Fuze Meeting is looking for a special, select few to join our Beta Testing Group and help us test out our new products. In the coming weeks we’ll be testing Skype integration and new and improved screen sharing. Imagine how impressed your friends will be when you tell them about your tour of the Fuze Meeting Lab. We have a coffee pot that will blow your mind.

Add a comment or email us to participate!   Better yet – @reply us on twitter at @fuzemeeting

Hello fans of Fuze Meeting!  We don’t typically blog about our special offers, but this one is exciting!

In the spirit of giving, we want to extend a special offer to you – a free Flip video camera when you purchase a pre-paid annual plan for Fuze Meeting for next year. For just $279 you can be all set up for 2010 and ready to take advantage of all the great time and cost saving features of Fuze Meeting.

If you’re interested in this special end-of-year offer, give us a call. We can get you all set up in minutes. We only have 50 cameras on hand, so it’s first come, first serve. Contact us TODAY via email or better yet — call (866) 470-1901 to take advantage of this special offer. For new customers only. Not available to existing customers of Fuze Meeting, sorry!

You must order through one of our sales representatives so call today!  Not available via the website!  (see restrictions – available while supplies last, no refunds, must prepay for one year of service!)

Talk soon,

Patrick

ALREADY GOT A FLIP VIDEO CAMERA?  OTHER SPECIAL OFFERS CURRENTLY GOING ON UNTIL YEAR-END:

SPECIAL END OF YEAR DEAL FOR 25 SEATS:

25 seats for just $250 per month – a mere $10 per month per person*. With 25 seats – all with unlimited meetings with up to 25 attendees and 25 GBs of storage space – your group will be able to host some serious web meetings. And once you purchase the seats, they’re yours to do whatever you want with. Add people. Change users. They’re yours to use however you wish!

As far as discounts go, this is a savings 65% over our regular price and is about as low as we can go. So give me a call quick if you are interested – this offer isn’t available on the website! Call sales today!  call (866) 470-1901   ***some restrictions may apply.  Offer expires soon!

SPECIAL END OF YEAR DEAL:  BUY ONE, GET ONE SEAT FREE FOR 3 MONTHS.

If you sign up for Fuze Meeting before December 24, I’ll give you an additional seat free for three months for the price of one with 25 GBs of storage space each.  call (866) 470-1901  ***some restrictions may apply.  Offer expires soon!  Not valid with any other offer.

We recently received a great testimonial from one of our customers – Arnold WorldWide – thanks guys! check it out below.

Interview with Will Burns, EVP, Director of Business Development and Agency Innovation at Arnold Worldwide

Can you provide a little background on the company?

Arnold is a creative communications agency focused on delivering strong business results for brands like Citizens, Jack Daniel’s, Hershey’s, Ocean Spray, Volvo, Fidelity Investments, Carnival Cruise Lines, truth® and more. With a commitment to Great Work that Works, Arnold provides clients with a return on idea that drives a business forward. The agency delivers services across all communication touchpoints under one-bottom-line, fueling holistic integrated programs. Arnold is owned by Havas and has full-service offices in Boston, DC, New York, London, Prague, Milan, Madrid, Sao Paulo and additional global resources in 75 countries through our network.

How have you done collaboration and web conferencing in the past?

Arnold’s product is ideas – and it is the task of the account services and business team to represent those ideas in the very best way possible. In a perfect world, you’d get to present the idea in person – but with the recession, most companies have cut their travel budgets, and it’s just not possible to meet in person all the time.

Before Fuze Meeting, we generally emailed PDFs and other files to clients and colleagues, got everyone on a conference call, and tried to navigate people through the documentation over the phone. With video, we’d typically overnight a DVD to a client and then discuss the video over the phone. One of the major problems with this method is that it prevents us from maintaining control of the conversation. People naturally want to look ahead to what’s coming next – if you send a presentation or a video ahead of time, they will run right to an idea without any setup. We try to carefully craft the argument to lead the client to the idea. All that is lost if they move ahead before you’re ready.

We’d also tried using WebEx – this worked OK for slides, but the video was very hit or miss, and often the sound wouldn’t work properly. I think it also intimidated some users. We do have videoconferencing capabilities, but we found the interaction could be awkward and distracting. In fact, we’d tried most of what’s out there, and none of it really met our needs, particularly around video and ease-of-use.

Why did you select Fuze Meeting?

At Arnold, the new business team is sort of the unofficial R&D group – we try new technologies all the time. We’re often asked to do capabilities presentations remotely, which was the impetus to try Fuze Meeting. It is the strongest when it comes to video – we can post and present high-definition videos for people to watch, and they look fantastic. Video is a very important medium for us, and Fuze makes it very easy to collaborate and present video in a seamless way. There have been times when there’s a rough cut being done in New York, while the creative director is in LA – now the account and creative teams can simply set up a Fuze Meeting, post the file and work on it together.

We were also impressed with the client experience – Fuze Meeting is also way ahead of the competition in this regard. You don’t want your client to have to download something complicated and deal with it during a meeting. Fuze makes sure they aren’t putting a burden of ramp-up on the person you’re presenting to. This ease-of-use has helped us get momentum behind using the product, both with clients and internally. And, we love that we can import any kind of file into one meeting – a research report in a PDF, creative brief in Word, a PowerPoint with sales data, and of course video. Our files tend to be quite robust and graphics intensive, and Fuze Meeting handles them easily.

How is Fuze Meeting helping you build your business?

