Author Archive: Paul Carollo
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
ReadyTalk’s video clip playback feature is now publicly available. Video clip playback gives your trainings, sales demos, and webinars a more engaging, personal feel by incorporating a short video clip into the live presentation. Your meetings will never be the same and your participants will thank you for incorporating rich video content in your presentations. With video clip playback you can:
Upload and store up to 10 video clips to your access code.- Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content.
- Record your meeting with video clip content included.
We think video clip playback is a great new feature that will enable you to create engaging and memorable presentations. We’ve seen it used in many successful situations from a professionally produced product commercial, to a short CEO update in an all company meeting. This feature improves the ROI of your professionally produced content by allowing you to re purpose it to a live audience and through the recordings you generate. The playback experience for participants and presenters is exceptional as there is very minimal buffering. This means that your participants will be seeing the videos you push to them in real time creating a seamless viewing experience.
For more information on this feature please or to find out how to get started please check out our How-To guide. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166 or leave your feedback in the comments below.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Collaboration, Lead Generation, Product Marketing, Web Conferencing, Web Events, Webinars, Webinars | 2 Comments »
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Thursday, March 15th, 2012
I know this sounds ridiculous – what’s the point of meeting in person if everyone will be staring at their computer screens the whole time? Using web conferencing while we are all in the same room something we do all the time here at ReadyTalk (and not just because we’re a web conferencing company). There are many benefits to meeting this way, here are a few of my favorites:
- Better quality meeting visuals than trying to project: Have you ever held a meeting where you are hoping to project some visuals only to spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting trying to adjust your computers resolution so the visuals will project in a somewhat normal size? How about dealing with the colors that never look right on projectors? ReadyTalk enables you to share your screen with any participant and will automatically scale your screen to their native resolution in full color clarity.
- Multitasking is much easier (and more productive): Lets face it, we’re all going to multitask in a meeting. What better way to multitask than to have the web conferencing content right in front of your face along with anything else you’re working on. There is a much greater chance of you staying in sync with the content if you’re actually participating through the web conference than not watching the projector.
- Content can be shared by anyone in the room with no need to pass around a cable: I think the most annoying part of projecting is that when the presenter changes, and you spend 5 minutes fumbling around trying to switch the projector cable to the new computer. With ReadyTalk, you can easily pass control from one presenter to the other through our Co-Presenter feature. Co-Presenters then have full access to ReadyTalk’s presentation tools.
- Meetings start much faster: This one is fairly obvious, no fumbling with projector cables, warming the projector up, or messing with screen resolution necessary! With ReadyTalk, simply start your online meeting from the web, on your desktop with the ReadyTalk Quick Launcher, or through the ReadyTalk Scheduler for Outlook. Participants can easily join your meeting through the ReadyTalk Quick Launcher’s “Join a Meeting” feature. In a minute or less, your meeting can be up and running.
- Record your meeting: Often times you will be missing someone who is vital to the meeting or you’ll simply want to take notes on what was discussed. Since you’re already running a ReadyTalk meeting you might as well record it using our recording functionality. ReadyTalk gives you extremely easy one-click recording abilities so you can focus on your meeting and not getting the technology set up.
These are just a few of the many benefits of adding a web conference to your in-person meeting experience. If you’ve got some suggestions of how to improve in person meetings please share below.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Collaboration, Product Marketing, Teleworking / Telecommuting, Web Conferencing | 1 Comment »
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Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Working from home can be challenging. The temptation of the comfy couch, the allure of daytime TV, and the overwhelming urge to not change out of your pajamas can be daunting. However, I’m not here to discuss these issues. More often, working from home or from a remote location may cause you to feel out of the loop from your colleagues. I’ve compiled 5 quick tips to make your remote collaboration sessions more effective.
- Utilize collaboration tools and communication techniques to be a more active remote participant.
Often times remote collaborators listen in on team meetings while the rest of their colleagues are sitting in a conference room. This can cause a whole slew of communication issues resigning the remote collaborator to be frustrated or, worse yet, tuning out the entire meeting. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to you to be come a more engaged member of the meeting. Use an instant messaging application to stay engaged with others in the meeting. Utilize web conferencing tools, like ReadyTalk, to share your screen and view the slideshow of others while meeting. Politely ask your colleagues to speak clearly and be more verbose instead of exchanging non-verbal cues. Be a more deliberate communicator from your end of the meeting and don’t be afraid to interrupt so that you are heard.
- Establish ground rules at the beginning of your remote collaboration session.
At the beginning of any remote collaboration session, whether your colleagues are all remote or you are the only remote participant, establish ground rules for communication to set yourself up for a successful meeting. It’s easy for only the loudest or most opinionated people to be heard; by setting simple ground rules and being a little more patient, all members of the meeting will be heard even if they can’t be seen. When getting buy-in on a topic or when asking for feedback, individually call out all members of meeting to get their specific feedback.
- Make sure you are speaking on a headset and have a solid internet connection.
