TeamApart Blog

Since our initial private beta launch in August, we’ve received a lot of great attention and an incredible amount of feedback (thank you!).

For the past month we have been hard at work improving our site based on user feedback. Today we are releasing some new and exciting features, and to celebrate we’re giving away 100 beta invite codes. Click here to claim your invite!

Included in today’s updates:

• Document viewing is now synchronized: changing presentation slides or scrolling a document will result in the same view for every participant, so giving presentations or making sure everyone is on the same page is a snap
• Documents and images now have zoom and pan capabilities; zooming and panning is also synchronized across all meeting participants
• Documents and images also can now be drawn on or annotated with text, so you can mark up a wireframe or document in real-time with others in the meeting
• A workspace will now maintain the state of all open documents, notepads, whiteboards and images between meetings; it will look just like you left it when you return to meet again!
• Various other tweaks and bug fixes

We hope that these updates will make meeting and collaborating with Team Apart even more effective. Be on the lookout for additional updates soon. Thanks again for all the wonderful feedback, and please continue to let us know how we can improve Team Apart!

Team Apart is thrilled to open our (virtual) doors to a few good beta testers.  Team Apart lets small workgroups create a shared website (we call them workspaces) with group video-chat and real-time collaboration tools (whiteboards, notepads, file-sharing, etc) for online meetings. Users create a persistent workspace that allows up to 4 people to video-chat simultaneously, with full video and audio. Whiteboards and notes can be downloaded and saved as a file, or can remain in your personal workspace for those times when you can’t all meet together at once. Here are some of the key features that we think makes Team Apart special:

• Team Apart works in real-time, so everyone sees the same thing at the same time – video conferencing, file sharing, whiteboarding, notes and more
• Team Apart is browser-based and requires no software download (we recommend having Flash 10)
• Team Apart is simple to use – create a workspace, send your team the URL and they simply click through to a shared workspace
• You can store persistent data (files, whiteboards, etc) in the cloud at your permanent workspace
• Best of all, Team Apart is free (not just for Beta, it really is free)

Team Apart is launching in Beta, and that’s for good reason.  We’ve made a valuable tool for online, remote collaboration (hence the name, “Team Apart.”  Clever, huh?) but, we also know that we have a long way to go.  We need business users and workgroups to try it out and give us feedback.  You can report feedback, bugs, usability issues, or laudatory praise (we like the last one best, but don’t be shy about constructive criticism) in a variety of ways. You can report it on the website, or while you’re actually in the meeting, by clicking on the feedback tab.  Or you can send an email to: feedback[at]teamapart[dot]com

Team Apart is perfect for business users, like small teams that work remotely and need to collaborate, or client-based businesses that need to meet regularly in different locations.  Some of these might include:

• Small businesses & distributed workgroups
• Grad school students and groups like MBA programs
• Client-based / service businesses
• PR agencies
• Ad agencies
• Design Firms

You can join the queue to get a Beta account here. We’ll try to move fast to get you in and collaborating as fast as possible.  Thanks for reading, and welcome to Team Apart!

One thing that I’ve learned over the past few months while working from home is that it can be hard to get motivated in the home office. I sometimes find myself looking for anything to do except work. Bills, phone calls, cleaning my room, making a sandwich; it’s easy to get distracted when there’s nobody else around to focus with you.

I’ve written before about how we use MeetCast to keep in touch while working, but I didn’t touch on how the ability to speak to one another in real-time actually motivates us. I now find real-time meetings essential to disparate teams, and any team that doesn’t utilize a solution for real-time, face-to-face interaction should seriously consider it.

So what are the benefits? Face-to-face interactions with others is quicker than written communication, can help the team connect and build trust, and can be an excellent motivator. Regardless of whether or not you’re in the same physical location, actually speaking to others and seeing their reactions to ideas and statements results in better feedback and quicker decision making. Still not convinced? Read on:

You Are Social (yes, you)
People are inherently social creatures. They thrive on social interaction and encouragement. Especially for remote team members that work from home, a chance to look at and speak with other teammates can be uplifting and a refreshing break from the monotony of the day.

Additionally, the bond between two teammates grows stronger with more personal communication, as does trust and commitment to deliver quality work. I personally find myself more pumped to accomplish things after a MeetCast meeting; I get a little boost from knowing that others are working hard on the same project.

