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Skype Gets A New Competitor: Amazon Announces Chime (geekwire.com)
Amazon has released new service to make voice and video calls and share screen. Called Chime, the service is aimed at business users. It directly competes with well-known players such as Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Cisco's WebEx, among others. From a report: Amazon Web Services today unveiled Chime, a new service that it says takes the "frustration out of meetings" by delivering video, voice, chat, and screen sharing. Instead of forcing participants to call one another on a dedicated line, Amazon Chime automatically calls all participants at the start of a meeting, so "joining a meeting is as easy as clicking a button in the app, no PIN required," the company said in a press release. Chime also shows a visual roster of participants, and allows participants to pinpoint who exactly on the call is creating annoying background noise.
...does it run well on all operating systems?
does it work with alexa whould be cool to get a request throught it no pc needed
So... just as useless as all the other offerings.
Dialing in to a meeting has never been a problem. I prefer a phone line for conferencing vs IP anyhow, as it reduces latency and its easy for anyone to connect to the audio from any phone. Doing the screen portion separately over IP works great. Not everyone wants to have a headset ready to go on their computer.
I'm not so sure they are solving much of a problem.
I will take a serious look to see if it can really improve GTM/JoinMe/etc crap services.
GTM is by far the worst offender, every version remains fully intact on your machine until you find and manually delete it. And they have a release schedule that makes Chrome look good.
Only issue is the pricing. Chime pricing seems awkward.
If I have a noon meeting, don't call me at the start of the meeting... All too often I've got back2back meetings and not everyone ends their meetings a few minutes short of the hour. So we need a few minutes for a bio break before the next meeting....
It will be spyware just like skype. Don't install this on any machine near you.
This.
another horrible company announces Toot.
We should be wary of having all our eggs (utilities, services) in one (or say 5 really big) basket (mega corp/s).
They are able to play the long game, and once all the other basket's have been dispatched, the basket maker is free to increase prices as he sees fit.
Chyme
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
https://webrtc.org/ "WebRTC is a free, open project that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose."
You can host it yourself, internal, inside of your firewall if you're that security paranoid.
There are also solutions hosted by other people if you don't want to deal with that:
https://appear.in/
https://opentokrtc.com/
https://talky.io/
I don't know for a fact that it runs in AppData, but the fact we lock it down to keep crypto lockers from running and the fact GoTo Meeting throws a screaming fit demanding it be not locked down AND it runs from randomized directories to prevent us from making an allowance tells me that Amazon is likely to be just as big of a pain in the ass.
I hope Amazon has learned some good practice about writing programs that can be installed as a system program OR be installed as a user program like Chrome, not as a user program or nothing like the Amazon music player (or Goto Meeting, or Spotify).
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Good god. I cannot count the times I've heard "please mute your phones" shouted over a conference call.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
... in your conversation. We have already added a selection of said material to your shopping basket, based on your preferences we inferred from spying on all your activities. We have charged your account accordingly and shipped the package. We are keeping our promise on "serving you better".
Looks like it costs $15 per user per month for for any plan that allows calls with more than 2 participants. For comparison, I believe Google Suite is $5 per user, and includes email, calendar and an office suite apart from the conferencing software. Or if you want just video calls I think hangouts is free for up to 5 participants. Hangouts and Skype are not nearly perfect, but most of the time they are good enough. How much better this has to be to justify paying that steep price?
I've found that in IT, you better be versed with Amazon's stuff, or else you will be a fossil. Use it on the job, or get laid off and replaced by someone who does. Many companies are falling over themselves to get everything onto Lambda, for example. Just because it means they can fire the ops guys as there are no OS or physical platform issues to take care of.
G-Suite is great for us. We switched from in-house Exchange and Lync to G-Suite and have not looked back.
We pay $10/month/user and that gets us *Unlimited* Drive space, Docs, email and up to 25 users on a Hangout (a number that will increase soon) - The subscription we use allows for eDiscovery (even for hangout chats).
We still have some users with traditional MS-Office (because the license already existed) - but most people were blown away by the collaboration capabilities in Docs, Sheet and Presentations. This is far better/cheaper that the equivalent offering by Microsoft (even after paying for Lucidchart for the product mgmt dept.)
Relevant to the conversation, Hangouts has come a long way and it is deeply integrated with gmail for chat and video (yes - still Outlook has a plugin).
The *Free* version of Hangouts (meaning those not paying for G-Suite) has a limit of 10 users, the Gsuite customers paying $5/user/month are limited to 15 users (this may have changed). You are allowed to merge/Bind traditional phone bridges/numbers into a video hangout and there is *No* limit to the length/duration of a video hangout (keep in mind that hangout phone calls or bridges bound to a hangout will drop off after ~10 hours....just reattach/bind).
With Google Voice (though not officially a part of G-Suite end user license agreement - hence no HIPAA or other privacy guarantees),this allows SMS integration and inbound phone calls from a persistent number (if google voice not setup, outbound calls originate from some random number). Either way, for a powerful offering for so little.
P.s. Allo & Duo are the new messaging platforms being pushed for *free* users of Google - Hangouts is not a core part of the G-Suite offering and is tailored for business use... for my company (~2000+ people between Europe, US, India, Japan) it works very well.
This will be Big, and a true competitor to Skype if PSTN integration is offered.
"Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the smartest thing we ever did.." Homer Simpson
Apple Facetime, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. Do you know anyone who uses Skype anymore? The ultimate criteria when choosing one are popularity, usability and performance.
You want killer features for a conference calling app?
1 - Highlight on your screen all the people who are currently talking.
2 - Automatic transcription of calls with the individuals talking labeled.
3 - Ability to pass along a 'talking now' and 'request talking' tokens so that someone can "raise their hand" while someone else is talking. Also the ability to cede the talking now token to one of the other people talking (for when a lot of people are on a conference call)
Or do current apps have all of this?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
and allows participants to pinpoint who exactly on the call is creating annoying background noise.
Dammit. Does this mean I can't sit back at web meetings with my old AM radio, various bits a crinkly plastic, and with loads of unshielded fluorescent lights on so that the audio's so uncomfortable, the meetings don't last more than a few minutes? Does this mean that we're gonna have to listen to whoever decides they like the sound of their own voice ramble on ad infinitum? They could at least add an anonymised button that plays this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Surely you could run Chime in an Android VM on a Linux host?
If the service stinks, it might start being referred to as Chyme.
Retroshare is free and secure and much more than a video phone.
From TFA: "and allows participants to pinpoint who exactly on the call is creating annoying background noise."
Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Ring.cx is a videochat app that puts user privacy and freedom 1st place. By design, there is no big brother, no middleman, no trust problem. Ring leverages the same architecture as bittorrent (DHT), a decentralized network to connect peers. From there, all communication is encrypted peer-to-peer. Best of all, it's free software, backed up by the Free Software Foundation: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki... More at https://ring.cx/ Check the team's recent talk at FOSDEM: http://ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2017/...