The easiest way to ruin a remote meeting session is to have a poor audio or web conference connection. Do yourself and your colleagues a favor and invest in a headset or headphones with a mic if you’re on a cell phone. If you’re working from home set up a simple workstation with a wired internet connection so that your web conference has less of a chance of failing or being so slow it’s unworkable. This simple tip will go the farthest in setting yourself up for success while in a remote collaboration session.
Lets face it, who doesn’t love working on email and other projects while sitting on a conference call or web conference. While multi-tasking is nice, wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to just work with some music playing over headphones than listening to the drone of a meeting in the background? The fact is you will get back to work faster if you are actively participating in the meeting you’re currently listening to, not to mention you will feel more engaged and feel more camaraderie with your colleagues if you are paying closer attention.
Just because you can’t meet in person doesn’t mean you have to lose your personality. Make a point to reserve the first few minutes of a meeting to catching up with colleagues you haven’t seen in a while, vacations you have planned, or something funny that happened to you recently. This fosters a team rapport and will ultimately help your virtual collaboration sessions by creating a more personal remote environment.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Collaboration, Audio Conferencing, telecommuting
Posted in Collaboration | 2 Comments »
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Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Today we are excited to announce the beta of our pre-recorded video playback feature. Pre-recorded video playback gives your trainings, sales demos, and webinars a more engaging, personal feel by incorporating short video clips into the live presentation. Your meetings will never be the same and your participants will thank you for incorporating rich video content in your presentation. With pre-recorded video playback, you can:
- Upload pre-recorded video clips to your access code
- Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content
- Record your meeting with the pre-recorded video content included
To sign up for beta access to pre-recorded video playback please fill out this form. You will receive an email within 1 business day providing you with instructions on how to get started.
Currently the process for uploading and playing back your pre-recorded video clip is a 4 step process (see diagram below). For more information please be sure to view the recorded demo, the Quick Start Guide, and the Best Practices and Known Issues documentation to gain valuable tips and tricks on how to use pre-recorded video playback in your meetings. When this feature becomes generally available (first half of 2012), the process for uploading and playing back your videos in the live presentation will be very similar to uploading and inserting slides into the ReadyTalk Conference Controls.
We’d love to hear about your experience with pre-recorded video in the feedback form or in the comments below. Tell us how the feature is working, if you’re experiencing any issues, or if you have any specific feature requests. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Collaboration, Lead Generation, Product Marketing, Sales, Training, Web Conferencing, Web Events, Webinars, Webinars | No Comments »
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Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
ReadyTalk has made significant enhancements to our application and desktop sharing feature. If you are not familiar with this feature, it can be used to share your entire desktop or specific applications with everyone in your web meeting.
Sometimes application and desktop sharing may appear slow and blocky in the participant view of a web meeting. We have made significant advancements in the way we deliver this content to eliminate this blocky effect for participants. Instead of painting the screen in segments as the information becomes available, we now paint the screen all at once. Your participants will see the information you are showing instantaneously with no blocky effect. This enhancement greatly improves your sales demos, webinars, or trainings where sharing rich desktop content is vital to the overall presentation.
Have you noticed these enhancements as a participant on a ReadyTalk web meeting? We encourage you to test it out for yourselves and let us know how it looks in the comments.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Collaboration, Product Marketing, Web Conferencing, Webinars | No Comments »
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Thursday, October 27th, 2011
This week, we rolled out some new hold music on ReadyTalk’s audio conferencing bridges. You would think choosing the perfect hold music would be an easy task. Just pick the music that fades into the background, annoys people the least, and sounds neutral…right? That’s not always the case.
Picking hold music is tough. There are limitations around music available to us. There’s a world of musical tastes, general annoyance around being on hold in general – the decision of what hold music to choose becomes monumentally hard!
We’ve heard some surprising feedback, including someone who threatened to bite their own forehead if we didn’t change our hold music (I’m not exactly sure how that works)! We don’t want our customers hyper-extending their jaws or causing any unnecessary bodily harm/property damage, so we are trying to mix up our hold music a little bit more. We hope you enjoy the latest choice. I find it somewhat uplifting, not at all grating, and a little hopeful. Most importantly, i think it fades in the background sufficiently allowing you to wait for your next ReadyTalk meeting in peace.
If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments!
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Audio Conferencing, Product Marketing, Teleworking / Telecommuting | 8 Comments »
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Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of ReadyTalk Quick Launcher – a tool available on your desktop that makes it easier and faster to start, join, and invite others to meetings. This tool will be a favorite for people who would like a quicker, persistent way to connect to their ReadyTalk accounts. If you are tired of logging into ReadyTalk through the browser to gain access to your account then this is definitely the tool for you. Quick Launcher gives you the ability to:
- Start an On-Demand Meeting with a single click. The Quick Launcher stores your account credentials eliminating the need to type in any numbers or codes.
- View a list of Scheduled Meetings in Conference Center and choose the meeting you’d like to start.
