I had a great conversation this week with SightSpeed CEO, Peter Csarty on the launch of their business conferencing product.
Sightspeed is taking a very unique and aggresive stance in realtime business communications with this update. If you’ve worked in a larger company you may have seen a Polycom (or similar) video conference set-up like I have, though you also probably rarely if ever, used it. Everyone regards these things as unfriendly and expensive and in general they are!
Taking lessons and experience from over a decade of work as well as knowledge gained from the 30,000 business users of the consumer product, Sightspeed has rolled out an enhanced version of their software-only conferencing product specifically geared to the SMB (< 500 people) market. You supply the camera (or bring your existing web cam enabled computer) and you've got a video conferencing ready setup. Since this works with any web cam, you can take your calls on the road and not worry about being restrained to the conference room. Peter assured me that this works on a 256K connection which means mobile 3G users can also get in on calls. Sightspeed has done a lot of work behind the scenes to optimize the video calling quality and general quality of service. The service was developed with video as the priority and in calls you'll see that it shows.
While there’s nothing stopping you from using either the Sightspeed consumer product or even an existing solution like iChat, Sightspeed offers a great deal of features and most importantly support (over video!) for the business customer. As a business product, an IT manager can easily manage the seats, allocate any DID lines and view usage reporting … in other words it’s designed to be simple.
Each account also gets a personal URL which enables participation by parties without a camera for view-only sessions which could be great for an instant sharing session when a phone call or an emailed PDF simply doesn’t cut it. There’s a 30 day trial on the site, why not give it a try!
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Video, VOIP, sightspeed, conference, smb