Speaker 1: Hey everybody, it's Lon Seidman. It's time once again for your weekly wrap-up, and this week we're going to be talking about online meeting platforms. We're going to talk about my two favorite ones, and I'm going to give you some tips for more effective remote meeting. Lots to talk about now, so let's get to it. So my two favorite conferencing apps I've used this week so far are Zoom and Google Hangouts Meet. both of these are premium services. You get Hangouts as part of your G Suite subscription, so you get a lot of other stuff which we'll talk about in a second along with that. Zoom is a standalone subscription service and I think you're paying about $15 a month per host to use the Zoom service, but I really like Zoom. I'm actually quite impressed with it the more I've been playing around over the last week or so with it. I've got it up here on my screen and what I wanted to show you was just a few of the things that I thought were kind of noteworthy. So the first thing is that it's very easy to share your screen, which is something you can do on most of these platforms, but Zoom does a really nice job of scaling the image and making it look good, and I was really pleased with how all of that's working, and it's pretty simple to get up and running. What's interesting though is if you go over to the advanced section here, you can actually bring in a second camera, so if you have like an overhead microscope kind of thing or something that you want to accompany what you're doing, you can have that on simultaneously, you can show a portion of your screen, you can even share files with your collaborators as well. So there's a lot of cool stuff that's kind of embedded into the Zoom interface here that I thought was rather unique and interesting. Another cool feature of Zoom is the fact that you can live stream your sessions out to the world. It supports Facebook and YouTube natively, and you can also have it go to any RTMP source. And why this is interesting is that you can do all of this without having to use your own bandwidth to do it. So when you enable this live streaming feature, this is going to transmit from the Zoom cloud servers to Facebook, YouTube, and whatever you set up for a custom streaming service. And I think it can do all of of these simultaneously as well. This is a really good solution for local governments because those institutions have to have meetings in public. They're not able to meet in public right now, so this is a way to get the meeting out so people can observe it, but you're not giving out the meeting ID number, so no one's going to come in and interrupt the meeting. You can figure out how you want to bring that comment in later, but this is a really cool feature and something that I haven't seen on the other platforms. And oftentimes, what you have to do is stream it out yourself by taking a computer and grabbing its screen output, and then using OBS or some other kind of streaming application to get stuff going. Having it integrated right into this is really, really useful. What it will do is kind of just automatically switch between speakers. If you put up something on screen, like a screenshot or whatever that you're sharing, it will leave that locked on, and you'll be able to see the people on the side. You can also switch to a gallery view so that you can have multiple people on screen at once as well. And as the host, I believe you're the one that sets that look for the video. So really good stuff, a really good solution again for local governments, but really anyone that's trying to have a stream of their Zoom session without allowing everybody in that can interrupt. You have to be a paying member for this and you want to look for this setting here in your settings screen because this is not enabled by default, so you have to turn this on and then enable the platforms that you want to connect to. And I found it works really easily with YouTube and Facebook. I haven't done the custom one yet. I might try that a little later, but I think it should be pretty simple to get everything going with that. And for me, that's really the killer feature of Zoom and why I might use it for something that I might not use Google Meet for. It's that useful. So while Zoom is a great meeting platform and that live stream feature is a real killer feature, there are some things that really bug me about Zoom. The first of course is the price tag. You're looking at $15 a month per host. So let's say you've got four or five people in your organization that need to host meetings at the same time. You're going to need to pay for each of them to have an account. There is a free tier that gives you a meeting maximum of 40 minutes, and I think right now they have blocked the ability to take people in via the telephone. So if you have people that insist on calling in on the phone, if you are on the free tier, that's not going to work right now. If you are a school system, they are giving away some of these paid accounts for now. So I would definitely suggest taking a look at that, especially if you have board of education meetings to run, for example, but everyone else has got to pay and it could really add up in price. My other gripe with Zoom is that it's not the easiest thing for people to join, because what happens is you send out the meeting ID and then it really insists on people installing software to get it to run, and you don't have to do the software. It's not required. In fact, it'll run just fine in a browser, but it really, really pushes people to download and install software, which I'm a bit nervous about. And the reason why I'm nervous about it is that Zoom has had some problems with their software in the past, including a pretty big vulnerability on the Mac last year that was so bad that Apple themselves actually fixed it before Zoom stepped in to fix it. So their track record with addressing some of these security issues wasn't good. And this software is just kind of sitting there all the time. And that was something that really bothered