ooVoo Blog

Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election was arguably the most important the world has witnessed in decades and people from around the globe were eager for up-to-the-minute information.  According to reports more than half of the 110,000 million television households in the U.S. were glued to coverage of the election from 8pm until midnight. Twitter, the fastest growing micro-blogging service with more than three million subscribers, reported its busiest day with information updates doubling in number compared to regular traffic and CNN.com reported five times its normal website traffic.

Channel 2 News, Israel’s leading broadcast television network, stayed connected to the U.S. elections until the early morning hours by broadcasting live ooVoo video conversations with more than 20 correspondents stationed throughout Israel and the U.S.  A wide range of differing perspectives of the election results were offered by contributors that included Dana Rapoport, a writer for Channel 2 News stationed in New York, Eileen Smith the editor of Texas Monthly in her publication’s home state of Texas, Edmundo Rocha an activist, freelance writer and founder and editor of The Sanctuary and Shireen Mitchell is founder and Executive Director of Digital Sisters in Washington D.C., amongst many others. Highlights of the broadcast can be viewed here. To read more about the correspondents, many of whom participated in the MyooVooDay Political event earlier this year, please visit www.MyooVooDay.com/political.

The internet, social media and technology played a vital role in changing the landscape of how political campaigns are communicated and information is shared. On Tuesday millions of individuals tuned into broadcast television and radio news hungry for breaking news of the U.S. president elect, and many more logged onto to websites, discussion forums and social networks to around the world to sharing their opinions with text chat, images and videos around the world. According to BusinessWeek's article 4.9 million Facebook users indicated that they had voted.

How did ooVoo users share their politcal views leading up to, on and after this historic election? Share your stories or conversation recordings with us and we may include some of them in an election update.

Philip Robertson

UPDATE: Service has been restored, we do not anticipate any further problems. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. 

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We are experiencing a temporary service interruption and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. We are working to get ooVoo up and running again quickly. We appreciate your patience during this time.

Thank you and see you on ooVoo….soon!

The ooVoo team 

A few weeks ago Philip asked me to write a blog post to provide an update on ooVoo’s recent progress from “the COO’s” perspective.”  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we were working to make organizational changes internally and that I would be taking a different role.  And I don’t think he would believe me if I told him I was the “grand architect” of my own demise as the COO of ooVoo. 

What’s happening at ooVoo?  And how did I set myself up to lose my ’big title’ of COO?  Our long term technology leader and VP of R&D, Eran Kariti, plans to leave the company at the end of the year.  Eran has been a major contributor and key architect of ooVoo.  Eran wants to move on for personal reasons but he promises me he is always on ooVoo should we need his help. He knows we won’t be bashful about asking for his help.  He has been instrumental in making ooVoo what it is today and we owe him a great deal of gratitude. 

So, with Eran’s decision to leave we have been searching for a new CTO.  The problem: we found 2 great candidates.  Asher Shiratzky and Louis Holder. Hey, if you don’t believe me, Google these guys. My advice to Philippe Schwartz, our CEO, was to hire both of them.  Of course that puzzled him.  So, I explained “let’s hire Asher as the CTO, his skill there is incredible.” Eran Kariti agrees and fully endorses Asher. 

Philippe said “..great, but what about Lou?”  I told Philippe that Lou has a great technical background but his management skills and interpersonal skills are exceptional, and would make a great COO.  Philippe paused and said, “..well what would you do?” to which I replied  “nothing if at all possible.”  He declined that offer and reminded me he had to keep me around to do the jobs he didn’t want to do.  Such is my role in life.

          Louis Holder                         Asher Shiratzky

So, how are we doing?  Well, the number of registered ooVoo users and usage of the ooVoo service continue to grow.  We have added lots of new features including high resolution and Call Non-ooVoo friends and have another big release planned in 2009 which should be really good for our customers (I call them ooVoo’ers) and business partners.  We continue to invest more time talking to our users to learn more about what they like and what we need to work on. I think that is what we are supposed to be doing anyway, isn’t it?  Getting closer to our users and really understanding what they need. 

Here’s to all you ooVoo’ers.  We really appreciate you using ooVoo.  Tell your friends to visit ooVoo.com and download it. Help us grow. Let’s help get people talking face to face.

