CoolConferenceLive (CCL) is a simple to use and free web conferencing service (albeit with a terrible name) that provides an instant online meeting between you and other participants. The online tool is still in beta, however it is currently fully operational. The interface is very intuitive, easy to use and allows you to start up a web conference or webcast very quickly.

When you log onto the site, you enter a participant code, given to you by your online meeting host. You fill out a short profile, identifying who you are (you can upload a picture if you want) and just like that, you’re in the online meeting. CCL can present online PowerPoint slides and other documents, however there is currently no white boarding or annotation so it is strictly webcasting. Features include quick ad-hoc polling, chat and whisper (chat with one person in the meeting only). Other unique features include the ability to upload and play an audio (MP3) file and a useful feature called “Notes,” which allows someone in the meeting to take notes and then with one click send them to themselves, to specific people outside the meeting or to all those that attending the meeting.

Created by CEO and motivational speaker Don Straits, CCL was designed to fit his personal needs as a consultant and through that success has expanded to a larger market. CCL’s business model is revenue through ad banners at no cost to the user. For a $300 annual fee subscribers can web conference ad-free. Unlike more robust online presentation services, CCL focuses on the basic online meeting services and makes them easy to use. The tool is built using Flex 3 and Adobe Flash.

This month, telecommunications company Nortel, conducted a survey testing the “hyperconnectivity” of major corporations around the world. Nortel defines a “hyperconnected” company as having:

more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.

The survey was comprised of the data and opinions of 2,400 people from 17 countries and studied the ‘connectedness’ of today’s businesses in terms of the use of devices and online applications such as online meetings, webcasts, video conferencing as well as examining the rate of growth and the impact hyperconnectivity has on enterprises.

The results of the survey indicated that 16% of the global information workforce is already hyperconnected, regularly using web conferencing and other online collaboration tools, with 36% considering themselves to be “increasingly connected,” occasionally using video conferencing and web conferencing in lieu of conventional business travel. Of all respondents, 20% claimed their company is currently “passive online” and the remaining 28% are “barebones” users, who are online, but use basic internet and email features only.

Peter Newcombe, president of Nortel:

Companies have to embrace hyperconnectivity. They need to accept that it’s coming, it can’t be stopped. Putting up the shutters will achieve nothing. It’s inevitable that the growth will continue. We already have 80% of people using one mobile phone for business and private use and many are also using one PC.

The survey concludes that companies must be “ready to compete in the emerging war for talent. Tomorrow’s workforce will increasingly expect to work in a hyperconnected communications environment and many will consider this a condition of employment.”

As globalization expands international networks, there has been an increased need for collaboration between groups that are geographically distant. Irv Rothman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard’s Financial Services division, for years has traveled at least once a quarter with his top staff from his New Jersey base, to Hewlett Packard’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, California. After the six hour flight, they would meet with management for about an hour, and then fly back home.

Thanks to Halo, Hewlett Packard’s video conference system, this year, Rothman hasn’t traveled to California at all. Online meetings and video conferences allow him and his team to conduct the same business without leaving the New Jersey office. His company saves on constantly increasing travel expenses, and Rothman and his staff aren’t burdened with the wear and tear of a full day of business travel.

As the economy slows down, many corporations have slashed their travel budgets. The International Air Transport Association recently reported that business and first-class travel has experienced the biggest plunge in five years. While reduced travel is common in an economic down-turn, for many companies it’s unlikely that travel will rebound when the economy does. Across the US, companies are ditching conventional business travel for technologies such as audio and video conference, webcasts and online meetings. With online collaboration technologies becoming less expensive and oil prices increasing the cost of travel, for many companies, there’ll be no good reason to ever look back.

ConferencePlus, Inc. a provider of web conferencing, and audio/video conferencing services, today announced the launch of Share Portal, a content management tool for online conferencing. Share Portal is the backbone of a suite of services that will allow ConferencePlus customers to store, publish, and share all their web conferencing content, including video conference recordings, and other media files and documents. These various files can then be shared with other users on a secure website.

ConferencePlus President and CEO Tom Reedy on SharePortal:

We’ve had a long track record of managing the highly customized and complex events of major companies.We realized there was an unmet need for an easy way to distribute their highly valuable content. Two years ago, we began proactively addressing this need. For these customers, we developed custom portals that contain not only content that has been generated from our services, but we’re taking their archived content and other files and adding that to their portal site as well.

Share Portal will be embedded into the ConferencePlus account dashboard giving customers an easy way to store, publish, and share the captured content from their video and web conferences. This enhancement to the dashboard interface adds a feature set that already includes the ability to schedule and edit automated audio and video conference calls, launch web conferences, and view service history and charges from previous meetings.

The launch of Share Portal is the first in a suite of offerings from ConferencePlus that will include the ability to store and publish presentation files, online web presentations, webcasts, videos, podcasts, and any other relevant content. Subsequent releases planned over the next year will give online conferencing users more content types to work with, more security options, enhanced branding capabilities, and other functionality to enhance ease of use.

On Thursday, New Yorkers and Londoners had a direct connection without benefit of cable TV or video conferencing, courtesy of an unusual live optical hookup created by a conceptual artist with a tale of a long-lost tunnel. The telectroscope is the invention of Paul St George, who instead of explaining the video conference technology involved in the project, prefers to stick to his story that the machine was started by his great-grandfather in Victorian times and transmits images via a tunnel under the ocean.

