Fuze Meeting, An Awesome Desktop and Mobile Collaboration App

A few days ago I came accross this application that lets BlackBerry users join powerful collaboration sessions straight from their device. I immediately realized it was just a piece of a powerful collaboration tool just launched at Demo ’09.

Fuze Meeting is a comprehensive service to manage online meetings that offers very powerful features straight from your computer as well as BlackBerry/iPhone devices.

Fuze Meeting, developed by Fuze Box (formerly CallWave), enables seamless, high-definition online collaboration between mobile and desktop users. Fuze Meeting takes online collaboration beyond the desktop, enabling users on virtually any device to experience high-definition synchronized content, high-fidelity audio conferencing, online media storage, integrated presence, and secure, persistent chat – all in one easy-to-use web application.

There are three available plans:

1) Monthly
Unlimited meetings
15 web attendees
15 audio attendees
Fetch all audio attendees
120 toll-free or fetch mins/month
$29/Month
$0.06 for extra mins

2) Yearly
Unlimited meetings
15 web attendees
15 audio attendees
Fetch all audio attendees
120 toll-free or fetch mins/month
$23.25/month ($279/year)
$0.06 for extra mins

3) Pay as You Go
Unlimited meetings
Unlimited web attendees
Unlimited audio attendees
Fetch unlimited audio attendees
$.19/min/per web attendee
$.06/min/per audio attendee

You can get a 30-days trial or subscribe to their Free offer. The latter is quite limited (max 3 attendees, 8 audio attendees and max 1GB storage) but you can try their service without the need to provide your credit card and it could be fine for most small businesses.

The web interface looks very well designed, with a main area for content sharing and collaboration and a left sidebar where you can see who is attending via web, phone and a box through which you can chat with the other attendees.

The cool thing is that most of the available features are available from your mobile phone. The user interface of Fuze Meeting on my BlackBerry is quite impressive, with all main functions very usable and intuitive. The only downside is that the app is very big in terms of memory and BlackBerry users know very well that the application memory of their device is quite limited.

Main features of Fuze Meeting include the ability to share your desktop (on the mobile phone too!) or HD content in realtime, business-grade instant messaging and HD audio conferencing (makes sense from your desktop only, of course). They also claim to have a patend pending technology that improves the way content is synchronized among meetings’ partecipants.

Haven’t tried it yet but I’m looking forward to it. I subscribed for a free plan, my aim is just to test the main features, the overall experience on my BlackBerry and very curious to check how it compares with other similar solutions like CalliFlower. Fuze Box compare their service with other well-known solutions like GoToMeeting and WebEx, but didn’t take into account that other (meybe less-known) apps like CalliFlower are quickly adding innovative functionalities that can let them stand out of the crowd.

The only concern I have is about the variable cost for extra minutes of audio attendeees. Six cents per minute is quite expensive (could be fine for “fetch” option, not for dialin), a wide range of dial-in phone numbers could have been a better alternative.

What do you think? Appreciate your comments, you can easily subscribe for a Free Fuze Meeting account at this link.

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Tagged as: Fuze Box