April 24th, 2010 @ admin // 3 Comments
The week nobody could fly in or out of Northern Europe hopefully showed businesses that online meetings should not just be a business backup but a viable, affordable and essential method of conducting day to day face to face meetings around the globe. Saving time and money are the most obvious reasons for companies to conduct online meetings but what about business continuity ?
If companies learned anything from the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull Volcano they should start planning for possible further interruptions or (eruptions) to business.
Online meeting rooms were approached by the organisers of the Inaugural Green IT Summit. Minister Eamon Ryan responsible for Communications Energy and Natural Resources spoke at the event.
in conjunction with ICT Ireland and the Irish Software Association, the inaugural Green IT Summit is a major conference focusing on how and where you can make green IT deliver business value. This gathering of experts and peers aims to provide Irish businesses with an improved understanding of how they can go green and save money along the way.
Guest speakers and keynotes including Tom Raftery, the lead analyst of GreenMonk and Energy & Sustainability analyst from RedMonk (Spain) Jonathan Steel, Founder & CEO, Bathwick Group UK and Sonny Masero, VP, ecoSoftware EMEA, CA (UK) were unable to attend the event in Dublin due to the flight ban. Online meeting rooms were able to work cross platform and cross browsers to deliver the guest speakers directly into Croke park by way of video link. Presentations were delivered along with Q & A sessions after the presentations. All remote speakers were also able to see those that attended the venue as Tom Raftery indicated when he asked venue participants to raise their hands while assessing the roles of those assembled.
fantastic help from Joe at Green IT Summit yesterday in dublin. Well done, you saved our skins.
The question now is, what happens if this Iceland Volcano goes off again ? What will it take for companies to embrace “Green” Technologies like for instance video conferencing ? For one thing, this volcanic activity has shown the fragile nature of our dependence on air travel, hopefully it has also shown companies that business meetings can be conducted online. Online meeting rooms were given 36 hours to co-ordinate with the venue, the speakers, the av people and the event organisers. But, everyday companies still send their people on flights to some broadband available nation… why ? Work practices and efficiencies must be found. To stay competitive as every well run business knows, no matter where in the world they are located, environmental and human impact in terms of stress on our planet and us is also a massive factor when you consider keeping your employees. Teleworking is now regarded by many as a major “benefit”.
Think about it! and If you need additional convincing please watch this video on FORA.TV
CO2 Emissions
April 19th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments
On Friday 16th at lunchtime we were contacted by the wonderful people from Seminars.ie. Their dilemma was how to get some of their guest speakers into Dublin’s National Concert hall for an event over the web the next morning. Unable to travel with the European airspace lock down. The volcanic ash plume from Iceland had put the event beyond the reach of the keynote speakers involved from the UK and Canada. Travelling to Dublin to give presentations was out of the question. Some 450 people were expected at the event.
Specialists in on the subject of Health and Music, Dr. Daniel Levitin and Prof. Paul Robertson were expected to arrive for the event. The event was described as
Music has always been considered a soothing and healing influence, calming the soul and relieving stress. With the rise in Music Therapy as a paramedical discipline we have come to understand just how useful it can be in the treatment of autism, learning disabilities, dementia, neurological disorders and depression.
With no chance of travelling, the National Concert Hall and Seminars.ie pulled together and worked on a way with us to stream the speakers and their multimedia presentations to an audience. We had less than 16 hours to organise, train and coordinate Professor Paul Robertson and Dr. Daniel Levitan. Here is a 4 minute video of how Dr. Levitan got on.
This is a short amateur video captured by one of the attendees.
March 11th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments
DERVALA HANLEY RETURNS to Limerick for a few days and has agreed to a roundtable Social Conversation in Limerick’s Absolute Hotel for two hours from 1100 on Wednesday, 10 March 2010. Dervala sparked creative thoughts during a classroom lecture in Tipperary Institute a few months ago, pointing to specific ideas about innovation, creativity and working productively in highly competitive industries. Read more on InsideView.ie
This is a short clip of Dervala speaking with members of the Limerick Open Coffee group about Foursquare and Meetup. Recorded while in an online meeting room.
February 1st, 2010 @ admin // No Comments
Back in 2006 we were approached by the Health Informatics Society of Ireland (HISI) to provide services for the streaming Dr. Susan Newbold’s presentation from Maryland in the U.S. After some initial training with Dr. Newbold, she was able to login from her home office and give her presentation to the conference where a group of 400 health informatics professionals listened and participated and Q&A. Here is a brief 4 minute clip of how it went.
Remote guest’s and speakers save time and money by utilising streaming technology this way, events organisers can also benefit from providing streaming facilities for their remote speakers by increasing the chances of availability of the speakers and by simply making life easier for their remote speakers. Dr. Newbold had a standard DSL connection, a webcam and as you can see from the recorded clip, a standard headset.
January 28th, 2010 @ admin // One Comment
Shiv Singh (Author of Social media for Dummies) gives his keynote presentation at the recent launch of Seesmic Look. Well worth watching if you have an interest in Social media.
January 5th, 2010 @ admin // 2 Comments
Companies, organisations or governments can save money, tax payers money, bottom lines, mileage allowances, work efficiencies and get true return on investments. They must absolutely accept the virtual option in 2010 and beyond through online meetings. So often touted by the so called and ever increasing large entities that are MS and Cisco, government bodies are typically directed for various reasons to buy into the employers within their country. Of course, employment and revenue is on the mind of every elected politician. The fundamental flaw in democracy starts here, politicians cannot get elected without funding, who funds the politician ? And so unified communications or “unfunded communications” (if you fund it) started. What a ridiculous waste of money and time this term and implementation causes. What smart phone battery or laptop truly supports voice and video over IP for any length of time? What software and what proprietary licences do you need to subscribe to if your organisation wishes to avail of these services ?
