While my office certainly doesn’t qualify as a product review lab (any vendor mentioned here, please take note), I am a typical ‘micro-business’ — those defined as companies between 1-5 people and often with many if not all working from home. And like many consulting businesses, my clients, partners and colleagues seem rarely to be within driving distance. My challenge with this: my most productive meetings are those that include face time.
So I find myself wanting to hold as many of my calls as possible over video, especially the ones where a document is being reviewed. Video provides me with body language clues and an ability to better control people’s attention span. But I’m finding it more difficult than I anticipated to come up with a solution for this.
Skype is great for one-on-one; it’s fully adopted so everyone knows how to use it. But I’m expecting it to take some time before the multi-party service is ironed out (in terms of UI) and fully available (in terms of platforms). Until then - and maybe even after then – I want something else that works well enough to depend on it weekly, if not daily.
Micro-business has proven to be a healthy market for communications (just ask any of the virtual PBX leaders). The market is reachable through a combination of online and telesales channels and can be nurtured into long term loyalty (lack of IT staff means we don’t like to change interfaces once we get to know how to use them). While Skype is no doubt a formidable competitor, there will be room for a few well-packaged, creatively marketed services. In the case of the very small business segment, my sense is that these are basic requirements:
- Video and audio quality as good or very close to what we experience with Skype. Yup, they’ve set the bar.
- Easy on-boarding for the admin. If one hase to dig deep to figure out how to use it I, nor the masses, will adopt.
- Trusted brand. Most still require a download, so some peace of mind may be required.
- Screen sharing, or file sharing at a minimum. There’s video calling, then there’s video collaborating. People will pay for the latter.
- Extra, extra-easy on-boarding for the invited participant. Like with basic screen sharing, people will be turned off if it’s complex and ad-hoc is so important to this segment of users.
From my informal research, I’ve found two that are getting closer but not all the way there, and a few others worth mentioning:
TokBox: Recently launched a major upgrade to their site and services. Rightfully so – given Skype’s brand strength with consumers – they aim to be recognized as the ‘dead-easy’, for business video calling service. Everything about their site and packaging screams simple; high marks for this. Services are broken down by number of concurrent callers and certain broadcast-related features.
What’s missing: Screen/file share is not the way a business user would expect it. The feature is fulfilled through an integration with SlideShare (creative) but the files need to be marked as ‘public’. One, it means uploading into SlideShare, but more importantly content is often confidential and therefore can’t be shared this way. Customer Service told me that full screen/file share is very high on the roadmap so I’d keep an eye on it.
ooVoo: A long time player in the consumer market with millions of downloads to date, they have been slowly adding to their business offering in the last year. Apart from my unlucky timing (when I tried it there was a Mac bug that made everyone’s Mac crash upon clicking into the meeting; I was none-too-popular), the video quality was very good in multiparty and the layout of the video boxes was pretty intuitive. The pricing is perhaps more tiered than it needs to be but I do like that they offer use of credits to add features like screen sharing and multi-party to lower end packages for those who just need it once in a while.
What’s missing: I have yet to try to screen share (this week I hope) but somehow the overall UI did not come across to me as ‘business-like’. I can’t put my finger on it, perhaps it’s because of the consumer heritage of the product. But I’m using so many super-clean UI’s from just launched B-B web application providers these days and this one does not yet measure up. Easy enough to fix I would think, so hopefully that’s coming.
Others: I took a quick look back at SightSpeed Business, that I used to use before it was acquired by Logitech. The quality of their video – which was always a strength – is still high. But their interface has not changed one bit, I was surprised to find out. And if ooVoo’s seems like it could use a freshening for 2.0-friendly business users, SightSpeed then qualifies for a complete make-over!
I’m also keeping my eye on two services I recently bumped into at a conference, ViVu and Vsee. Although in both these cases, I would argue that the micro-business is not the core target. More on these another time.
Video nurtures relationships, and collaboration tools boost productivity. Put them together in the right package and I’m betting many other micro-businesses like mine will add a monthly expense line to have it.
(On a separate note worthy of another post, I also liked that TokBox is making it clear that platforming their offer is a core part of their go-to-market. In a previous incarnation, they were targeting key verticals like religion and education with their retail offer. I imagine those will now will be secured through their platform efforts.)
