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Today, I took a tour and signed up for a Hot Conference Room package. Thanks to Julie Wolf of Income Assurance for her patience with the tour.

The Hot Conference product is HOT! Let’s start at the beginning. I have been looking at “Web Conferencing” tools now for about 3 months. I was mostly appalled by the pricing of the “good ones”, they were so expensive. I’m sure their product is top notch, but they were well out of ball park.

I was looking for a tool that I could use to conduct interactive seminars, broadcast my screen to demonstrate something, take questions from participants and generally interact. Sound a little bit like a school room? It should! If you want to know some of the “why”, see this page - Teleseminars.

I wanted more that 5 screens in a broadcast session and for a “standard” webinar without screen sharing, I wanted 100’s of users.

Most of the so-called Web Conferencing packages were an audio broadcast requiring the host to dial in on a land line to run the conference. There was no, or extremely little, support for Visual presentations. Many of them are limited to prepared Powerpoint slides.

I found some organisations who would provide full web conferencing for more than 5 users, but the pricing was in the $100’s a month.

Then I came across Hot Conference, Conference Rooms. I get 5 Conference Rooms a month, with up to 500 users, for well less than $100 a month. If I want to Screen Share, I can have 25 concurrent guests! Fantastic.

Have I mentioned yet that I can record my session for later podcasting? Including the text chat sections?

So why is this important to this blog and what I’m doing here? Simple - I want to provide world class support to my guests, members and friends. It is often easier to see the same things and discuss the technology challeges you are viewing at that time. If you need help, you can access my Hot Conference Room as well. I also plan on holding training courses in the Room to help everybody.

In order to assist, I have produced a quick video on how to access my Hot Conference Room:

If you would like your own Hot Conference Room, please click here for more details.

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