We’ve all been there – when you’re on a conference call with many different team members, someone is bound to be a few minutes late. Whether they forgot about the meeting, were just held up in dialing in, or even someone dials into the wrong conference room by accident, it’s not uncommon to hear someone join in minutes after a meeting has begun. While a bit disruptive, this is hardly the worst downfall of conference calls (see: quality, bandwidth, lack of collaboration tools, presence, etc). However, this can be a problem when you are in a private or confidential meeting – don’t you wish you could virtually lock a conference call room, just as you would a meeting room?
appear.in thought about that too, and recently introduced an easier way to lock a room and allow people to knock and ask to be let in to a call.
Meeting organizers are able to press the “Lock room” button in the top bar of an appear.in meeting. The feature stems from some issues people reported about letting new participants into locked rooms. All participants currently will be able see people knocking and be able to respond.
Participants who are trying to get into a room can take a picture of themselves that will be shown to all the existing participants. Any feedback of the new feature can be sent to [email protected].
appear.in enables WebRTC video conversations with up to eight people for free. Users can create customizable conference room names (appear.in/_____) and easily share, lock or claim the room. There is also chat functionality, giving users another means of communication within the conference.
We caught up with Svein Willassen, founder and CTO of appear.in, a few weeks ago to discuss the company’s technology, implementations and plans for the future. The company ragets anyone who is fed up with the complexity involved in setting up existing video conferencing solutions, and who needs something simple that anyone can use without having to install applications or plugins, create accounts and exchange contact details. It’s a great solution for team meetings and external business meetings, and now, there can be a little more control over who is joining those meetings.
Dag-Inge Aas, software engineer at appear.in, will be speaking in a session at the upcoming WebRTC Conference & Expo, “Service Provider Views.” The session will feature Telenor, appear.in’s parent company, and other service providers on how they see using WebRTC in their offerings to enhance services and revenue. The event is happening June 17-19 in Atlanta, Ga., and will cover a wide range of other WebRTC topics, including revenue opportunities, business implementations, development challenges and different industry benefits.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
