Corporate Travel =  Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking

If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel.  If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying.  Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.

One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel.  Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price.  Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next?  Charging for inflight air?  Or perhaps pay toilets?  One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive.  From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.

Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…

The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another.  Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead.  Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and  lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean).  That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.

Of course large - and we’re talking enterprises as in Fortune 500 - have another solution although it is mostly used internally since they can’t count on their clients having the correct matching equipment.  That solution is dedicated video conferencing environments.  Generally these are set up in such a way that two matched rooms are equipped so that from one end of the call it appears that you are staring down a boardroom table at the other location that is on the call.  With the top end gear (which will set you back a cool six figures just to get started) this set up is pretty compelling but in a strange alternate reality way.  Unless you’ve actually used one of these systems it is hard to explain what makes it feel so weird but take it from me, it just does.  In any case, for all but the largest companies with the most serious need of regular face to face conferences or extended large executive team meetings these solutions are prohibitively expensive - so much so that for a small company traveling ends up being a bargain by comparison.

.…Or

Up until a couple of years ago these were your choices: travel, make do with phone and screensharing or invest major bucks in a dedicated video conferencing solution.  Then, along came an upstart company, SightSpeed who set out to prove to the world that the impossible - decent quality video conferencing from the average user’s desktop was not only possible but in fact possible to offer for free.

Frankly, when I first head about SightSpeed two years ago I was skeptical to say the least.  Way back in the dark ages (circa 2001-2002) I worked as the VP of Sales for a company called BackBone Communications that specialized in video conferencing and the least expensive solution that we would provide (that had sufficient quality to not be an embarrassment) ran around $6,000 to buy the gear and get set up plus between $400 and $1200 per month in line charges for the dedicated bandwidth and the local loop.

I couldn’t imagine that a typical sub-$100 web cam and an average broadband connection (think DSL, Cable Modem or leased line at 768kb or so) could possibly deliver an experience that was anything except unacceptable.  Certainly it couldn’t possibly be good enough that it could substitute for a real meeting, even in a pinch.

At the time decent web cams were not all that common and about the only computer that had a built in camera was the Sony Picturebook which, unfortunately, except for one odd-duck very expensive model, was so anemic that the camera was all but useless anyway.  To solve this problem. Peter Csathy, the Founder and CEO of SightSpeed was actually sending out web cameras in his SightSpeed starter packs (which wasn’t a bad way to endear himself to more than one blogger).  Set up was a little bit of a chore but after a while I was able to see the goldfish that their endpoint was focused on and I was even reasonably sure it was actually a living fish.

To make a long story somewhat shorter let me say this of that version of SightSpeed:  it was far better than I expected.  Far, far better.  It made other video chat applications seem even worse than they seemed before by comparison, however, it still wasn’t what I would call “business class”.

That was Then, This is Now

SightSpeed has come quite a long way since the first time I reviewed their product.  They have improved the application in every way that I could have reasonably expected and commensurate with their improvements technology in general has also upped the ante quite considerably.  For the most part, bandwidth has increased for most locations, the average computer is much faster and typically has much more memory, many sport integrated web cameras (and more major manufacturers are adding them to devices with each passing month partially, I suspect due to SighSpeed’s success).

Their product line has been refined to accommodate the needs of the consumer/home office worker and the small to medium business.  The former with a totally free product and the latter with a product that is incredibly reasonably priced especially considering the feature set that it includes as well as the quality  of the video conferencing experience.

So what has changed?  Well, version 6.5 (yep folks. they’ve been at this a looong time in Internet Years they’re 113!)

Here are a few of their firsts:

• First desktop video conferencing application to provide video in full motion at  30 frames per second
• First desktop video conferencing application to provide VGA mode (no more postage stamp sized video image)
• First desktop video conferencing application to provide support for multiple participants
• First desktop video conferencing application built for small to medium sized business capable of supporting nine participants on a single call

Professional vs. Personal; What’s the Difference?

When I asked about the distinction between the consumer and the business products  I learned that the first distinction is that the consumer product is free while the business application is priced on a per seat per month basis as follows:

# of Seats	Monthly Contract	Annual Contract
Single Seat	$19.95	$189.95
5-User Pack	$89.95	$895.95
10-User Pack	$149.95	$1,495.95
50-User Pack	$695.95	$6,995

Of course there are some other differences aside from one being free and the other being…well… not free.

The consumer/personal version is designed to be as easy to use as it can possibly be.  Imagine you’re a Midwestern Grandma who wants to see her Grand kids on the computer.  So did SightSpeed. Basically they focused on really high quality video calling with little else in the way of features.  They wanted the application to be fun and easy to use.  Judging by adoption numbers they have done the right things.

For the business application it’s a whole different story.  They have pulled together a robust suite of the tools that are most important to the business user.  These include:

• Support for  collaboration
• The ability to share files
• An option to keep the video always on top while screen sharing
• Low use of PC resources so that other applications can still run while in a video call
• Adaptive frame rate adjustment in case of limited bandwidth or network resources
• Highest quality video based upon available bandwidth, even to the point of downsizing right away when the bandwidth is constrained

Basically the business application is very  focused on delivering a solution that works in the real world consistent with the equipment in the typical small business and the bandwidth that the average small business is likely to have.

Other Goodies

SightSpeed has also launched a Flash-based in -browser application targeted at the Tween market which is now appearing on sites like Hi-five which is doing quite well.  Even more recently SightSpeed inked a deal with Dell to host Dell’s new Video Chat application, powered by SightSpeed.  From what SightSpeed tells me, Dell sees their hardware as more than just fast chips in pretty boxes.  They are now bundling Digital Video Chat into all of their consumer products.
M…M…M…Mobile?

Of course I couldn’t let an entire briefing go by without asking what the company had planned for mobile.  To me this seems like the natural progression for the company and it appears that they are on the same page.  There is, however, a caveat:  according to Eric Quanstrom, SightSpeed’s VP of Marketing,  mobile is obviously their path forward however you’ll probably see their first announcement in this regard outside the US.  Eric sited bandwidth (at present day rates of growth it will take the US 100 years to provide the average household with the 60 megabits that Japanese homes get today, and mobile is even further behind)

So there you have it folks.  If you want to make your CFO happy, or your piggy bank less unhappy, or if you simply come to the conclusion that the risk of a TSA body cavity search is not your idea of a great way to start the day, SightSpeed has created what may well be the first truly viable alternative for the small business or the sole proprietorship.  From my perspective the use of this sort of application is going to become more and more the  rule rather than the exception.  Gas and oil pricues are not going to come back down to their prior levels and airport security is not going to get any more pleasant so you may as well start your adaptation process now.  In so doing you can save yourself some money, save your body some stress and save the planet some, period.

Tags: Contributors, Downloads, Features, GTDtimesavers, Getting Things Done, Oliver Starr, Software //