San Francisco Employees Answer – What Is Fuze Box?
We asked our San Francisco office what words came to mind when they thought of Fuze Box, and the answers were great. Stay tuned – I don’t want to give anything away, but there may be an AWESOME outtakes video on its way!
Update: As promised…you can find the update video HERE.
The Live Demos Are, Yes, Live
As (maybe?) you know, we recently moved offices to accommodate our growth so we shuffled the seating arrangements and most of us got new neighbors. So, your favorite Fuze Meeting Community Manager (me) is now happily sandwiched between Tatiana, the woman who keeps our office standing and Larry, one of our Live Demo guys (the other one is Caryl and she works remotely from Arizona).
Quite to my amusement, about three times a day, I hear Larry say “Yes, it’s actually live. Don’t worry, it sort of surprises a lot of people.”
So – seemed to me like the World Wide Web could use a little reassurance! When we say ‘Live Demo’ we actually mean that there’s someone there on the meeting waiting to answer your questions from 8 AM to 2 PM Pacific. The live demo is geared towards potential customers (though quite a few existing customers hop on with easy questions). On top of THAT we have a whole customer care center at the ready to answer anything a little stickier.
So…looking for answers for Fuze Meeting?
Drop in on a Live Demo
Or contact customer care via live chat or email or call them at (800) 844-4118 and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a Fuze Meeting expert!
What in the World Is Coworking?
Just the other day, I was doing my due diligence on the webbernets trying to find out some juicy tidbits about alternate working situations. And since you happen to be on a web conferencing blog, chances are you’re on the lookout for more tips and tidbits that could make your situation more efficient. Well, I ‘discovered’ (similarly to how Columbus ‘discovered’ America) this brilliant alternative to from home not from home!
It’s called coworking! And from what I gather…
Coworking is a way of working where you independently work alongside other workers, though the work you’re doing is totally separate. Think of it as a well-lit and nicely temperature-ed café where you can go to work comfortably all day without enduring the angry glares of the barista trying to Jedi Mind Trick you into buying more coffee or get off his ‘free’ WiFi. There’s only so much caffeine one person can take, doncha know.
No, it’s not free, but it seems reasonably priced. These coworking spaces are all over the place and a quick Google revealed five locations within walking distance of my current office and a whole bunch more in the area.
What’s more – these places seem really COOL. Quite a few of them offer free drop-in options to check them out. You can use meeting rooms, supplies and whatnot as part of the service. I had a big old #FAIL that one day I had to work from home, and if I had to work from home on a regular basis, I would totally consider signing up for something like this.
So… whether it’s coworking, meeting online, figuring out a way to pre-occupy the kids or putting an accountability system in place (Thanks Heather and Yasou for the tips !!!) – we realize that knowing your options is the first step.
Have you ever tried coworking? How did it work?
6/17/10 Update: Seth Godin recently did a post on coworking. Check it out > Goodbye To The Office
Community Guidelines
and the No-Tolerance Ninjette
We realize if you’ve made it to the Fuze Meeting site and its associated blog, then you’re already probably a certified genius who knows how to conduct him/herself in an online community. But lest we are accused of under communicating, we thought we’d make it official.
- Do
- Be chatty. We love opinions and inter-commenter conversations. We love dissent just as much as accolades (especially when witty).
- Be courteous. Free speech has been all the rage for the past 200+ years, but please keep your comments in good taste.
- Think first, submit second. This site is a public forum and once it’s up, it’s up. The web has an impressively long memory.
- Don’t.
- Hate. Or use hate language/symbols, vulgarity or piss poor manners. We’ve got no tolerance for that business.
- Spam. Setting the obvious Karma implications aside, this is still no fun and ruins the spirit of commenting. Spam includes identical repeat posting or posting anything unrelated to the topic and/or specifically intended to drive traffic to another site.
- Break the law. Actually a good life-rule. Unless you want to go to jail. If you don’t know the law, learn the law.
We’re so excited to have an engaged and energetic community. Unfortunately, there are some e-baddies out there who can mess things up for the rest of us so we hired a no tolerance ninjette (female ninja) to do the dirty work. Our ninjette has the right delete any comment or ban any user, with notice or with ninja-like stealth, at any time and for any reason. *swish swish* (ninja swords)
Ms. New Community Manager
To steal a passage from my Programming 10 Class, nerdy T-shirts of the 1990’s, and Bill Gates’ first Tweet:
Hello, World!
Fuze Meeting has just signed on a Social Media/PR/BloggyBlog/Community Management enthusiast (me) to take the reins on keeping our users and prospects (you) up-to-date and in-the-know about all things web conference-ish and other (loosely) related topics.
That’s right! We now have a whole entire human exclusively dedicated to listening to your deepest desires and needs…er…particularly those associated with web conferencing (and more particularly Fuze Meeting)!!! Can you believe your LUCK? And you thought Chinese New Year was over.
So, don’t be shy! Make my day! Let me know what you think about our product – what do you love? What could be better? What do you want to see next? Are you really excited about the iPad or do you just think it’s going to fizzle away? What would you do for a Klondike Bar?
“Yes, Kristen, YES!”, you scream with gusto. “How ever may I communicate this valuable information?!?!!?”
Good question! We’re multi-talented and well-versed, so hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or slap a comment at the bottom of this post.
Nice to meet you folks. I’m sure I’ll see you around the circuit soon.
-k.
Happy New (Fiscal) Year
With the New Year comes a renewed budget that’s just begging to be spent. But before you blow half a year’s allowance on flat-panel TV upgrades and that company bowling alley that’s been in the works for over a decade, take a minute to think practically about where to invest. Hint: web conferencing solutions.
Web conferencing gives your team a dependable, flexible, and most importantly, cost-effective way to hold web meetings with each other wherever your peeps find themselves. (Not the marshmallow peeps. They have no auditory capacity.) Plus with the money you save on travel costs, you can fund company bowling nights. Finally, your chance to bust out that old shirt from league play and rock everyone’s socks off.
Happy Holidays from Fuze Box
The title of the post really says it all. As we all finish up our last-minute holiday shopping and get ready for the caloric overload over the next few days, all of us here at Fuze Box want to wish you a Happy Holiday season. If you’re one of our Fuze Meeting customers, we sincerely thank you for your business this year and look forward to providing you enhanced web conferencing services and continued value in 2010.
From us to you, have a happy and safe holiday season.
Your friends at Fuze Box
Customer Case Study – Arnold and Fuze Meeting – Better Online Meetings
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.
What? You didn’t see us present our social and mobile meeting apps at DEMOfall 09?
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.
Vote Fuze Meeting for Mashable Open Web Awards “Best Mobile App”
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
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fuzemeeting: Doing your best to spare some air? Good job! Telecommuting also has it's headaches, though! http://fuze.me/9Sr #sparetheair
9/02/10 06:45PM
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