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New from buzzumi – Online Events

Posted on May 16, 2012 by admin

We’re pleased to launch a brand new feature at buzzumi – Events. Now you can easily create, promote and sell tickets for an online event through buzzumi.

Why would you use buzzumi’s Events feature?

Events are ideal when you want to easily and quickly set up, and market an online event, such as a webinar, lecture, interview. Use our step-by-step wizard to create your event in minutes. You can create the event and name it, schedule a date and time for the event to take place, and effortlessly build a promotional landing page, manage RSVPs and/or sell tickets We handle all the bookings and ticket sales so you can focus on running a great event. You can create as many events as you like, we only charge you a 10% commission for paid events. Free events are, well, free!

To create your first event today, log-in to your buzzumi profile and click the ‘launch event’ button. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@buzzumi.com or hit us on twitter @buzzumi. To find out more check out our Events FAQs page.

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buzzumi for business

Posted on March 9, 2012 by admin

buzzumi is an eCommerce platform for knowledge workers (consultants, bloggers, tutors, trainers, experts etc) to deliver their services online. Our tools help knowledge workers go beyond simply marketing their services and provide them with an easy way to actually deliver these services online. We make it happen with paid webinars, 1-2-1 video chat consultations, document sharing, and interactive whiteboard collaboration all online, all in real time.

For larger businesses which want to project their knowledge workers online in a full marketplace, we offer a custom-built version of the buzzumi platform. This includes the features mentioned in the video above including:

  • Searchable directory of knowledge workers.
  • Easy customer – knowledege worker session scheduling
  • Seamlessly integrated payments
  • Fully brandable
  • Analytics Dashboard

For more information please email info@buzzumi.com.

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New – Embed buzzumi chats directly onto your website or blog

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Karim

We’ve launched an extremely exciting feature at buzzumi, you can now easily embed any buzzumi chat session directly into your blog or website. This effectively gives you all the functionality of a buzzumi chat session right where you want it. Easily create engaging discussions with your blog readers or website visitors, create live, real-time customer feedback sessions, and easily monetize your time by adding a pay-to-join chat to your site. Check the video below for a step-by-step guide to embedding buzzumi video chat into your website.

Once you’ve created a buzzumi chat session, ensuring to make it either free or pay-to-join, click on the ‘setting’s tab at the top of the chat screen, then select the ‘embed chat’ tab at the far right side. This will provide you with two snippets of code you will need to add to your website or blog to embed the buzzumi chat. The code will generate a ‘join chat’ button on your website that your fans/readers/followers can click to bring up the buzzumi chat session right on your site (it appears as an overlay).

 

As always, please email us at info@buzzumi.com if you have any questions or comments.

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New – Share Live Video Streams in buzzumi

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Karim

You can now easily share live video streams from services such as livestream.com, ustream.com and Justin.tv. See the video below for a step-by-step walkthrough.

 

To share live stream videos on buzzumi, first log in to your buzzumi profile (you need to have a buzzumi account to do this, go to buzzumi.com to sign up in seconds), then click the ‘launch chat’ button. Select the type of chat you want to create, then once you’re in the chat session click the ‘add content’ button on the right hand side. Then select the service you want to use to share a live video stream, copy and paste in the stream URL and you’re done.

 
This is a great way to create engaging buzzumi chat sessions with your friends, colleagues or clients. For example, pull in a stream for a live sporting even then watch it with your friends while you text and video chat with each other.

For bloggers and businesses this is a great way to create a high-engagement event for your fans/follower/blog readers. For example, a social media blogger could livestream the latest announcement from Facebook and comment on it real-time with 100s of his readers watching. Of course you can make these events free to participate in on require attendees to pay an entry fee. This is all easily done through the buzzumi.com platform.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this new feature by emailing us at info@buzzumi.com.

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PDF and Video Sharing Launches!

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Dan

We’re delighted to announce the launch of buzzumi content sharing.  Now easily upload and share PDF presentations and YouTube videos in your buzzumi sessions.

Here’s how to do it:

Create a chat session, click the ‘add content’ button, and follow the instructions to upload a PDF presentation or YouTube URL.  Guests will then be able to view the content you post.  You, as host, control the flow of any PDF presentations.  Simply move the cursor over the presentation and arrow buttons appear to move pages backwards or forwards.  YouTube videos work slightly differently- once they are loaded in the room all participants  can start, stop, or rewind at their leisure by using the controls that appear when you mouse over the video image.

Many other changes and improvements have been made in the last 30 days.  Here are a few to note:

-Wallpapers (backgrounds)- Personalize your buzzumi experience by uploading any image as the background for your session.  Change your wallpaper at any point by clicking on “settings” and then “choose your wallpaper.”

- Chat descriptions-  Let everyone know what your session is about. You can do this when you create the session or by clicking ”settings” during the session.

- Improved chat guest management-  You can now click on a guest’s name to view their profile, enable or disable their camera and allow them to comment (like passing a microphone around in a physical conference).  We also allow you to ban someone if they’re being annoying or naughty!

- FAQs are now available here - https://buzzumi.com/faq

To see the potential of buzzumi, check out the recording from an amazing, recent buzzumi interview with the inventor of the world’s first personal spacecraft- a cracker-sized sattelite - http://blog.buzzumi.com/.   More than 100 participants from 13 countries interacted over audio, video, and text chat with very high levels of engagement in realtime.

More exciting features will be launched in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for these email updates.

Lastly, we are always eager to have conversations with our users.  If you’d like to talk to us, pilot new features, or help us design new features, we’d love to hear from you.  Please drop us a line at info@buzzumi.com

 

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KickSat- The first personal spacecraft- Interview with Zac Manchester

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Dan

Kicksat – The First Personal Satellite – Interview with inventor Zac Manchester from Buzzumi Video on Vimeo.

Since the dawn of the space age, unless you were lucky enough to be an astronaut or an engineer, most people’s relationship with spaceflight was quite distant.  You watched launches on TV.  You read about missions in a newspaper.  A very few hardcore enthusiasts travelled to Cape Canaveral to watches launches with their own eyes.

Enter Zac Manchester.  Zac is an engineer at Cornell University in the Space Systems Design Studio who has created the Sprite- a “cracker-sized” satellite that changes the dynamics of the economics and thus the accessibility of spacecraft by several orders of magnitude.  On Tuesday, January 10, we interviewed Zac about his groundbreaking research, where he thinks it’s going, and how we can all buy our own satellite!  The Live webinar was a great success, attended by over 100 people. If you’d like to create your own Live events and webinars, visit www.buzzumi.com to get started in seconds.

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The Startup Pathogen

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Dan

I think you either believe it in your bones – or you don’t.  A belief that we are here on this planet to make something, build something, breathe life into something- or assist someone else in building.  No value judgment- the world needs people in both categories, but the genetic disposition is different.  I have had the pleasure of working for some terrific organizations in my time from the earlyish stage- iVillage.com, to the mid-size rocket ship rider, Gateway- the PC company now owned by Acer, to the global behemoth, Deutsche Bank.   They were all radically different organizations from business model, to culture, to stage of development, to size.  What was always present in my own mind while working at these  very different places were two idea streams:

1)  I have always tended to look at organizations from the top- the view from the big chair.  I have never been good at doing things for parochial reasons to serve my group, or division- behavior that particularly in banking is considered normal- even required.  I always looked at the whole shop- as if I were the CEO.  It is not arrogance- it’s a world view.

2)  I  wanted responsibility.  I wanted to be able to make the calls because I had a path in my own head mapped out of where I wanted things to go.

In a start-up- everything is your responsibility.   There are no excuses, there is nowhere to hide, there is only the bank account and whether you are making it grow or shrink or whether there is a prospect of making it grow.  There is only your team and whether they are strong, and whether they are motivated, and whether they are willing to go with you on the journey.  There is only the breathlessness of knowing that every decision you take has consequences and that the demons that govern the laws of unintended consequences are always lurking in the dark corners.

Entrepreneurship is not a rational act.  It is risky and stressful and intense and exhausting. Your brain never turns off.  Every moment- sometimes even when your are not awake- there is at least a peripheral murmur in the background of calculation and consideration for next steps.  Work is never done- there is always more to research, more to think about, more to know, another way to look at things. There is no “down” time just less aggressively “on” time.

All that said, it is a thrilling path to take.  It is filled with daily moments of humiliation and exhilaration all wrapped in a gentle fug of optimism.  It is the nature of the start-up pathogen- it is the nature of the entrepreneur:  A pragmatic optimism that the future will be better and that your ideas and sweat can help make it so.  Time for another espresso.

 

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How To: Launch Video Chat from Twitter with buzzumi

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Karim

Earlier today we announced the launch of our buzzumi twitter bot that lets Twitter users launch live, video chat right from Twitter. Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing this:

Launch a buzzumi chat room from twitter:

Step 1

From Twitter.com or Tweetdeck, create a new tweet starting with @BuzzumiBot followed by the names of any twitter friends you want to chat with:

Step 2

You’ll instantly receive a reply from @BuzzumiBot with a link to your very own chat room. Twitter friends you included on the original tweet will also receive this message.

Step 3

Follow the link to your own chat room, enter your name and start chatting with your twitter friends, using text, video and audio

Start chatting with your Twitter followers now, just drop a tweet to @BuzzumiBot to get started.

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buzzumi Launches Video Chat for Twitter

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Dan

buzzumi announces the ability for Twitter users to launch real-time video, audio, and text chat with their friends and followers, straight from Twitter.

This innovation has been created by buzzumi.com, the recently launched London-based video chat and webinar start-up. Entering a public beta in November this year, buzzumi.com offers users extremely light-weight yet powerful video chat rooms and large-scale webinars. The company was founded by Daniel Marovitz, a former senior executive of Deutsche Bank in London, and previously, iVillage.com in New York.  The company is about to close its first outside round of funding. buzzumi can be used for debates, chats, interviews, or webinars.  Hosts can start a chat for free or decide to charge for a session or a webinar using the integrated payments capability. If users decide to charge for a webinar or online consultation, buzzumi takes a 10% commission on the ticket price.

How it works: Twitter users simply send a public tweet to @buzzumibot, and include the Twitter handles of the individuals with whom they would like to chat in the tweet. @buzzumibot will immediately respond with a link to an instantly created video chat room. No additional log-ins or sign-ups are required. The users can get chatting with audio, video, and lightning-fast text in seconds, all in a platform and browser-agnostic chat room.

“The functionality to launch a video chat directly from Twitter is significant, as buzzumi allows users to extend Twitter discussions and debates into a more interactive environment, while staying in the “Twitterverse,” says CEO, Marovitz. buzzumi brings a whole new world to Twitter, allowing a range of highly interactive discussions that were never possible in the text-only service.

The buzzumi chat technology is 100% browser-based and requires no additional software downloads or installations.  The Twitter video chat platform is a direct result of buzzumi’s commitment to making online video chat easier, hassle-free and quicker to set-up than ever before. Frictionless communication.

To find out more about buzzumi, please visit buzzumi.com. For press enquiries please send an email to info@buzzumi.com.

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Cloudwords- Taking the cost out of global business

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Dan

 

 

This Friday, December 9, at 10 AM PAC, 1PM EST, 1800GMT, we will host a webinar with Michael Meinhardt, President and Co-Founder of Cloudwords.  Cloudwords provides a “translation management platform” that lets companies transparently and efficiently manage the selection of a translation vendor and the project of getting their work translated through a single, easy-to-use system.  It revolutionizes one of the most cumbersome, expensive, inefficient, and murky aspects for companies of living in a globalized world- localization.  Cloudwords is backed by some of the major players in the world of cloud computing, including Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com.  We look forward to a great discussion about how cloud computing and global access are turning the translation/localization industry upside down.

 

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