How to set up a portable, inexpensive conference room ?
At Uzanto, we work as a small but highly integrated product development team. This team comprises members across two continents (in New Delhi & Silicon Valley) that work in close collaboration across diametrically opposite time zones. The nature of this collaboration is such that we need affordable, uninterrupted and reliable means of voice & text conversations, the ability to quickly transfer bulky multimedia files, share computer screens and remotely control each others computers, give online demos, do fast design iterations with multimedia elements like images, animations, sound etc.
We could really do with a fully equipped conference room, all with overhead projection systems, video conferencing, wireless microphones, panaboards et al. But a bootstrapping startup like ours can ill-afford such luxuries at this stage and so, we have to make do with what contemporary internet based collaboration technologies have to offer. However, experience backed up by a never ending quest for experimenting with cutting edge technologies has taught us, that it is possible to replicate all the functionalities of a conference room using a combination of relatively inexpensive and easily available hardware and software products. In fact, some of the technological acrobatics that is possible with these products would probably make the best of modern conferencing systems seem boring & obsolete. So here’s my recipe for what all you need to set up a portable, inexpensive conference room, that should allow you to work seamlessly with remote team members.
A ‘Multimedia heavy’ Laptop – The most essential component of this ‘recipe’ is a good, fast laptop- it makes sense to have one that has a robust sound card apart from having built in speakers and microphone; make sure to pump up the RAM to at least 512MB (higher RAM helps in multitasking in Windows). I have a IBM R40e, a Celeron machine with 512 MB Ram & running Windows XP and it works absolutely fine for remote collaboration. Its only unsuitability for this role is its sound control, which even at its peak volume, is not loud enough.
Web meeting Software- We use Citrix GoToMeeting because it scores very high on reliability and usability. It loads up quickly and is quite fast over our DSL speed (512 kbps with a contention ratio of 1:4). We have tested it for latency with zippy Flash animations at different (high) frame rates (12, 24 fps) and it performs very creditably. ( for advanced users- you could try fine tuning the graphics acceleration parameters of your computer to further stifle out the latencies). At 40$ a month, GTM is a trifle more expensive than the better-known WebEx but we have tried out WebEx as well and we prefer GTM. You could also try out free screen sharing softwares line VNC, NetMeeting etc; we have tried those out and decided that we needed better reliability and performance than what the free ones can offer. GTM requires an initial download into your computer (every webmeeting software does that). With GTM, you can easily set up remote screen sharing; you can also transfer controls of your keyboard and mouse to a remote computer with very fast changeover times. GTM also has whiteboarding, text annotations and an online chat (though we don’t use that). We use GTM regularly for internal team demos and presentations; we have occasionally used it for clients meetings as well as for remote user testing of our software.
BaseCamp- For collaborating on projects, we use BaseCamp. This is obviously not a conferencing thing but while on this subject, it is worthwhile to mention the utility of this software collaboration tool. Basecamp affords efficient, fast and uncomplicated project collaboration for remote teams. We use it both for internal collaboration as well as for external client projects. Our current plan allows a maximum of 15 concurrent projects and costs 24$ a month.
Voice- We are diehard SKYPE junkies; in fact, we must be one of the very early stage adopters of Skype (we have been using it regularly since August 2004). We have tried out numerous other VOIP options (like GoogleTalk, YahooVoiceChat, VOIPbuster etc) but none of these gives a comparable voice quality. Skype is good for internal (or informal) conversations. For talking to clients, we haven’t found it reliable enough, so we don’t risk that. We also use SkypeOut to call phones in the US from our Delhi office. One drawback with Skype is that while they are frequently releasing newer versions with added functionalities, (in our opinion) the voice quality in some of the previous versions was superior to what it is currently.
IM– Yahoo IM is the best; we use it for text conversations; we don’t use Skype for text because Skype’s text transfer latencies are far greater than Yahoo. Yahoo has other advantages as well- an excellent whiteboarding feature and a fast, reliable file transfer facility (much faster that Skype).
VOIP conference phone– This would be useful in a multimember remote team meeting. I am currently hunting for a good, reliable, not too-expensive VOIP instrument. I haven’t had much luck on this as yet; some models are available but they require additional networking hardware besides being expensive. Currently we use simple headphones and the laptop’s inbuilt speakers. I would recommend the use of lightweight headphones because one should be able to put on/take it off in a jiffy; we have earlier tried out the fancy (and bulky) stereo headphones but soon discarded them. For, surely you don’t need 4 track sound with bass controls for talking to your colleagues.
Digital Camera We use a digital camera to take a snapshot of the writing board that quickly gets filled up with scribbled text after a design brainstorming session. The snapshot is a permanent record of the board and it is loaded onto a shared directory on the LAN for reference. Meanwhile, one can rub off the board’s content and proceed with the scribbling. Thus, a digital camera-whiteboard combo does exactly what a state of the art Panasonic panaboard would otherwise do.
