OR, why Live Sharing your apps changes everything!

Q. What’s the worst part of a web conference?  

A.  The first 10 minutes when people are struggling to join the right session, make sure they have the right software, etc..

Why is this?  Web conferencing replaced getting on an airplane to see a client or prospect in person.  It was OK that it was difficult to join, it still was better than travelling.  Now, with web conferencing a part of everyday work life, we thought it would be useful to take a historical look at the context within which it evolved and innovations that are rapidly making it outdated.

Let’s take a quick walk through the evolution of business processes and document sharing over the last 30 years.  What are the big innovations that come to mind?  The list might include the copying machine, facsimile, FedEx, cell phones, email, web conferencing, VoIP, IP-PBX’s and Dropbox just to name a few. 

There have been incremental advances in each of these categories (i.e. fax over IP) but there has been no new category of activity created in the last few years.  We’ve got all this technology but no new innovations for making work easier, faster and simpler.  In fact, a lot of the new technology has actually made work harder.  Don’t you feel like you are constantly being asked to download this app, remember that password, find this file on that device, etc…?

Successful products need to be designed to complement existing behaviors, not create new processes to adapt to.  Just like Uber makes it easy to order a car to your location, it should be easy to share content with anyone over the Internet from your phone. Live sharing from your phone replaces the need to send documents via fax, email or present them at a pre-arranged time in a “meeting”. 

Imagine, you can present the information you want to share at the time you want to share with the audience you want to share it with.  Best of all, afterwards, you still control the content.  So, instead of having a pre-arranged meeting from 11am – noon where everyone is in front of their computers and tied to their desks, you can just see if your colleagues are available and then quickly share your work with them for a 10 minute review.

There is a category of innovators creating mobile first products for a mobile workforce.  Larger, more established companies like Slack and Dropbox have pioneered this market and this approach.  The reasons tools like these are embraced is not just because they are easier, they are also better. They remove inefficiencies instead of creating them and save customers time and money. Low-cost SaaS pricing delivers a compelling ROI for all products in these categories.

ScreenMeet, my company, delivers a live sharing solution suited for today’s knowledge workers.  Now, anyone can live share any content that is on their phone to any smart device.  Best of all, attendees view it in 1 tap, with no app required.

“Before we had Screenmeet.com, we had to spend lots of time helping our merchants install software so they could join our screen share sessions.  Now, it just works, automatically.  We love it and so do our clients.”

-Osha Kondori, Account Team Manager, ZOZI

In fact, you can download ScreenMeet for Android, ScreenMeet for iOS in the App Store or ScreenMeet for PC/MAC.

About the Author

Ben Lilienthal, Founder and CEO, ScreenMeet.com is a 20-year veteran of the Internet communications technologies.  He started and sold the world’s largest VoIP audio conferencing service to Citrix Online. He then worked as the GM, Audio for GoToMeeting for 2+ years.

ScreenMeet.com recently was one of the featured participants at ITEXPO East where select companies presented how they are creating the future and disrupting markets with breakthrough innovations.