ViVu is a Name You Should be Hearing a Lot in 2010—What is a Participative Event Platform Anyway?
ViVu.tv is a new company that may become a regular OEM partner to many virtual event platforms as well as a standalone “Participative Event Platform.” Virtual Edge spoke with Sudha Valluru, founder and CEO of Vivu and a veteran of Cisco Systems. ViVu has developed a platform that enables live video participation from a PC, Mac or Linux machine without any downloads and seamlessly integrates with most of the popular streaming video and conference solutions.
The platform allows a presenter to be featured in a video box (which can be increased to full screen by the viewer) while they are displaying and pushing slides (again which can be increased to full screen by the viewer) and watching for questions by the audience—all from a simple and clean dashboard. The attendee can use the system to ask a question via their own video camera (webcam) or they can use an onscreen IM interface or twitter feed.
See ViVu at the Virtual Edge Summit February 22-23 in Santa Clara or on your computer. Register FREE at http://www.virtualedgesummit.com.
The unique auditorium view provides an efficient and productive interface for a virtual classroom feel, allowing the presenter(s) as well as the other attendees to see who else is attending the event and break off into private or group video chats creating a Participative Event. IMASTE, a Spanish virtual event platform company, was present at the meeting and immediately saw the potential for the platform in their Virtual Job Fair solution that they are running for Monster.com amongst others. “I can see how a company would be excited about the ability to break into a private video chat with a potential job candidate. That could potentially speed up the process and add efficiency,” said Miguel Arias Director of IMASTE.
Other virtual event platform companies are also excited about the opportunity to integrate ViVu into their systems. “We can offer high quality video to hundreds or thousands of concurrent users at very competitive rates because we have built out our own network and therefore have been able to optimize it for video with very low bandwidth requirements,” noted Valluru.
This new availability of high quality video at low prices and very low bandwidth requirements for attendees allows ViVu to serve markets that are often precluded from video because they don’t have bandwidth available. “Large multi-nationals like that capability because now they can broadcast to all of their employees no matter what part of the globe they are in,” said Valluru.
From a price and turnaround standpoint, another capability of the system that makes it appealing to virtual event and virtual meeting producers is the instant playback feature. As soon as your event is over, you can make it available to view on demand. This eliminates the initial step of post production; a savings of time and money. The automatically archived file can then be put into further post processing if the customer wishes to edit it or modify it for other purposes. “You can clean it up, do the post-production editing but we’ve found that half the people say, no, leave those ums and mistakes in because it just makes it more realistic,” noted Valluru. “100% of the videos that we have online right now are as-recorded. But, there are some training materials for example where customers might want replace their video because the material changed or they want a more professional recording for an ad maybe.”
What is exciting about the technology from an event producer’s standpoint is that the system can be integrated in to a virtual event platform and because you can do desktop sharing for example, a salesperson in a virtual booth can now do a demo. They can also break out into private video chats and get face-to-face with prospects or entire buying or engineering teams.
Other applications include augmenting or replacing a networking lounge with a video chat lounge or having your presenters doing a live presentation with the ability to do desktop sharing. You can also organize special interest group meetings (BOFs) but the best application might be using the system as your hybrid event streaming platform. You don’t need any special encoders or equipment; a commodity webcam, computer with internet connection and a microphone or connection from a sound board and you are ready to turn your event into a hybrid.
There is a one second delay in the video but that can be increased in order to monitor and edit content if necessary--like a seven second delay you get with TV. Valluru noted, “There are many other elements that can be customized. It’s all templated; the look and feel, the sizing of it, positioning of it, colors, skins, logos--all of it can be customized.”
When ViVu is integrated into another platform, the user information is passed to ViVu so that the activity can be tracked and reported back to the host platform system. “We don’t get the actual users information or even know who the users are,” said Valluru. “The data we get are just labels for us. They pass the parameters, the credentials, the authentication of the individual and we send back the tracking info and we don’t even maintain it in a database on our system.”
One final feature that is really quite impressive is the ability to view a recorded event and click to a particular slide or time point and see everything synced up. The video, audio, IM chats, twitter feeds, etc. are all synched to that point.
To date, ViVu’s largest event had some 10,000 attendees attending virtually from 80 different countries. The event was a hybrid and portions of that event can be seen on the ViVu archive website.
