June 30, 2005
Marratech Free - Flashback
Hi,
I would just like to write a blog entry on the reasoning behind Marratech Free, since it is of great importance for us.
1. Product accessibility
There are a few things in the web conferencing industry that I feel needs to change. What better way than to change yourself first?
There is a clash between internet culture and web conferencing providers.
Internet savvy users want to try software without contacting a sales agent first. This is true of people at home, IT departments doing evaluations and university users.
Web Conferencing tools are often sold as complex solutions and in a way that is reminiscent of video conferencing systems. High prices, complex setup (ISDN for breakfast anyone), etc...
I believe that the future lies in quick, small and nimble systems. Free is our first step towards making it simpler to use and test, more changes at Marratech are to come.
With Marratech Free, we want people to be able to try our solution out and use it without having to have to go through aggressive sales tactics.
If you try Marratech Free and you like it, great! If you like Marratech Free, but would like encryption, SIP / H.323 bridging, Multicast and all the functionality, contact us! Our resellers include very devoted and talented people that will help you in that step.
2. Competition
There are many free solutions out there. Some of these are "alternative" solutions as they do not come from traditional web conf / video conf providers.
iChat, Skype (both with up to five for video and audio) MSN Messenger, etc... These tools are all seeing wider and wider acceptance, and are slowly moving into the corporate space.
While each of these tools have clear usage scanerios and benefits, we believe that our Marratech Free will fit into many new, unthought of usage scenarios that will open doors to widespread usage.
Instead of letting those competitors creep up on us some more, we decide to not hide our product behind complex sales processes and push it as a great alternative. Cut the chat :-)
3. Product comparisons
During purchase decisions and when analysts do a table comparison that includes our software I always get the nagging feeling that the truth is not coming through.
For instance, there may be a check box for VOIP... but does it really work? Does it have higher than telephone quality? Does it have very low delays in the audio? We have tested a well known solution just last week (Brrrrrr....) and after a 20 minute meeting I had over 5 seconds of delay in our conversation. ( I have a dedicated 100 mbps internet connection BTW)
Another example is multi platform support. Some compared solutions may say they have multi platform support, when the truth is that only a subset of the functionality is available.
Marratech Free will enable people that are doing these evaluations to do much more indepth comparisons, instead of looking at pages full of check marks that may hide the truth.
I do note dare say our solution is perfect (it isn't, and if you want something fixed or improved, tell us!) and I hope this does not come off as arrogant... but these grids have been somewhat frustrating.
4. Quality Assurance
This one is kind of easy to explain. The more users we have, the more feedback we get, the higher the product quality we can achieve.
5. Marketing
This is probably the most important one. Marratech is not a known name. Throwing huge amounts of money in marketing is not possible for our company. We do not have the time to grow this by word of mouth, as the market is moving fast. By using the internet as our platform, and using Marratech Free as a tool for this, we hope to reach more people than ever before.
Well, I hope these ramblings explain a little bit more the thinking behind our Marratech Free initiative.
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 02:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
External Code - Thanks!!!
Hi from Norway, yes I am in Trondheim today but still online (as always). For those that doesn't know I live in Luleå in northern Sweden.
I wanted today to thank the open-source team that has made it possible for Marratech to include SIP functionality into Marratech. First of all the main part, JAIN-SIP from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST and then we use a few files from the SIP-COMMUNICATOR project headed Emil Ivov of the Network Research Team, Louis Pasteur University.
The full licence information for these are included with every Marratech Manager installation in the .../copyright/ directory.
JAIN-SIP is released under an "AS IS", in the public domain and SIP-COMMUNICATOR is released under the Apache Software License the following copyright statement:
Copyright (c) 2000 The Apache Software Foundation. All rights reserved.In future releases we will make this information even more accessible and visible in the product interface.
I also have to mention that we by mistake included the SIP code in the Marratech 5.1 client as well, but it is not actually used in the client at all. It will of course be removed in the next release. In our Marratech MeetNow 5.1 client this is not the case.
Thanks all of you involved in these projects!
Take care from a warm Trondheim!
Posted by peter at 01:51 PM | Comments (1)
June 28, 2005
A vision: Tovah, the always present expert
Just wanted to share a small vision about the future usage of e-meetings with you.
Tovah, the always present expertWhat do think? Is this something you would feel was beneficial in the future?Tovah is working on the nano-satellite project where she has a very specific expertise regarding the propulsion system, her expertise also means that she is working as an advisor on other projects and due to that she has to be always available. Tovah also has a great interested in what is happening in the various projects she is involved in. Tovah further feels that she wants to be very close to her work colleagues to get a feeling of presence.
Tovah works from several places, from her desk at her main office, loaned offices at the other projects, from home and while on the move (both on business trips but also when she is moving within the same city, between offices and to ad from her home).
Tovah is using the Marratech Ubiquitous Human Communication, UHC system to be in touch with his various groups. When Tovah is on the move, she will get information pushed to her mobile device. This information can be anything related to the projects she is working on, including presence information of her colleagues with live video sent from each participant.
The Marratech UHC includes general positioning and context awareness so when Tovah reaches her main office her desktop computer will automatically start displaying the same information she saw on her mobile device and start sending video to show her presence to her colleagues.