The “optical” device was placed at the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn and another one on the Thames River in London on Thursday. Passer-by’s on both sides of the Atlantic could see their trans-Atlantic counterparts, and many waved and wrote greetings to each other in real time on wipe-off message boards.

From St George’s website:

[He] has always been concerned with questioning the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed. His work is also often associated with different realities, spectacle and viewer participation.”

The telectroscope will remain operational and on display until June 15^th.

Today, Persony, a startup from Los Gatos, California, announced the release of a new integrated audio and web conference recording solution designed for conferencing service providers. Persony’s integrated solution allows a conference moderator to simultaneously record audio and web conferences from an easy-to-use web interface and create a synchronized recording that can be played from any web browser. The solution is a companion application to the Persony Web Conferencing 2.0, a leading private label web and video conferencing solution, in use by many conferencing service providers.

Integrated recording simplifies the making of synchronized audio and web conference recordings. Unlike other web conferencing recording solutions which require a meeting participant to record a conference call on the participant’s computer using special phone-to-pc hardware, Persony’s solution records the audio and web conference directly on the server and requires no special setup or hardware on the participant’s computer. A conference moderator can initiate the recording of both the audio and web conference with a single click. Recording are available immediately for playback and does not require downloading any additional software. Participants also have the option to download the audio as an MP3 file for podcasting or playback on portable music devices. The add-on module also allows a moderator to easily control and manage an audio conference, including muting, un-muting, hanging up a call, or dialing out to a participant.

Persony’s recording solution can be hosted by any service provider and without per-minute usage fees. Persony has partnered with ThinkEngine, an audio conference bridge manufacturer, to add controls and recording of any audio conference calls hosted on a ThinkEngine VSR1000 from a Persony web conference interface. Service providers can host a ThinkEngine voice router in their facilities.

The requirement for greater personal productivity and an increased awareness of the environment has led to a boom in the video conferencing and online collaboration market in Europe. Two recent studies released by Wainhouse Research show that across Europe, revenue from audio conferencing increased 37% and web conferencing saw a 50% revenue growth in 2007.

The data projects that the overall European market for online collaboration & conferencing services will grow to over $1 billion in 2008, and market analysis shows the potential market size to be nearly four times that. With prices for online meeting services approaching that of a typical long distance call, the barriers to more widespread usage are limited only by training, awareness and adoption of the technology.

The 2008 European Collaboration Services Market study offers a current market sizing and 5-year projection for audio and web conferencing, and other online collaboration technologies across the 12 major markets in Europe. Forecast data includes attended and unattended audio minute volume and revenue as well as web conferencing and video bridging services revenue.

Nimbuzz has launched a free mobile phone application that supports voice, telepresence, and SMS. The Java and Symbian client software will work across more than 500 handsets, and an iPhone client is being developed. The new Nimbuzz app will allow users to make and receive calls across 50 countries, particularly emerging markets where PCs are still too expensive for many people. The technology will offer free mobile VoIP, limited web conferencing via audio conference calling, IM and group chat and online collaboration, sending files across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including apps/widgets for Facebook and Myspace.

Nimbuzz was founded by Dutch mobile veterans Evert Jaap Lugt and Martin Smink, the company was most recently funded to the tune of $10 million by Mangrove Capital Partners (the original Skype investor) and says it already has 500,000 registered users since the beta launched last year.

Nimbuzz is one of about a dozen other startup companies that have offer complete mobile services to customers that purchase data-only plans from their carriers. Users are then only charged the flat-rate data fee from their provider, and all calling and web conferencing features are then available through Nimbuzz. It’s not entirely clear what their profit strategy is, they may eventually charge for the service once it’s out of beta, or they may push advertising to the client’s mobile phone. Either way, Nimbuzz and its competitors are likely to force mobile phone carriers to offer more competitive pricing on their services.

HyLighter, is a new document collaboration service now in beta testing. It delivers benefits unavailable in more generic online collaboration services — most notably, HyLighter has an intuitive color-coding scheme that highlights (hence the name) areas of concern to the business team.

HyLighter tracks comments and suggested changes separately, similar to Microsoft Office products, so they don’t obscure the original document. You can only do mark-ups in the HyLighter application. Actual changes can’t be made, which might make it unsuitable for some users. However, in situations where tracking collaborators’ concerns are important, it can be a useful tool in an online meeting or used in conjunction with video conferencing or web conferencing.

Being that HyLighter is still in beta testing, I wouldn’t recommend relying on it exclusively while working with important clients and documents. It does look to be a promising technology, and being a completely web-based application allows cross-platform compatibility without having to worry about downloading and installing additional software.

BeamYourScreen is a new web-based app for the Apple iPhone that lets users engage in desktop/screen sharing and Web conferences using the popular handheld device. iPhone owners can enter their session ID through the Safari web browser and view the host’s desktop in real-time. Anything loaded by the host such as websites, PDF files and Office documents can be shared. Up to 20 guests are supported.

The service operates through the web, so normal iPhone controls still apply, such as zoom and tilting between portrait and landscape modes. Users cannot however make a iPhone call and run the HTML viewer at the same time, as the current 2.5G iPhone does not support simultaneous voice/data connections. A separate phone is needed for receive audio conferencing.

With the immanent release of the 3G iPhone this Summer, and recently rumored native videoconferencing capabilities, BeamYourScreen is likely to be only the beginning of the mobile webconferencing and videoconferencing revolution.