Marty Walker, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer)
More specifically, my job is to do what Philippe doesn’t want to do!

We recently completed another successful “My ooVoo Day” event this one focusing on discussions about the political landscape in the U.S. ahead of the election of a new president later this year. The conversations were fun and meaningful, providing the political hosts and bloggers a platform to express their opinions about the forthcoming elections but also an opportunity to see and hear from other individuals.

Several of the participating bloggers continued to use ooVoo to file reports live from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions earlier this month. The conventions were amongst the biggest events in the U.S. political calendar with thousands of people attending to hear speeches from the presidential candidates, vice presidents and their parties. 

Eileen Smith, a host during My ooVooDay Political and editor of Texas Monthly,  a well respected magazine and website serving Texas, attended both conventions in Denver and Minneapolis and conducted a daily ooVoo video interview with her editorial team back in Texas. Throughout the road to the Whitehouse campaign Eileen and her team will offer their insight and opinion in a daily “ooVoocast” – as Eileen has begun calling her reports which can be viewed at http://www.TexasMonthly.com, click on the Election 2008 update on the left side. 

The summer can be considered a time for relaxing at the beach, soaking in the sun, BBQs and being outside. Well, at ooVoo we've been busy. Very busy. And it’s about time we let you know that we’ve been creating new software, powering conversations, hosting and attending events. Check out an example of ooVoo powering the conversation all be it a rather shaky Qik video of one from Erin Kontecki Vest's (AKA Blogger Queen of Spain) where ooVoo connected panels at two different conferences discussing political issues - BlogHer in San Francisco, California with the Netroots conference in Austin, Texas.

(A landscape pic from the back of the room at BlogHer, San Francisco)

At the end of July we took part in the Independent Features Film Festival held at Tribeca Cinemas in New York, where we powered the post movie 'Question and Answer' sessions for directors and producers with members of the audience.

(Jonald Reyes, producer of "That Asian Thing" takes questions
live on ooVoo at Independent Film Festival)

Memorably Romulo Guardia, director of the acclaimed movie El Señor Presidente, dubbed as “the film that said no to Hugo Chavez” was able to participate and have a face-to-face conversation with the audience, despite being denied a passport to travel to New York by his home government. The movie, which is highly critical of Venezuela’s human rights record, was one of the 23 films showcased at the festival. The full Q&A session can be viewed on the Festival's YouTube channel and video messages from directors and producers from all Independent Film Festival participants are hosted on the festival’s YouTube Channel.

Best regards,
Philip Robertson, director of marketing communications

In just under two weeks, I'm heading to PodCamp Boston 3.  ooVoo is a sponsor and we're excited to announce that we'll be giving 20 PodCamp 'scholarships' to college students interested in attended this unConference as guests of ooVoo.

Podcamp Boston 3 takes place on July 18, 19 and 20 in the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School.

You may already know that PodCamp Boston is charging registrants $50 to attend this year, so this is your chance to get in for free.  While $50 might not seem like a lot of money, especially when you think about all the great presentations you'll hear and all the social media friends you'll meet, we know that when you're a student, every dollar counts.  So rather than invest our sponsorship money in an exhibit table, hand-outs or tsotchkes/swag, we thought we would give back to the community in the form of free passes.

If you're a student -- or know students that might be interested in applying (please feel free to spread the word) -- we'll be giving away the scholarships to the first 20 people who contact us and meet a few simple criteria:
• You are a college student with an active .edu email address.  You're on the honor system, so we ask that professors and alumni sit this one out.
• You are an ooVoo user who can provide us with a valid ooVoo ID -- it doesn't matter if you subscribe to the fully loaded Super + Phone package or the free Standard package; in fact, it doesn't matter if you just signed up today.  But you will need to include your valid ooVoo User ID in the body of your email and send an ooVoo friend request to philiprobertson for verification.  We promise not to bother you; we just need to make sure you are a subscriber.
• You have a first name, last name and a date of birth.  We know you do, but we'll need to know them to complete the PodCamp registration form -- so if you are selected for a scholarship, we'll need to ask that you share this information with us.
• You let us know you're interested by emailing us at ooVoo@crayonville.com.

