Easymeeting.net is proud of the partners and customers that we work with in the Cloud. This month we’ve decided tof share one that we feel deserves a little spotlight with our readers, The Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce.
The Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce is a non-profit, member based organization. They devote their efforts to improving the community of the greater Mystic area, by fostering and promoting business for its members. They are committed to their community and their members in the services they provide and, as members, we can tell you that they do a great job!
Recently Easymeeting.net was able to give back to the chamber when they needed to host interviews for a new Chamber President. Not all of the interview candidates lived in the Mystic area, or even the state, so that’s where we came in. Easymeeting.net provided the chamber with our conference room and connected them to their interviewees using our video conferencing system and the individual’s personal computer.
Jim Bates, Board Chairperson, expressed to us the benefits of conducting interviews with distant candidates over video and their reason to use video conferencing for interviews, “As a lean organization, we knew that the only way to meet them personally was to fly them in for an interview and then fly them back. This would be very expensive and very inefficient. So we turned to Easymeeting.net right here in Mystic. The staff was great! They set up our calls and even tested our candidates’ computer systems to make sure they were compatible and glitch-free. Our search committee then met in their very comfortable conference room to conduct the interviews. The technology is amazing. Both the quality of the video and the clarity of the sound made for extremely easy interaction. Thanks to the great staff and technology, the interviews went well and we saved a tremendous amount of time and money. Another great benefit is that the candidates looked at our Chamber as one that is organized and at the forefront of technology.” Without having to travel they got the feeling that the candidate was in the room and could really gauge their personality and body language—a much more personal experience all together. He went on to add, “I would highly recommend that any business who is looking to improve their image; time management; and bottom line, talk to the people at EasyMeeting.net. You won't be disappointed."
According to their website, the Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce is the unifying voice in a shared community that draws 60 percent of the state's visitors to the area. The chamber participates in several local and state agencies. It initiates and fosters legislation as it pertains to business, and advocates on tourism impact issues as they relate to visitors and residents. It is also active in small business legislation and works with the two local school systems, including them in the business community.
We appreciate the chamber’s efforts to promote and support shopping local, especially all of the recent fundraising efforts to bring our area back from the storm damage this past Fall from Hurricane Sandy. We understand the importance of keeping local business and the local economy alive and are proud to be a part of The Greater Mystic Community . In other words, we simply love The Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce!
You can find a complete list of their events,volunteer opportunities and members on their website, www.mysticchamber.org.
Ready to try it yourself? Try the Easymeeting.net Cloud for 14 days, FREE, and see if it's a place where you can do business!
At Easymeeting.net we know that we offer an amazing service to our users, but sometimes our EasyConference virtual room service over shadows some of the other great benefits we offer in addition to a professional, affordable and high quality video conferencing experience.
Because of this we decided to create another video blog explaining one of these benefits, EasyNumbers.
EasyNumbers are a free service provided by Easymeeting.net to our customers and even non-customers to make dialing video conferencing systems as easy as dialing a phone number and instantly connect to anyone in the Easymeeting.net cloud.
Now sit back, relax and enjoy another episode of Easymeeting.net's Vlog while we tell you about EasyNumbers.
Have a video system that your want to enable with an EasyNumber and list in the Directory? Now is your chance- Register below!
This is a visual world, I'm a visual girl, and Easymeeting.net is a visual company selling a visual service. Because of this- I sometimes find it exhausting to explain what I do for work. People don't quite understand the video world if they haven't been immersed in it. Those of us who have been immersed forget that the rest of the world hasn't been drinking the video conferencing kool-aid and don't know what virtual meeting rooms, standard based codecs, gatekeepers and continuous presence mean. This issue is, if I may quote Ashton Kutcher potraying Steve Jobs in the upcoming film "jOBS", "How does someone know what they want if they've never even seen it?"
So, how do we solve this? We show you! Meet some of the Easymeeting.net team from around the world, and really experience what it's like to use a video conferencing service and talk with a group of people in a "virtual meeting room". If you like what you see, all you need to know is that you can do this too.
