My agency, Comunicano and I have been involved in a few successes in the conferencing field, starting with SightSpeed (now a part of Logitech), HiDefConferencing (now part of GoToMeeting but originally acquired by Citrix), WebDialogs (acquired by IBM and at the core of SameTime), plus we've kicked around WebRTC since it's earliest of days, working with leader Temasys, pioneer of ORTC, Hookflash, and others. That's why when it comes to being impressed by something new in video conferencing, or conferencing, I usually hit pause, as not much motivates me, as I've pretty much settled on Zoom and UberConference, while canning paid subscriptions to GoToMeeting and Cisco's WebEx last year.
So when I saw Acrossio on pal Tsahi's WebRTC Index I figured it was at least worth a look, as here's a company openly admitting they're WebRTC based, as the collision of VoIP and WebRTC was one of my predictions for 2017.
Acrossio instantly got my attention with Living Meeting on their home page. But, as I began to play with Acrossio I realized their core value isn't Living Meetings, it's smarter meetings. They do this by real time tagging as part of the note taking (I wish I could integrate their Tasks with Basecamp or Trello, send notifications via Slack-especially if you assign a task to someone not in the meeting. Right now they integrate with LinkedIn, and do a better job of it than Hookflash's original attempt by avoiding being the calling company for LinkedIn but leveraging LinkedIn's sign in for sign up.
What's more there's lots of power in the way they've approached video conferencing. For starters Acrossio offers four different modes of conferencing: Online, Local, Self Recording and From External Content such as YouTube or Vimeo.
While you can share files, Acrossio lacks on screen sharing of files in the session. So while you can share the video, you can't share a Google Slides document in the session the way you can with UberConference. A minor drawback and one I expect them to solve overtime.
My feeling is Acrossio is really just starting out, so while they are listed as five years old, it feels like their approach with WebRTC is taking video conferencing in a different and more robust direction, as the note taking and tagging, assigning tasks, and making those actions a part of the actual conversation is almost novel, and really is long needed functionality in video conferencing. The self recording mode, which for the work team sharing and tasking. They have a Windows Desktop app, that appears to be a messaging app. There's various ways to invite people to join, maybe too, including Slack integration so I get the sense there's more to come. Lots more.
There's something here, and I hope to learn more about Acrossio as time goes on.
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