You cant feel the limp grip of a clammy handshake, or tell how they perform over 18 holes but video conferencing is winning over businesses with its improving technology and knack of cutting back the need for travel.
What do successful businesses using video conferencing today have in common? There is a Connecticut Mercedes dealership that invites customers to take a live, video-assisted walk with a salesperson around the cars on the floor. Theres also a hair transplant referral centre that gets a close look at the scalps of bashful prospective customers online to check their suitability for restoration procedures.
These businesses exploit a growing offering of inexpensive video conferencing programs to connect with existing and new customers and get their sales messages and support out to the world visually.
The bad old days of buggy software with performance too unreliable for business seem over. Video conferencing is now built into most free instant messaging programs such as AOL IM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger in a way that allows most simple webcams to light up a video connection. These programs combine video conferencing with an ability to track the online presence of your associates, transfer files and communicate to mobile devices inexpensively. But business demands much more than this, such as an ability to pierce a protective firewall and better security. Indeed, you may eventually shoot up to more sophisticated solutions, including better and more dedicated telephony hardware from companies such as Polycom.
But before you jump to such a premium level, a low-cost solution worth considering as an entry point to video conferencing is the less well-known SightSpeed. Unlike some other offerings, it has the advantage of running more reliably on both Windows and Mac OSX.
And if you peer beneath the surface you find some other interesting advantages. While it is relatively simple for all the video conferencing parties to install a small application on each participating computer, for business sales purposes it is better to avoid that if possible.
SightSpeed allows a video conference that originates from the vendors web page. Attendee customers can see the vendors live video embedded in the vendors web page without having to install anything on their own computer. This significantly cuts the barrier to success for using video conferencing as a business-to-consumer tool, even globally. As it happens, 20 per cent of SightSpeeds customers located chiefly in the USA, Brazil, Japan, Israel and Australia use it for international calling because SightSpeed is specially designed to eliminate connection latency problems common in net connections between countries.
Business users who value security and video conferencing for the most part run video through servers in the USA. This is unlikely to lead to interception of your particular conference, but if it is an issue, smaller competitors such as SightSpeed allow video to travel entirely peer-to-peer. This cuts the possibility of being overheard to zero. And exploiting special additional technologies such as a virtual private network make business use even more secure.
There is nothing special about the kind of equipment needed for video conferencing. A long list of inexpensive webcams are now up to the job. The computer processors minimum requirement is only 800 MHz (or 1.2Ghz with a VPN) and the internet connection can be no more than dial-up although at least a 256k downstream and 128k upstream broadband connection will be best for most business use (you would need to consider moving above Telstras lowest ADSL tier to achieve a larger video window).
One of the most important issues for businesses is being able to record and retrieve communications. There is little point having multi-party video conferences, even with the super-svelte 3D multi-party interface of Apples iChat service in its forthcoming new Tiger operating system, if the conversation cant be captured. This is also achievable now, at lower cost and with greater reliability than previously, through software such as SnapZ Pro for Mac and Camtasia Studio for Windows. Video can be captured directly from a window anywhere on your screen and saved in a variety of formats that can be published on a website or sent to recipients as a record of the conference. The multimedia elements of a video conference can be filed and searched for in knowledge management programs such as DEVONthink for Mac OSX and InfoSelect for Windows.
The method for capturing your video session marks one of the key price inflection points in video conferencing. There is a dramatic difference between SightSpeeds $7 a month for unlimited usage used in conjunction with SnapZ Pros once-off $96 pricetag on the one hand, and the price range of between $30,000-300,000 for full video-capable conferencing and distance-learning solutions such as Macromedias Breeze. Breeze enables an entire educational experience (replete with polls, questionnaires and recorded results) around a video conference, including an ability to index and search for a particular point in the video by keyword. This makes it a much stronger business solution.
One US company used low-end video conferencing software to connect the boardrooms of its branches around North America, allowing its employees to jump on a permanent, low-cost video connection hooked up to big flatscreen TVs whenever they need to talk. This was possible at a fraction of the cost of more conventional hardware-based video conferencing. In another example, Ohio-based speech pathologist Cheryl Poseys company, http://www.speakingyourbest.com/, helps foreign-born clients who need $63 an hour speech therapy to improve their American accent.
Posey says SightSpeed was the first low-cost video conference solution she found with connection quality good enough to keep her lips in sync with the audio, even for customers as far afield as Hong Kong. In the six months she has used video conferencing, Posey has attracted 20 clients to her web-based video conferencing learning series and expects to have 100 clients within a year. 'The international link has worked fine for me with no quality issues,' Posey says. 'It takes only 10 seconds to set up a new client and there is nothing lasting they need to install on their PC. With one web address they are hooked in.'
San Francisco-based senior industry analyst at global research company Forrester, Claire Schooley, has watched video conferencings rapid spread through education and business. She says it is still most cost-effective to avoid video conferencing for straightforward business meetings and save it for when you have something important to show. 'Explaining a procedure or showing how some new product works is where it is very nice,' Schooley says.
She hasnt encountered any legendary big business deals that were only closed thanks to a last-minute video conference. But she can point to incidents where lives were saved or dramatically improved, such as Brazilian nurses who learned how to put on artificial limbs through a distance video medical learning program.
'They were far from any community where they could get training themselves,' Schooley says. 'The video showed them how to give injections and learn enough to take the prosthesis they had there and work with it. It was not the same as having the instructor there, but it was either no limbs at all or learn this new way to help someone walk,' Schooley says.
Some of the leading low-end video conference solution providers will release multi-party versions by years end. Prototypes also exist for video conferences that can span 3G smart-phones. These are held back only by those phones relatively low CPU power and data rate.
But for phone-based video conferencing to catch on, phones will have to come with cameras that swivel to face their owner, not the world at large. That raises the eventual need for video to be reconciled with vanity. The customer feedback is clear: people are still uncomfortable about having their boss peering at each nose pore and, worse, the prospect of seeing their boss in the same way.