Anton needs to get in contact with Tovah to ask her a couple of questions and he simply sends her a private chat message asking if Tovah is available for a voice communication. First they exchange a few messages about what this is related to and Tovah agrees to the voice conversation and uses her desktop for the audio communication, but after a while she realizes that this is going to take some time and she has to drive her daughter to soccer practice. Tovah now transfers the conversation to her mobile device and continues the communication with Henrik actually not noticing any difference in the audio. In the car, Tovah's car mounted camera will start sending a video stream of her to Anton automatically when Tovah seats himself behind the wheel. The car mounted display will show the documents and drawings Anton showed Tovah earlier during the conversation and the audio will once again be moved to the audio system mounted in the car.
Using the Marratech Ubiquitous Human Communication, UHC for rich communication it allows Tovah to be instantaneously available independently of where she is located at the moment and it will make her mobile allowing her to work from anywhere she wants and by that give her a higher life quality.
Posted by peter at 01:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 27, 2005
Marratech Free
The cat is out of the box! Marratech is going free! Yes you heard right! You can now have Marratech e-meetings for free!
Robin Good over at Kolabra.com has written a very good article about the new Marratech Freeware and of course you can read all about it on our new www.marratechfree.com site.
The catch is of course that you cannot get everything for free so you only get basic functionality. But hey, that is a HUGE step forward for the collaboration market.
Depending on which type of Manager you connect to, you will get different functionality, but it is still the same client so you do not have to install anything new just because you are jumping between various Managers.
Download it now and tell us what you think!!
Yipes, there is so much fun happening around Marratech right now, Marratech Free, Marratech Time-To-Meet via http://us.ttm.marratech.com/, Marratech Manager 3.1, Marratech 5.1 and so many other fun things I cannot tell you about hiding in the shadows. And I am so bad at keeping secrets.... How will this end?
Posted by peter at 09:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 26, 2005
Meeting on the porch
I just finished an e-meeting on the porch with a friend in Israel and now I am watching the sunset. The wonderful Marratech technology allows me (and you) to work basically from where ever we want and it also makes it much easier to work when ever we want. If I want to meet with somebody for a quick check about some issue then I do not have to go into the office, but rather do it from my home. Of course, now you think I could use the phone instead but that is not the same thing. Usually when meeting with colleagues, you want to share some information with them, such as documents and display something. That I cannot do over the phone.
Another thing that always amazes me is commuting. Why spend time commuting when you can start working later from home instead and still be early for work? I do that most days of the week and I enjoy it very much.
Do you have a story about e-meeting use you want to share with others via this blog? If you do, Email me! Peter.Parnes@marratech.comBy the way, it is my birthday today! :)
Posted by peter at 09:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 24, 2005
Mid Summer and Marratech 5.1 preview
God Morning!
Today is actually a holiday in Sweden, "midsommar" in Swedish meaning mid summer. Big party for everybody with very long traditions. And here I am working....
Anyhow, I promised you gossip and here is where you will get it first. We will soon release Marratech 5.1, but as a reward for those reading this blog you can try it out for yourself via MeetNow on one of our public Managers, http://us.emeetingportal.com/ and http://emeetingportal.com/.
I will not provide an official list of new features in 5.1 but there are some nice ones such as the ability to choose language of the interface in Marratech!
Take care in the sun!
Posted by peter at 09:42 AM | Comments (2)
June 23, 2005
Serge's first post
Not to be outdone by Peter, here is my first post. He snuck in his before mine :-)
The idea of blog felt like an answer in how to differentiate our company by communicating directly, without hiding behind the vail of white papers, press releases and user manuals.
I think the catalyst making this possible quickly is the discussions I had with Robin from http://www.kolabora.com/ After reading about some of his frustrations with corporate PR from companies in our industry, it all became clear to me. I thought to myself: We are a small company, let's do things in a way the big elefants can't!
The first proof of this is our user forum, on http://www.marratech.com/ With around 2500 articles, and titles showing up on our home page, we are showing that we mean business. We have users and resellers out there using our software in very important scenarios, dedicated enough to share experiences and help each other out. This was the result of another small hint by Luigi, which has resulted in much more forum participation.
It is not always fun to have tough headlines showing up automatically on our home page, some saying: "It does not work", or "I missed a meeting". But guests that look in our forum closely will see a dedicated staff that has solved most problems in a very timely fashion. I believe this inspires confidence in our team.
Marratech is in an exciting position. With this blog, I hope to be able to take up subjects like why voice-over-TCP is just not adapted to real time collaboration (versus UDP), design decisions and pin point the things that are just impossible to convey in evaluation grids when looking at the market.
I will also try to talk a little bit about the challenges in developing computer based communication tools, like our favorite pastimes of upgrading drivers and configuring pesky firewalls that were designed on mars.
So, join us for the ride, after 7 years, I can truly say it is only beginning!
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2005
Marratech Blog
Hi and welcome to the Marratech blog! Here we will share Marratech related information with you in a more relaxed manner than on our main website, www.marratech.com. Hopefully we might give you some interesting gossip about new functionality to come.
Just to have something to say today I can mention that we released a new press release yesterday, "Marratech Brings Real-Time Collaboration to United States Business and Education Users".
On another note, I can mention that we have been working on an EU-project proposal with about 15 partners all over Europe and Israel. We have our first physical writing meeting in Trondheim next week and up to now we have had 3 formal online meetings and a number of informal online meetings. Most people have joined with Marratech MeetNow and some have joined via phone via our SIP-phone gateway functionality. We had the third meeting today and it worked verywell! Of course not all have learned to use all the features of the Marratech client. I should say that we are doing this together with the Media Technology research group at Luleå University of Technology.
The future looks so bright I have to wear shades! Take care!
Posted by peter at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)