We’re launching!

admin on February 7, 2012 · analytics, autopilot, General, launch, lifehack.org, lifehacker, News, thenextweb, Uncategorized, venturebeat, webinar, , , , , , , , · Comment

After nearly a year in BETA we’re launching MeetingBurner to the public with brand new features we’re incredibly excited about, and a three-tiered account model that starts at the best free solution in the market, all the way up to a new premium account with all the bells and whistles you can imagine.

Over our beta period saw overwhelming demand as we signed up more than 20,000 small business users and hosted over 100,000 meeting attendees.

More than 75% of our users switched to MeetingBurner from GoToMeeting or Webex saying that their favorite feature was the “ease of use” and that makes us incredibly happy.

New Features

Today we’ve released the following brand-new features:

  • Meeting Autopilot – Record a meeting on Sunday, have it play on a Tuesday as if it’s live.
  • Paypal Integration – Charge attendees directly from the registration screen for your premium content.
  • Mobile – Native android functionality and iPhone/iPad apps to view meetings!
  • Gargantuan Meeting Rooms – We’re launching meeting rooms that hold up to 1,000 attendees (need more than that do you? Contact us!)

With these new features we’re rolling out three tiers of service:

We’re Launching Three Tiers of Service:

  • MeetingBurner FREE – Fast, beautiful, and always 100% free. Up to 15 participants in online meetings, integrated phone conference line, email support, and no ads to your users like other freemium solutions. In other words the best Free Webinar platform in the world.
  • MeetingBurner PRO– $39.95 a month. You’ll get everything in FREE plus you can host up to 50 participants, you get full telephone support for your questions, meeting recording, enhanced security encryption, and more.
  • MeetingBurner PREMIER – $99.95 a month. Everything in PRO + up to 1000 participants, telephone support, autopilot meetings, PayPal integration, meeting analytics, and more.

Check out our handy-dandy feature list to understand the exact features that come with every single level of service by clicking here.

We’ve Gotten Great Coverage You Should Check Out:

We’re thrilled to add to the list of press reviews and mentions that we’ve collected in BETA with some launch exclusive press, check out the stories below:

Beta Users – THANK YOU!

We are eternally grateful to our tens-of-thousands of beta users for helping us get MeetingBurner out of the gates.

If you were a BETA user be sure to check your email for a special gift from us to you!

 

New Full-screen Mode, Improved Sharing Privacy and More!

admin on October 6, 2011 · Beta updates, webinar, , , , , , , · Comment

We’re excited to share the news that our top two requested features have now been implemented! We also made some great infrastructure changes that should make connecting to meetings a smoother process. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with suggestions – we appreciate your feedback!

Full-screen Mode

Our full-screen mode now collapses the modules on the left of the screen so your participants can focus exclusively on your presentation.

Improved Sharing Privacy

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature which enhances your privacy when running a meeting. Let’s say you’re sharing your browser window and suddenly an instant message pops up. In the past, your participants would have seen your IM window and the contents. Now, we gray out anything that you haven’t specifically decided to share. For now, this is a Windows only feature but we’re hard at work on a Mac version.

Connection Infrastructure

We developed a smarter connection algorithm that will try all means to get your meeting started successfully, whether you have a tricky firewall or just plain old internet connectivity issues. We also try to reconnect you should you get booted during a meeting.

Paypal Integration – Coming soon!

We have a fully-integrated Paypal solution coming soon, so you’ll be able to easily charge for your meetings. We expect to have this ready in November, so keep your eyes peeled!

Feature Highlight – “Schedule Similar”

Do you host the same meeting over and over? Then you’ll probably want to take advantage of our “Schedule Similar” feature. It duplicates an existing meeting and allows you to make any additional customizations that you might want. It’s a great time saver! To access this feature, click the My Meetings tab, then click Meeting Archive. Simply locate the meeting you want to duplicate and click “Schedule Similar”.

Thanks for using MeetingBurner, and keep the great suggestions and feedback coming.

 

Webinar Analytics-Is Anyone Paying Attention?

admin on August 18, 2011 · analytics, Beta updates, Uncategorized, webinar, , , , , , , , , , , · Comment

Our new Meeting Temperature Analytics feature will revolutionize the way you run webinars. This feature provides:

  • Interaction – Your participants rate your meeting
  • Instant Feedback – You can view their feedback in real time
  • Detailed Analytics – Get a detailed post-meeting analytics report

Are your meeting participants bored? Or are they on the edge of their seats waiting to hear what you say next?

Our awesome new feature – the Meeting Thermometer – will help you find out.