The Motivation Factor
In every team there are members have what I like to call the ‘motivation factor’. These are the people on the team that inspire others, that help move meetings to a consensus, or that set deadlines for firm decisions or task completion. They are the factor that drives the team forward when they are discouraged, and that helps produce tangible results. You’re either that team member, in which case you should be meeting face-to-face to motivate others, or you’re not, in which case you should be meeting face-to-face to get motivated yourself! Regardless of how much you motivate others, real-time meetings help bring everyone together as a team to discuss issues or ideas, and that alone can be extremely beneficial.

Email Sucks
Email is undoubtedly one of the greatest changes to how we communicate in the modern office, but anyone that’s worked remotely or with remote customers knows that email can also be a huge pain. Intentions are lost or miscommunicated, and it’s not uncommon to completely misunderstand or miss important points in an email. Emails are delay-able, even ignorable, and the back-and-forth required to detail any complicated actions or decisions take precious time.

Talking directly is quicker, more reliable and helps ensure that everyone stays on the same page. One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication used to express feelings or emotions is delivered through non-verbal queues. If someone isn’t jazzed on an idea, it may be hard to tell via email, but it’s certainly easy to see when speaking face-to-face. Email 0, Face To Face 1.

Harder To Lie To A Face
Along the same lines, real-time meetings encourage clarity and honesty about timelines, progress reports and general feelings. Email and IM allows for more ambiguity, but it’s harder to take both sides of an idea in real-time. Face-to-face meeting also forces real interaction that results in firmer decision making, because it’s much harder for everyone to just let an issue go than on email or IM. You’ll find that people are more responsive, more clear in their responses, and that you come away from a meeting with a more complete understanding about how to move forward with your work and the status of others.

Inspiration Comes From Others
It’s easy to get locked inside your own head, especially if you work alone. When I work remotely, I often get stuck thinking about something from a single perspective, but usually a quick conversation with another teammate will let me see a new angle on an issue. Sometimes it takes just a small off-the-cuff remark from someone else to completely change your thinking on a business plan or design. Brainstorming is definitely enhanced through conversational banter. A real-time, face-to-face web connection is essential for real collaboration and brainstorming when you can’t be in the same room as other teammates.

Seriously, Try It
Although I can’t often meet with Wes & Gordon in the same physical location, I do get a lot of the problem solving and brainstorming accomplished when we connect with MeetCast, and I come away from each meeting motivated and ready to work. If you’ve experienced similar benefits, please let us know! We’d love to hear how MeetCast or any other web collaboration tools have enhanced your remote working experience.

Side note - I used to love Face To Face when I was in high school!

I’ve noticed the term “real-time” getting a lot of action lately, both in tech articles and in the way companies market their products. Digg, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed; now even Google is declaring real-time search the “biggest challenge”. You just can’t get away from it.

The phrase is growing in  popularity because real-time is growing in popularity; information consumption on the web has slowly morphed into a continuous stream that, with the proper filters, provides a powerful mechanism for keeping current with our social sphere, trending topics and breaking news. Real-time is important because it enables one to capture a snapshot of hyper-current information about a topic, a market, or an event, which can be an extremely helpful tool when used properly for a business.

Real-Time and Business
Most popular real-time stories today relate to social media, but businesses can also leverage real-time information and collaboration to increase efficiency, especially across remote teams.

One thing that many small companies lack is the capacity to utilize real-time information to inform business decisions, manage resources, or communicate effectively with customers and clients. Customer support, sales, and even executives teams could all benefit from real-time collaboration, and real-time information sharing.

For example, real-time data sharing can shorten the turnaround time on a support issue, and reduce wasted customer/support cycles while issues are being resolved; email-based issue tracking systems seem archaic in comparison to a live feed of statuses, customer questions and engaged team members. Sales teams utilizing real-time software can stay in the loop with account managers, resulting in fewer back-and-forth calls and a consistent message to clients. Collaboration in real-time can reduce the overhead of ‘reply-all’ emails and teams can shift gears more rapidly based on immediate feedback.

Real-time collaboration applications will not only help reduce resource waste while information propagates, but will also encourage disparate team members to function as a cohesive unit and be more efficient. Bridging the gaps between various communication mediums and keeping everyone in a team ‘on the same page’ is essential, and the ability to send and receive information in real-time will become crucial to disparate teams that want to keep pace with modern fast-paced markets.

