What do you need to know about Web 2.0 audio conferencing? How is it different than your crusty old dial-in number a PIN you’ve been carrying around in your wallet or purse?
Traditional services lack innovation – Audio conferencing has seen little innovation since its emergence in the 1980’s. It started as a part of an AT&T operator call center and you paid $1 per minute per participant. It had basic features and rules rigid. After your allotted time you were cut off. You were charged extra for everything like operator fees, late fees, no-show fees and cancellation fees. Put bluntly, traditional services were as mean as a drill sergeant. After AT&T divestiture in the mid-1980’s “reservation-less” technology emerged to give the emergent Baby Bells basic services. These technologies are still with us. The innovation with reservationless was the ability to use the same PIN for multiple calls without having to schedule each call through an operator.
Blends the best of the phone & data worlds – “Web 2.0 audio conferencing” is an emerging industry that describes a new breed of technology that’s breathing new life into a stodgy yet much needed business service. Traditional services, or same-old-same-old conferencing, connected phone wires together. The new services blend traditional phone technologies with the new breed of web-based technologies, like the i-Phone® and Blackberry® to offer new features and functions that make the user experience more effective… and maybe even more fun, too. Ease-of-use, convenience, more features and higher quality at lower costs are its calling card.
Web 2.0 feature power is finally here – This new audio conferencing technology blends the best of the phone and web worlds. For example, say you need to get your work team together right now to handle an emergency. Now you can simply tap your group list and voile! You are all on the phone. No more slogging through the process of sending everyone an email, waiting for confirmations, starting the call, waiting for stragglers. Those cumbersome barriers to greater efficiency are removed. Such capabilities were impossible with same-old-same old audio conferencing, but today they’re simple to accomplish and generate powerful results.
Special Note: Web 2.0 audio conferencing and “web conferencing” are not the same. Web conferencing enables the broadcast of a computer screen view, like a PowerPoint slide to participants. Audio conferencing manages the phone connections. Sometimes the two technologies are used together. More often than not however, audio conferencing is used since it doesn’t require everyone to be in front of a computer each time.
To learn more, Google “Web 2.0 audio conferencing”.
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