E-Conference offers interactive alternative to business travel

BOULDER ? The Internet is to us today what the wheel was to people thousands of years ago ? the longer we’re around it, the more uses we find for it.

Companies started their affairs with the Internet by putting their brochures online. Then they start selling stuff. Now the list is beginning to swell, especially when it comes to communicating with each other.

One small, four-person company in Boulder called E-Conference Inc. is a good example of how businesses are capitalizing on the Internet’s capacity to change the way we communicate.

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E-Conference helps companies conduct online presentations and meetings, primarily via voice conference calls, but it also can turn the common conference call into an Internet multimedia show by adding slides, animation and video.

“With the economic downturn, most companies are looking for alternative options to travel for meetings and presentations,´ said Marc Church, vice president of E-Conference. “Our current clients have increased their e-conferencing sessions, and new clients are quickly discovering the value we have to offer. This economy is encouraging businesses to reassess their spending, and luckily for us, our services are a great way for companies to save money.”

While the company may be recession proof, it’s certainly not competitor proof. Little and big hitters are joining the online meeting fray.

Church says Microsoft, America Online and Yahoo are all on deck. Microsoft is planning an upgrade to its core meeting technology, NetMeeting, and AOL and Yahoo are developing their instant messaging services into instant meeting services, he said. Once developed, Church said these services will be capable of achieving what Mshow and Raindance Communications Inc., formerly Evoke Communications, have.

Analysts agree that the potential for growth in this market is large. A report from Collaborative Strategies, a Braintree, Mass.-based management consulting firm, predicts that the e-conferencing market will grow 111 percent this year to $1.8 billion.

Education and e-Learning: The Next Revolution, a report published by the Internet Group of Needham & Co., states that the average employee attends 60 meetings per month. Many of these meetings are off site and require costly travel expenses, in addition to the loss of time.

“Online conferencing saves companies time and money by eliminating the need for travel, while increasing productivity and collaboration among work forces through the online conferences’ interactive nature,” Church said.

Companies are beginning to see the benefits Internet meetings. Cindy Skerjanec, director of marketing programs at Rogue Wave Software, a Boulder-based software and consulting company, launched an online seminar project for the company. She also oversees some of the distance learning initiatives.

“Wave and Web casts lets us give our customers information that is convenient and high quality,” Skerjanec said. “We can offer our participants the next best thing to a live seminar, without the worries or expenses associated with traveling to that event. It’s easy on our budget since there’s no need to reserve a conference room at a hotel and send presenters to another city to host the event.”

Musictele.com, a developer of telephony applications, also has jumped on board. “We needed a way to cut down on our travel costs without losing touch with our off-site people,´ said Stephanie Fennell, media relations manager at Musictele.com. “It was important to keep our sales department up-to-date without having to fly them to meetings. E-Conference helped us find the proper technology for our online events.”

By integrating E-Conference’s meeting service, Fennell said her company was able to increase collaboration among its sales force and save money.

Church said E-Conference’s meeting service is designed for companies putting on small or frequent interactive presentations such as company meetings, sales presentations and software demonstrations. The service features live, instant polling, as well as audience chat, group Web surfing and document collaboration. Those services cost 35 cents per minute.

Church said an audio conference is not always needed with the meeting service because calls may be one on one and only require a direct call between parties. For calls with three or more people, the company offers 1-800 audio conferencing. This service is 20 cents per minute without operator assistance and 25 cents per minute with the assistance of an operator.

Conference services target companies that need to run larger events such as online marketing seminars and product launches. For these events, E-Conference invites participants, moderates the conference and provides technical support, training and a post-show report. Technology features include live text messaging, voting and polling with post-show reporting, phone or Internet audio, group Web surfing, streaming video, white-boarding, live software demos and custom content that includes animation. The cost for conference services is 60 cents per minute, so a 60-minute conference with 75 people would cost $2,700.

E-Conference also offers services to enhance presentations. For $750, a company can archive a presentation in formats such as Windows Media Player, Real Player or Flash. E-Conference will edit archives for $100 per hour. For that same price, E-Conference can develop and design a presentation using animated GIFs, HTML and video streaming.