Making Waves
Yesterday, Google released information about it’s new Wave product, to one heck of a lot of acclaim. Being an actual ocean surfer, my initial impression was actually one of slightly arrogant distaste. Did they have to name it “Wave”? First “surfing” the Web, and now this? And what does the name imply, anyways? That Google…is the internet?

Actually, it appears as though the team has done a wonderful job of compartmentalizing real-time functionality, “anchoring” users with the foundation of communication on the web, and cleverly mixing threaded synchronous and asynchronous conversations. I’m definitely interested to check it out. While not specifically targeted at business, this kind of functionality will hopefully gain traction in the modern workplace soon, as teams realize how powerfully these kinds of interactions can positively affect their day-to-day work life.

As it relates to MeetCast, we’re definitely excited about any platform for increased interactivity and collaboration on the web, especially real-time collaboration. If Wave is as interesting as it looks, we’ll examine how MeetCast extensions to Wave could help increase productivity and encourage real-time collaboration for disparate teams. Only time will tell if Google’s Wave will swell with the real-time tide or crash into the sand, but either way we’re excited that people are beginning to realize the true power of real-time.

When it comes to streaming live video and audio in the browser, Adobe’s Real Time Media Protocol (RTMP) is usually how it’s done. RTMP is a TCP-based (slower but packet transmission is guaranteed) protocol that allows communication between a client and a server. So in a video conferencing application, a user publishes their camera and microphone streams to the server and then the server broadcasts those streams back out to the other connected users. Unfortunately, there are more cons than pros using this method for transmitting live video and audio.

First of all, it’s expensive! The server must manage a total of n^2 incoming and outgoing streams, where n is the number of users in the conference publishing and streaming audio/video. A typical combined video and audio stream rate is between 24kb/s and 48kb/s and Amazon’s EC2 charges about a dime per GB transferred. It really starts to add up.

Secondly, there is usually quite a bit of audio and video delay depending on your location. Let’s say you’re video conferencing with your next door neighbor in Seattle but you’re using a server in New York. Even though you live next door to each other, you’ll notice a significant delay when talking because you have to wait an entire round trip across the United States for an update.

This is where Adobe’s new Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) saves the day. RTMFP is a UDP-based (faster but packet transmission is NOT guaranteed) protocol that enables direct peer to peer communication between Flash clients without having to travel through a server. This solves both of the problems above! The server no longer has to send or receive streams and because clients send audio/video directly to each other, there is minimal delay. In addition, you can send higher quality video and audio to each other because you don’t have to worry about overloading the server. It’s a HUGE win.

You must be wondering, “what’s the catch?” The catch is, you and your conference mates must have Flash 10 installed. Do it! It’s definitely worth it.

We integrated RTMFP into Meetcast last week and it’s such a big difference: Less delay and higher quality audio and video. If you’re still using Flash 9 and don’t want to upgrade, that’s fine because we still support RTMP as a fallback. Flash 10 clients will additionally publish an RTMP stream if there are Flash 9 clients in the conference.

Hopefully you guys will notice a big improvement with RTMFP and please let us know if you have any problems or concerns.

(Images created by Brian Lesser)

When compared to just 20 years ago, communication in the modern office is incredible. Technological advancements have dramatically increased our ability to immediately connect to partners, customers, and teammates. Email, IM, smart phones and the like let you stay in-the-know and work from just about anywhere. And yet, despite these advances, our work schedules often remain firmly rooted in the industrial age, where our output is measured in terms of hours spent at the office, not results.

Businesses are beginning to turn around, however. A rising coalition of telecommuters have been slowly chipping away at the standard 9:00 to 5:00. According to a study by World at Work, the number of people telecommuting at least once a month has risen by 74% since 2005, as a result of better connectivity, economic factors and the increasing acceptance of telecommuting by employers.

There are plenty of benefits to working remotely. For many, the reduction in commute time translates into more time to get things done, both for work and around the house. Stress levels are reduced and less interruptions results in increased productivity.  Working from home even benefits others; there’s one less traveler on the roads, and offices save on energy as well. Imagine if everyone was required to work from home one day a week: one-fifth of the morning traffic would be wiped out instantly!

