Some of you may have noticed that palbee.com is currently not working.  We are moving our servers to a faster, more stable connection, and so they are unavoidably offline for a few days.  We should be back up and running by the 26th of June, so don’t worry.

If you have any questions about the move, I’ll be paying special attention to this post, and I’ll answer any questions in the comments section as soon as I can.

One of the most important aspects of starting a new web service is telling people about it.  Despite the wonders of Google, it is still difficult to get people to notice your new web site.  That’s why it’s still so important to tell people face to face what you are doing.  But where?

I’ve found seven great places to let people know about new Web 2.0 services this year.  Here they are, in chronological order:

1.       Software 2008

April 29-30, 2008

Las Vegas, USA

The comfortable equilibrium between software supplier and IT buyer has been shattered. Open Source is now an accepted – and often favored – option to traditional commercial software. Monolithic applications are threatened by SOA. SaaS liberates businesses from software itself. And Enterprise 2.0 tools, such as wikis and social networks, pose a growing challenge for IT.

2.       Enterprise 2.0

June 9-12, 2008

Boston, USA

The largest and most important gathering for companies making the shift to Enterprise 2.0. It’s the only event that brings together the latest trends and practical information about Enterprise 2.0 to help you drive the transformation of your business.

3.       NXT Comm

June 16-19, 2008

Las Vegas, USA

The one event delivering the ecosystem of network-enabled voice, video and data

NXT Comm is the leading conference and tradeshow venue for the converged communications industry. This is seeking the next generation of thought leaders to speak at its 2008 event in Las Vegas.

4.       Business and Technology Solutions Show

Aug 19-20, 2008

Rosemont, Il, USA

The Information Technology sector in USA represents a growing market for IT equipment manufacturers and software suppliers. Business users, corporate decision-makers and government policy planners are highly confident in the telecom/IT technology flowing all over the world.

5.       TechCrunch50

September 8-10, 2008

San Francisco, CA, USA

Find the best start-ups and launch them in front of our industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.

6.       CTIA-Wireless IT & Entertainment

Sept 10-12, 2008

San Francisco, CA, USA

CTIA-Wireless IT & Entertainment focuses on integrating wireless technologies into the enterprise and vertical business markets such as healthcare, government, automotive, retail etc. Additionally, the show reflects the explosive growth in wireless entertainment – encompassing everything from music downloads to digital cameras to interactive games.

7.       Web 2.0 Expo New York

September 16-19, 2008

New York, NY, USA

Web 2.0, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing ranks of designers and developers, product manager, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who are embracing the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies.

In today’s world every executive tries to find new ways to cut costs and maximize ROI. Every executive also knows how costly business trips are. However, not everyone seems to notice that with emerging technologies things are not necessarily that pricey.

Recently, I have found an interesting website http://www.webconferencing-test.com which is run by Publicare. It is an online marketing company with global customers. Instead of travelling to the customer’s site they decided to use an online video conferencing tool. Since 2003, on a daily basis, they have communicated face-to-face with their customers via a web browser. When they were searching for the perfect solution they “realized that there is no vendor-independent website that gives a quick overview of the leading solutions.”  So they came up with their own website that filled in the void.

The website compares several solutions using different criteria. What strikes me the most is the cost comparison.  They have assumed that:

 They have compared a few solutions and here are the results:

If one would add PalBee to the above comparison, the total annual savings would equal the cost of meetings at customer locations. This means that the enterprise could cut their costs by almost $25k!

Hi, my name is Monika and I have recently joined the PalBee team. I’m working in the marketing team and focusing on spreading the word about PalBee over the Internet. I lived here and there and whenever I have some days off I travel. In my free time I grab my camera and observe the world through the lens (see the picture).

I honestly think that PalBee is one of the neatest communication tools available over the net. It definitely brings the online communication to a brand new level. Right now we’re working on developing new features and UI. Also, the PalBee.com will get a new touch. Stay tuned as there is much more to come!

I have put together a short PalBee Video Conferencing Tutorial for new users. You can check it out here.

The Christmas holiday is not the best time to do an exhaustive Internet search. And yet I must persevere.

TWiki is still looking good, but it should be evaluated on a comprehensive background of information about its competitors. One of the more interesting ones is:

Achievo (www.achievo.org)

At first glance Achievo has some interesting features. Its free, web-based, open source, claims to be fully adjustable to company requirements, and has both project management and time tracking. You can view an online demo of the latest stable build or latest nightly build. That’s where the first suspicious thing shows up, because the latest nightly build is dated, and its dated 22-08-2007. This hasn’t been updated since August? As always, I head straight for the demo.

The demo provides a menu with a lot of promising links, such as Time Surveys, Project Planning, and Employee Statistics. However, it’s also got links for Sales and Organizations, two things that I don’t really think will come up any time soon. Also, each page load is slow. Additionally, there are many variables which must be set for a specifically small thing, such as reporting time worked, and setting many of these variables requires a complete page reload. This program could use some serious Ajaxification. Page load times might simply be a result of a bare-bones demo server, but it serves to emphasize that you must reload pages often, for selecting the simplest things. Also, projects seem to have phases, which I haven’t considered. It might be interesting to add in the future.