Still not sure if video conferencing is right for you? Download our guide or sign up for our free trial!
Welcome to our very first BLOGEoOoOo! This is take one of the new Easymeeting video blogs, we promise- there will be more to follow. And the jokes can only get better from here- right?
A year in review- it's been an exciting year for cloud technology and video conferencing. Here's what we have seen, and what we're looking forward to!
Check it our for yourself- we are happy to join you for a free demo and an introductory call to the world of Easymeeting!
Want to check out some of the topics we've chatted about this year?
BYOD
Benefits of Video Conferencing over Teleconferencing
What is the Cloud?
Five Benefits of Video Conferencing
25 Participant Video Call
Happy Holidays from the Easymeeting Family around the World!
I wish this topic made as much sense as the benefits of Internet as a service, or a cell phone as a service. Let's be serious here, how many people are going to invest in the infrastructure to create their own internet or telephone service when they can call Comcast, Verizon and the likes.
We're not quite there with video conferencing yet, but we are well on our way. Most of it is because of history. Traditionally, for videoconferencing you, or more likely your company, did buy the infrastructure and host it internally to make sure that the CEO of your company could have a choppy, pixelated call with the CEO of another company.
But guess what? Those days can be over. Now video is available as a service. You pick the service and/or service provider that works for you, and voilà- you are connected to the world! Without having to get a budget of a zillion dollars approved so that your company can build the necessary configurations in house. Oh the beauty of the cloud.
So if the fact that video conferencing as a service, or managed video conferencing is readily available isn't enough of a reason. Here are five benefits of why video as a service just makes sense.
1. Help
Your IT department is already busy, so when they also have a large amount of video infrastructure to manage- how happy are they going to be when you have questions of how to use the system or how to get a customer on a call. With Managed services, you have a service center to call to help you with these issues. You can get the answers you need, when you need them, without putting added workload on your IT resources.
2. Bandwidth
This is a touchy subject for anyone who has had to deal with allocating bandwidth to a company. It ain't cheap, and how do you know how much is too much or when too much is not actually enough? When you are using video in the cloud, you don't need to worry about having enough bandwidth to host an eight way call from your location. Be selfish- just worry about yourself, and the service provider in the cloud will host the bandwidth for the other seven participants.
3. Money, money, money
Let me put this simply. It is going to cost more to buy, host, manage and continually service and upgrade your own multi point video infrastructure that it is to pay a monthly or yearly service. Did I mention that salary that you will have to pay someone to handle having all this hardware somewhere in your office?
4. Scalability
With Managed services you can scale the amount of users that you need on a call fairly easily compared to that of changing the port capacity on an MCU that you have previously purchased. Needs change, companies change, and meetings change-- you don't want to be constricted to a certain amount of callers when it doesn't fulfill your needs, right?
5. Mobile meets hardware, easily
Now I am not saying that you cannot have the capability with in house infrastructure to connect a video system, an iPad and a computer into a multi point call. But, it's going to cost you. With Video Conferencing as a service, you are able to connect with so many different kind of endpoints, and you know, and as the times and technology change service providers adapt and continue to offer the latest options.
If you need more convincing, let me know. I am sure I can come up with a few more reasons why managed services are they way to go, explain why they are here to stay, and that they were worth the wait!
There is some seriously amazing stuff happening in our world that should be even more shocking to us than it is. We have become so accustomed to the technological advancements, that we don't appreciate them.
Example 1. A man just jumped from a height of 24 miles into "space" and "fell to earth" at 833 mph in 4 minutes and 19 seconds.
