Archive for the 'ConnectSolutions Podium' Category

Rethinking Business Travel

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrei_dimofte/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrei_dimofte/

Americans logged 694 MILLION business trips in 2008. That’s a lot of missed flights, late check-ins, and time away from family and friends. Believe it or not, 694 million business-related trips represented a decrease of 12% from 2007, and with the economic woes of the past few years, that trend is continuing. The days of traveling for large conferences (think global sales kickoff in Vegas) are also increasingly scrutinized, and as a result, were down 14.5% in 2008. Fast-forward a bit, and you know that today’s economy and travel experiences are met with fewer flights available, at increased costs, with heightened security processes, making for a stressful and unproductive “travel experience.” But wait…there’s more! Nearly a quarter of a billion of the above business trips were conducted by Sales and Management positions within the US. For sales people, this means time away from being productive…even time offline while your competitors hammer away at your leads and customers.

Imagine the impact of saving 2-3% of that expenditure and investing in R&D, or employee benefits, or customer-service programs! It’s time to rethink business travel…

There is incredible value in being face-to-face with customers, but physically being there comes at a cost as described above. With real-time collaboration capabilities provided by ConnectSolutions, millions of meeting minutes are delivered everyday from the comfort of offices, homes, or vacation spots we’ll pretend we’re not at. These virtual meetings and events provide extremely effective face-to-face experiences without the travel, and without the hassle.

Many organizations are spending 5% or more of their gross revenue in business travel. Imagine the impact of saving 2-3% of that expenditure and investing in R&D, or employee benefits, or customer-service programs! It’s time to rethink business travel…

For a great resource on travel expenditures and statistics, please take a look at Business Travel Market Metrics by IHS Global Insight (http://global.ihs.com/), which was the source for the above stats.

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President Obama’s Town Hall in Shanghai Broadcast to Global Audience on ConnectSolutions Podium

President Obama's Town Hall from Shanghai was broadcasted by the U.S. State Department using ConnectSolutions Podium.

President Obama's Town Hall from Shanghai was broadcasted by the U.S. State Department using ConnectSolutions Podium.

It was an amazing weekend for us here at ConnectSolutions.  We had the privilege of supporting the State Department in President Obama’s historic Town Hall in Shanghai, China with a group of university students.  You may have read about the tenuousness of the Town Hall and the American and Chinese governments were negotiating up until the last minute to figure out if and how the event would be run.

In the end the decision was made that the event would go on, but it would not be broadcast on National Chinese TV leaving the internet as the only vehicle through which many Chinese citizens could view the event. (Note: The event was broadcast on local Shanghai TV, providing another venue for residents.)   Taking this challenge head on, the State Department enlisted us to help them reach as wide an audience as possible with the event.

On Friday, the Co.Nx team at the State Department opened up an Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro chat room on our QuickConnect Platform where Chinese citizens were encouraged to submit questions for President Obama and share their biggest concerns.  What was most clearly articulated in the chat room was an apprehension over the censorship of the internet in China, and a growing movement was revealed.  In fact, over 75% of respondents in the chat room cited internet censorship as their greatest concern.  They dubbed this the “Great Firewall of China” and they aligned themselves with the 20th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, speaking out against what they perceived to be widespread government censorship of the internet.

This chat room proved to be pivotal, as cited in The New York Times, as it produced the infamous Twitter question asked of President Obama in the Town Hall in which he spoke out in favor of freedom of information and openness on the internet.

Connect Pro Chat Room where Questions for President Obama were submitted by Chinese Citizens

The Connect Pro Chat Room where Questions for President Obama were submitted by Chinese Citizens

But our involvement did not end there.  Needing a way to get the broadcast out to as many people as possible, the State Department enlisted the use of our ConnectSolutions Podium webcasting product to provide a video feed of the Town Hall to those inside China.  The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and many universities in China would rely on this feed to host viewing parties where Chinese citizens could congregate and hold discussions after the event was over.  Similarly, the event URL was proliferated by influential Chinese bloggers (and some here in the U.S.) to promote viewing by as wide an audience as possible.

The event was able to reach such a large audience in a short time in large part because of Twitter and the rest of the social web.

The event was able to reach such a large audience in a short time in large part because of Twitter and the rest of the social web.

Facebook was also utilized to get the word out.  The Co.Nx program already has over 36,000 fans on the site and created a Facebook Event that was shared with their network.

