Legal Marketing & PR

slideshare Announces Zipcast -- Free Live Web Meetings

By Larry Bodine

Have you ever wished you could jump into an online meeting from anywhere? Or start meetings instantly? Now you can. No need to download software or wait five minutes for a meeting to start. Open your browser and with one click you're in a Zipcast meeting.

Slideshare, which lets users share PowerPoint and Keynote files on the web, is launching Zipcast web meetings, a simple, fast and social web conferencing system, where the experience is entirely browser-based.

What's different about Zipcast?

1. No downloads for anyone.
2. Works on any modern browser.
3. Everyone gets a personalized meeting room – if you have a SlideShare login, you already have one at http://www.slideshare.net/USERNAME/meeting.
4. Zipcast meetings are interactive and social and take place entirely within a browser window. Unlike other online meeting systems, no clunky screen takeover is required – you can keep other browser tabs open.
5. You can see the video (and hear audio) of the presenter who is also driving the slides. Everyone can chat.
6. Every public presentation on SlideShare now has a Zipcast button – meaning you can start a quick meeting with any presentation on SlideShare. You don't need to upload to SlideShare to start a meeting.
7. There is no limit to meeting size. You can meet with one person or 5000 of your best friends.
8. You can invite people to a Zipcast by giving them the meeting room URL via IM, email, Facebook, or Twitter.
9. A public Zipcast can go viral – you can share chats can be shared on Twitter or Facebook, which will cause other people to join in.
10. Activity from all public Zipcasts gets aggregated into an activity feed here - keep a watch for interesting upcoming Zipcasts.

The pricing is simple – every SlideShare user has access to Zipcast for free for conducting public meetings. All Pro users get additional functionality like (a) ad removal, (b) private, password-protected meetings accessible only to people invited by the host and (c) audio conferencing.

Zipcast is going to be a in Beta for the next few months. What that means is that we will be watching how you use it, and listening to what to what you think of it. Since this is the first version of Zipcast, we expect to make a lot of changes and improvements as we go forwards. You can also expect changes to the pricing as we understand how people are using Zipcast better.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on February 18, 2011 (boomark / email).