The Register: Web Conferencing – Ready for Prime Time
Interesting little article on the reaching of a tipping point for web conferencing. Two interesting snippets – 1) seeing a torso as opposed to just the head is more effective as the audience can see a whole gamut of body language 2) the frequency range of most voice transmission through phones and cams is small – a wider bandwidth of frequency allows the nuance of inflection and tone to be picked up.
Webcam meetings have to be one of the cheapest, yet potentially most effective way of bringing a team or class together – I’ve been using Apple’s iSight and it’s full screen video, very decent lens and audio gives a richer webcam experience than I’ve previously had.
I was pretty excited to see that Windows Messenger now has an integrated webcam feature. As netmeeting sucks badly -difficult and unintuitive, this new version of messenger will be a huge step forward. But from what I can tell it’s constraining video to a small window…this seems a terrible limitation. On the other hand if does this to enable group messaging, then I’m sold – I’ll test it on Evan when I get my PC back from repair…
Interesting to see the consumer vs. pro structure of Microsoft’s IP-based collaboration software. I reckon there will be interesting developments/integration from their PlaceWare purchase.
Webcams, weblogs -dirt cheap ‘guerilla’ collaboration tools – $100 and you can equip ev ery worker with a half decent webcam and a copy of Radio. Now there’s a thought.