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.

Video is required for our weekly meeting

ConnectSolutions has a distributed team, so the very same tools we enable for our customers and partners are the same ones we use each and every day to get our work done.  The team is growing quickly, and with people in various locations, it’s important that we make the visual connection to make for a more engaging and team-bonding experience.  If you’ve ever spoken to someone on the phone over the course of many months or years, and never seen them face-to-face, you know what I mean.  The above photo was taken yesterday during an all-hands meeting we hold once a week.  Each of the remote participants is able to share their video through Adobe Connect.  Sure, we could go out and buy a telepresence system, but with nothing more than a webcam and a laptop, we’re able to deliver a great experience.

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

LiveCycle Collaboration Service was the subject of a research report by Gartner Research, which you can read here:   http://www.gartner.com/resources/171800/171891/adobes_new_collaboration_ser_171891.pdf

Exciting to see some external acknowledgment of the incredible potential behind this technology framework.

From the report:

Adobe will likely become the first vendor to offer cloud-based component collaboration services that can be integrated into business applications. For example, an enterprise could create a training tool for sales agents where the students act as customers to help each other improve skills for customer interaction and upselling.

Personal meeting rooms with Acrobat Connect Pro are one of the most highly appreciated features amongst our user community.  You can set-up a room, and use it again and again (a virtual office), without having to set-up a new URL each time like other solutions require.  The only complaint I sometimes hear from the community is that they have a very long URL to remember and communicate over phone, email, IM, etc…

To solve for that, we’re introducing a completely free service for Acrobat Connect Pro users.  Piggybacking off of the “url-shortening” services used extensively through Twitter and other social sites, we’ve setup a similar system at:  http://meetnow.in/connect/create.php

Using the service couldn’t be simpler:

1. Go to:  http://meetnow.in/connect/create.php
2. Enter in the URL of your personal meeting room
3. Add a “path” to your new URL
4. Click the magic button, and you’ll be presented with your new URL to copy/paste into email signatures, speak over the phone, etc…

The service works for any Connect Pro meeting URL (hosted by ConnectSolutions, Adobe, or on-premise), and is completely free.  We hope you enjoy, and if you like it, leave us a note in the comments below.