The Possibilities of Web-Based Teleconferencing

A teleconference is live communication among persons and machines that are far away from one another but are connected by a system that uses various services, such as telephone, telegraph, teletype, radio, or television. With its help, you can even connect with people who are at the other side of the globe, and talk to them as if they were sitting right next to you.

Computers have given new meaning to teleconferencing, because with their help, you can do a lot more than just talk. In a web conference, the group can share applications or instant messages. There are many solutions offered through networks, such as Microsoft's NetMeeting.

Two or more persons at different places can make a conference call by using a computer network for talking or sharing visuals. A point-to-point (two-person) video conferencing system is just like a video telephone. The people making the conference have a video camera, microphone, and speakers on their computers. As the two participants speak to each other, they can hear each others voices through their speakers, and images in front of the video camera appear on the other participant's monitor. In other words, you can see and hear your partner (who may live at the other end of the world) as if he or she were there in the same room with you.

In multipoint videoconferencing, three or more participants can also communicate as if they were sitting right next to each other, as members of the same team. Until the mid-90s, hardware costs were so high that videoconferencing was too expensive for most organizations, but this is changing very fast. In the next few years, this type of teleconference may become a booming segment of the computer industry.

Today, it may be difficult to get everyone together for a call, so now you can make use of Digitized Replay, where you can record your conference call and others can listen to it later. You can also ask for a recorded teleconference on a CD. You just have to inform the specialist on how to record your call when you reserve the service. Some teleconferencing services can involve 20 to 1,000 or even more participants in a conference, and they also have features by which you can know in advance the people who will make the teleconference, as well as how many people will take part in a call. Such services can be used for effective team meetings, sessions or customer contact events. These features are ideal for international businesses having many offices around the world.

Some of the other internet teleconference solutions include various Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) applications and Skype, which is the one of the most popular conference call solutions for personal use. Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger are also also very popular solutions for web-based conferencing.

Go on to read about the benefits of telephone conference calling