HiDef Conferencing is an audio conferencing service where participants can call into a voice conference via Skype, designated landline numbers or toll free numbers. Its name derives from its support of HD Voice – a feature inherent to Skype that results in crystal clear voice quality superior to our experience with standard phones or mobile phones.

Through web-based controls hosts can schedule calls, send out invitations and, during the call, manage who is speaking, monitor hand raising and record the conversation. Should the speaker be accessing the call via Skype, all others who are listening via Skype will benefit from the HD Voice feature. Landline and wireless participants are limited to the audio quality of the underlying phone service.

Yesterday HiDef Conferencing, recognizing that businesses will be looking for ways to save on not only communications costs but also travel costs in these economically challenging times, announced that they will not charge subscription fees for the balance of 2008 while new subscribers can trial their service with no monthly subscription charge.

Accessing a call via Skype is free for unlimited minutes while accessing via a country-specific phone numbers will result in any long distance charges to that phone number.

Pat Phelan has made considerable use of HiDef Conferencing and was delighted to receive an email where this offer was extended to their current customers. Tom Evslin became an HD Voice fan when his Vonage service failed him.

Here is an ideal opportunity to see if audio conferencing solutions are viable for your business.

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Palbee homepage

In the fight for dominance in the video web conferencing realm, we have WebEx, the granddaddy who struggles to stay one step ahead of the young fighters such as GoToMeeting. But into the ring leaps Palbee, a scrappy upstart based out of Seoul, Korea who can throw a quick and unexpected left hook that could knock the socks off the competition.

Palbee is leaner than the big guys. And it is cheaper. Much cheaper. While still in beta, it is completely free. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of the heavy hitters, however, what it lacks in bulk, it makes up for in simplicity. Palbee sought out to be easier to use, and it succeeds.

Set up a free account, log into Palbee, type the title of your meeting, hit start. Voila. You can get a little more complex – but not much more – by opting to record the meeting (click a button), invite other users to your meeting (click a button, type in their Palbee names), and schedule your meeting for another date and time (click a button, enter date and time).

Other quick specs:

• You can have up to 10 people in each meeting.
• There is a limit on meeting time – 1 hour.
• Palbee currently supports JPEGs, GIFs and PowerPoint files.
• Cross platform – runs with a Web browser and Flash.

Palbee Meeting

Now Hear This

Palbee delivers the one two punch with these features:

1. Their whiteboard feature - Every participant can gain access to markup tools including drawing and text functions to make notes on the image or PowerPoint file as it appears on everyone’s desktop. Currently, you have to take a screenshot to save those notations, but brainstorming and collaboration is easy to do.

2. Their conference room embed feature – While I’m not quite sure of the work application here, I was intrigued by the ability to lift some embed code of a Palbee meeting space and paste it into your Web site, blog or even MySpace page. This means that people can click on the Palbee widget and enter the same meeting room. Yes, this also means that if you paste the widget on multiple sites, those become multiple points of entry into the same conference room. So your visitors can engage not only in a live video web conference call or chat with you but also with one another at any time. Freaky!

In the Works

Some of the handy features that will be in a future version of Palbee include:

1. A premium level of services.
2. The ability to save the whiteboard edits.
3. Inviting conferencing guests who are not already registered users of Palbee (registration is free).

Palbee Widget

The company says that Palbee was not initially designed to fit a market need – it was created to fit an internal company need and then they realized it could serve a much wider market.

When I did the demo with the company as part of researching this post, the camera feature did not work for me. The software was not recognizing my Webcam built into my MacBook. There was also the expected delay – I was in Alaska and they were in Seoul, Korea!

If you like Beta products and don’t mind working out the kinks along with the company, Palbee is a handy little tool to meet your next basic Web conferencing needs.

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I recently reviewed Rondee, the easy-as-pie phone conferencing site, but just heard about a new conferencing site worth mentioning to expand your options for free conference calls.

Calliflower provides services to cover the entire process of conference calls – from setting them up to holding them to the followup and continued dialogue after the call is over. Calliflower is all about “building conversations” and sharing media, and they do it through a relatively clean dashboard so all of the elements of your call are on one screen.

Calliflower actually began as a FaceBook application adding free audio conferencing capabilities to people’s FaceBook accounts. As the app grew in popularity, the demand for the services apart from FaceBook became increasingly apparent to the company’s founders. They expanded their solution for not just conference calls but kept an eye toward being a solution for holding teleseminars and teleclasses as well.

To showcase their site’s capabilities, the company is offering their Calliflower Communiques, regular tele-conversations between a host (life enhancement speaker and writer Allan Hunkin) and authors and celebrities ranging from Alan Alda to William Shatner presented as teleseminars.

Here are some of the aspects of Calliflower worth noting:

1. Pin-free access to calls. After registering a call participant’s phone number becomes their personal pin. Easy to remember. Those who don’t want to register can access calls with a pin sent to them when the call is set up.

2. Controls at your fingertips. You can mute and unmute participants; acknowledge raised hands (a little hand icon that participants can use to signal they have something to say); lower hands; and other moderator functions. Everything is visible on a handy dashboard, a single Web -page view of your controls.

3. Multiple ways of accessing calls. Participants can opt to use VoiP (Truphone) or even a “call my phone” service (Sitofono) which is especially popular in Europe were mobile phone calls are free when received but incur a fee when made.

4. Enhancing call with a chat wall. You can carry out a simultaneous text chat as well as drop in links to MP3 files, flicker URLs to embed photos, share slides, and other multimedia resources to supplement the call and allow others to follow along.

5. “Seeing” the callers. You can see the names, pictures and caller status of everyone participating in the call – all on the dashboard. You can also see if their mike is open or closed or if their hand is raised.

6. Accessible call archives. You can archive the call agenda, any handouts, links and files to be accessed anytime after a call has been completed. This can also include an MP3 recording of the call.

Calliflower is looking to “reinvent business conversations” and provide new ways for people to interact within a conference call. Looks like they are on their way.

Some other conferencing call sites and services we’ve covered recently include FreeConference.com, SightSpeed (video conferencing), and Yugma.

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As useful as high definition audio is for person-to-person calls, it would be great to have this type of option for conference calls as well.  Vapps provides this type of service, called high-definition conferencing, to Skype.  In the Tools menu of the Windows version of Skype, there’s a Do-More button that launches the Vapps-powered conferencing solution.  Within this interface, you can start an instant meeting or schedule one in the future.  Meeting attendees are notified either by a Skype IM message or an email. Meetings can consist of up to 500 attendees.

While using Vapps, meeting facilitators can see who joins and leaves the meeting, mute and unmute participants, and record the conference as well.  The Skype Do More menu is available in English, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, and Spanish.  This conferencing service, with its use of pure VoIP, is popular with international teams who need to conduct conference calls.

Why does Vapps sound so much better than a traditional phone call?  It’s all about wideband connectivity.  That is, a normal copper phone wire transmission only uses about a third of the fidelity the human ear can hear.  High definition conferencing uses 16KHz and you can definitely hear the difference as audio quality is theoretically 4-times better using this metric.

For Skype conference calling, Vapps Service is free.  Packages begin at $25/month and go up to $75/month.  It is possible to have a mix of landlines and Skype participants, where traditional phone users will call in via a toll-free phone number or local number.  For more information, check out Vapps’ website.

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