I’ve had the luxury of telecommuting in some form or another at almost every job I’ve held since college, thanks to a few simple strategies. If you have responsibilities you could accomplish from home, and have wanted to try but don’t know how to take the leap, here’s a few things that got me teleworking over the years:

Negotiate Before You’re Hired
Always try to negotiate telecommuting at least a day a week before you are hired. This is the best way to ensure you’ll get a few days a month with no morning commute. The first step is to ask if the position you’re applying for is open to telecommuting. You might get a “no” or a “we’d prefer if you work from the office”. Don’t stop there! Follow up with something like “I really prefer to spend a day at week at home; is there anything additional I can do to help make this an option?”. Often, the opportunity will present itself with just a little extra effort.

If all else fails, consider suggesting a pay cut in return for the option to telecommute. Crazy as it sounds, you’ll thank yourself in the long run. The quality of life boost you get from telecommuting is much more apparent throughout your daily life than the extra money.

One important point: If you do get hired with an agreement to work at home certain days, try to be sure that there is some language in your final offer that details this agreement.

If you didn’t negotiate when you were getting hired, you have to do it the hard way - convincing your boss that the change is a worthwhile one!

Start a Trial
Changing your work schedule can be a tough thing to approach. Pick a time after you’ve been extra productive, such as when you’ve finished a big project or document, to soften the negotiations a bit.

Tell your boss that you’d like to propose a trial period, working one day a week at home for a month. Explain the reasons you’d prefer to telecommute, and make them legitimate ones, like working extra instead of commuting, or getting time alone to finish something without distractions (not because you want to take conference calls in your PJs). Explain how you plan to stay in touch and work efficiently. Suggest that you’ll send a status update email at lunch and at the end of the day each time you’re telecommuting. Follow these points up with a bit of reassurance: “Let’s try it out and reevaluate in two weeks. If you aren’t satisfied, we can stop then.”

If nobody in your office telecommutes, you’ll probably hear something like: “well, nobody else works from home, if I let you then I have to start letting all of them.” Be cool. The proper way to respond is to relieve your boss of the pressure; Explain that you’ll inform everyone that you’ll start working at home for personal reasons, and that you’ll be careful to not flaunt the privilege to other workers.

Be Available!
Trial period or not, when you work from home you need to be on your game. Your response time and productivity should be top notch. Make sure each email or IM is clear; miscommunications can be used as ammo against you.  Be proactive about responding to all emails that require your attention, even after work hours.  Your performance at home will determine your ability to continue telecommuting!

Finalize It
Assuming all goes well for a few weeks, you’ll be ready to ask for the indefinite extension. Schedule a time to sit down with the boss and lay out the facts; you were (hopefully) productive and communicative while at home, you accomplished as much as you would in the office, and you feel more satisfied with your work, your life, and the balance between the two.

With any luck you’ll find that you’ve joined the work-at-home workforce. You’ll be enjoying days with no commute, less office distractions, and you might even be surprised to find that you get more work done too!

Oh, and feel free to use MeetCast when you telecommute. We want to make working with your team while you’re remote feel like you’re working with them in the same conference room. If it doesn’t, tell us why!

More info (or, negotiation ammo) - http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/

At MeetCast, we try to build software that helps make working together from afar simple and effective. Working and collaborating in disparate teams remains a challenging and often frustrating experience. We should know: MeetCast is based out of Seattle, but I live in Santa Cruz, California, which is about 800 miles south as the crow flies. As such, I work remotely just about 100% of the time. In fact, I’ve never worked a full day in person with the rest of the team!

Living so far apart definitely runs contradictory to the standard startup practice; most would advocate living and working together day and night. However, in our case, the distance provides us with a unique opportunity: we’re forced to utilize our product on a daily basis to get things accomplished. Since working remotely is our only option, we use MeetCast to work on, well, MeetCast!

Using your product internally is commonly referred to as ‘eating your own dogfood’, and companies use it to vet out new features, discover bugs, and to test products from the perspective of an end user. To not do so is potentially disastrous; I’ve worked at places where the product we were building was not intended for anyone in the company, and we often found ourselves re-implementing features to fit requirements we had never even considered. Who eats their own dogfood? Google and Microsoft, for starters, so you can be sure there’s some merit to it!