me about it. So in addition to just the overall complexity for a technology neophyte to get it working, there is also the issues of security and the company's track record and that's stuff that you have to keep in mind. Now, my favorite system from a usability standpoint is Google Hangouts Meet. This is part of the G Suite system that you can subscribe to from Google. So I have a subscription for my business. So me and the two people that help me out are all connected on that. And you get a lot of other stuff with it, but Google Meet is part of the deal. And what's nice about it is that it's not hard to get people up and running. There's no software to install unless they're using a mobile app. So right now I've got a meeting here started on my phone. If I go over to my computer screen here, you can see I've got an incognito window up. I'm not logged into anything. I can go to the meeting address that I just sent to my participant here, allow the camera and everything, and then I can just join it here just by saying test. And if I approve it on the phone here to let them in, oh, there goes my voice echoing back, here I am in the meeting, and everything is working just fine. It's so easy. You can see there's no software nagging here. I didn't have to download anything. It just runs in the browser. Now, another neat feature of Google Meet is that it has a built-in closed captioning system. So if you go down to the bottom of the screen here and click on Turn on Captions, you will see that as I talk, It is transcribing what I say, and it will do that for every participant. It's not perfect. It's going to make all the same mistakes that your YouTube captioning system makes, but it's automatic and built in. Zoom requires somebody to manually do the captioning if you want to include closed captionings in your presentations and meetings. So there's some cool stuff in here that I think makes this a really nice system for meeting people online. You, of course, have all the same abilities to share your screen. I don't believe you can share files through this, but you do have some other things like recording the meeting. Right now, they allow recording for all service tiers, but normally that requires the next step up on your Google subscription. There is a live streaming feature on Google Meet. However, it only will live stream to people that have an email address and an account within your G Suite domain. So for example, I can't stream my Google Meet out to more than the two people that I have in my subscription account at the moment. I'm hoping Google might relax that a bit and allow those to go over to YouTube. I think that would make Google Meet kind of the killer platform for me right now. But as of this moment, it will only stream to people that are in your domain. Now, another thing I like about Google Meeting here is that if somebody from outside the domain wants to try to get into your meeting, if they happen to get a hold of the meeting link, for example, it will not let them in unless somebody grants them entry. And the only people that can grant entry are current members of the domain. And I think that provides a good layer of security, at least in the sense that you won't have people popping in and interrupting your meeting unless they've been specifically authorized to be there. The way you authorize outside people to come into a meeting is by setting up the meeting through Google Calendar and everything within the Google Suite is very tightly integrated. And I think for $6 a month, The G Suite is a pretty good deal for a small operation like mine, because you do get a pretty robust conferencing system with the Hangouts thing we just looked at. You get a Slack-like chat room with their Hangouts chat, which is coming along pretty nicely. It's actually fairly functional at this point. You got the Dropbox alternative with 30 gigs of storage through Google Drive. That, of course, is shared between all of your applications here, but it's still a pretty good amount of storage to work with. We use that quite a bit for moving editing projects around here. You get all your Google Docs, and Sheets, and Slides, and Forms, and the Website Builder, yada, yada, yada. It goes on, but you get all of that as part of the deal. And in many ways, you're getting what you would normally pay for five or six different subscriptions in one. And I think the value proposition is pretty strong there. Individually, none of these things are better than their alternatives out there, but they're good enough, I think, for a lot of small organizations to get by. And then if you wanna spend more money, at 12 bucks a month, you get a terabyte of storage. When you hit five users, you get unlimited cloud storage between them. So there's a lot of things to look at here. And I think it's something worth exploring if you were about to go out and pay for Zoom. I think you'll get a lot more out of the Google package. And if your company's using the Google package already, you already have Meets. If it's not showing up on your system, you need to call your administrator and have them activate it. So for example, our school system had disabled it because the kids were using it to have chats with each other and they were concerned what might be going on on a school-sponsored system, so they had shut it off. They turned it back on now so that we can have meetings with teachers remotely. So it's in there, even on the low-cost plan, and again, definitely something worth looking at if you are looking to pay for a meeting platform. So both platforms are really good, but my pick really is Google Meet. I think from a cost standpoint, it's better, and I also think it's better from a user standpoint because you're not nagging people to install software that slows down the process. Click, click, and you're on is so much better than click, download, install, and then, of course, wait for tech support to come in and bail you out. So normally it's fine for most people, but I think there's a lot of, again, tech-unsavvy