“Give us a chance, we’ll do bigger. We’re looking for more big ones,” said Valluru. “With our cloud architecture, there is in this magic of the elastic cloud. So smaller events are good too.”
The platform allows a presenter to be featured in a video box (which can be increased to full screen by the viewer) while they are displaying and pushing slides (again which can be increased to full screen by the viewer) and watching for questions by the audience—all from a simple and clean dashboard. The attendee can use the system to ask a question via their own video camera (webcam) or they can use an onscreen IM interface or twitter feed.
See ViVu at the Virtual Edge Summit February 22-23 in Santa Clara or on your computer. Register FREE at http://www.virtualedgesummit.com.
The unique auditorium view provides an efficient and productive interface for a virtual classroom feel, allowing the presenter(s) as well as the other attendees to see who else is attending the event and break off into private or group video chats creating a Participative Event. IMASTE, a Spanish virtual event platform company, was present at the meeting and immediately saw the potential for the platform in their Virtual Job Fair solution that they are running for Monster.com amongst others. “I can see how a company would be excited about the ability to break into a private video chat with a potential job candidate. That could potentially speed up the process and add efficiency,” said Miguel Arias Director of IMASTE.
Other virtual event platform companies are also excited about the opportunity to integrate ViVu into their systems. “We can offer high quality video to hundreds or thousands of concurrent users at very competitive rates because we have built out our own network and therefore have been able to optimize it for video with very low bandwidth requirements,” noted Valluru.
This new availability of high quality video at low prices and very low bandwidth requirements for attendees allows ViVu to serve markets that are often precluded from video because they don’t have bandwidth available. “Large multi-nationals like that capability because now they can broadcast to all of their employees no matter what part of the globe they are in,” said Valluru.
From a price and turnaround standpoint, another capability of the system that makes it appealing to virtual event and virtual meeting producers is the instant playback feature. As soon as your event is over, you can make it available to view on demand. This eliminates the initial step of post production; a savings of time and money. The automatically archived file can then be put into further post processing if the customer wishes to edit it or modify it for other purposes. “You can clean it up, do the post-production editing but we’ve found that half the people say, no, leave those ums and mistakes in because it just makes it more realistic,” noted Valluru. “100% of the videos that we have online right now are as-recorded. But, there are some training materials for example where customers might want replace their video because the material changed or they want a more professional recording for an ad maybe.”
What is exciting about the technology from an event producer’s standpoint is that the system can be integrated in to a virtual event platform and because you can do desktop sharing for example, a salesperson in a virtual booth can now do a demo. They can also break out into private video chats and get face-to-face with prospects or entire buying or engineering teams.
Other applications include augmenting or replacing a networking lounge with a video chat lounge or having your presenters doing a live presentation with the ability to do desktop sharing. You can also organize special interest group meetings (BOFs) but the best application might be using the system as your hybrid event streaming platform. You don’t need any special encoders or equipment; a commodity webcam, computer with internet connection and a microphone or connection from a sound board and you are ready to turn your event into a hybrid.
There is a one second delay in the video but that can be increased in order to monitor and edit content if necessary--like a seven second delay you get with TV. Valluru noted, “There are many other elements that can be customized. It’s all templated; the look and feel, the sizing of it, positioning of it, colors, skins, logos--all of it can be customized.”
When ViVu is integrated into another platform, the user information is passed to ViVu so that the activity can be tracked and reported back to the host platform system. “We don’t get the actual users information or even know who the users are,” said Valluru. “The data we get are just labels for us. They pass the parameters, the credentials, the authentication of the individual and we send back the tracking info and we don’t even maintain it in a database on our system.”
One final feature that is really quite impressive is the ability to view a recorded event and click to a particular slide or time point and see everything synced up. The video, audio, IM chats, twitter feeds, etc. are all synched to that point.
To date, ViVu’s largest event had some 10,000 attendees attending virtually from 80 different countries. The event was a hybrid and portions of that event can be seen on the ViVu archive website.
“Give us a chance, we’ll do bigger. We’re looking for more big ones,” said Valluru. “With our cloud architecture, there is in this magic of the elastic cloud. So smaller events are good too.”
Tags: Participative Event Platform, Sudha Valluru, vivu.tv
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