We use Fuze Meeting extensively for new business – we recently presented to eight CEOs from eight different cities at same time – no one had a problem, it was a great meeting and a huge success. We also have a number of account people who are starting to use it regularly with clients It’s a great way to shrink the distance between our clients and the Boston office.

We’re also using Fuze Meeting for internal collaboration. One great example is when we were working on a big pitch – the creative team was at the office on a Sunday morning working on a presentation of more than 70 slides and needed to link in the president, the chief creative officer and some others to finalize the pitch. We were able to get everyone onto a Fuze Meeting – working from the office, working from home, or from wherever – to review the whole deck together and make changes on the fly. We just couldn’t have done that without this program.

We’re seeing a much more rapid adoption of Fuze Meeting than we saw with other technologies – I think with other technologies there’s a perception that it is going to be a hassle or difficult. As soon as people see how easy it is to use Fuze Meeting and the benefits, they quickly make it part of how they do business.

What are the business benefits of using Fuze Meeting?

Fuze Meeting gives us many of the benefits of an in-person meeting — the real-time collaboration, the give-and-take, the ease of moving between different media, and the ability to control the flow of the presentation — without the travel. We’re saving thousands of dollars in travel using Fuze Meeting. It also fits with Arnold’s brand – we’re an innovative agency, and using a next-generation application like Fuze Meeting helps us project this.

Another benefit is efficiency. Being able to get everyone on the same page at the same time from around the world dramatically increases the speed with which we can complete work. Fuze Meeting makes complex collaboration and presentations simple and quick.

Finally, Fuze Meeting is enabling us to better communicate and sell our ideas, and that in turn helps us close more business.

Hi guys! Just saying hello via our team blog. I just got back from a trip to NYC to visit investors as well as the Web 2.0 conference.

Hey – question for you – are you a user of Fuze Meeting? If so – please tell us what you like (or don’t like!!) about our service – Frustrated? We’re sorry. Happy? Even better! Share!

Patrick

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Are you serious? You missed it? Well, lucky for you, it was caught on video. For those unfamiliar with the DEMO format:  You have 6 minutes to launch your latest product.  We had a lot of fun prepping for this – and yes – that is my son and daughter in the video.  Our premise and internal goal is to TRULY make our web meeting app “so easy a five year old can do it” – whether you are joining from your mobile device or the web.

I am laughing at a recent post on ZDNET titled  “SharePoint 2010 SKUs multiply like rabbits” – Now SharePoint is pretty powerful (so I hear; we abandoned it for Box.net internally) — but does it really need 10 SKUs and a degree in Microsoftology to purchase and deploy?

…and I quote:

With SharePoint 2010, there will be (at least) 10 different SharePoint SKUs. (I guess the SharePoint team is bucking the trend that other Microsoft teams seem to be following — that fewer SKUs is better.) On the product editions list: SharePoint Server 2010 for Intranet Scenarios (with Enterprise and Standard Client Access Licenses); SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise; SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard; FAST Search for SharePoint 2010; FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites; Search Server 2010; Search Server Express 2010; SharePoint Designer 2010; SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the product formerly known as Windows SharePoint Services). There are also at least two SharePoint Online SKUs: Standard and Deskless Worker.

Did you get all that?  This was after a fun time in the office poking fun at HP’s “purchase page” for HP Skyroom (a competitive product to ours, I guess) that has the header, “HP SkyRoom Version 1 (Quantity 5) Node-locked E-LTU Software (VK631AAE) – Specifications and Warranty”  – That makes me want to buy it, you?!

Here at Fuze Box, we want to keep it simple.  Maybe all these names are why their prices are so high, and ours are so low… Anyway, If you see us doing complex things that add friction to the process, let us know!

Hey there!  Patrick here, Chief Strategy Guy here at Fuze Box – do us a favor… If you like us, please nominate us for the prestigious Mashable Open Web Awards for “Best Mobile App”.  We’ve done some killer things with our iPhone and BlackBerry apps — breaking all sorts of rules for “what should be possible!

Anyway, I’d really appreciate the vote – the team hear has worked very hard on this stuff!

Simply click on this puppy to nominate us.  Go ahead, it is easy!

Cheers,

Patrick

We’ve made some updates!

Your awesome feedback has helped us create the newest version of Fuze Meeting, which we are happy to announce is available today at www.fuzemeeting.com.

We’ve kept the same great low price but added some valuable features to make Fuze Meeting the most innovative and easiest web conferencing service.

Universal contacts: Access all your address and personal IM contacts from multiple applications such as Microsoft OCS [beta], Gmail, LinkedIn and more.

Social meetings: For ad-hoc webinars, share meeting links in real-time on Facebook and Twitter.

Enhanced high-definition presentations: Now supporting Microsoft PowerPoint animations, transitions and imbedded multimedia, without desktop sharing enabled.

On-demand content availability: Fuze Meeting enables pre- and post-meeting content available on-demand to all meeting participants.

All this and more for $29, less than half the cost of Cisco WebEx!

I know this is old-school, but it is exciting to watch our new brand come together in the physical world.

If you haven’t yet, check out our main site at FuzeBox.com here.

Fuze Box, Inc.

We’re very excited to announce three big items for us today:

1) We changed our name to Fuze Box, Inc. (from CallWave)  It’s official!

2) We launched the first phase of our integration with Box.net (not related to our corporate name change!)

3) We have shared our newest milestone – over 1 million users of Fuze Meeting and Fuze Messenger

See the TechCrunch write-up here.

I’ll add more later, but wanted to get the word out!

- Patrick