There is nothing about Sunday's descent that is not amazing. Agreed? Yes, I thought so. A success, thankfully, and amazingly- Felix Baumgartner broke the sound barrier and a hand full of other records. Personally, my favorite part of this story was in an excerpt I read that Baumgartner noted, from 24 miles above earth, that he wished everyone else could see what he was seeing. He called it "humbling", and that it was no longer about breaking records, but about returning in one piece. The video is amazing, the pictures are amazing and the fact that it was not trending in my yahoo news top ten topics on Monday is annoying. The crew,and all of the training and technology used on Sunday all acted as they were supposed to and Felix Baumgartner is now one really awesome -flying, man. (If you didn't see this on Sunday, please do yourself a favor and watch)
Example 2. You can watch the Presidential Debates, Live, without cable.
Maybe this doesn't seem that amazing to you. But I just moved into a new house a few weeks ago and with the copious amount of painting and "renovating" in my future- my husband and I have decided to for go cable for the time being. Otherwise, we will be watching endless hours of How I Met Your Mother and HGTV and not accomplishing anything in our house! But back to the Presidential Debates- We haven't had to miss a beat during the debates because of the live streaming that Mashable, AOL, CNN, YouTube and a lot of other sites are providing. It's actually worked out better, because we can bring our computer to whatever room needs to be painted on that particular night (we'll be in the dining room tonight) and watch everything live.
Now to take a step back, example 1 and 2 are both great things that have been brought to you by technology. But what if they didn't work. Would it have been acceptable? No. So why is it so acceptable for so many other things in technology to not work?
Case in point: you guessed it, video conferencing. But in all seriousness- there seems to be a stigma around video systems. I have previously mentioned how often we run into interested people and companies who have video systems within there organizations that are literally unplugged and sitting in the corner. People accept that they do not work and leave them there. Why is that acceptable? Why does the video industry seem to be so technologically advanced at the same time that it is as confusing and overwhelming as archeology. It's an annoying problem, and quite frankly if we sent a man to the moon in 1969, we can be on the internet while on an airplane and we broke the sound barrier this week, we(as in human kind) should be able to get your video system talking to the outside world.
Here's to hoping that this will be the way of the world. Just imagine video systems that work the way they are supposed to.
In the meantime, cheers to Felix Baumgartner to taking technology, red bull, and sky diving to another level!Time Well Spent sir!
I do more demo's of the Easymeeting services than I could possibly even begin to count. Our partners call me at various times with their various end users and I get the opportunity to show what we do, while meeting some pretty cool people around the world. This week has been what I can only describe as a "Super Demo" week. As I hang up from one call, I am often being immediately brought into another one.
Typically I will be on a large screen overlooking a conference table full of Scandinavian business people, then broadcast over 4 iPads throughout a company in London, and then make my way across the United States from East to West. It's too bad I can't acquire frequent flyer miles on the cloud -and let me tell you, there is nothing more nerve racking than realizing your face is plastered on a 65 inch plasma screen in front of 30 people you have never met. Needless to say, I have gotten pretty comfortable being on video, and accepting that everyday is not a perfect hair day.
Today I was on a demo with a company in Southern California for awhile doing some demoing and testing of the product. It's always interesting to learn what companies do and how they are thinking of using video conferencing. As soon as we said our goodbyes and finished up our convo on California's superior weather, I received a call on my video system from one of our other channel resellers, and I was suddenly doing a demo in the middle of a park in San Fransisco. The traffic was zipping by, and we were LITERALLY walking the guy's dog while talking about Easymeeting. Like I said, I am not often surprised by demos- but this, was pretty freakin' cool. Talk about the epitome of ad hoc meetings.
(A Snapshot from my iPhone of my walk through the park in San Fransisco, sorry- I didn't catch the dog quickly enough!)
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Our partner was on his new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone checking out our beta Droid app and cruising around San Fran. They gave me a little 360' tour of the park and what other companies were in the general area, and then of course- introduced me to the dog. He's not the first dog I've met over video, as we get to work with a lot of people who have the luxury of working from home, but he was the first dog I ever got to take on a virtual walk.
