PCWORLD (May/2005)

Face-to-face...from afar

Save time and money by trading in your plane tickets and hotel bills for Internet conferencing

With no up-front fees and at only $29 monthly per user for unlimited use, CloudMeeting appears to be making good use of the Internet's infrastructure to connect business people the world over. Better yet, the service had required that all users be paid subscribers, but that promises to change this month with the launch of a more flexible service model, permitting its business subscribers to invite up to 2 FreeGuest users at no additional charge to any meeting.

CloudMeeting's interface reminds one of Microsoft's MSN Messenger, with a contact list and the ability to exchange instant text messages. But it's possible to get up to 200 participants together in a single voice and video call, as well as share and edit documents, with changes updating in real time. Better yet, in a very secure environment everything is encrypted with a 128-bit key via SSL.

For Brandi Attorneys, a 30-year-old international firm with 65 lawyers in South America, CloudMeeting has been an ingredient in their international expansion, connecting professionals at their offices in Brazil , Argentina , Portugal and China . We formed a partnership with a firm in Beijing eight months ago and sent some of our attorneys there to get things started, explained Fernando Dionisio, Brandi's managing partner. We've been able to work on deals Brazil-China, for example, as if we were in the same office. O ur attorneys don't feel as isolated, and we have been saving thousands of dollars a month in phone calls to boot. Brandi also used its same CloudMeeting user accesses to hold a seminar for Chinese executives, connecting a projector and loudspeakers to a notebook in an auditorium.