Coronavirus Google and Microsoft

Transcript of Black Star Radio talk Fri 6th March 2020

Mark
Very good morning. On the phone with me now, as we do every fortnight is the man who is the IT expert around the area is Seamus Campbell from Boldacious Digital in Mareeba. Good day, Seamus, how are you?

Seamus
Morning Mark, how are you?

Mark
What have you got coming up, what are we going to learn about?

Seamus
Well, Coronavirus is on everyone’s mind at the moment and well, bums too, really with the toilet paper scares.

Mark
I’m just rolling on the floor laughing about that!

Seamus
Yeah. I’m actually not going to talk about that, but I’m going to talk about what’s happening with the Coronavirus, one of the many things that have happened is that, for instance, the World Health Organisation has recommended that people travel less for the next few months just to try and slow down the spread of the Coronavirus. And the big companies are cancelling their physical conferences and things like that. But how it affects local businesses and councils and organisations here is that the two major companies, Google and Microsoft are offering free versions of their enterprise-level, video conferencing software, which is an amazing offer.

Google “Hangouts Meet” and Microsoft “Teams”.

And you can obviously see why they’re doing it they’re trying to get people involved into it more. But it seems to me it’s a really good opportunity for local small businesses and councils and volunteer organisations to give those enterprise-level tools a go, you’ve got them for three to six months for free. And you can then work out whether it’s worth it for you. So just to put video conferencing back in scope and why it’s valuable. Even for places, say, in Far North Queensland we’re still quite a geographically diverse area and councils and volunteer organisations and businesses, sometimes have to have meetings with all of their players, and they’ll do things like you know, book a hotel in Cairns and fly all their people from wherever they are to Cairns. That’s really really expensive and a lot of times you can replace that with video conferencing and video conferencing sort of, most people have tried, you know, we use Skype or zoom on one to one, but it’s really efficient for businesses. So the benefits are, as I said, it’s very very efficient. It saves you heaps in travel and accommodation money, but also heaps in time – if it’s not a large area – just trying to get people into the same physical room, the same time, takes a lot of effort to do

Mark
With this – a lot of the time I’ve been involved with video-conferencing – people are trying to talk over one another – can we control, we can mute certain people while the other is talking. Is that one of the tools these Google and Microsoft tools have.

Seamus
Yes, indeed. And also, often in physical meetings statistics show that taller men, and it is not saying all men but often taller men can dominate conversations, whereas video-conferencing women and shorter men don’t – you just see your head so that the height or the dominance issue is not as pronounced.

Mark
Yes, I’ve never thought of that before

Seamus
Yeah, women, some women in particular say they don’t feel their voices are heard in physical conferences, but they feel more heard or, or that got slightly more power with video conferencing. So that’s an interesting side effect that I don’t think anyone ever thought of.

Mark
I’d never thought about that either.

Mark
Now with the conferencing and everything else, how good an internet connection do you need, because I do know with some of the centres throughout the Cape it’s not the greatest of internet connection is probably host something but how good a regular service do you need

Seamus
you do need a reasonably reliable internet service, and possibly in another session, I’ll talk about a little tool called Speedify, and what Speedify can do is combine multiple internet connections so if you had a normal sort of landline internet connection that wasn’t very good. You could combine two or three mobile connections with that to increase your speed, and even out the irregularities of the main service provider.

Seamus
Oh yes definitely another time.

Mark
Now with Google and Microsoft, how many participants can be involved in the video.

Seamus
Well, one of the advantages of this is the Google one on now off the top of my head is, I think, 250 people so plenty for most businesses in. Yeah, yeah, so it’s designed these enterprises are actually designed to be efficient for large groups, but what that does mean is that quite often they are more data-efficient than the cheaper or the free versions. So there’s value in that in at least trialling these, these enterprise-level versions

Mark
Where do people go to find these?

Seamus
The best way to do it is just to type in three words, type in coronavirus Google and Microsoft, and that will give you links to the names and the offers that both Google and Microsoft. That’s another couple of ones and I think more people will start doing this sort of thing. But for the moment just type in Google, