There is a gap in your communication tool set. If you’d like to create and send remote presentations to specific individuals by recording your screen view while narrating the presentation with your microphone, when the other person is not there, which tool do you use?
There are great software out there for sharing your screen and talking over the web in real-time, but not for doing this when the other person is not present.
For communicating remotely with others, we use many rather familiar tools, from SMS messages to videoconferencing. Roughly speaking, they come with 3 kinds of media: text, voice audio and remote screen view (with various methods to share pictures and files). Moreover, for all of these, there exist both real-time tools in which both participants are present simultaneously, and “offline” tools in which they are not. Except for remote non-realtime screen viewing, that is.
This is why we created ScreenMail.
- For exchanging text and files, you can use IM (chat) for realtime communication, as well as email, SMS and other messaging systems for offline communication.
- For audio, you can use a phone (landline, GSM, VoIP or other) for realtime communication, and voicemail as a familiar offline backup.
- For remotely sharing your screen view with others, you can use a screen-sharing application (such as WebEx or Skype) for realtime communication. But here is the catch: for offline communication, you are out of luck.
What you would like to have is this: a way to create a narrated recording of your screen view, and send the recording to another person so that she can watch the recording later. She could be, for instance one of the following:
- a colleague or friend,
- a client,
- a sales prospect,
- a technical support person,
- a contractor.
One would think that such tools are a standard part of our everyday communication. But since they are not, we have adapted Dream Broker’s proven enterprise video technology to fill this gap, resulting in ScreenMail.
You can easily find tools that do something similar, but not exactly what you want. In order for something to work as a communication tool, we have found that people have the following requirements for it:
- Intended for communication, not just sharing. The difference between ScreenMail and vanilla video hosting like YouTube is like the difference between sending an email and writing your message on your blog.
- Effortless Recording. You just show your screen and talk to your microphone. There is no need to think about the tool itself.
- Secure Delivery. The message is delivered securely to the right person, by using SSL transmission with password protection.
- Smooth Playback. The intended message content is encoded in an easily accessible Hi-Definition format, such as HTML5 or Flash video.
It is sometimes difficult to communicate the significance of ScreenMail, because the fact that this gap in communication toolbox has existed this long just does not make sense! But, precisely because we haven’t had the tools, most of us have become used to the endless series of meetings, the burden of web-conferencing, and the awkward long email threads.
We intend to fight this rampant unproductivity, one ScreenMail at a time.