To recap, scholarships will go only to the first 20 people who meet the criteria -- so if you're one of the 20, we'll let you know and provide you with a complimentary pass to the event.  (We'll cover your registration fee but you'll need to pay your own travel expenses.) We'll be in touch with each of the lucky 20 personally.

While I'm at PodCamp, I'll also be joining crayon's Greg Verdino, SHIFT Communications' Doug Haslam and Morpheus Media's Adam Broitman in a session about "Smart Social Media Marketing."  We'll chat about how ooVoo has been using social media channels to promote and implement programs like My ooVoo Day With... and the forthcoming My ooVoo Day: Political Edition, and to engage directly with both influencers and customers on a day-to-day basis in addition to social media and marketing with Greg, Doug and Adam – they are the experts and worth coming to listen to.

I hope to meet some of you at PodCamp - so be sure to join us for our session.  We'll be in the HIM Room from 11:15am to noon on Saturday, July 19.  You can get all of the event details at the PodCamp Boston site. 

Good luck and see you there!

Philip Robertson
Director of Marketing Communications 

Children say the funniest things at least that was the evidence of the popular TV show of the 1990s and 2000s that shared kids being candid, inspiring, awkward, funny and lovely. Kids being kids on video. This weekend is Father's Day for many people around the world and we've heard from a number of users that are sending and receiving ooVoo video messages, especially those fathers that travel for business and won't be at home this Father's Day. Check out a sample video message right on this page. You may need to download and install the latest DivX codecs to view the video in Internet Explorer.  

Format: avi
Duration: 00:09

We'll add more video messages to this blog in the next few days and if you'd like us to feature your child being cute, lovely or just funny please send us the video to press@ooVoo.com in either a flash (.FLV) or audio visual (.AVI) format.

If you'd like to send or record a video message for yourself or record a message with your children click here or on the video message button on your ooVoo contact list.

Press "record" to begin recording your video message.

You can now send the video to any ooVoo user by pressing on 'Add' or to anyone with an email address by pressing on the envelope with a plus sign.  

To save the video message as an .FLV or .AVI so you can post it to your blog, website, Facebook and YouTube simply press the "Save As" button at the top of the message. 

And that's it - simple and easy huh?! Hope you have a happy Father's Day.

Philip

Good news; we won the Red Herring 100 award which recognizes the top 100 private technology companies in North America. 
The timing is highly appropriate as we officially came out of our beta phase last week with the launch of ooVoo 1.6. What a great way to cap off the first year!

We’ve received plenty of feedback on our new version and the ooVoo Options packages through our support center, the ooVoo forums and directly to us via ooVoo, which we love. Look out for a cool new web feature we’re launching that will bring you face-to-face with some of ooVoo’s employees for direct, real, face-to-face conversations about how you feel about the product, how you’re using it, etc.!

Jamie Watson from ZDnet and Mitch Cantor from Studio Nashvegas blog and others are giving us valuable input and we are encouraged by the initial reactions. Almost everyone appreciates that we have kept ooVoo’s most often-used features free: high quality video chats between up to three people on PC or Mac, video messages, instant message text chat and file transfer. Let’s be honest, there are some customers who aren’t too happy with the change and while we NEVER want an unhappy customer, we are working hard to build a business for the long-term and sometimes that includes unpopular decisions. Call us crazy, but we still believe it’s unbelievable and AMAZING that you can have a video conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world – for as long as you want to – for free.

For those people that are new to the ooVoo experience (where HAVE you been?!) we include a month free trial of ooVoo Super + Phone option that includes video conversation recording, hosting and streaming, adding people to a video chat by phone, advanced video effects and enhanced customer service.  ooVoo Mac users, while not yet enjoying all of the features available on the PC version, will continue to have free six person video chat (in addition to unlimited video messaging, text chat and file transfer) until the full-featured Mac version is ready – we are aiming for Q4 of this year.

Come back soon! 