Open source video conferencing has been around for many years, notwithstanding the power of the flash plugin, why reinvent the wheel? – just upgrade your switches … get a little more bandwidth, even get a dedicated element to the management of your bandwidth, you have the kit! you probably have the network – web based, without the need for massive investment in servers, no need to buy anything else with the exception of a webcam and a headset.. how hard can it be to reduce your annual spend on meetings via travel?
Accepting our political leaders are not software savvy for the most part, their advisors are supposed to be. Do you need to install something ? #FAIL. Do you have to have windows for it to work ? #FAIL. Do you need propriety hardware for it to work ? #FAIL. The solution must be web based for future proofing and economy of scale. Bandwidth is the key, switches allow data transfer, everything else is down to your vendors “cloud” or in our case rackspace << a data center, why would your company take on more than you need to… why reinvent the wheel?
December 8th, 2009 @ admin // No Comments
A Piece from InsideView
This academic semester, I’m bringing founders, promoters, directors and effective social media communicators into my Social Media classroom and letting them explain how they frame their online business dealings with a personal dimension. We will record and share most of those guest appearances through clips recorded through Online Meeting Rooms. Those success stories reveal honesty, passion and commitment to the extended online communities that I’ve used to good effect since 2004. In 2010, my students will have stories >> read the full post
A Piece from the Anseo Blog.
After a couple of months of trying, I finally found a school willing to try out videoconferencing with me. Using Online Meeting Rooms, a brilliant online package from http://www.onlinemeetingrooms.com, my school, Carlow Educate Together hooked up with the Athy Model School, 20km down the road for a Christmas Carol sing-off.
Each school sang two Christmas carols to each other. Our school were treated to two popular Church of Ireland carols and we sang “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree” and “Ceallóga Sneachta ag Titim”. The kids were really enthusiastic and clapped and cheered each rendition. Read the rest of the post.
A Piece from the IIA
Our white papers are now coming close to publication. We intend to widen the circle of collaboration and with this in mind we plan to publish the documents (via the wiki) in draft format. We will then invite people to review and post comments directly to the wiki. We also intend to host a review session for each document, online of course, using the services offered by OnlineMeetingRooms.com. I’m personally very excited about this as it provides the opportunity to gather the expertise from practitioners and interested business professionals in a constructive and engaging manner. Read the full post.
Using Firewire DV and onlinemeetingrooms.com
Getting the most out of desktop web and video conferencing through onlinemeetingrooms.com can be as simple as taking an old DV camera and porting it through your firewire option. In most cases webcams suffice but if you want that extra clarity and powerful zoom Onlinemeetingrooms.com supports DV along with high resolution bandwidth server side. Thanks to Bernie Goldbach for the use of his video.
So many business professionals rely on PowerPoint to get their message across to an audience. As previously demonstrated the New .FLVplayer allows you to stream a flash video into your meeting. I use a number of different tools when it comes to online meetings. One I particularly like is Camtasia 6 (which is Now also available for MAC) from Techsmith.com. (Download for PC here) Camtasia is highly recommended if you are involved with making tutorials, streaming presentations from services like Screencast , if you like slideshare or you’re involved with coaching and training. For the purposes of this demonstration I have borrowed an excellent PowerPoint from Mr. Bernard Goldbach A senior multimedia lecturer inTippinst.ie .What I have done is simple, I have recorded the PowerPoint (quickly, for the purposes of the tutorial) in Camtasia, rendered the video out in .flv format and hosted it on another great service, my dropbox. Then I’ve called the public URL (you can see the link in the image) and posted the URL in the .flv player. Notice too that you can allow users to scrub the play head, this means users can play, pause or “scrub” to the slide they want to focus on. This gives the viewer control over the pace of the presentation. You can also switch your guests video streams off during the video presentation. This can be a good idea sometimes when trying to reduce possible distraction from the main presentation video you want your guests to see.
VLE, Whiteboards, video conferencing and budgets.
Computers in schools from what I have seen, and agree with the author have been in place but rarely used. I have often discussed with Bernie Goldbach the need to connect Third levels to second levels in some form or fashion using onlinemeetingrooms.com We have done it before with guest speakers at Tipperary Institute and Principles of other Schools, in this case Daithi O Muruchu. Daithi was unable to attend the conference, he was streaming to the conference from another http://www.gaelscoil.com/in Newcastlewest, Co. Limerick. http://www.anseo.net/?p=1538
This is an example of how the principle of a first level school is able to get involved with a third level hosted conference. Whiteboards connected to a PC could give a valuable window into any third level or any School for that matter. As the Anseo piece goes on to say Schools can find the budgets for the whiteboard. If the school also has a broadband connection education could change significantly in Ireland with just a few simple connections. Teachers and lecturers could work with different classes in a simultaneous, sychronis way… Students, the digital generation are ready for this type of interaction, specialist teachers could extented their skill sets to class rooms throughout the country as well as to remote schools or desktops at home. Training is of course the key, the complexity of any “solution”, platform, VLE call what you like is the barrier to entry. Streaming Video, screen sharing and whiteboarding are the future, if so, many schools have them they are one step away from the digital classroom.