So how do we do it at MeetCast? Each morning we start a live conference to go over our goals for the day, discuss bugs and issues, and to make sure everyone is on the same page. Having a few minutes of face time in a conference is a good way to keep us connected and focused, but more importantly, it forces us to experience MeetCast as a user would. Regularly using our product makes the least developed areas of functionality glaringly obvious, since each time we meet we’re forced to work around things that are still missing. New features are also prioritized quickly; the features we find that we need the most are implemented first.

So far, we’ve found and fixed a lot of issues thanks to this technique. A few good updates:

• We’ve fixed an audio glitched that was severely hampering our conversation flow
• We added sound level controls to help reduce the annoying echo we kept hearing when someone didn’t have headphones
• We created a module that allows for shared note-taking and code editing, so that we could keep a running to do list while meeting or work on coding together.

Of course, it helps that our product is built for collaboration. MeetCast helped us quickly tackle issues as we came across them. We’d discuss an issue or potential feature in real-time, share photos of bugs or designs, and keep a running to-do list that everyone could edit, all within the same conference.

We would never have discovered what our product lacked had we not spent so much time using it. The end result is that our product is better, and we’re having quicker and more productive remote meetings. I would encourage anyone rapidly iterating on a product to spend as much time as possible using the product in real-world usage scenarios. The strategy seems to be paying off for us, and with a bit of luck we’ll be turning our dogfood into a fine steak dinner soon enough!

Flash-based audio conferencing solutions have always had that annoying echo you sometimes hear after talking through your microphone. You’ll notice the echo when the person you’re talking to is using speakers. Your voice (coming from their speakers) is picked up by their microphone and is then sent back to you. Flash has an “Echo Suppression” setting you can toggle on (right-click on a flash app and go to settings) but it doesn’t help much as it merely reduces microphone gain. There is a feature request for Acoustic Echo Cancellation in Flash 10, but no word yet of whether it’s approved or not.

In the current version of Flash, you have a couple of options to get rid of echo. First, you can make sure everyone in the conference with an active microphone is using headphones. It seems like most sites rely on this method by displaying a “We recommend wearing headphones” message, like Tokbox. Second, you can have a push-to-talk feature where the user has to press a button to say something. This reduces the chance of their microphone being on while sound is coming out of their speakers.

We dislike both of these solutions because they add complications for the user. Instead, we decided to let the user modify their own “silence level” which is basically the amount of sound required to activate their microphone. When the active sound level is greater than the silence level, the microphone begins transmitting the sound until the sound level is below the silence level for more than two seconds. The goal is to set the silence level just high enough so the sound coming out of the speakers won’t trigger the microphone to begin sending.

The tricky part in implementing this feature is how to make it easy and intuitive enough for the user in the UI (which is usually the case with most of our features). We chose to add another thumb to the microphone volume slider on the right hand side of your webcam display which you can use to modify the silence level. When your microphone is not transmitting (the microphone meter is below the silence level thumb) you’ll notice there is a red bar below the silence level thumb. However, when the microphone meter reaches above the silence level thumb, the red bar disappears and the microphone begins transmitting.

Hopefully this feature will help reduce echo with people using speakers in Meetcast conferences. Also, cross your fingers for Acoustic Echo Cancellation in Flash 10! If you have any other solutions for reducing echo in conferences, we’d love to hear!

We recently changed our microphone sampling rate from 8 kHz to 22 kHz. To give you some context, the telephone uses an 8 kHz sampling rate so we now sound much better than a phone call. I wish we would have done this earlier because it makes a HUGE difference! Everything sounds so crisp and satisfying. It’s like upgrading from a one-channel integrated laptop speaker to a Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1 system (An awesome speaker system BTW, totally worth it). 

Also, we significantly lowered our video bandwidth without really affecting image quality. This means we can handle many more participants than we could before. Additionally, conferences now feel more responsive and there is minimal loading time when you join an existing conference. 

I’m going to take another pass on the participant module and put in few more features such as a microphone volume control on the left. I might add the abililty to manually change the video and audio qualities as well. 

We’ll have some other big news for you hopefully tomorrow. So stay posted!

We just launched our new blog today and I’m really happy with it! Thanks to Al Whiting for putting in the hours to get it done. BTW, if you don’t know Al but you’re a Counter-Strike fan, you’ve probably played his map “Scoutz and Knivez.” It’s a classic!

So with the launch of our new blog, we’re going to be posting on a regular basis and keep you updated with Meetcast. There is a ton to write about as we’ve been very busy.