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Polycom, a voice and video conferencing company has announced that it has once again been named to an annual listing of the nation’s 500 most innovative users of business technology. This is the second year in a row that Polycom has earned this recognition.

For this year, Polycom is honored for its next generation  video conferencing project which involved the retooling of the company’s online presence, including a number of Intra and Internet sites.

Polycom CIO, Glen Noga:

The goal of our project was to radically change the online experience for Polycom’s customers, partners and employees. Since launching the project, we’ve seen significant cost savings due to streamlined and improved globalization practices. Additionally, our employees, partners, and customers all benefit from the improved access to information and the time saved accessing that information online.

The new project is a collaborative effort between Polycom’s IT and corporate marketing groups and is aimed at better aligning the Web and portal sites with the company’s business objectives. As a result, Polycom hopes to offer the stability, scalability, improved content management, customer ease-of-use, access to back-office systems and new functionality.

Beyond making it easier for Polycom stakeholders to navigate the Web site and locate information, the team also sought to change how customers and partners will do business with the company.

The improved infrastructure has resulted in a better public Web site. This amount of time spent by customers on the site has increased. More partners have registered to use the new features and functions on the site, and what’s more, the costs and effort required to keep the sites current have decreased dramatically. The project has been a tremendous success, and I’m proud of the team that helped implement it.

Fuze Meeting has joined up with Box.net to add real-time online meetings and screen sharing. Now the SaaS file-sharing and collaboration suite, which is going after SharePoint head on, has the added component of web conferencing.

Fuze Meeting is a fairly slick alternative to popular options like GoToMeeting, Dimdim and WebEx. The company — formerly a public one listed as Callwave — was recently revitalized and now revolves around its online software service.

Both software as a service offerings are free with a premium, paid option so there’s a complete spectrum of payment options. The limited personal versions are free, while real enterprise use will require an annual fee. Using Fuze as part of your Box account will allow you to conduct meetings, share your desktop (which requires a download), and upload your Box files to a Fuze collaboration space.

Box has added the Fuze Meeting support as part of its OpenBox system, which allows users to share their files with a plethora of services. Everything from Gmail to Zoho and beyond can be connected to a Box account, so this is really just another addition to the ecosystem for Box.

But Fuze is competing against some extremely entrenched services, namely WebEx and GoToMeeting. To draw in Box account holders, an enterprise user base that is naturally more open to new SaaS tools, might be a big boost in its quest to gain market share.

Cisco presents a comprehensive platform specializing in niche markets. And the networking giant may help the music business survive in the digital millennium. Cisco and Warner Music Group just widened a long-standing partnership. Warner landed a license to launch an unlimited number of Cisco Eos social-networking sites around its impressive stable of recording artists.

Eos is a Cisco-hosted media platform, custom-built for large entertainment businesses that want to “create, manage and monetize social entertainment experiences built around their branded content.” The “monetize” part of that vision is what’s important here. Warner hopes to tap into the power of viral online marketing by creating a miniature version of Facebook or MySpace around artists like Paramore and American Idol alum Jason Castro, where fans can keep up to date and purchase music or band-related paraphernalia.

Warner Music VP, Michael Nash:

Having witnessed such a dramatic shift in the way consumers engage entertainment, we are constantly searching for new capabilities to address emerging digital behaviors. In plain English, today’s music fans are a far cry from your father’s hipsters and greasers, and Warner must keep up with the digital revolution.

For Warner Music and rivals like Sony and Disney, Cisco’s sophisticated turnkey platform provides a quick path straight to the fans, where monetization begins through a combination of tightly controlled advertising and direct sales. For Cisco, Eos is an early step into the computing cloud. The application is hosted and managed by Cisco. Warner simply provides the design templates and content. Once Cisco’s clients dip a toe into these waters, Cisco could lead them to larger contracts, such as installing web conferencing firm WebEx-based long-distance collaboration platforms or helping Warner build out a private cloud-computing infrastructure.

ClearOne, an HD video conferencing service, announced the release of a new customer service portal called ClearoneExpress. The collaboration tool allows a company’s suppliers, distributors and dealers to place orders for new products, pay online, print shipping information and check the status of orders all through this single system.

The account-based system creates permissions for different individuals and different options will be available depending on who logs into the system and what they will need access to. ClearOneExpress has a live chat feature so that at any point in the process, the end user can contact customer support and chat live to resolve any issues that they can’t complete automatically online.

ClearOne VP, Joe Sorrentino:

 ClearOneXpress was designed to give our partners the ability to easily and securely take care of their own immediate needs, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We are always looking for ways to further improve our best of class customer service. ClearOneXpress can be used as a single point of contact to consolidate all transactions into one user friendly and efficient interface.

The ClearOneXpress system uses viaKLIX, a merchant system from NOVA infromation systems to guarntee a robost and reliable  system with secure transfers.

Skype has finally released an iPhone application that will allow iPhone users to access the popular VOIP services through their handset. Since all iPhone contracts offer unlimited (actually 5GB) of data, calls within the Skype network will be absolutely free to Skype users, and they will incur a nominal charge for calling numbers outside of that network.

Unlike a standard phone call which transmits voice over a cellular network, Skype’s VOIP system turns voice into data and can send it through the wi-fi network.

In the initial release of the Skype iPhone app, second calls and video conferencing won’t be enabled, however its rumored that these features will be in a future release.

Skype COO, Scott Durchslag:

We’re considering video carefully but we have a really high bar on the quality. If we do it we will have to do it incredibly well. The number one request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone, there’s a pent-up demand [for Skype.

Skype plans to launch a similar version of their VOIP service for the Blackberry this Summer and are working on version for other smart phones for future release.