WiredRed’s new e/pop Web Conferencing

Another project has had me waist-deep in video all week and I forgot to post this tidbit about WiredRed’s new e/pop Web Conferencing product. (You can read my news story here.) For a self-hosted Web conferencing product, this is pretty powerful product. It can do both slideware shows, application and desktop sharing, as well as multi-point audio and video. (It’s not H.323-compatible, though WiredRed says it’s working on a SIP gateway.) I got two demos of the product – the first from the company itself where I was on a DSL line and the second from a customer (Joe Forman of Bond Street Capital) where he was on DSL and I was on a T-1. In both cases we didn’t use the audio version, but the video quality was pretty good when the frame rate was under 10 fps. Bandwidth was the limiting factor on the video quality. But where this product really demonstrates its merits is in the slide delivery and app sharing -even through tight firewalls. Slides do not have to be uploaded head of time and the delivery to the viewer is speedy. On the application/desktop sharing, users can share just a single application or even just a portion of their overall desktop. Forman says he likes the ability to give a viewer control to share their own desktop – useful in training and collabortive efforts. I also like the pay once, use as much as you want pricing system. WiredRed is offering e/pop Web Conferencing for $2,000 per year for five simultaneous users. The server piece runs on any Windows 2000 or greater server and the easy-install client runs on Windows 95 or greater.