The entire thing, however, feels like early 2000 with trash can links next to items in a list to delete them, check boxes next to what could be quite a long list with no way to check all, and the whole thing just seems to be too slow, too old, and too unpopulated. The August timestamp for the latest build is continuously troubling. A final analysis is:

Pricing: free, open source

Project Features: no Wikiness

Time Tracking: Present, annoying to fill out

Work Reports: Not really present

Bloat Level: Sales, Organizations sections

Web 2.0ness: No wikiness, no Ajaxity, constant reloading

Serendipities: Project phases

ProjectPier (www.projectpier.org)

ProjectPier is more of the same vein in what I’m looking for, a free, open-source, self-hosted PHP application used for managing projects and tasks and teams through a web interface. It seems to be a fork of activecollab.com, which means that it should be more evolved. This saves me the trouble of checking out activecollab.com myself. There’s a short explanation as to why, which is that activecollab 1.0 is going to be a commercial product and ProjectPier.. isn’t.

There isn’t a demo of ProjectPier, which means that I’m stuck reading the Tour link. It’s got all sorts of goodies, including E-mail notification. That’s nice, I suppose, although I wasn’t explicitly looking for it. It says it’s about tasks, milestones, files, and messages, the things of everyday work. No limit to projects, clients, users, and tasks either apparently. It’s based off of PHP and should be scalable to grow with me. So sayeth the intro page.

The quick start guide says that I can start off by creating a project which is typing in a name for the project and a short description. However, this seems like it is a common problem with these project management tools. I don’t want just a short description of a project on the page, I want all relevant details. There are some screenshots which show a focus on milestones and recent activities. This seems to be very similar to Achievo in layout and style.

Ahh, who am I kidding, I keep thinking about Twiki. I need to stop this futile analysis and install a Twiki install.

Pricing: free, open source

Project Features: TWiki is better

Time Tracking: TWiki is better

Work Reports: TWiki is better

Bloat Level: TWiki is better

Web 2.0ness: TWiki is better

Serendipities: TWiki

Hey everyone; my name is Jasper, and I’m going to be joining the Palbee team here at Zenitum. I’ve already been here for a few weeks now; so now that I’m all settled I thought it was time to let you all know what’s going on. On Web 2.0 in Korea? Well, there isn’t any yet. That’s where we come in.

Some of the things I’ll be working on with regards to Palbee are ..

Better enterprise integration. Palbee is a powerful platform, and businesses realize that too. No more single-platform, hard to adopt, integrate and manage applications. With a browser-based solution for both presentation, collaboration and video conferencing, Palbee can be just as powerful on the intranet as it is on the internet.

User interface design improvements. Joining the design think tank here at Zenitum is no easy task, but I do think I have contributions to make to the current way of thinking. What drives Web 2.0? Openness, simplicity and a whole lot of Javascript. I’m going to work improving some of the web application features of Palbee, and minimizing needless complexity so that everyone can enjoy Palbee.

Palbee for everyone. What comes to mind when you think of scalability? If you’re thinking of large mainframes and beowulf clusters, don’t worry; that’s all so pre-2.0. How do it here at Zenitum? By moving our software over to a component based design, we make sure that scalability will be easy, and implementable with commodity hardware.

What I’ll also be working on is keeping in touch with reality; and that means you. Together with Matthew, Albert and all of the other team members here at Zenitum, we’re going to make sure to listen to what you have to say. So keep in touch!

Jasper

For the time being, you’re only able to followings on recording,

- Host Video and Audio
- Whiteboard

Other recording features such as videos & auidos feed from all attendees would be available in September.

But, I think it would be a great tool for recording seminars, presentations or eLearning contents.

If you follow the instruction on my last post, there would be no problem on recording your presentation (or senmiar, or eLearning)
Once you finished, go back to your “MyPage.” Click “MyPage” link on the upper right side when you logged in to PalBee.

Now, you can see your page. On the middle, you would see the list of your recorded meetings. (In the red box)

 If you click one of those, Palbee player pops up like this..  

 Interface components are pretty much the standard.
You can also maximize the window by blowing up.

Now, it’s your turn. I’d love to see some nice webinars,
presentations and eLearnings.

- Albert

Free spontaneous video meetings for everyone!

Ever felt that video conferencing is too expensive?
Downloading and installing the software sucks?
Never liked all the information you must punch in before you try?

We all had same experiences! That’s why we created this simpler, faster, easier video conferencing service with “anything goes” attitude. We felt the life is so confusing, not to mention all the Internet gadgets.

In this age of uncertainty and confusion, we began to search for an answer. The answer for “reasonably priced and super easy video conferencing tool” was so hard to come by. From our grueling and unfortunate experiences, we have now implemented a beta (here, we say a “Larva version”) of Palbee.

Yes! It’s Free!

However, there is a catch. The current larva version has some limitations:

• Each video meeting session lasts up to ONE HOUR
• Maximum attendees are FIVE PEOPLE.
• Only 10 video meetings rooms simultaneously, hence “First Come, First Serve.”

But, at least, it’s FREE (It’s your mantra for make you satisfied for the time being)

Some of the features at this “Larva” stage are:

1. Comprehensible Meeting Status
Since we only have 10 meeting rooms, it’s more difficult to make it incomprehensible.

2. Palpitating Meeting Initiation
As mentioned, it is a “First come, first serve” based service. If you find the room list is full, then type the title and wait until a room emptied. Although Palbee allows an hour long video meeting, some capricious users finish the session before the scheduled time.
When that happens, you need to fire “Start Meeting” button to make yourself a session. The rewards usually go to those focused and quick users.

3. Flamboyant Meeting Interface
Our 100% Flash based interface is filled with rich features. Originally developed for professional video conferencing, users don’t need to download as long as the Adobe Flash is installed. Some available features are: Power point slide sharing, a whiteboard, a chat window, image and file sharing, and many more. Most significantly, the meeting moderator can give permission to other attendees for speaking and writing. If you don’t like attendees, you can also kick them out from the meeting , too.