The Co.Nx program also utilized Facebook and its 36,000+ fans to help spread the word about the event.

The Co.Nx program also utilized Facebook and its 36,000+ fans to help spread the word about the event.

We were truly blown away by the number of people who were able to reach the event, especially considering that promotion did not start until the day before due to the uncertainty around if the event was going to happen or not.  In the end, we were able to help the State Department connect with 10,000 viewers from 60 countries with the event with our HD Quality stream of the event.

A student from the audience asks a question.

A student from the audience asks a question...

...and President Obama Responds

...and President Obama Responds

What’s more is that nearly 70% of this audience was inside China from over 200 cities.  And the response to the video quality and overall experience has been something we are very proud of.  While this raw number works out to something near 7,000, the actual number of viewers is likely much larger, as the State Department facilitated viewing parties at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and at Universities around the country, and each individual view had the possibility of being consumed by entire households or groups of viewers.

Our event reached nearly 7,000 Chinese Citizens in over 200 different cities.

Our event reached nearly 7,000 Chinese sites in over 200 different cities.

I cannot articulate how honored we all were to part of this effort and I wanted to personally thank Mark and Tim at the State Department for the privilege of supporting their efforts.  We are continually blown away by how they keep pushing the envelope and taking the State Department’s Co.Nx program to new heights.

If you missed it the first time around, here the Obama Town Hall meeting in China in its entirety:

Watch Town Hall Video
Download Town Hall Video

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President Obama – The Ultimate Teleworker

For federal employees, telework is a mandated option (read more about ConnectSolutions support of FISMA-compliant web conferencing), and with the productivity gains combined with the benefits of remote work in the face of pandemic flu concerns, a very logical option at that.  It is good to see the continued support for telework by Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry and federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra:

“When you think about it, the president is really the teleworker in chief. He’s connected wherever he goes,” Berry said. “Yesterday was a good example: New York City in the morning, Pittsburgh in the afternoon and Washington at night. While the president has a little bit of a unique position, and everyone can’t have all of his communications gear, the technology is catching up to that.”

Source

The reality is that everyone does have access to sufficient communication systems to empower successful telework.  We’ve been doing this for quite some time with thousands of federal employees, and look forward to continuing to expand upon these services with ConnectSolutions Podium for large-scale events and communication efforts as well.

ConnectSolutions has had the opportunity to support a variety of webcasts for President Obama through its partnership with the U.S. State Department and its highly successful CO.NX program, but we’ll have to work on providing him with his own personal virtual oval office meeting room as well.

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ConnectSolutions Podium (free) for Do-Gooders

Helping Community

ConnectSolutions has been fortunate.  We work with a fantastic variety of people that we’ve been able to get to know personally over the past two+ years.  The close work we do with our customers allows us to learn about the impact our services have on their lives, both at work and at home, and this serves as a great motivator to continue to innovate and deliver great experiences.

This year, our team introduced ConnectSolutions Podium, which is quickly becoming the most exciting web casting and virtual events platform available.  This on-line service is the result of a lot of hard work by the team, and now I’m excited to announce a new program available immediately for the “do-gooders” out there who are trying to make a difference in their communities, organizations, etc.

Inspired by our good friend Peldi over at Balsamiq, we are introducing a program to provide “do-gooder” non-profits with the opportunity to use ConnectSolutions Podium, absolutely free, to communicate and reach a much larger audience than they could ever have before.  Have a new program you want to announce to the community?  Want to reach geographically disperse members of your organization without travel or other costs?  We would be honored to support your efforts.

To get started, please let us know you are interested by going here, and we’ll follow-up as soon as possible.  We hope to keep this program going for some time, but in the short-term, we’re really excited to see what you’ll be able to accomplish!

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Corporate Travel Declining 15% (no surprise)

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in web conferencing adoption and usage amongst our customers and partners, particularly as the economy has struggled and organizations look to save on one of the most readily quantifiable budget areas of travel.  The following link is suggesting corporate travel will fall off 15% this year, which when taking into account that the corporate travel sector represents nearly 40% of the overall travel industry size of $85 Billion, is very significant.

Corporate travel off 15%: ouch! | Gadling.com

Fortunately, real-time web conferencing provides a great alternative to travel.  Users can meet face-to-face with clients, partners, and employees without ever leaving their office or home.  This is more cost-effective, while also eliminating the down-time associated with traveling.

