Posts Tagged ‘bill’

Bill Birnie – VP, General Manager at Panasonic Panasonic has recently presented a new product called VC500 HD Visual Communications. It is the world’s first full HD video conferencing solution and it is entirely made of Panasonic products – the same brand is behind everything from the camera to the video codec. With this product you are getting full HD – 1080i with 60 fps, at the lowest possible bandwidth. That makes it affordable because you don’t have to pay for tons of bandwidth while still getting a state of the art technology. Panasonic’s HD Visual Communications is a solution for businesses that need to do true collaboration

Who wouldn’t want to be sitting in the business class lounge of an airport sipping champagne and eating a delicious dinner? Unfortunately, the reality of business travel is rarely as glamorous. For many senior executives, business travel is actually pretty dreary. The rise of video conferncing systems has in part been due to executives wanting to cut down on the time spent travelling to meetings that could just as easily be conducted virtually.

It’s not just executives that need to travel to meetings, all grades of office employees find that visiting clients is becoming more and more necessary, particularly when the economy goes sour.

All this adds up to an enormous headache for the accounts department. It’s difficult to justify the high cost of business travel in a recession, even if it is necessary. One of the solutions to cut back on this heavy expense is to use video conferencing.

Luckily, the technology has advanced now so much that it’s possible to conduct a live, face-to-face web conference on the internet without the massive cost of installing traditional video conferencing equipment. This allows it to be used by people across an entire organisation,  not just the senior board-level.

A typical web conference will allow many people to connect to a single ‘meeting room’ which is hosted online. Microsoft’s Live Meeting works by hosting one of these virtual meeting rooms on their server, and allowing access to anyone with an internet connection and either the Live Meeting software, or a web browser with Java enabled.

Participants can then enjoy the benefits of web conferencing with additional collaboration tools. They can, for instance, present material, edit spreadsheets and documents together, and record training sessions. This information can then be stored in the conference center and be made accessible to anyone who has participated in the meeting.

This is great not only for conducting meetings with colleagues in other locations, but also for meeting suppliers and discussing on-going work with clients. It might not replace real-life meetings with prospects or highly-valued clients, but it can certainly relieve much of an organisation’s unnecessary travel.

Colorado grocery-liquor bill iced
Colorado shoppers are much less likely to find beer, wine and liquor on supermarket shelves after a House committee on Wednesday killed a bill to expand alcohol sales and the prospects dimmed for two similarly aimed ballot initiatives.

Read more on Denver Post

Bill.com Selected to Showcase Latest Bill Management and Payment Technology at FinovateSpring 2010 Conference
PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – 03/22/10) – Bill.com, the leader in online bill management and bill payment for small and midsized businesses (SMB) and CPA firms, today announced it was selected as one of thirty-six vendors to showcase current and upcoming product innovations at the FinovateSpring 2010 conference in San Francisco, California, on May 11. Bill.com will demonstrate the company’s award …

Read more on Marketwire via Yahoo! Finance

NBP: Broadband for everyone by 2020, but who foots the bill?
“Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing,” opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan titled “Availability.” What would that mean in terms of performance? “An …

Read more on Ars Technica