people that might run into some trouble with Zoom. And I wanted to give you some tips about how to make these meetings better, because I've been on a bunch of these this week, and they get very frustrating very quickly. And I think there's some things that might help if you are responsible for running one of these meetings or trying to help make them better. The first thing, and this is really important, is to train non-tech savvy users first. Both Zoom and Google Meet allow people to go into the rooms before the meeting starts. And you might want to have people go in and get ready ahead of the meeting by a couple of hours just so that you know it's all going to work when it's time to actually get down to it. Because in many cases, these things don't typically happen before the meeting. And you end up spending a half hour trying to get everybody in versus getting everybody in to start the productive workflow. Another thing I strongly suggest is that if you have non-tech savvy users, educating them not only on how to get in, but also the etiquette of being in, which is muting your microphone or muting your phone if they're calling in, and showing them how to do that, and really drilling it in that you shouldn't unmute unless you got something to say. I think those are really important things because much time is wasted continually reminding people to mute phones. The second is to use video whenever possible for a couple of reasons. One, I think it keeps people focused because if you start playing video games or looking away, everyone who's on the call is going to see that. And I think having people's attention will lead to a more efficient meeting. And I really can't stress that enough. If you have people that are resistant to video, you really gotta push it, because I think it's something that is critical for a productive meeting. The other thing I suggest you do is look in the camera, because a lot of people are gonna look down because they're gonna try to talk to the person down there. And if you're having a hard time with that, what I would even do is resize your window super small for when you are presenting, so that you're really forcing yourself to look at that camera. And if you have to look down just to see what somebody's saying to you, they're not gonna see your eye shift all that much. And that's been something that's really helped me over the years to try to keep my eyes on that little webcam because direct eye contact, just like YouTube, is very important in one of these meetings. And if you're trying to convince people of something, you're going to be less persuasive if you're looking down as opposed to looking into their eyes through the camera. So that little resize trick, I think, will help out quite a bit in getting you to be more of an effective communicator there. Now these next set of tips involve some leadership decisions that I found work really well when you've got a good leader at the helm. The first is that you want to assign a host to these meetings, preferably somebody in a leadership position in the organization who can lead things, because if you just have a free for all, you're never gonna get anything done. You've gotta have an agenda, you've gotta stick to that agenda, and you need somebody that will cut off people that are talking for too long and keep people focused on getting this meeting over with as soon as possible. It might be fun to meet in person, it's not gonna be as fun to meet over one of these platforms if this is not part of what your organization normally does. That person also needs to limit discussion and make these meetings about finalizing decisions. Hopefully, these small groups that are getting together in a larger group have done a lot of work to get their things to a good place, and I think that leader needs to decide on their own whether or not the direction that team took is the right way to go. So the question for the group is, are there any objections as opposed to what do you think? Just because what do you think is spitballing, I think having some real firm directions right now, given how difficult it is to get work done in the first place, is really going to make a big difference. And that's where good leaders are really important here, both within your organization, but also on these calls so that the meeting purpose is directed in a better way. The last thing, of course, is to meet only when absolutely necessary. You might want to have an end of the day powwow or something. That's fine. But you really want to be careful about holding too many of these meetings throughout the day, especially randomly. Let's get the team together and discuss this question that came up. No, the leader should say, yes, that's the way we should do it and then have that is anyone objecting question later in the day. When you have the ability to drop in on each other in person in a regular work environment, That will be better, but I think right now it's going to be really hard to replicate your normal workflow, and you've got to keep things moving for the good of the company and for morale. There is a really good amount of resources out there for you for looking at how to do this remote work and thinking about remote work differently versus how it might work when you're in person. And one of the best guides I've seen comes from Basecamp. This is an organization that makes a really good project management application, and they are a completely remote company. And they've put a lot of thought into the management of this company that they have put together almost entirely remotely. They're very profitable, they're doing well, and they really think about this stuff. And they put all of their thoughts down on paper. And this is just one of a bunch of documents, and I think they've even written books about their workflow, that I think you should check out if you're in a management role, because it'll get you thinking about some of the challenges remote working creates and some of the opportunities that you might be able to find if you