See ePresence 6.0 in Action

Please join us online at www.sig.uwaterloo.ca beginning Wednesday, January 27 at 7PM EST (GMT-5), to watch the live webcast of the Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation featuring Adam Kahane.

The team at ePresence is delighted to be working with SiG@Waterloo to deliver this highly anticipated lecture to hundreds of viewers online.

An internationally acclaimed social innovator, once praised by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Adam Kahane will deliver this year’s Waterloo Lecture on Social Innovation and will present new ideas on how to achieve significant, durable social change for pressing and increasingly complex social problems. In the lecture, Kahane will draw on his extensive experience working with business, government, and civil society leaders from around the world to help them address their toughest challenges. The lecture, entitled “Power & Love”, will explore the role that these seemingly opposing forces play in affecting positive social change.

Download the Brochure

This release is focused on the end users’ experience as well as the UI improvements for the event producers. The list of fixes and improvements is long, but here we’ll mention just a few important ones:

• The Presentation Player has been re-designed using Adobe Flex technology. In addition to the look being completely refreshed for 2010, there are also some exciting new features. Users can watch presentations in full screen, switch between different layouts, and share it with others in a variety of ways. Embedding live and on-demand presentations to any 3rd party web site or CMS has never been easier. Any presentation can be embedded in practically any size.
• Screen capture in ePresence has been re-developed from the ground up. Whether the presenter is simply playing a simple PowerPoint animation, or showing a full-screen DVD, ePresence 6 will do a better job capturing dynamic content than ever before. A new feature in this version is a new “Screencast” mode, specifically designed for software demos. In this mode, the presenter’s audio is embedded into the screen video, ensuring perfect synchronization at all times, both live and on-demand.
• Our Capture Station software has been completely re-designed. This software is built around the H.264 video codec, for both the camera and presenter’s screen, ensuring the highest quality media playback at the lowest possible bandwidth requirements.
• ePresence Producer has been moved from the Capture Station to the Web. The administrator can now edit slide titles and chapters, move them around, trim the start- and end-times of the video, and revert to previous versions. It is no longer necessary to do all of the post-production before publication – our new online tool can be used at anytime.
• Scalability was another focus in 6.0. A lot of features have been optimized for deployment on Cloud Computing infrastructures, which enables the support of many thousands of concurrent connections.

We hope you’ll enjoy the beauty, ease and reliability of ePresence 6.0.

Major Features

ePresence 6.0 is scheduled for release in January 2010. It includes many new and exciting features, such as:

• Complete redesign of our Capture Station software
• Updated webcast viewing interface: 100% Flash-based with improved UI, scalability, and new ability for the webcast viewer to switch between viewing modes (video/PPT/both)
• Better embedding – customizable, lightweight, just like YouTube – for live and on-demand presentations
• New screencast mode for the creation of high-quality software demos
• Improved commenting/sharing system for presentations
• New, easy to use web-based presentation editor

Preview Screenshots

On-Demand Viewing UI

A labeled diagram of new UI

Advanced search & Navigation includes a table of contents (which follows the presentation progress) and search. The view can also be switched in different ways – for instance, to video-only mode.

The UI controls automatically hide when the user is done interacting

Live Viewing UI

Watching a live presentation with a newly designed chat

The new chat includes tabbed private messaging

Commenting / Sharing

Commenting has been re-designed, and is much easier for users to access

Support for AddThis, a popular link sharing service – email or share the presentation with your favourite social networks!

Screencasting

New H.264 screencast includes an intelligent window tracking mode, which minimizes bandwidth requirements and improves readability

(See more screenshots on our Flickr photostream.)

We received a lot of great feedback yesterday regarding the webcast production quality, consistency in the streaming video delivery, and the look of our soon-to-be new Flash templates. The whole team is still beaming about it here at the office!

A huge thanks to Tyler Turnbull, Paul Crowe, and the rest of the TEDxTO committee for letting us take part in this incredible, inspiring first TEDx event in Toronto. Tyler and Paul gave us an amazing production team to work with. We’re indebted to Venture Communications for ensuring our webcast needs were accommodated, and the Videoscope production crew for giving us the best sound and camera switching a webcast audience could ask for.

