OoVoo launched a new free videoconferencing program that lets up to six users connect in a video call. Available for PCs and Macs (Linux version will be launched soon), it allows recording, text chat, direct file sharing and much more.

This new service of video conferencing is not so new. OoVoo has been launched six months ago, just enough time to make it ready for prime time and for a full review. The interface is fundamentally similar to the Skype, well designed and gets no special negative criticism from me. So, for those who already use Skype, means OoVoo is easy to to manage. Everything has been kept simple and easy to use, with straightforward commands.

Videoconferencing quality is also good, and better than Skype (which only allows two people per video conversation). I personally like the way that conferencing is laid out, which organizes all conferencing participants in an automatic.

Oovoo Key Features

OoVoo is essentially a video conference service with integrated Phone Call and allows to share documents easily, all in one. Key features of what looks to be a very promising platform are available to you immediately.

For those unfamiliar with what OoVoo is capable, I walk you through all the details. Here, what I have been able to uncover. These include:

• Cross-platform (PC and Mac) support
• File sending among attendees
• Video messaging
• Video Recording
• Text chat
• Invitation capabilities
• Multi-party videoconferencing
• Contacts management
• Videoconference recording
• Free calls to US and Canada landlines and mobile phones
• Moderation tools

Below a overview of some of these key features with details about their operativity and functionality.

Video Recording

Once your recording is saved on your hard disk and converted into a .FLV file that should make it easier for people to upload it to any better video sharing site.

Free Phone Calls To The US And Canada

For people that living in the USA or Canada country, OoVo lets make free calls directly from OoVoo to a landline or mobile phone.

• No credit card required.
• Add phone participants to your ooVoo video calls.
• Introductory period includes up to 120 minutes of FREE
  phone calls.
• FREE phone calls to the USA and Canada available
  through March 1, 2008.

Video Conferencing

Its user interface with clear quality video stream as I have said already, gets no special negative criticism from me. Video stream depend from your bandwidth connection and type of webcam you are using.

Text Chat

If you want to messanger with other users you can make this, but if you want to know what people were talking about a week ago, OoVoo don’t have integrated message history function.

File Sharing

The sharing of files and information has become important not only for business professionals, but also for individuals. 25MB shared are kept in your account and can be easily re shared or re-sent to anyone anytime during any OoVoo videoconferencing session.

Video Messaging

You can record a one minute video message that you can send directly to family, friends, co-workers - anyone. You can also save it as Div/MP3 recordings in your favorite folder.

• Record and send video messages to ooVoo users or
• friends who don’t have ooVoo yet.
• Send to as many people as you want at once.
• Play video messages on any computer.
• Save the video message to your computer.
• Save unfinished video messages to drafts folder.
• Get creative! Use video messages for birthday party
• invites, sales contacts or as postcards from your travels.
• Find out how to add video effects to your video message.

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My round table gang and I came up with a new service to help you save on expensive online conference services. In little words, what I’m going to release to you today, is one of GoToMeeting clone. If you aren’t satisfied with the price that GoToMeeting giving to you, take a look at its competitor.

Unlike of GoToMeeting that is available for $49/month price tag, whether you are a windows user , Conferencing Now give an online screen-sharing meeting with up to ten attendees completely for free. Go here now and enjoy the great bargain.

Conferencing Now allows you to share your computer screen with others for online meetings. You can share your entire desktop or a single application, host online demos for sales or training purposes, also dynamic presentations with drawing tools. Record your meetings with full animated screen capture and audio to share with others or post directly on your website. Conferencing Now gives you access to online meetings with complete control and instant access at your finger tips.

Conferencing Now, is a completely free conference calls service that allows you to organize meetings in advance or on-the-fly. Once joined into a web conferencing session, you can share your screen with anyone else on another Windows PC.

The first attempt to emulate the success of GoToMeeting already comes by others conference services like Yugma, and LiveLook, free screen-sharing tools available out there. However, Conferencing Now seems be the first really GoToMeeting clone.

In my view the main differences between GoToMeeting and the newcomer is only in the look, icons and graphics used across the GUI. Functionality is almost identical to its Citrix GoToMeeting.

How does To start Conferencing Now

Simply sign up online and receive your free account instantly and start holding meetings right way. This is a free service to use anytime, not a free trial or limited time offer. Once you’ve signed up and downloaded the Conferencing Now application, you can sign in with your login information (username and password) then invite guests by phone, email or IM.

