Posts Tagged ‘Pda’

Teleconferencing Services are Everywhere

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

I have been in the teleconferencing industry since 1995 and have seen the services availability grow from a boutique industry to where it is today.  Teleconferencing services are virtually everywhere.  Here is a quick take on the different services and where you can find them.

  • Audio Conferencing – Teleconferencing services leading type of service is audio conferencing.  Since audio conferencing became an automated service that was so easy to use it has grown exponentially.  It is hard to find anyone in business these days that has not been on a conference call using a dial in number and pass code.  Audio conferencing still has other types of calls but the automated conference call is the most prevalent.  Other types of audio teleconferencing services include the operator assisted conference call where an operator greets the participants, gather information and then facilitates the call by assisting the leader and performing a question and answer period.  Teleconferencing services like this are primarily used for large calls.  One of the most widely used applications for this type of call is the investor relations call used by public companies to speak quarterly to the investment community.
  • Video Conferencing – Some people think that teleconferencing is actually referring to video conferencing alone but again it really refers to a number of types of conferencing.  Video conferencing has been around for a long time and the industry keeps thinking the latest iteration is the one that is going to crack the code and make this form of teleconferencing services explode.  It just doesn’t seem to matter if it is the big room systems, desktop video, home phone video or video on a PDA now it just doesn’t seem to appeal to people as widely as audio conferencing.  I think it is more a social issue than a technical issue as most people are simply uncomfortable in front of a camera.  Maybe the kids today who are growing up with all of this technology and YouTube will finally find video conferencing comfortable.
  • Web Conferencing – Teleconferencing services newest addition is web conferencing.  The ability to share your desktop and do presentation remotely has given people the ability to add a visual element to a regular conference call without much effort and has been widely accepted.  As more and more people attend these kinds of webinars and be exposed as a participant the more they will become hosts of future web conferences.  Web conferencing will continue to grow and become a part of regular phone conference calls.

Teleconferencing services are now widely available and companies like Zip Conferencing offer all types of teleconferencing services at very reasonable rates.

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Are Conference Calls Too Convenient?

Friday, January 8th, 2010

We are more connected than ever before.  Between the email, voice mail and BlackBerry or other PDA it is difficult to escape the endless stream of information from your work and personal life.  It just seems to me we are heading to where there is no escaping work and like many of the other modern day work convenience maybe conference calls are getting too convenient.

Let’s face it, you can do a conference call from anywhere.  Just like you can talk to people from anywhere, I don’t even want to know all the places that calls are done from, conference calls are as convenient as your next cell phone call.  When cell phones first came out the conference call service industry would discourage people from using them on a cell phone because they introduced a lot of noise and the networks were such that a dropped call during the conference call was pretty much a certainty.  So, naturally our customers would call us and complain about the conference call service because they were losing participants during the call of there was a lot of noise on the call.  And inevitably when our operators would join the conference call we would identify the culprit and most times it was a participant on the conference call on a cell phone.  Well that has certainly changed.  Now most of the participants on a conference call are probably on a cell phone.  With the cell phone networks improvement and better equipment you can join and participate on a conference call from anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.  And that is just about anywhere.

And now that people can get you just about anywhere they can also get you just about anytime.  People seem to expect that since you have a cell phone than I should be able to reach anytime, anywhere.  So, before when you would schedule a conference call with Asia, for instance, the participants would schedule the conference call for a time that was good for all concerned, knowing that people needed to be in the office during normal work hours to conduct the call.  But know it seems that people just assume you can get on a call anytime.  My wife, for instance, is regularly asked to attend conference calls with other parts of the world at all hours of the night.  The other night she had three conference calls from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at night with Australia and Asia.  They just don’t seem to think that there are any boundaries since you are always accessible.

So, what do you think?  Are conference calls too convenient?

www.zipconferencing.com

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