For those who were inquiring as to how we managed to deliver the webcast stream consistently throughout the day, stay tuned for a “behind the scenes” blog post soon!

Missed the live webcast?

Keep a look out at TEDxTO.com in the coming weeks for finalized stats and news of video archives.

Also be sure to check out:

• Official TEDxTO Flickr photostream for great photos taken at the live event at Theatre Passe Muraille (TPM).
• Official TEDxTO live event coverage
• Event recap by Torontoist: The Day TEDxTO Took Over

RSVP at: http://kmditedxto.eventbrite.com. Drop-ins welcome!

What is TEDx?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx – local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x=independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.

What is TEDxTO?

TEDxToronto (TEDxTO) was established by an enthusiastic group of volunteers based in Toronto who are passionate about TED and generating “Ideas Worth Spreading”. The theme of TEDxTO is “What’s Next?” We see it as a challenge: what are the new and as-of-yet undiscovered ideas, projects, and people that will shape the future of our city, and ultimately the world? The event includes:

• 13 speakers (See speaker bios on TEDxTO.com for full information)
• 3 TED Videos
• 2 networking breaks
• Toronto’s 1st TEDxTO After-Party
• 130+ live attendees with a webcast of approx. 3500 connections.
• Visit TEDxTO.COM for more information.

The main event will be held at the Theatre Passe-Muraille. Because space and tickets are limited, we are hosting a live webcast of the event at KMDI.

Sneak Preview of New Templates

Watching the TEDxTO live webcast will also give everyone a sneak preview of new templates that are coming in ePresence 5.1. These new templates are developed entirely in Flash, which gives us some opportunities to do some neat things, like give the user the ability to change how they’d like to view the webcast, as well as offer:

• Improved UI and customizability
• Improved scalability
• Better embedding — customizable, lightweight, just like YouTube.

If you’re attending  the TEDxTO live webcast on September 10, feel free to let us know what you think!

Wowza has issued a patch that resolves the issue, which has been applied to our hosting servers. We recommend that all ePresence sites with their own Wowza server update to the latest version of the software.

The latest patch for 1.7.0 is patch 1.7.0-patch21. If you are running Wowza 1.6.0, you will first need to apply patch 1.6.0-patch24. Please read the instructions included with the patches carefully before you begin.

If you have an ePresence support package, please contact us and we will perform the update.

Two New Ways to Capture Content

Mobile Capture
Use your Windows, Mac, or Linux laptop to present PowerPoint™ and share your desktop with a webcam and mic. Or share the desktop of another presenter with an optional VGA2USB device.

Web Capture
Give a live talk via your web browser with just a webcam, mic, and PowerPoint™ presentation – no additional equipment or software installation required.

Capture Station Upgrade

As well, 5.0 will offer some significant updates to our existing Capture Station solution, including:

- High quality h.264 Flash support
- Ability to create chapters for longer presentations
- Enhanced third party support for Content Delivery Networks

For More Info…

The following ePresence Capture comparison table gives a good technical overview of the three production scenarios we will now be offering with 5.0.

To learn more about ePresence 5.0 and get pricing information, visit our store or feel free to contact us for a quote!

We will be pushing out a Release Candidate later today, which can be used on the beta instance until the end of the week. If you signed up too late, and didn’t get an invitation to the beta, please contact sales@epresence.tv for information on how to request a trial instance to evaluate.

Requesting a beta invite

To request a beta invite, please use our contact form, or send an email to beta@epresence.tv. In the body of your message, please include the following details of the computer that you plan on using for capturing content:

• Operating system and version (e.g. Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.5.6, Linux [Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10])
• Processor type (optional)
• Amount of memory (optional)

Please note that we will be sending out invitations in stages. When you receive an invitation, you will be sent instructions for accessing your own ePresence 5.0 beta site, and links to download desktop capture software.