What do you need to know about Web 2.0 audio conferencing? How is it different from your old crunchy dial number, a PIN you’ve been carrying around in your wallet or purse?

Traditional services lack innovation – Audio conferencing has seen little innovation since its inception in the 1980s. It started as part of an AT&T operator’s call center and you paid $1 per minute per participant. It had basic features and rigid rules. After his allotted time he was cut off. You were charged extra for everything like carrier fees, late fees, no-show fees, and cancellation fees. Put bluntly, the traditional services were as bad as a drill sergeant. After AT&T’s divestiture in the mid-1980s, “no reservation” technology emerged to provide Baby Bells’ emerging basic services. These technologies are still with us. The breakthrough innovation was the ability to use the same PIN for multiple calls without having to schedule each call through an operator.

Combine the best of the telephony and data worlds – “Web 2.0 audio conferencing” is an emerging industry that describes a new generation of technology that is breathing new life into a heavy but much-needed business service. Traditional services, or the same old conferences, connected telephone wires to each other. The new services combine traditional telephone technologies with the new generation of web-based technologies, such as the i-Phone® and Blackberry®, to offer new features and functions that make the user experience more effective… and such even funnier time. Ease of use, convenience, more features and higher quality at lower cost are your calling card.

The power of Web 2.0 features is finally here – This new audio conferencing technology combines the best of the phone and web worlds. For example, let’s say you need to get your team together right now to handle an emergency. Now you can just tap on your group list and browse! You are all on the phone. Gone is the process of emailing everyone, waiting for confirmations, starting the call, waiting for latecomers. Those cumbersome barriers to greater efficiency are removed. Such capabilities were impossible with the same old audio conferencing, but today they are easy to achieve and deliver powerful results.

special notes: Web 2.0 audio conferencing and “web conferencing” are not the same thing. Web conferences allow the transmission of a computer screen view, such as a PowerPoint slide, to the participants. Audio conferencing handles phone connections. Sometimes the two technologies are used together. However, most of the time audio conferencing is used as it does not require everyone to be in front of a computer each time.

For more information, please Google “Web 2.0 Audio Conferencing”.

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