Conferencing Now features include:

• Screen-sharing and remote control
• Collaborative annotations
• Remote control
• Full session recording
• Live annotation and markup tools
• Text chat
• Change presenter facility

All of these features are already available to you immediately and completely free, but once you sign up for the free basic account, Conferencing Now offer these features for up to ten users. But there are also features not available inside Conferencing Now like:

• Basic capacity starting at 15 users
• Teleconferencing support
• Integration with your instant messengers
• Support for users on other platforms (Mac, Linux)
• The original slick GoToMeeting GUI graphic icons and visuals

System requirements:

• Windows-based PC compatible
• Internet Explorer 5.0 Sp1, Netscape 4.x, Firefox 1.x
• Minimum 256Mb of RAM
• Minimum 10Mb of HDD free space
• Minimum 1Ghz x86 compatible processor
• 56Kbps LAN connection and higher
• Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Recording and Playback with Conferencing Now

Conferencing provides a free online meeting recording, which allows you to playback your web conferences and share them with colleagues.

Text Messaging

Conferencing now allows direct communication to one participant or the entire group as needed through a full text chat feature.

Conclusion

Not much else to say about Conferencing Now because it have replicated each and every single tool and functionality normally available inside GoToMeeting. There is no reason to repeating the characteristics.

Of course one key question that shouldn’t be ignored is if Citrix tool is a clone of its brother Citrix GoToMeeting. Conferencing Now web site no give any information about it, on any connections between Conferencing Now with Citrix GoToMeeting.  So, let me ask you a question: Conferencing Now is a  GoToMeeting clone? Let me know your comment.

If you’re looking for a free totally web conferencing solution you are bang out of luck because I’m talking today of Yugma (pronounced “yoog-ma”), a perfect tool that  provides to connect on-demand and real-time, by offering a free Skype plug-in through its WebEx-like screen sharing in any Web browser. It allows to build a one-to-one meetings as well as one-to-many meetings without the marketing costs that this would normally entail.

Yugma is a free web collaboration service that enables people to instantly connect over the Internet to communicate and share content and ideas using any application or software. Whether you are using Windows, Mac or Linux computer, you can connect on-demand and in real-time with co-workers, clients, friends and family - regardless of whether they are across the city, nation or even the globe.

The name Yugma is a word derived from the Sanskrit language meaning “the state of being in unified collaboration.”

There was need of a breath of fresh air. Yugma Skype enter on market as an tool for all VoIP service providers around the world.  It a blend of good, pragmatic business tool, the best of what the world of companies and novices has need.Whether you are using Windows, Mac or Linux operating system, Yugma provides a free remote support solution that enable you to connect with co-workers, clients, friends and family  across the city, nation or even the planet. I would recommend taking a look at Yugma video introduction on the official website to get an good feel of how their services functions.

It features new functions that allow an number of people to use the same file, a useful Skype invitation facility, session recording, and it allow you to invite up to 500 other people, that are all Premium features available only to paying subscribers, but become available to anyone that register an account for free for the first 15 days of use.

Yugma offers a simply way to create a web conference sales presentations, projets meetings, demostrations, training, distance learning a zero price. Users who need a simple screen-sharing, web presentation or remote have a strong solution and many people that has just used it are going to be very happy with this new Yugma.

The free paying users get in addition for the features described above and available to everyone for 15 days.

1) Share Mouse & Keyboard controls with other attendees

2) Schedule Sessions

3) Web Session Recording, Playback and Hosted Webcast

4) Shared File Space (100MB)

As you already know, all of these features are available to you immediately, even if you have registered for a free basic account, in fact Yugma has decided to offer them to all users for the first fifteen days after sign-up.

Before completing this review, I wanted to sign-up for an account just to see what happens. First and foremost, you need to sign up for the Yugma,  all you have to do is enter your name email and password, and you can start directly a screen-sharing session with any of your Skype contacts. You can invite people and direct your invited guests to www.yugma.com through phone, messanger, or via your mail box. Presentation is an important part of the business and the Yugma interface is well designed and ensures that menu have never been easy to manage.

Mains Features

Desktop Sharing:
Share your computer screen in real-time so that everyone sees what you see – regardless of the application, software or operating system you are using. With this powerful Yugma feature, you can get things done as though you were meeting with someone in person.

Attendees You Can Invite:
In addition to the Host, the number of attendees you can invite to a session is 10, 30, 100 or 500, depending on your service level. For example, you can have up to 11 people on Yugma Free session (1 Host + 10 attendees).

