Many of our enterprise and government customers use ConnectSolutions for internal collaboration with globally distributed team members.  Many also conduct live web training events to their international and domestic staff.

These secure broadcasts enable interaction at a fraction of time and cost of in-person collaboration.  Additionally, with the wide distribution and reliability of our server network, we are able to make public events available to even wider audiences.  This wide, public distribution strategy is seen most regularly with the US State Department’s Co.Nx program, which engages in virtual diplomacy via facebook.

Co.Nx is currently live-streaming the Association of Binational Centers of Latin America Conference, and next week will broadcast The Presidents Forum with Young African Leaders.  The broadcast of the Young African Leaders forum includes a Town Hall with President Obama on Tuesday afternoon, a webchat with State Department Undersecretary Maria Otero, and a chat with a group of Namibian Delegates to the forum.

The US State Department is just one of many ConnectSolutions clients, in both the government and enterprise spheres, who broadcast internationally.  Here are some stats about our top international visitors in the first 7 months of 2010:

Top 10 Countries (by Number of visits)

1. United States
2. China
3. Canada
4. United Kingdom
5. India
6. France
7. Germany
8. Australia
9. Turkey
10. Japan

Top 10 Countries (by average time on site)

1. Uganda
2. Mauritania
3. Congo
4. Tunisia
5. Cambodia
6. Estonia
7. Costa Rica
8. Uruguay
9. Slovakia
10. Syria

As the year progresses, and more of our clients engage in international collaboration, we look forward to seeing how these numbers shift.

The two discuss the future of streaming video and web collaboration, and what sets ConnectSolutions apart from other competitors. Here are some highlights:

• A premium, full-screen capable HD webcasting product, that works on PCs, Macs, and iPhones
• Web collaboration in a secure environment
• A discussion of how our customers have used social media like Twitter and Facebook to increase audience size
• How ConnectSolutions’ focus on customer service helps ensure customer success by focusing on providing real-world customer solutions

Here’s an excerpt:

“But it’s not just cranky customers who can use readily available, powerful, hyperconnected technologies to make an impact. Employees can, too. Mark Betka and Tim Receveur, of the U.S. State Department, used off-the-shelf software called Adobe Connect to create Co.Nx, a public diplomacy outreach project that presents webchats with U.S. government officials, businesspeople, and others. The webchats now have international audiences in the tens of thousands and more than 100,000 Facebook fans.”

The State Department’s Co.Nx public diplomancy project has conducted over 250 live broadcasts with ConnectSolutions, featuring speakers like President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, ambassadors, policy analysts, and even an astronaut.  Their next broadcast will be another in a series of World Cup webchats.  The chat on Wednesday, June 30, will feature a discussion with DC United Head Coach Curt Onalfo.

The Traditional Webcast User Interface, brought to you by On24.

But we are not simply a static head that sits on top of a torso, so why should we be presented that way.  With the advancements in web video that have taken place over the past few years, these antiquated experiences can no longer capture the attention of event viewers who are getting more and more used to HD-quality video complete with high production values.  In a time where sites like ESPN.com, Hulu, and Current.tv are revolutionizing what people think is possible with video on the web, how can enterprises and government organizations keep up to keep their audiences engaged?

With our ConnectSolutions Podium product, we are enabling organizations to provide true TV-like broadcasts over the web.  What’s more is that we do not mandate that you drive all viewers to a monolithic interface, but instead, follow an approach where our customers can provide their content to their user communities on context.  For example, if a viewer is learning about an event on Facebook, why make them click away and switch contexts?  That is one less reason for this person to attend.

The Web 2.0 Event broadcast to Podium, Adobe Connect, and Facebook simultaneously (please excuse the messy desktop!)

The idea is here is to stream once, but broadcast anywhere.  This is an idea that has really started to take hold here, and one that we will continue to build upon in upcoming releases.

Our CEO and co-founder, Michael Fitzpatrick, was interviewed at the Web 2.0 Expo and shared some of his thoughts on this topic as well as the rapid pace at which new collaboration and communication tools changing the way people work.  Watch as Michael discusses this and other topics at Web 2.0:

We’ve been fortunate to work with several organizations that truly understand the potential of social media, and will be publishing a paper discussing real-impact metrics shortly.  For now, here are a couple of screenshots of organizations using our real-time collaboration platform to reach their audience and embrace social media.  If you want to see a live example, head over to O’Reilly’s Facebook Fan page today to see the Web 2.0 Expo experience.

Acquisition of Xuggle

ConnectSolutions has completed the acquisition of Xuggle, a San Francisco company with incredible people and technology that will help us drive our vision of video-centric real-time collaboration.  If you are interested in learning more about Xuggle’s people and technology, I encourage you to take a look here for an FAQ and supporting material.  For the thousands of you working closely with Xuggler, the open source library for real-time video transcoding with Java, we are happy to announce continued support of the community to ensure you continue to build great things with the technology.

Real-Time Collaboration Platform

We are also very excited to announce the availability of the ConnectSolutions Real Time Collaboration platform.  This platform has been purpose-built to provide private-cloud deployments of real-time collaboration technology, including support for one-to-one, group, and broadcast collaboration.  You can learn more about this platform at the link above, as well as see a discussion we had this week with Paul Ritter, Vice President of IMS, on the subject of video-centric real-time collaboration, social media, and mobile platform delivery.

Telepresence.  These systems are beautiful, exciting, and so insanely expensive that even Fortune 100 companies can’t afford to put them where their employees do their work.

I had to take a three hour train ride, each way, to get to our closest telepresence system and participate in the discussion!

I heard that the other day, and simply had to chuckle.  Organizations are being sold on the “in-person” experience of telepresence, and the resulting increase in employee productivity while also reducing travel budgets.  Yet, these systems are so expensive ($500,000.00 or more, per room, plus monthly recurring fees to support the network infrastructure and maintenance of these complex systems), that even the largest corporations can’t afford to put them in each of their regional offices.  The scarcity of these systems in large corporations is rendering them counter-productive, and actually increasing the amount of travel for some employees like the one I referenced above.  The fact that employees in the field, strategic partners, and customers can’t participate in these experiences is just further insult-to-injury.

For the bitter employee above, there is a happy ending to the story given their investments with ConnectSolutions and our desktop-based web collaboration tools.

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.

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 20^th 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.

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.

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.

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...

...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 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

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.