Here’s how it works:

Using a simple slider, your participants rate your meeting, letting you know if you’re hot (or not).

Not only do you get that feedback in real time, you also get a beautiful graph of their average feedback that you can play along with a recording.

In other words, you can go back later and watch your presentation and see exactly what parts went over well, and which ones tanked. (Or, as The Next Web author Cheri Macale more kindly put it in her recent article about MeetingBurner, “which segments might need a bit of sprucing up.”)

In our Meeting Temperature report, we also show you the hottest and coldest 30 seconds of your presentation, letting you instantly see which parts of your presentation are great, and which ones need work.

This feature is going to revolutionize participant feedback and interaction in the webinar industry.

And as MeetingBurner beta users, it’s free for you to use (for now).

To check it out, just login and schedule a meeting.

We hope you love this tool as much as we loved building it, but more than that, we hope it helps you hold even better meetings.

Enjoy the new feature!

We’ve received some great press recently about MeetingBurner. Here are 4 articles you might want to read in order to learn more and a video walkthrough:

 

Beta Updates Round Three: Recordings, Skype and SMS Integration

admin on July 21, 2011 · Beta updates, General, News, , , , , , · Comment

We want to take this opportunity to share with you some new improvements and highlight a couple features that we hope you’ll take advantage of. We also have a few cool new features up our sleeve that we’re excited to tell you about. But first, we want to share some great news!

We’ve gone ahead and doubled the room size from 25 to 50 participants for all Beta users. Plus, we’re starting to open up a few 100 participant rooms. If you want to be one of the first to try them out, email support@meetingburner.com and request a bigger room!

Improvements

Listed below are just a few of the improvements we’ve been making to MeetingBurner.

Recordings

By popular demand, we focused our improvments on recordings. They’re not only more reliable, they’re also processed faster. And, we send you a notification when the processing is finished so you don’t have to keep checking to see when they show up. Not to mention we size them appropriately so they actually fit on your screen! We also added the ability to easily share your recordings on Facebook.

Advanced Settings Page

We added some new advanced option to our Settings page. Don’t like Auto-pause? Now you can turn it off. Click My Meetings and then the Settings button to access this. On that page, you can also adjust sharing quality, screen loading style, and more. Check it out so you can set up your meeting room exactly how you want it.

Export Participant List

You can now export your participant list! To access this feature, click on My Meetings -> Meeting Archive -> Participant Summary, and then Export.

Infrastucture Updates

We also made lots of good techie behind-the-scenes updates so that your meetings are more secure and reliable.

Feature Highlights

This week we’re going to highlight two features:

Skype Integration

Have Skype? You can click a single button and instantly connect in with your conference bridge. Your participants can do it too. This is a great option if you’re international, or if you just don’t feel like picking up a phone.

Text Message Reminders

Text Message Reminders allow your participants to enter their cell phone number on your meeting registration form. That allows us to send them a quick meeting reminder 10 minutes before your meeting. If you haven’t tried this yet, now’s your chance. This is a premier account level feature but we’re giving it to everyone during our Beta period. This feature is found under My Meetings -> Manage this Meeting -> Registration.

Coming Soon

  • First things first, we are working on a full-screen mode where you can minimize the panel on the left to get maximum screen real estate. We’ve received this request multiple times so I know many of you will be excited that we’re getting it done.
  • While the Android phones can view meetings without a hitch, we still need to do some work so the iPhone and iPad can do the same.
  • And finally, we’re going to launch a feature at the end of the month that I can’t actually tell you about. It’s nothing I’ve seen before in this industry. I’m desperate to give you a hint but don’t want to ruin the surprise. Stay tuned.

Alright, that’s all the updates this time around. I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who is using our software and helping to make it better. For those of you who have taken the time to submit feedback and suggestions, you get a slightly bigger thank you. We really are listening to what you have to say and using it to shape MeetingBurner into the best meeting platform out there.

Happy Meeting!

 

Why we’re building a boring business (and you should too) . . .

admin on July 12, 2011 · General, News · Comment

After talking up MeetingBurner with my friend Noah Kagan and his AppSumo team, Noah deadpanned “I don’t understand how anybody could get up in the morning and want to work on online meetings.”

Ouch Noah. Ouch.

But Noah had a point – the world of online meetings just sounds, well, boring.

It’s been done, it’s a crowded space, and I even had trouble mustering any excitement out of our PR rep when I first told her about what we were doing.

So why are we focused on online meetings?

Because online meetings ARE boring and disrupting a boring market is a great way to build a business . . .