It's days like today where I get so excited about the technology that is available to us and think about the 100's of people that I have been able to meet from all over the world because of it. I did quite a bit of traveling throughout college and right after and miss the experiences that you have when you are soaking up the culture of a place that is not your own. Needless to say, I still miss traveling to new places, and am looking forward to a few upcoming trips, but I still get the experience of meeting people from different cultures, communities and countries. It's amazing and quite frankly very refreshing how often I get off a call and am amazed by how friendly the people I just met were.
Clearly, it's been a good day for me and our Easymeeting team and I am looking forward to another "Epic Friday" at the Easymeeting offices tomorrow! We hope you are experiencing the same kind of productive, efficient, and exciting job bliss. If your not; try something new. Remember: The definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"- Albert Einstein.
We often get calls from customers, or questions during demos that I automatically reflect to one of our tech specialists Grant Murdock. As Grant will tell you- almost anytime the word firewall is mentioned I am standing at his office door handing over the phone or dialing him into a video call. It works well this way, I think technically speaking it is called 2nd tier support- but here at our Mystic, CT office, we call it "asking Doogie Howser", whose nickname was assigned by our US Channel Sales Manager, Cody Loughlean, after we realized that Grant either already has, or can find the answer to just about any technical question we have tested him with.
With the being said- we thought it might be a good idea to enlighten our readers with some of those FAQ's that we get from our customers, and potential customers, as well as a few questions to learn a little more about Murdock too. Why question #5? Because with the copious amounts of hot sauce we have at the office... I need to know which one to keep fully stocked to keep our in house brainiac satisfied!
1. Are the Easymeeting services secure to use?
Yes, Easymeeting uses the same level of encryption that consumers use to protect their banking information online when shopping. Most room systems support encryption by default, but you should ensure your call is encrypted prior to discussing anything sensitive.
2. How many people can I connect with at one time from my video system or a mobile device?
Up to 28 continuous people can be seen at one time. After 28, the last 28 people that spoke on the conference will be the ones displayed on the screen at any given time. We had a 32 participant call on an iPad one time and it was fun setting up my transformers Optimus Prime replica to be a "participant."
(See Optimus Prime in a business meeting in the lower right hand corner)
3. How do you recommend setting up a videoconferencing system on a company's network?
It depends on your companies security posture. The easiest way is to set up a dedicated line on a public IP to allow a steady and reliable connection. Codecs don't hold the valuable information that our computers posess so hacking is not as much of an "issue". If you want to secure things a little bit more, you do have some options. They all have their plusses and minuses but two options would be opening ports or creating a DMZ for video conferencing equipment.
4. What is the latest, or upcoming piece of technology that you are the most excited about?
Technology in general excites me. Speed, capability, and features are getting crazy! Just yesterday I streamed an episode of The Walking Dead to my phone on my porch. With a few taps on my phone, I paused the show and moved the stream to my Samsung SmartTV right where I paused it on my phone! How cool is that?!
5. What is your favorite hot sauce?
I've been on a huge Sriracha kick lately, but I will go back to good ole' reliable - Frank's RedHot every now and then. If I'm feeling adventurous, nothing says hot like a 2oz. bottle of Blair's 3am Private Reserve. Signing a waiver to get it and reading a page long warning label basically telling you to not let it touch you or put it directly on food is a sure fire way to warm the soul.
If you have any Easymeeting questions, or want to tell us about your new technology kick or have a hot sauce recomendation for Grant-- give us a shout out! Want to follow Grant "Doogie Howser" Murdock on Twitter? Check him out @grant_murdock
We are currently in the midst of election season here in the US, which obviously means cartoon after cartoon about policies and debates. I have to admit, I don't read the Newspaper anymore- I don't even receive the newspaper at my house-- but the cartoons section was always a personal favorite of mine and thanks to the fabulous World Wide Web-- I can have all the cartoons I want, and not just on Sundays!
I was clicking through some the other day that were poking fun at the candidates and so on and so forth and somehow ended up perusing through some business cartoons. I found quite a few videoconferencing cartoons that had me laughing- maybe not out loud, but in my head at the very least. Just like politics(which I am by no means gettings ready to discuss here, don't worry!) videoconferencing sometimes gets a bad reputation, simply because poeople are just too confused by it and rather stay away from it.
