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

faceless manYesterday I came across a remote managers discussion thread.  One person new to remote managing was having trouble working with “faceless” remote clients.  Several respondents were rather unsympathetic to his problem, insisting that the loss of facetime shouldn’t affect his ability to influence and build rapport with his clients.

Maybe the nature of their jobs made face-to-face meetings unnecessary for them or maybe they’ve simply been working with the same people for years. But, virtual team studies have shown that face-to-face meetings are crucial for building team trust, especially in the beginning.  While virtual teams can be just as strong as face-to-face teams, it usually takes them more time (which they might not have) to learn to work together effectively.

It turns out, this remote manager wasn’t the only one who missed the interaction of face-to-face.  CEO Rae Hoffman-Dolan is just one of many managers who puts Skype video chats at the top of her list of “6 Must Have Tools For Managing Virtual Employees.”  Furthermore, a Microsoft Flexible Working report found that about half of their managers had issues with their ”inability to talk face-to-face” with telecommuters.  (This was by far the most popular complaint, with “lack of focus” being mentioned by only 26% of managers.)

As a remote worker, I have to say the immediacy of “seeing” someone, makes a huge difference in communication and relationship-building. It really hit me on one occasion when a coworker IM-ed me to do something for her.  I more or less ignored the text at the time, shoving it onto my mental to-do list.  Fifteen minutes later she VSee-ed me to talk about the request. That video call made all the difference in making me remember and prioritize her request. Without seeing and talking with her face-to-face, I know I would have either forgotten what she wanted me to do or not gotten around to it until days later.  It isn’t that text communications don’t work, but rather they delay work that could be done more quickly because they usually make less of an impact and require more time to follow up and receive feedback.

As for relationship-building, it’s difficult to quantify, but especially for isolate remote workers like myself, seeing faces allows us to work more like human beings. Talking with people over VSee lets me feel like I’m not just talking with machines or a name on the screen, but with real people who have lives and personalities. It quickly clears up misconceptions that I sometimes build up about other people’s personalities or what they meant in an email. It keeps me engaged during a presentation or group discussion. It also makes me feel more productive and more connected to the group.

So just because you’re able to get by without “seeing” the people you work with doesn’t mean seeing faces doesn’t matter. It could just mean you’re missing out on the extra benefits of seeing face.

How important do you think video chat is for remote managers?

Related Articles

Follow us on Twitter (@VSee) and Like us on Facebook to hear about the latest from VSee!

photo credit: adapted from HaPe_Gera via Flickr

VSee At VoIP Users Conference

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Last Friday, Milton our fearless CEO, was the guest speaker for the hour-long VoIP Users Conference (VUC).   If you’ve never been to a Milton talk, he’s really good at inspiring you to try out VSee, and I, personally, always end up learn something new from him.   Besides highlighting how VSee’s design philosophy makes it more collaborative than other products, he also answered a lot of great questions you may also have had about VSee, such as

  • How is VSee different from Google+ video chat?
  • Does VSee plan to have WebRTC integration for those without the VSee client?
  • What makes VSee more secure than H.323/SIP videoconferencing?

If you want to hear some of the answers and get a more in-depth look at VSee, you can listen to a recording of Milton’s talk here or share the talk with a friend.

About VUC

Btw, VUC is a weekly program that holds fairly technical live discussions with a guest speaker about “VoIP, SIP, Asterisk and all kinds of telephony-related topics,” which means that you’ve got a shot at getting your more difficult questions answered :)  The discussion is held live each Friday at 9 AM PST or 12 noon EST, and they’ve got it going by phone, Skype, SIP, and Google+ Hangouts.  There is also an IRC (chatroom) you want to hop on so you can make side talk and ask questions without being disruptive.  Listeners from all over the world call in, and they record all their shows in case you have to miss it.  If you want to pop in on a talk sometime, you may want to check out their schedule of upcoming speakers.

 

Follow us on Twitter (@VSee) and Like us on Facebook to hear about the latest from VSee!

Update from Haiti—Checking in on HELP

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Randy Roberson is In Haiti today.

We’ve mentioned Randy and his organization, HELP (Humanitarian Emergency Logistics & Preparedness), several times in the last couple weeks.  Well, I spoke to him yesterday while he was in a hotel on the Haitian border in the Dominican Republic.  I recorded some of the interview and we’ll post some video here once we’ve had a chance to edit it.  In the meantime, let me tell you about their efforts and some of their needs.

Randy said they were going to pick up a few tons of rice and water, adding it to what he and his group had brought overseas, before crossing into Haiti.  He’s got a three man team on the ground there.  They’re coordinating with the larger effort through some of the tools likely worked on and discussed at CrisisCommons.

He’s also working to bring in a 20 foot “container” clinic.  That’s a clinic made from a shipping container to make it easy to move from relief area to relief area.  They would like to fly it in to provide another clinic more quickly, but due to budget constraints they will likely need it shipped to the coast, then transported by boat the rest of the way.  Randy has two surgical teams willing to come in and work through that clinic.

They currently have more ties to doctors in the states than they will likely have the ability to utilize.  There are groups monitoring beds at ICUs, doctors in Chicago, and doctors in Arizona.  However, HELP’s cost for their satellite link is $16.55 per minute, restricting HELP’s ability to do telemedicine for Haitian quake survivors.  The current budget only allows them about two hours of linkup time per day while the demand (and available help) requires closer to 10 or 12 hours per day.   They can mitigate this somewhat because some survivor issues can be handled without a live doctor in the US seeing them in real time.  Randy referred to “store and forward” techniques:  For many survivor/patients, aid workers can take notes and pictures, attach them to emails, then wait for the medical advice to come back the next time HELP is able to go online.

(I can’t neglect telling you about the few thousand dollars-worth of extra solar power supplies needed to power all the equipment in their operation.)

They are utilizing tools by InSTEDD (Innovative Support To Emergencies Diseases and Disasters—a humanitarian group created by Google) and Ushahidi, which provides interactive maps for various distressed areas around the world.  People are able to text to the Haiti map messages like, “Corner of X and Y.  Need help,” or, “Looting on this street.”  This map has been lauded as one of the most important in coordinating aid efforts.

If you’re able, please donate something to help HELP out.  Go to their website and make a donation.  We have also done an interview just today with a second group in the Dominican Republic right now (GATR), and we’ll post about that, along with some screenshots and video from both interviews.  Randy has promised a couple minutes of that precious satellite time in order to help spread the word.  These two organizations are continuing in the aftermath at a time when the news organizations are beginning to pack up.  Check back in and we’ll continue to share their stories.