A few articles ago, Milton wrote about how hard it is to get noticed and remembered in today’s work world because of all the information noise coming at us.  This really goes double for remote workers since they are rarely seen or heard in their work places.  Many feel isolated…

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently had an article by Professors Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi titled “Effective Managers Say the Same Thing Twice (Or More).” We put this principle into action all the time in our personal lives, like repeatedly telling your child to look both ways before crossing…

Maybe it’s the $4 per gallon gas prices or perhaps people are tired of traveling 6-8 hours for one 45-minute meeting.  Maybe it’s the advances in networking technologies and services or the pricking of our environmental consciences.  Maybe it’s because the world really is a global village today or because…

It’s no big secret that virtual teams need to meet face-to-face.  As mentioned in an earlier post, a study completed by Dubé and Robey found that the most prevalent contradiction or tension in virtual teams is the necessity for face-to-face presence. There’s something important about corporeality that allows us to…

If we’re talking purely about their goals and functions…nothing, really. Like all other teams they are formed to solve a problem, do a project, perform a service, or come up with some answers.  What makes them so  special is that they are able to pool together talent and expertise from…

Milton discussed in some earlier posts the importance of smiling and eye contact in facilitating video mediated communication.  At the heart of these issues is the issue of building video trust. The Research On Video Trust The good news is that according to video trust studies, people using only video…

Yesterday while I was at a conference Skype announced on their blog that they were dropping the ‘beta’ label from their Mac release, and that group calling would now be a paid feature.  Obviously, I had to respond.  🙂 I have a lot of fun talking about Skype because I…

Lest you think I don’t support video collaboration in conference rooms, I actually love it!  I just don’t think an expensive telepresence setup is needed for a successful conference.  For a sliver of a fraction of a percentage of the cost, you can have a great conference room setup using…

We’ve devoted posts to the corporate environment of remote work and distributed teams.  Today’s installment is directed at our end users who find themselves to be, you guessed it, remote workers. There is sometimes an assumption within the tech world that any problem can be solved by a tool.  “If…

In researching the cover story for the April issue of Inc. magazine, The Case for the Virtual Company, the entire editorial staff went virtual. Using email, mobile phones, and video conferencing they spent the month putting together the issue from home, coffee shops, and any place but their luxurious offices…

I didn’t forget the promise for a post on daytime lighting for a video conference call. Here’s an example of my office, with a typical issue I see when talking to people on VSee:

We’ve all been there.  Someone sends you an email asking you a question.  You respond and ask for some clarification.  Three days of back-and-forth emails later, you get fed up with how slow the discussion is going and call the other person.  Three minutes later, you both have all the…

Ah, lighting. Never underestimate the importance of lighting in a video call. No matter whether you’re using VSee or Skype, Cisco or Polycom, the people you’re talking to want to see you.  They don’t want to see… …which is lit mostly from the front.  You’ll note that due to the smaller space I am…

You may have used VSee’s capability of sharing an application or the desktop, but did you know you can share just a specified region of the desktop? This can be especially useful when you are using an application such as PowerPoint and you want to show the slide but not…

Georgina Laidlaw wrote on Gigaom’s Web Worker Daily about 5 Things You’ll Miss by Not Working In An Office. More usefully, she also offered some coping strategies. Since most of the people at VSee spend more time working outside of the office than in it, we’ve developed a few strategies…

It’s been almost four months now that I’ve been Chief Product Officer for VSee, a video conferencing and collaboration software and services that is based in Mt. View, California but is actually distributed around the globe. I’ll write at some future date about how our customers use VSee, but this…

Also posted at herot.typepad.com. One of the key elements is making a business relationship work is establishing trust. This is especially challenging when the parties are seperated geographically. Technologies such as videoconferencing can help, but the conventional wisdom is that these tools are useful for reinforcing an existing relationship but that…