As the Senior Product Manager at Loudeye who is responsible for the launch of the Loudeye Express Web conferencing solution, Colin Garvey is helping to change the face of online presentations, from a large-scale meeting interface supported by Web streaming protocols to a more intimate, everyday, self-service capability where holding a meeting is as easy as uploading a PowerPoint presentation to the Loudeye Express platform and then presenting it to up to 50 of your colleagues at a time, complete with slide pointer dexterity and SSL encryption.
Just as the rate of daily business meetings in the workplace far outpaces that of larger conferences, Colin has watched the market for Web presentation solutions steadily grow larger even while the audiences for each online presentation have gotten smaller. His vantage point has been uniquely Northwestern. After taking an MBA from Seattle University, and a short stint at Attachmate, Colin entered the Web conferencing arena working with the streaming media solution provider known as NetPodium and then its new parent company Intervu. He then migrated with the same Web conferencing application to Akamai. Along the way, the upwardly spiraling growth trend in online meetings also got an unexpected jolt from the events of 9/11 as more and more business people sought to shrink the expense and inconvenience of travel by meeting screen-to-screen instead of face-to-face.
With more than six years of experience in delivering Webcasts for some of the world’s largest corporations and an industry leading infrastructure, Loudeye has long offered the ideal solution for Fortune 500 companies wishing to take advantage of online communications as a streaming media broadcaster. Now, with Loudeye Express, the company can leverage its scalable Webcasting technology via smaller presentation units by using PowerPoint as the primary presentation vehicle.
“Loudeye has a very stable platform that we’ve been using for enterprise communications products for some time,” remarks Garvey. “That includes an event we did with the PGA last year that was upwards of 15,000 simultaneous users. We’re leveraging that same platform for Loudeye Express and the idea is to take advantage of all that great scalability and reliability that we’ve had for a long time.”
We had a couple of questions.
Seattle24x7: What’s the difference between using Loudeye Express vs. publishing a PowerPoint presentation online?
Garvey: Many folks don’t have the capability to put their PowerPoint presentation online. Loudeye Express is a far easier solution for them. In addition to that, when you publish a presentation to your Website you allow the participants to have control over the slide list. The moderator or the presenter loses control of the presentation. With Loudeye Express, the presenter is controlling the timing of what’s appearing and when. In Version 3.0, (to be released within the next 30 days) we’ll be adding a slide pointer which allows you to point to various slides and keep people focused on the presentation. We’re also adding SSL encryption along with the ability to support up to 20 slide presentations at one time.
Seattle24x7: How is the product being priced?
Garvey: With Loudeye Express, you’re actually buying a presenter license which allows you to conduct unlimited presentations over a monthly period of time, for up to 50 participants per presentation. That’s quite a bit different than the standard Web conferencing model currently on the market where you have to pay per “seat.” The price of the Loudeye Express service is $65 per presenter per month. There really is nothing else out there that even approaches that in terms of affordability.
We would agree. Streaming may be a more cost-effective way of doing a large event, but for regular meetings, client presentations, training sessions, press conferences, and other business functions, it’s hard to match the budgetary-efficiency or reliable, reservationless ease of use of Loudeye Express.
A free trial of Loudeye Express is available for a limited time at http://www.loudeye.com/express/freetrial.
[24×7]
Colin Garvey is the Senior Product Manager behind Loudeye Express.