Whiteboard:
An easy and powerful whiteboard feature that allows you to instantly and interactively brainstorm during a Yugma session. You can even save your whiteboard diagrams and annotations in standard JPEG format for later use.

Mouse & Keyboard Sharing:
Share mouse and keyboard controls anytime with other session attendees. You can collaborate in “real-time” on virtually any application or software. With this powerful Yugma feature, sales professionals can review proposal changes with clients; technical support representatives can more effectively assist remote customers; project leaders can have more effective weekly reviews; lawyers can review and revise contracts with clients; and you can collaborate with your online communities on topics of interest. Yugma makes it easy.

Session Scheduler:
Schedule future Yugma sessions and send meeting invitations to your invite list all at once. Yugma invitations are compatible with most scheduling applications, including Microsoft Outlook calendar.

Shared File Space:
You can set up virtual workspaces to share project or team documents easily. You get up to 100 MB of web storage space to post files that your team(s) can download at any time. This feature is great for overcoming file size limitations associated with many email services.

Free Teleconferencing:
When you are meeting with larger groups, our teleconferencing service makes it really easily to connect with others. The service is easy to access and free of any additional charges (you only pay your standard long distance rate, if applicable). The service has many helpful and advanced features. Furthermore, our service can be used with any VoIP service providers (Skype, Google Talk, Vonage, DigitalPhone, Cable VoIP, etc.). If you prefer to use an 800 service instead of our direct dial number, just let us know.

System requirements

• Windows 2000 and later,
• Mac OSX 10.3 or later,
• Linux (following versions: Centos, Red Hat Enterprise 4.0, Slackware, Mandriva*, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora*, and Open Suse),
• Java runtime 1.4.2_07 or later.

If you are running Windows and you have an older version of Java, then Yugma will install the required version of Java.

If you are running Mac OSX 10.3 or later or Linux, then please make sure that you have Java runtime 1.4.2_07 or later or run the software updates to install the later version of Java runtime.

Services and Pricing

The Premium Yugma Skype version allows you unlimited online web conferencing and to Invite up to 10, 30, 100 or 500 attendees in ase to different remium ffers.

Below plans and prices:

Conclusion

What can we conclude from all of this? Conference calling is painful, particularly if you must spend much money, so Yugma has a lot of potential to become a first free web conferencing tools especially for several small companies but also for Novices and non-technical users in a way that just anyone could use, also allowing to save money. This seems great and important for your business pitch.

According to rumours, Lypp intends to launch her free service of conference calling in September. The app are for users to communicate with one another using instant text messaging as MSN,  iChat, Jabber, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo.

Essentially lypp  gives you the chance to make conference calls with others peoples from around the world. Users can do up to 500 minutes of free calls per month although or they can get more minuts if they invites friends to the service.

Gibbons in a mail that has sent to Josh Catone has said:

“Our philosophy is that it’s difficult to create ad hoc group calls, particularly from mobile devices, and nobody wants to install software to do this.”

 Josh Catone explain the service in depth on its website  readwriteweb.com. Lypp also seems that will  release an API for the service that would hook into popular address books, as well as the transmission of short text messages(SMS) and email.

Lypp is absolutely free, it’s a new online communication service that offers a set of very features in line with what you would expect from such a service.

Unfortunately I can not to be able to see the Silicon Valley event 2007, I already had made prior plans before it was announced. I really wished it. However, after the success of the Silicon Valley event in November 2006, I’m really excited to announce for june 5th that will be holding the next event: Silicon Valley 2007″. It’s a half-day conference that featuring thirty tech startups who are launching new products and services. If you’ve never to a event this is a “must-attend“.

June 5th
Noon to 6:00 pm
Microsoft campus (Mountain View, California)
Register: acteva.com

 I are excited to announce the date and location for the Salesforce Developer Conference. The event will take place at the Santa Clara Marriot 2700 Mission College Blvd. Santa Clara(CA).

Guy Kawasaky is a professional speaker and instructor, he spend a lot of her time at conferences and he’ll be speaking at the Salesforce Developer Conference on Monday.

The conference are designed to provide at software entrepreneurs the insights of Salesforce.com, a software-as-service “platform” that has applicability beyond “salesforce automation.” Find out more this live event.

Today wordpress upgrades came onto my radar. I was overly excited. The wordpress 2.2 version is officially out and available for all users. Check out the features.