Getting up in a board room or on a stage and exposing yourself to the judgmental eyes of an entire group of people is damn scary. So when you get a chance to do it via video conference, you might feel a little more confident. However, video conferencing is no cakewalk. Damian Lepore, Managing Director at Logitech ANZ, has given a fair few presentations in his time and he knows that to be true.
He shared his tips with Lifehacker on how to best master the art of video conferencing.
Two-thirds of all communication is non-verbal in nature.
Get back to face-to-face communication and see the benefits -- for you, your team and the business. Here are just five of the powerful ways video conferencing will improve your workplace.
People want to meet and collaborate in a way that works for them, without worrying about what device the're using and where or how they connect. High quality video collaboration that combines video, voice, and content sharing technologies is a great solution, but what is the best way to get started? Here's how!
Over the last year, Westpac has been trialling the use of video conferencing in its branches to connect customers to small business specialists. What lessons has it learned about when video conferencing can be helpful, and when it's the wrong choice?
Video meetings save travel time (and potentially the need to wear pants), but there's an art to getting the most from them. Follow these 10 tips for more effective video meetings.
The standard complaint about video conferencing is that it's a nuisance because you have to make sure that you look good and pay attention. But that effort might be worth it: video calls typically take much less time than phone calls.
In-room video conferencing systems can be expensive to implement, which often leaves managers wondering: how much worse off would I be using Skype or Google+ Hangouts or FaceTime? IT pros argue the answer comes down to reliability and image quality.
Want to get a few people in side-by-side video chat but don't want to set everybody up with Skype, video conference software or a Google+ Hangout? Head to Meetings.io, create a room, and give your people the look. In seconds, you're all chatting live in a simple side-by-side setup.
I just had a video chat over 3G and it was the most amazing thing I've experienced all day. There was some lag, voice quality wasn't perfect and video was sometimes jittery. But I loved every minute of it.
The Gmail team admits in a blog post that options for video, voice and group chat were "curiously tucked away" in the lower-left corner, so they've taken steps to fix it.
We dig how easy it is to create one-off, disposable chat rooms with TinyChat, including multi-user video, audio and plain ol' IRC-style text. Now the site's offering a way to create chat rooms through your Twitter username.
Why do you almost never send handwritten letters to loved ones? The effort — locating pen and paper, writing, addressing and stamping — can seem colossal on any given, always busy, day. But keeping in touch is easier than you (and they) may think.
Have no place to cowork and working from home has got you down? Set up an office-to-office connection with a friend to recreate the effect of shared office space.
Tinychat is a powerful service that offers a lot of web meet-up power from one link you share with participants. Once they arrive, participants can stream webcam video and audio, display desktop portions, share files and talk in plain old text.
Web-based chat application Meebo now lets you video conference with up to five other contacts from any instant messaging service through a team-up with TokBox. As with their regular video chat, you log in, open a chat window, hit the "rocket ship" icon and choose the "Group Video Chat" option. There's simultaneous text chatting in the same window, and the video quality looks to be about the same as the one-on-one setup. Not too shabby for a free, no-installation service.
Integrate video and audio chat with the popular open source chat application Adium using the freeware MeBeam plug-in. Once installed, you can start a video chat by right-clicking a contact and selecting "Initiate MeBeam Videochat"; Adium will automatically create a web-based chatroom and send the URL to your contact (sort of like Meebo is doing). As a bonus, the video chat is completely cross-platform and application independent since it lives in your browser. Unfortunately, the quality of the MeBeam chat was mediocre in my tests, with audio dropping regularly and a much lower resolution picture than you can expect with video chat from the likes of iChat. That said, I'd expect the MeBeam service to continue to improve, so if you've been dying for video chat integration with Adium, the free, Mac OS X-only MeBeam plug-in will do the trick.
Popular web-based chat application Meebo has integrated voice and video chat applications directly into the Meebo's IM window. Just fire up a chat in Meebo, then click the rocket ship icon on the message toolbar. Your window will expand to offer different integrated voice and video chat options, like previously mentioned TokBox. If your buddy isn't also chatting in Meebo, she'll get a link to open a Meebo chat and start the voice or video conferencing. We're not talking the high resolution of Skype, but for a web-based, integrated video chat solution for any IM contacts, it's pretty impressive.
New video chat web app TokBox offers much the same functionality as Skype and other services when it comes to live chat, but embedded video emails and no need for software downloads set it apart. The site's interface aims for simplicity, offering single-button starts for launching video chat or recording a new message, and interfaces with web cams and microphones through Flash's interface. The Times notes that TokBox "looked a little grainier, and its audio sounded a little noisier," than Skype, but the backers—including a YouTube cofounder—say that will improve. Of course, our readers know how to get even better quality by taking Skype hi-res.
TokBox
