A voice without the face is still the same person…right? Given that humans are highly visual creatures, and that a disproportionately large portion of the brain is devoted to processing images (Wolfe, 2001), it seems to make sense that including video in virtual conferences could dramatically improve communication between people. …

I’m a few weeks late on this one, but this was an interesting headline:  “Twitter, Facebook Can Improve Work Productivity”  (PC World, citing a study from the University of Melbourne.) I’ve believed this for quite a while…with qualifications.  The reason stated is that taking quick breaks to scan Facebook and Twitter…

…and The 6 Month Challenge. We had an amazing time at Dreamforce.  More on that in another post. For now, watch Milton at Dreamforce telling you why you need VSee to help your sales teams: Dreamforce 2010: Milton Chen, VSee – Cutting Edge Video Conferencing In the Clouds, Reduce Sales…

My friend Jeff Urdan, honcho of VeaMea (a friendly competitor of ours that uses a client-server architecture), sent me an interesting email yesterday with the title “A laugh for your blog?”  Apparently the big guys, realizing they’re a little behind in desktop videoconferencing innovation (read: not optimized for ad hoc workflow),…

That headline really means audio-only phone calls.  The (“smart”)phone as the swiss army knife of communications tools will never die.  LONG LIVE THE PHONE! May I present the evidence?  I call to the stand this blog post by Larry Lisser, titled All I wanted for my birthday was a lousy phone…

Here is a must-read article in today’s New York Times by Eilene Zimmerman.  It touches on several common questions about how to behave in virtual meetings which I haven’t covered here.  (I’ll be honest: I didn’t think of them.)  Although it touches briefly on advice for presenters, it mostly focuses…

Lets say Susie is a sales rep and she’s meeting a customer in her office.  The customer asks a question that Susie doesn’t know the answer to, and she doesn’t know who to ask. Phone or video are not good choices here because Susie doesn’t know who to call.  A…

This was a very interesting post Michael Arrington put up on TechCrunch yesterday.  I myself am guilty of a one of the sins:  I have a two-sentence limit on my IMs before I hit enter and continue…but I’ll explain myself at the end.  The points he makes are very good…

Lest you think I don’t support video collaboration in conference rooms, I actually love it!  I just don’t think an expensive telepresence setup is needed for a successful conference.  For a sliver of a fraction of a percentage of the cost, you can have a great conference room setup using…

Believe it or not, you act differently when you’re on a phone call. And different from that on video. Oh, and you reply differently via chat. And why did you respond that way in email? Folks, it’s not news, but the medium informs the communication.  Obviously we think everyone should…

We’ve devoted posts to the corporate environment of remote work and distributed teams.  Today’s installment is directed at our end users who find themselves to be, you guessed it, remote workers. There is sometimes an assumption within the tech world that any problem can be solved by a tool.  “If…

In researching the cover story for the April issue of Inc. magazine, The Case for the Virtual Company, the entire editorial staff went virtual. Using email, mobile phones, and video conferencing they spent the month putting together the issue from home, coffee shops, and any place but their luxurious offices…

I didn’t forget the promise for a post on daytime lighting for a video conference call. Here’s an example of my office, with a typical issue I see when talking to people on VSee:

We’ve all been there.  Someone sends you an email asking you a question.  You respond and ask for some clarification.  Three days of back-and-forth emails later, you get fed up with how slow the discussion is going and call the other person.  Three minutes later, you both have all the…

Ah, lighting. Never underestimate the importance of lighting in a video call. No matter whether you’re using VSee or Skype, Cisco or Polycom, the people you’re talking to want to see you.  They don’t want to see… …which is lit mostly from the front.  You’ll note that due to the smaller space I am…

One of the most powerful features of VSee is the ability to meet with 2, 3 or up to 10 people (depending on bandwidth) and see them all simultaneously, each person in their own window. You have complete flexibility to position each window wherever you want, but sometimes you just…

You may have used VSee’s capability of sharing an application or the desktop, but did you know you can share just a specified region of the desktop? This can be especially useful when you are using an application such as PowerPoint and you want to show the slide but not…

Georgina Laidlaw wrote on Gigaom’s Web Worker Daily about 5 Things You’ll Miss by Not Working In An Office. More usefully, she also offered some coping strategies. Since most of the people at VSee spend more time working outside of the office than in it, we’ve developed a few strategies…

It’s been almost four months now that I’ve been Chief Product Officer for VSee, a video conferencing and collaboration software and services that is based in Mt. View, California but is actually distributed around the globe. I’ll write at some future date about how our customers use VSee, but this…

Also posted at herot.typepad.com. One of the key elements is making a business relationship work is establishing trust. This is especially challenging when the parties are seperated geographically. Technologies such as videoconferencing can help, but the conventional wisdom is that these tools are useful for reinforcing an existing relationship but that…