approach it the right way. And I found their publications here to be really useful. And you can start for free just by reading some of their blog posts here. So hopefully these tips were useful to you. I've gotten a lot of good feedback on these discussions over the last couple of weeks, given our current shared situation. And these tips and everything else we're doing today is brought to you by all of you, the supporters of the LandatTV network here. I wanna thank Jim Peter, who made a gold-level contribution this past week, along with Kevin Burns, who contributed on the DonorBox platform. On the YouTube Memberships Program, we welcomed Ken Lamb, Travis Rhodes, and Monterio Weaver. And then Cedar Lake made a contribution via Super Chat on one of our live streams a little bit earlier in the week. If you wanna support the channel, you can. You can go to lon.tv slash support and make a monthly or a one-time contribution to the channel. And of course, you have the option to do the YouTube Membership Program, where you get some really cool badges next to your name when you leave a comment or chat. And I wanna thank everyone for their ongoing support of the channel and everyone who watches on an ongoing basis too because all of those things equal channel growth. So let's take a look at the week in review. We did three live streams this week. We were poking around with a bunch of different stuff that made their way into regular videos and we'll be having some more videos from those sessions being posted later this week. We had nothing on the extras channel, but at least two of the videos that we shot during the live streams will show up on the Extras channel, so stay tuned for that. On the main channel, we looked at these new Mocha adapters from GoCoax. They're Mocha 2.5 adapters, so their backbone runs at two and a half gigabits per second. A lot of you were very interested in that video. It was one of my most popular videos of the last two months or so, so glad you all found those useful. Incidentally, not only are these the fastest Mocha adapters you can get at the moment as a consumer, They are also the least expensive, too, at 59 bucks. A good deal. You can find the video link down below along with everything else in the master playlist. We also looked at the Lenovo C940-15, which is a two-in-one with an NVIDIA GPU built in. And we took a look at how mouse and trackpad support is working on the iPad. And I hadn't even thought about the fact that the day that I posted this video was the day that the new iPad came out, the new iPad Pro. So, of course, I've got my daughter's pink beat-up iPad desk and everyone else has got a beautiful iPad Pro. It just shows you what we do on this channel versus others. Now this week on the channel I'm still trying to figure out everything I want to do, but I do hope to get to these YI security cameras. Very low price cameras, kind of an alternative to the Wyze cameras. They offer more options for camera type, so we'll explore those hopefully. I got to get that going. We're also going to look at a new NDI app for iOS. You can now transmit your iPad or iPhone screen over your network with very low latency into OBS or vMix or a TriCaster, so this will be a continuation of our production series. I love NDI and I love sharing with you some ways to make your workflow more efficient. I've got a couple other things coming up as well and if you want to get notified when those things do come up you can click on the bell to get notified every time we do anything on this channel. We have other channels you can find me on including the extras channel that we just mentioned. I got the podcast, which is an audio version of this show, and I'm behind a little bit on posting. We'll get those caught up this week. We have the snippets channel, which has some snippets of different things that we've done across various channels here in my growing network. We have the live streams, and you can find archive.lan.tv live streams, and of course my Amazon page, where we also stream live, and you can follow me there too to get notified when we go up on air. We have some ways to engage with the channel through my email list. The Facebook group is a great way to connect with me and other viewers. I'm really enjoying that experience. We're almost to, I think, a thousand members now, so it's growing every week and I really appreciate everybody stopping in. And then we've got my store where you can buy previously used items. I'm still shipping, by the way, because I'm just calling up the guy to pick them up. So if you are looking for some good deals on things that I've reviewed previously on the channel, you can check them out there. I am hopefully towards the end of the week going to go through my box of stuff here and see what else I can add to the mix so stay tuned for that and if you want to get notified whenever I do update the store you can go to lon.tv slash store alert I have heard from a few viewers that they are not receiving these emails even though they're subscribed so if you can email me at lon at lon.tv with your email address I'm going to troubleshoot this with my email vendor and you'll hear about who that vendor is if they're unable to fix this because I'm paying a good amount of money for that service and that is going to do it for this week's weekly wrap-up. I wanna thank you all for tuning in. Hopefully this focus on remote work over the last two or three weeks has been helpful to you. Let me know down in the comments below, and I would love to hear your stories, good and bad, about remote meetings this week. It might be a fun follow-up video to do in the future. Until next time, this is Lon Seidman. Thanks for watching. This channel is brought to you by the Lon.tv supporters, including gold-level supporters, the Four Guys with Quarters podcast, Tom Albrecht, If you want to help the channel, you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month. Head over to lon.tv slash support to learn more. And don't forget to subscribe. Visit lon.tv slash s.