Notes

Ways to Stay in Touch while Living in Different Cities
Participants in the virtual meeting are normally asked to dial-in using their telephone. But what if you could acoustically separate callers in a virtual meeting room?

Imagine three colleagues in Berlin, Paris, and San Francisco are participating in a tele-meeting together. They want to hold an ad-hoc brainstorming session; each is supposed to present their ideas one after another without anyone else knowing who's speaking at the moment. After every presentation of an idea they should be able to discuss it with other members of the group.

Another important characteristic of this scenario is that all people in the meeting should be able to speak at the same time without having any negative effects on each other; they want to communicate like they're in the same room.

Participants might need to participate via their smartphones, thus they will most likely use earphones with a built-in microphone.

Locking out audio from one participant when another person is speaking can have technical benefits for the phone system, avoiding echo and so forth. But more importantly it might ease communication in virtual meetings when combined with voice separation among callers. It also enables how easy it could be done technically by implementing a very simple interface just allowing participants to switch between different modes.

So, let's see how virtual holiday parties could be done on a very simple level.

Instant messaging is already widely used in business, often to coordinate meetings or discuss topics that are otherwise being discussed during meetings. Instant messages are also used as an internal communication channel between colleagues who are working together on the same project - but of course instant messages lack all the context of what happened before, and what the other participants might have talked about during the meeting.

Voice chat is basically used in the same way; people use it to coordinate meetings and discuss topics that are otherwise being discussed during meetings. However, voice chat also lacks context of what happened before, and what other participants might have talked about during the meeting.

So how would all these interact?

Imagine there's a business meeting going on in which participants talk via voice chat, share documents via instant messaging and exchange ideas with sketches on whiteboards. In such a case all participants would be able to sketch together on one virtual whiteboard, review each other's sketches and so forth. Moreover users could send links through IM while they're talking over the phone - imagine an engineer pointing out some technical details over the phone while simultaneously showing them in a browser window.

Instant voice messaging and sharing of whiteboard sketches would be completely separate from the phone call; you could even lock out the participants who are not speaking at that moment to avoid distracting them or confusing other participants in case they switched into an instant message mode accidentally. These user interface solutions should be simple: press "voice chat" button and start talking, press "instant message" and send your comments via IM - without having to switch back to one of these two modes when returning to the phone call.

Virtual Events Bring People Together

Using platforms like Skype or Facebook Spaces for tele-meetings might be cumbersome. Imagine that you have to deal with three VoIP accounts, install all necessary software and so forth - quite a hassle to say the least, especially for a group of people who are not used to it.

Virtual events via Zoom on the other hand allow you to bundle all these features into a single service. Creating a virtual event is as easy as sending an invite link to all participants, and it allows users to meet regardless of where they are in the world. And most importantly they can start working immediately, without having to install anything or requiring any special permissions.
Homepage: https://t2conline.com/4-social-events-you-hold-have-online/