One of those most important criteria in setting up a home based business is to have the capability to conduct important client meetings through video conferencing.
As more and more powerful, non-proprietary video conferencing tools become readily available online, you can easily chat, broadcast and record meetings with prospects and business associates without leaving your home. This can save you thousands of dollars in travel expenses every year and your profit margin increases considerably. All you need is a webcam (A camera that connects to your computer to take either video or still images that can be transmitted over the Internet.), microphone and Internet connection.
I have specially selected 5 of my favourite video conferencing tools to help you conduct those all important meetings with your business associates and clients. Best of all, the tools are free and take only minutes to download and install.
#5. Live Messenger – It’s easy to add voice and video to your conversations in Windows Live Messenger. By using webcams, microphones, and speakers, you can add video or voice to an existing conversation or use video conversation to synchronize video and voice.
#4. Yahoo Messenger – With the video call feature, you can make a high-quality video call to a business prospect. You can even go full-screen with your video call. But take note, video calling is only available in Yahoo! Messenger version 10 or later, so be sure to download the latest version.
#3. Oovoo – With ooVoo, you can make 2-way video calls for free! That’s right, you can record and send 1 minute video messages, create video chat rooms to embed on a website and send files up to 5 MB at a time.
#2. Dimdim – Dimdim is a very simple to use browser-based web conferencing service. You can show presentations, collaborate via whiteboards, chat, talk, broadcast via webcam and record meetings with absolutely no download required. Best of all, you can meet with up to 20 people, absolutely free!
#1. Skype – This is argubly the most popular tool among my business associates. And it’s not hard to tell why – its user-friendly interface gets both beginners and advanced users started in minutes and calls are free among Skype users, so seeing your contacts won’t cost a thing, no matter where they are in the world.
In these difficult economic times, companies are often looking for ways where they can cut costs. One obvious place where many companies can spend less money and still have similar results is travel. Especially when the travel is just for meetings, it can be an incredible expense that will never be recouped. Aside from the obvious costs (hotel rooms, airfares, and dinners in restaurants), there is also the cost for travel time of staff. When employees are in airports or traveling, they are unable to respond to customer requests or problems. Rather than loosing productivity in travel, technology makes it possible to conduct a meeting with participants throughout the country (or world) without anybody having to leave their office.
A video conference is typically very easy to set up. There are many different vendors that provide conferencing service to choose from. There may be some minimal technological capabilities that all participants’ computers must be capable of. Sometimes a small piece of web conferencing software will need to be installed. After the details of the conference are in place, participants will be given an 800 number to dial into. They will also have a code to get into the conference. If there are a large number of people in the conference, it is best for a moderator to guide the meeting.
Depending on the video conference vendor that is being used, there may be several additional capabilities. Some conferencing have the ability to utilize web cams so that people in the conference can see each other. Many times people conducting a conference want to share information on a computer program or application with members of the group. Using the web conference, they can give access to all participants to see their computer screen. Other conferences will include the ability for participants to instant message with each other and the moderator. Although this technology may appear overwhelming at first, many users can learn to use it proficiently in only a short period of time.
By using this modern conference technology, employees can be more productive. Communication between office locations may even be improved, since video conferences can be set up more often than in-person conference (due to the ease and cost savings of setting them up).
Thanks the introduction of webcams on computers, talking with people face to face is becoming an outmoded way of socializing. In the past, talking to people on webcams required typing and the pictures could not stream for constant movement. However, thanks to a new program known as “Skype,” the Internet web cam world will never be the same.
Skype is an online chatting program that provides the highest quality person to person communication. Because of this high quality, Skype is the fastest growing service in Internet history with over 75 million people on the network to date. Using the Skype program provides the closest venue for face to face communication without actually being there in person.
This new online chat module is set up as an online network, which is surprisingly cheap to own. When buying the Skype program, a computer owner will pay a fee and then be able to download software from the Internet. Once this is uploaded onto a computer, the owner can connect to the growing Skype network and talk to people from all around the world.
How Skype has become so popular so quickly is no phenomenon, because it truly provides the best quality of sound and picture while using a webcam and microphone. A user plugs into the network, which is run out of a server in Denmark, and the software encrypts all video and sound data. Then the program picks the best path over the Internet which allows it to stream its information faster.
When using Skype, a customer of this company is assured to always have the fastest streaming process, which gives the webcam talking an eerily human quality. This software, once added to a computer, works by connecting a computer to a network and then streaming their webcam to people all over the world. By streaming video over the optimal path, Skype is the best online face to face chat program there is.