A perfect example of “exciting vs. boring” is TechCrunch’s article-bias series.

For instance “TechCrunch’s combined coverage of five separate billion-dollar enterprise startups—Atlassian (9 stories), Palantir (7), ExactTarget (7), Workday (5), and Service-Now (1)—is less than its coverage of Chatroulette’s penis garden (36).”

The former five are behemoths reinventing and improving tools used by hundreds-of-thousands of businesses every day (and making a killing doing it).

The other is Chatroulette.

Do you remember cell phones before the iPhone?

 

The sexiest phone on the market in 2004.

Heck, BlackBerry was the most exciting company in the space because they – wait for it – actually let you email from your phone.

The entire SEGMENT was boring – it was dominated by old, tired enterprise players that thought that status-quo was just right.

A phone that flipped open was heralded as revolutionary industrial design in that market.

And then, in the span of 15 minutes, Steve Jobs single handedly revolutionized an industry with his first demo of the iPhone.

He reinvigorated the hottest market in the world, took a boring business segment and MADE it exciting, and has been in the money printing business ever since.

As 37signals’ article “Ten apps is all I need” points out, the iPhone was disruptive because it PERFECTED the features that users actually want!

And bringing online meetings up to that iPhone level is our vision for MeetingBurner.

Have you ever attended a GoToWebinar meeting (which has revenues in the hundreds of millions)?

Does the Windows XP–esque interface of their forced desktop app installation make you feel nostalgic?

How about this, have you ever spent the first 10 minutes of your meeting answering technical questions from guests that are still trying to figure out how to log in?

Most of what’s out there just feels enterprise, it’s not pleasant to use and they’re not innovating.

So we’re going to help online meetings reach their full potential by innovating around:

  • Speed – Attendees click once to join a meeting, and it loads lightning fast.
  • Simplicity – Grandma can join meetings without calling tech support.
  • Integration – Phone bridges and webinars in perfect harmony, fancy that.
  • Sharing – One-click to share a recorded meeting on YouTube? Check!
  • Price (err, lack thereof?) – Free, fully featured, non-ad-supported.
  • And one more BIG thing… But we can’t talk about that quite yet, follow us on twitter for an update right around the corner!

All of that stuff above actually works beautifully today – come see it in action right now just click here to receive instant access to MeetingBurner Beta!.

P.S. - Please do share this article if you liked it and leave your comments below – we’ll see you when you sign-up for MeetingBurner Beta!

More Beta Updates: Chat, YouTube, Improved sharing… and soon, mobile!

admin on June 21, 2011 · Uncategorized · Comment

We’ve been hard at work at MeetingBurner using YOUR feedback to improve the service. Over the past few weeks we have added many changes, including:

  • Improved sharing reliability
  • Exporting videos to YouTube
  • Fully integrated chat feature
  • Revised dashboard user interface

All of these improvements came from listening to YOU. We also wanted to give you a sneak peek at what’s coming next:

  • iPad viewer
  • Improved full screen mode
  • Short (twitter-friendly) meeting URLs – mee.tw

Thanks to each and every one of you for helping us create an amazing product!

Don’t forget to connect with us on Twitter and Facebook

Beta Updates: Round One (Phew!)

admin on May 26, 2011 · Beta updates, News · Comment

First of all thank you for the good tidings via Twitter – we feed off of your comments and excitement!

We’re working hard to build the best meeting platform in the world and a big THANK YOU to all of our beta users for holding hundreds of new meetings daily, and providing on-point feedback.

So after two weeks of happy chaos, here’s the latest Beta update list live today:

  • End Meeting is now a more logical process and works properly.
  • Skype integrated so you can call into a meeting without a real phone.
  • Improved Sharing App instruction screen that pops up when you startup.
  • We increased the maximum meeting room size to 50 participants.
  • The “hide participants” option for hosts works reliably now.
  • You can easily grant permission to another attendee to share their screen. EG – “Switch meeting host”
  • You can now invite 3 other people via invite system.
  • When you click “Start Sharing” the Sharing App will auto minimize out of the way to the toolbar / dock.
  • For Mac users the Sharing App icon in the dock will properly re-maximize the app when needed.


And the next items on our list that you’ve asked for:

  • Adding the ability to chat – Wow, we flat missed this one. Everybody wants it, so it’s coming!
  • Improved Sharing App –  We’re working to make the process easier and more efficient.
  • Tutorial Vids – You want to actually learn how to use all our cool features? Awesome! Coming soon.

Now please go forth, enjoy the new features and let us know how they work for you!

P.S. – Follow us on Twitter or join Beta now if you haven’t already.