Philippe

Hi everyone – Philippe here again. As most of our ooVoo customers know, we’ve been running a trial offer since February to promote the launch of ooVoo 1.5. This promotion gives our customers FREE telephony (up to 500 minutes/month) so they can call any landline or mobile phone in the U.S. or Canada (from within or from outside the U.S.) It’s a great feature because it allows you to add friends, family and co-workers into your video conversations even if those people aren’t at a computer.

We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from this promotion and we’re learning a lot in the process. Unfortunately, one of the things we’re learning is that some people are using it to make harassing or prank calls to individuals, a behavior not uncommon in VoIP or regular telephone services, but obviously very concerning to us (and not permissible per the terms of the ooVoo end user license agreement). 

We’ve taken immediate steps to answer the complaints we’ve received from the affected individuals and to block the users making these calls. We want to be able to continue to offer this great feature (and trial offer) to our valuable customers who are using it in the way it was designed: to communicate and connect with each other - whether it’s face-to-face or on the phone – from anywhere in the world. Please send an email to reportmisconduct@ooVoo.com if you need any assistance in this regard.

Thanks,

Philippe

I wanted to write a quick post to tell everyone some good news about ooVoo. We found out yesterday that we were one of the winners of the CNET Webware 100 Awards in the Communications Category. This award is great because the Web 2.0 user community decides the ultimate winners – voting for the finalists selected by the Webware editors. This year, the community voted nearly two million times and we think some of those were from our loyal ooVoo users like you – so thanks! Read more in our press section here.

Philippe

Ever wanted to actually communicate with the people you have in your Facebook friends list? I don’t mean communicate in the Facebook “poke” sense of the word, by sending a virtual plastic monkey or randomly being bitten by a vampire.  ooVoo users with Facebook accounts can now initiate a live face-to-face video chat from within Facebook at the click of a button.

Follow these steps and you’ll be having real conversations quicker than you can become a vampire or get involved in a food fight.

1. Find the ooVoo link

2. Be sure to check “put a box in my profile” – as this is where your friends will find the ooVoo Me button

3. Add your ooVoo ID

4. Voila - your ooVoo link, complete with your lovely profile image will now appear on your Facebook profile.

5. We might suggest moving the ooVoo link onto the left hand side of your profile just below your friends to make it easy to find and start talking.

6. Your friends that have ooVoo running on their PC or Mac need only click on “ooVoo Me” to start a face-to-face conversation with you. Those that don’t can click on “Get ooVoo“ to catch up with the rest of civilization and have a real conversation… without virtual plastic monkeys

Don't have a Facebook account but do send email or host a webpage/blog? Then simply follow the instructions to create your ooVoo widget and have people contact you in the same way on MySpace, your blog or even the signature of your emails. Follow the instructions on how to download the HTML code here. 

Philip Robertson
Director of marketing communications

By way of a brief introduction, I’m Tom Herman vice president of product development for ooVoo. I’ll keep this post brief, or as brief as I can make it. There have been many requests by ooVoo users who want to broadcast their ooVoo conversation over the internet… to many people at the same time.  It's pretty easy to do and here are the steps:

1) Download a virtual camera software, there are many out there, but one we have used successfully here in the test lab at ooVoo is SplitCam (http://www.SplitCamera.com).  It's free and stable.

2) Launch splitcam and set the video source to "Desktop".

3) Set the frame rate to 30 FPS and test both interlaced and de-interlaced for highest quality
 

4) You now have a virtual web camera that looks like a real camera pointed at your desktop.  If you have a broadcast solution, then you're all set, just grab this "virtual" video camera as the source for your broadcast.  If you don't have a broadcast solution, you can use a free one like uStream.TV (http://www.uStream.tv). At their homepage, click the "broadcast now" button and set up an account.

5) On ustream, you also want to make sure to set the video and audio qualities as high as they will go.  uStream allows you to embed your video stream w/ an HTML snippet into your web site and it also allows you to just give the uStream URL for people to watch your broadcast on their web site.

6) Once you have SplitCam and uStream all set up and you're ready to go, you need to launch ooVoo and start your call.  Then make the ooVoo window 100% and you'll see that the broadcast shows your whole desktop, but that means it just shows ooVoo since at 100% it takes up your whole desktop.  SplitCam doesn't recognize an "extended desktop", so if you use two monitors, you can open up a web browser in your second monitor and see the broadcast of your ooVoo conversation which takes up all of your 1st monitor.

