Video Chatting – Do You Do ooVoo?

Two weeks ago over on my personal blog I talked about taking part in My ooVoo Day, an event taking place in the new video chat platform ooVoo in which participants could sign up and talk to their favourite new media specialists. I took part in a talk with Joseph Jaffe of Crayon and Jaffe Juice fame.

Last week I participated in a workshop via ooVoo with Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting in Boston in which she taught us how to improve our presentations. I was doubtful how much I could get out of a one-hour session in video, but was very pleasantly surprised. Laura had each of the five participants run through parts of our existing presentations and gave us constructive comments. My full write-up of the experience is also on my blog.

Okay, so big deal. Video chat. We’re used to video with YouTube. Some of us use video chat using Skype. But what is truly outstanding about ooVoo is the ability for 6 people to chat together at the same time in video. It is not until I was connecting with people from Boston, Nashville, Vancouver, Brazil and Finland that I realized just how strong the power of this tool is.

Screenshot: by Andrea Vascellari

This weekend I was involved in organizing the social media “unconference” Podcamp Toronto. After Eden Spodek and I participated in the My ooVoo Day event, ooVoo signed on as one of the Podcamp sponsors (coincidence?). Yesterday we ran a fun ooVoo session at the end of the day bringing in social media experts who were not at the conference talk about personal branding. Mitch Joel participated via audio from Montreal, Laura Fitton was on the road somewhere in Michigan and stopped at a coffee shop hotspot to participate, Mitch “StudioNashVegas” Canter signed in from Nashville, and Andrea Vascellari participated from Finland. Jay Moonah, one of our Podcamp Toronto organizers, moderated the session. We projected the session on the big screen in a room of about 50 Podcamp participants. Our Internet connection wasn’t ideal but it gave people the idea of how it works. And this morning I had about 8 new people signed up sending me their contact information.

It is free to sign up for and use ooVoo. Software does need to be downloaded and installed. PC users can download it from the main website. The mac client is still in development but an early version can be downloaded from the My ooVoo Day page. Once you go through the installation process, it will have you create an ID and password. You will need a video camera, microphone and headphones to participate (I use a macbook with built in camera and headphones with a microphone). Also some fairly good bandwidth for it to work well.

If you want to see it in action before signing up, have a look of this recording Mitch Canter made of this first session I participated in. If you give it a try I’d love to hear from you.