Webcam– We have a webcam but we’ve never used it; frankly, we haven’t felt the need for it. A combination of voice, text and web-meeting options actually obviates the need for video. Also the broadcast quality achieved through the use of webcams over our current DSL bandwidth is not good enough (though if you must, try out Skype video- it is far superior to Yahoo IM webcam).
19 comments
Excellent article. Looking forward to more such posts. BTW Have you checked out Scanr?
Nice article, innovative “jugad” technology!
Will help a lot of Indian startups, esp the ones who are working on shoestring budget and dont want to spend needlessly on luxuries.
I was about to mention ScanR. Saw it yesterday and seemed like the answer to our prayers. Even we are doing a lot of whiteboards-to-online converstions.
And the ability to turn whiteboard scribbles into searchable text and vector lines seemed like a dream.
So I send a high res whiteboard shot to ScanR and it sent me back a pdf with that image embedded in it X-(
No OCR, no search nothing……
I’d love to hear more feedback on basecamp though…. how’s it working out. I just love that app.
Thanks for pointing out ScanR; hadn’t heard of this before this, will surely try it out as well.
BaseCamp is a super-cool product. It is probably the 1000th project management software in the market but has kind of revolutionised the way remote project management works.
Its beauty lies in its barebones design of the project management process, immortalised in its creators philosophy of building less & less (KISS)….so it just has the basic features and no further bells/whistles.
We have used it quite extensively within our own team as well as clients. In fact, we had outsourced one of our own webdesign works to a design studio located in a different corner of the globe; (those guys could barely speak english). We used Basecamp in that and it worked out perfectly …no glitches at all.
Another advantage of basecamp (which you might not readily realise) is that with external clients, it makes you look very professional and efficient.
Amit - I agree with you on most things.
Skype + ym IM
I think you should also try ‘mobile photo blogging’ + flickr (shozu seems good) coupled with scanR might do the trick.
What do you do about the visual part? does just webcam suffice?
Hi Amit
Nive article man. We are also using lot of tools suggested by you for conversation or meeting with our office in USA like skype, basecamp, yahoo IM.
The idea of camera men seems interesting to me which i have not used till now. but i am sure i will make use of tips provided by you.
There is one more imp thing which can reduce our cost - using online fax. this service is provided by lot of service providers free of cost or at minimal price
Vishesh,
Which online fax do you use…let me know
Actually we do have a fax machine at office but we never use it…because its so cumbersome ..also we find that faxes are getting replaced by a combination of scan+email….so I try avoiding to fax whenever its possible…
Most of my business contacts don’t use fax much except my chartered accuntant; he is an elderly gentleman and still caught up in the fax era; he has an email account which he probably checks (or gets somebody else to check for him ) once in two weeks.
Amit: This is a valuable post. We have used almost all the same tools though we moved to Skype for text messages as well almost since they launched.
For fax, you may want to try efax. Its easy to just efax hardcopy HTML sketches than to scan and email, provided you have a fax machine handy. Basic efax account is free.
Have you found a good tool for collaborative to-do’s that are not part of the project to be in Basecamp? We have tried BackPack but its tough to stick to it when you are used to a super efficient system of notepad for tracking to dos.
Vaibhav,
I’m surprised that you can manage to use Skype for text msgs…we have found Skype’s text transfer latencies quite unreliable..we always have thought so…or maybe we are doing something wrong..it will be good to learn more from you about it.
amit
Hi Amit,
Could you suggest some good web hosting companies?
Thanks n regards,
bhupi
Bhupi,
Are you looking for companies in India or abroad..we actually haven’t tried out comoanies in India..I can tell you about US based hosts..
amit
Hi Amit,
Thanks for a fast reply. Please tell me about US based hosts…
Best regards,
bhupi
Bhupi,
For the low end, check out Serverbeach.com and Serverpath.com. They are priced ok and the overall deal is good for that price. Reliability is > 95% but in case of emergencies, their response times can be frustrating.
For the high end, check out Rackspace.com. They are quite expensive but provide excellent support; In fact they call their support by the name “Fanatical Support”; excellent uptimes, excellent response in case of emergencies. The catch is that it is 3-4 times as expensive as the others.
amit
[…] amit ranjan ” How to set up a portable, inexpensive conference room ? … all you need to set up a portable, inexpensive conference room, that should … We also use SkypeOut to call phones in the US from our Delhi office. … […]
[…] Credits: Tools for Bootstrappers - Anjana Vivek Setting up a Low-cost conference Room - Amit Ranjan […]
[…] Credits: Tools for Bootstrappers - Anjana Vivek Setting up a Low-cost conference Room - Amit Ranjan […]
What about Internet? Which broadband are you using?
Excellent write-up. It would definitely be of help to small companies having teams in different parts of the world.
I’m planning to conduct training programs in Mumbai and other cities in India. Are you aware of any inexpensive training rooms/seminar rooms available for rent on short term basis. Thanks in advance.
[…] on my personal blog- here’s a post about how to tackle red-tape in the ROC office, here’s another one about putting together a simple, low cost conference room for your resource constrained […]
Leave a Comment