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A new look, a new product, new people and new customers too.

There have been a lot of things going on around here as you can tell from our new website.  We decided it was about time to give it a fresh look and to push the site live to correspond to our new product launch, Podium.

We hope you find the website more useful, attractive and informative. It is all still there just maybe in a slightly different spot or location; kind of like a new release of that desktop product you have used for years where the menus and options have changed or the keyboard equivalents have been re-assigned.  Well I don’t think we made such deep changes just a better and more functional site.

Podium. Where to begin. I suppose it all started when we had folks from across industries approach us about wanting massively large web events or broadcasts that went well beyond web conferencing or traditional web seminar models and capacities.  The questions were “Can we have a large event in the tens-of-thousands of attendee range and still keep the attendee engaged and involved, at a level and in a manner that the attendee chooses, or with only the select features we as the broadcasters might want utilized?”   Well many meeting, customer consultations, developer arguments, usability testing sessions and social networking and other feature discussions later we have a hit product up and running.

The tag line says it all:  Reach a global audience with your message through highly engaging, highly scalable webcasts. High Def quality audio and video with a global reach across Mac, Windows and UNIX in an environment that is FISMA compliant (that means the Federal Information Security Management Act for the implementation of and compliance with secure data management – it a government thing) that basically means really, really secure.  We put many hours of development, testing and Q&A into Podium to date with more to come as the product evolves and that word evolves really speaks to our development philosophy. Our team members have backgrounds with various software and hardware companies and we made a committed decision to have Podium evolve with new features as we can implement, test and deploy them and not get stuck in the product release cycle that so often bogs down software companies.  We are also not going to keep the product in beta forever it’s out there now and ready to use.  So many thanks to our initial “guinea pigs”, partners and testers that helped us get to this point.

While not a new product it’s a new name and go-to-market attitude with Managed Services for Adobe Flash Collaboration Service; what we formerly referred to as FlashGrid.  Why the change?  All around allot of people reaching out to us thought that perhaps we had a different flavor or technology as it relates to the Adobe Flash Collaboration Services and we don’t’ – We just let you deploy your AFCS applications in a much bigger way.  So to clarify that issue and reinforce that if you have an application that needs to scale in a really big way (that means global), across your enterprise (that means deliver to tens-of-thousands) and do so on a global basis (that really means a global basis like worldwide) in a safe secure, environment that has years of deploying such applications and frameworks than our Managed Services for Adobe Flash Collaboration Service are for you.  We still recommend that you start with Adobe for developing your application and testing it during the proof-of-concept stages but when you are ready to deploy and GO BIG and make some serious dollars and generate lots of traffic give us a call.

New People!  This may be the best part of being part of the connectsolutions team, you work with highly energetic and creative people and we are always looking for a few good people to join us.  If you think you might fit in on our team check out our careers page and see what opening we have and send us your information.  We have a growing business and our recent hires are great new additions to team that have a fanatical commitment to customer service and success.

New customers too!  Well I cannot and do not name drop but if you look at our solutions portal you can see a partial list of our ever-growing customers in both government and enterprises markets; my favorite part of the word enterprises is that it means tens of thousands of people are using a solution that makes their day-to-day work and collaboration easier.  That tells me that not only are there lots of new things going on around here at connectsolutions but also with our global customers too. Glad to see that we are all so busy in these challenging times and using our resources so effectively it is a great new day!

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New Services, New Website

The company has been busy this summer on a number of fronts, and I’d like to take a moment to capture some highlights here.

New Site Design & Content

New Site Design & Content

We have updated the website and associated content to better reflect the work we have been performing for our customers and partners.  The old website hadn’t changed since its initial launch two years ago, and given the set of new solutions we have developed since then, this update was overdue.  I encourage you to browse through it and learn more about what we’ve been doing with our existing customers, and if you are evaluating real-time collaboration opportunities, I believe you’ll find we support the full spectrum of your current and future needs.

Deliver your message to thousands

Deliver your message to thousands

We have recently launched ConnectSolutions Podium, a webcasting solution that enables organizations to reach audiences over the internet without the technical barriers and high costs usually associated with webcasting.  Podium compliments Acrobat Connect Pro with support for very large meetings, and we will be sharing more about this platform over the coming weeks.  For now, please read more here.

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