- Skip all audio prompts with the Start Audio Meeting feature. The Quick Launcher will dial you and immediately connect you to your Audio Meeting. It remembers the last 10 numbers you dialed so you can quickly select connect to your cell phone, desk phone or conference phone. Check the option to “Launch web controls on connect” to open up the web meeting controls for managing your audio meeting or for running an On-Demand Web and Audio Meeting.
- Instantly create an email invite with Invite Others. All the login information is included giving your participants a quick and easy way to join your ReadyTalk meetings.
- Join a Web Meeting faster when you’re colleague hosts a ReadyTalk meeting. Simply enter the 7 digit access code of the On-Demand meeting you’d like to join and the Quick Launcher will drop you right into the meeting, bypassing the registration process.
The Quick Launcher can be opened by double clicking on the optional desktop icon, left or right clicking on the tray ico. The goal of this tool is to be available for you anytime you need it, but to not be in the way when you don’t.
The ReadyTalk Quick Launcher is available today free of charge and can be downloaded for Mac or Windows here: http://www.readytalk.com/support-training/downloads. If you have any questions about the Quick Launcher or are having any issues downloading please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166. As always, if you have feedback, feature enhancements, or questions give us a call at any time or leave them in the comments below.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Audio Conferencing, Collaboration, Product Marketing, Sales, Teleworking / Telecommuting, Use Cases, Web Conferencing | 7 Comments »
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Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Have you been looking for a quick and streamlined way to send a ReadyTalk On-Demand meeting email invite? With the ReadyTalk Scheduler for Outlook you can quickly and easily send a customized email invite through Outlook. Your ReadyTalk account credentials are stored in the scheduler giving you a one click experience to email and invite your participants. With the ReadyTalk Scheduler for Outlook you can:
- Send a custom email invite for a ReadyTalk Audio, Web, or Audio/Web meeting
- Start an On-Demand meeting with 1 click
- Store your ReadyTalk Account credentials
To download the ReadyTalk Scheduler for Outlook please visit: http://www.readytalk.com/support-training/downloads. As always, if you have a question or support issue, please call ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Audio Conferencing, Collaboration, ReadyTalk Integration, Sales, Web Conferencing | No Comments »
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Friday, September 9th, 2011
Today we rolled out some exciting new enhancements to the ReadyTalk Administration Center. We’ve received great feedback from customers who have been using this tool for adding new users and access codes and viewing user information. We’ve taken the suggestions to heart and added some valuable new features to the Administration Center. With the expanded functionality you can now:
- Edit user and access code information
- Have the option to apply user address changes to all associated access codes
- View your invoice and detailed invoice reports
- Pay your current invoice
- Download a real time usage report for all users and access codes
For a more detailed description of these enhancements, and all of the features of the ReadyTalk Administration Center please check out the “Quick Reference Guide” under the Support tab in the Administration Center. If you don’t currently have access to the ReadyTalk Administration Center for your account, call your Account Manager at 800.843.9166 and they will get you set up. As always, if you have feedback, feature enhancements, or questions give us a call at any time or leave them in the comments below.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Other Topics, Product Marketing | No Comments »
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Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
ReadyTalk is constantly looking for feedback. We ask customers and participants for feature requests, we send customer surveys, we ask customers to participate in usability testing sessions and we share wire frames and our roadmap… we do all of this because our customers are the most valuable source of information we have at ReadyTalk. You know things we don’t because you use our products in ways we haven’t thought of yet. So, you may ask… where does all my feedback go?
Usability Testing
Frequently ReadyTalk will reach out to customers who may be interested in certain features, or fit a certain use case to test out proposed features. Usability testing puts you (the customer) through scripted scenarios and then tests your ability to navigate the user interface. We watch for confusion, stray mouse clicks, and we ask you to be as verbose as possible as you navigate the user interface. All of this feedback is logged by scribes during the meeting, and those notes are used to draw themes on the proposed improvements. This feedback is extremely important as it validates our ideas, shows areas of weakness, and uncovers ways for the user interface to become more intuitive.
Value Innovations
Value Innovations has been an extremely important process at ReadyTalk for further understanding two of our key customers: The Marketing User and the Collaboration User. The feedback we’ve obtained from Value Innovations Contextual Interviewing process is key for future development as it uncovers our most important customer’s unmet and unarticulated needs. Learn more about the Contextual Interviewing Process at ReadyTalk.
Feature Requests
Any time you give any type of feedback to ReadyTalk it ends up in our CRM solution tracked as a feature request. All in all we’ve got over 200 feature request categories which we use to run monthly and feature specific reports. This feedback influences many things from roadmap discussions and business cases, to mining for new ideas and innovations. This feedback also serves as a reminder to contact you when we actually build that feature you’ve been asking for.
These are some of the major ways we gather your feedback, interested in giving any feedback of your own? Contact our 24/7 live customer care team at 800.843.9166. You can also share it below.
Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.
Posted in Product Marketing | No Comments »
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