I get it, I've been there, and I remember how painfully awkward my first Skype call was- especially when I realized how ridiculous my face looks when it freezes for 35 seconds in the middle of a word! But now I spend most of my days chatting away on video- and generally don't think twice about it. But like I said, I get it- I know how confusing, or overwhelming, or awkward the thought of a video conference can be in the beginning. I also know that things have gotten a little twisted about who, how, why and where video can be used these days.
So in honor of it being Monday, and everyone needing a mental break-- I wanted to share some of my favorites!
(This is how NOT to make videoconferencing work for you)
(Our cars might not fly{yet}, but at least some of the Jetsons future came true!)
(And last, but NOT LEAST! Dress Code Requirements- better hope the door bell doesn't ring!)
I know that was short and sweet- but isn't that what cartoons are all about! Now don't be selfish- let us know if we are missing one of your favorite industry cartoons! We all deserve a little humor during the day and there just aren't enough hours in the day to peruse through all the options.
If you want to try a videoconference without getting on a plane and without having to have a flying "Jetsons" car (we will make no comment about whether or not you are wearing pants- if you promise to stay in your seat) - then check out the 14 day free trial of the Easymeeting Services and have a multiparticipants video call from video systems, computers, iPads and iPhones!
A few months ago I mentioned an upcoming event with some WWII veterans that had come to our office in search of connecting via video. The blog itself was a follow up to one that I had written in an effort to explain our cloud services a little bit better, "What is a virtual meeting room?, an EasyConference?, the Cloud?",while maybe slightly dogging my mother for not knowing what the cloud is. So to give you an update, my mom now knows what the cloud is, and how it works; and now- some of the 100th Infantry Association knows too.
To elaborate- Mr. William Glazier, of Mystic,CT had read an article about the Easymeeting videoconferencing platform and stopped by our office to check it out. As I mentioned in the previous blog, he wanted to connect the 100th Infanctry Association, in the Easymeeting cloud.
As you may have noticed in some of my other blogs- I am a big fan of the Easymeeting services; partially because I work here, but mostly because they really can change the way we communicate in business and bring face to face meetings back into the mix without all the travel woes. Typically, we see our services used in a business setting with discussions of marketing and business plans and so on. So this usage of our services was exceptionally exciting for us to be a part of. I come from a military background, both my father and grandfather serving in the U.S. Navy and my amazement and respect for the men and women who serve for their country never ceases to amaze me. Especially during the week of Septemeber 11th- when emotions are heightened and gratitude is plentiful. The opportunity to connect a group of Veterans from WWII was something that we could all barely wrap our heads around- and were all volunteering to be the one to come in on Saturday and help them connect.
(Mr. William Glazier(second from left), his wife, and part of the 100th Infantry Association connecting via the Easymeeting Cloud)
It was a pleasure, and an awesome experience to get to watch the veterans of the 100th Infantry Division chat via the Easymeeting video cloud. The bonds that they have reach so far back, and to be able to provide them with a technology that continues to let them connect, share stories from the past, and catch up on what they are doing in the present was amazing. They have had these annual meetings since 1946, and were scheduled to cease the conventions and get togethers. An age old tradition like that can't just be turned off for these men, and their families. Luckily, thanks to some out of the box thinking by Mr. Glazier- they don't have to stop.
We are looking forward to working with William Glazier, and the 100th Infantry again in the future. After the success of Saturday's meeting, there is talk of more video meetings to come for the division, and hopefully many more organizations just like them will start to adapt to this type of meeting so that they can carry on their traditions, in spite of travels. If things are going to change with the times, we are happy to see that people and organizations like the 100th Infantry Veterans are willing to change with them for the better.
To learn more about the Easymeeting, check out our Whitepaper and visit us on Facebook and Twitter!