A couple of notes...  First this is all free.  Second, the quality of uStream isn't the greatest.  To really broadcast to many people at the same time in high quality and high resolution, you obviously will need to pay for that service.  ooVoo doesn't offer that service right now, but we're looking at providing this in the future.  However  the more requests we receive for this feature on our feedback page, the more likely that it will happen... (http://www.oovoo.com//about/feedback.aspx).

Finally, you'll notice that SplitCam comes up in the web cam choices under ooVoo.  In this way, if you are in an ooVoo video conference and want to show someone on the video call with you an image, a video file, a web page or whatever you're looking at on your computer, it's very easy to just change from your web cam (Logitech or built in cam, or whatever) to the SplitCam virtual camera which is showing a feed of your desktop.  Pretty cool, eh?

Got any other power tips or what to share more idea?  Contact me at Tom.Herman@oovoo.com.

Tom Herman,
vice president of product development

I’m really excited about some great news we just received from CNET. ooVoo is being considered for a 2008 Webware 100 Award – an awards program where CNET’s Webware users vote for their favorite Web 2.0 applications across many different categories. The editors of CNET Webware.com selected ooVoo to be one of 30 nominees in the communications category -- and now it’s time for our users to show their love for ooVoo by voting for us here!.

Since we launched in June 2007 we’ve received a lot of positive feedback (some not so positive, but we encourage that too) and reviews from ooVoo users, bloggers and media. Our recent release, ooVoo 1.5, was positively reviewed by the Associated Press, Laptop Magazine, Yahoo Tech, ZDnet.co.uk and CNET. And last year, we won PC Magazine’s for Best Software Innovator award at the Digital Life show and a 2007 Web User Gold award. With your help, we can add to our growing list of kudos. But most importantly, these things help to increase awareness of ooVoo – which means more friends and contacts for you to chat with.

Please vote for us before March 31st. The winners will be announced on April 21 – please vote for us here!

Thank you!!!

Philippe

I’m Marty Walker, COO of ooVoo. I basically get to do whatever Philippe doesn’t want to do.

I’ll admit it: I don’t have a technology background. Before joining ooVoo, I was in the pet food business for many years. I had the good fortune to be at The Iams Company when it was very small and was there as it grew into a $1.7 billion business. You could say my background is in helping bring something small to a point where millions of people can enjoy it.

I’m also in that technologically challenged age group – I’m approaching 60, my kids are grown , have all left home and now live in different cities in America. I’ll tell you something: having the ability to see them on a regular basis with ooVoo is pretty cool.

Right before my son graduated last year, I ooVoo’d with my two sons. One’s in Hoboken. One’s in Boston. I was headed to Israel on business. The three of us had a great conversation and a big laugh about football chatter. It was funny watching them on camera being themselves - one is a typical college kid who was wearing a baseball cap and no shirt, his brother was “giving him the razz.” (translation “making fun of him”). His brother replied with an obscene gesture and we all laughed. That’s ooVoo – real communication!

Another example of how easy ooVoo makes staying in touch: My 71 year old mother-in-law is from Tokyo. Her daughters are in Sacramento and her son’s in Bakersfield. When she first connected with them on ooVoo it was incredible to watch – to be 71 and see your daughter this way whenever she wanted despite the distance. She had a real sparkle in her eye.

I’d like for everybody to experience face-to-face communication with ooVoo. A tremendous number of people don’t know the capability is there. It’s a brand new category of consumer experience. You need it in your home. As with all advancements, we believe technology savvy early adopters will use this first, and then, as awareness grows and people become more comfortable sitting in the living room ooVooing, face-to-face communication will become more widely used.

What’s unique for me about ooVoo is that the people here live and breathe this thing. We are heavier users of our own product than just about anybody. I use it every day. We’re really conscientious about understanding what it is we are providing by experiencing it personally. That really impressed me.

What would I be doing if I weren’t here? Something challenging that contributes to the lives of humans or pets. Maybe just reading a good Vince Flynn novel and drinking cocktails on the beach.
 
See you on ooVoo.

Marty Walker, chief operating officer, ooVoo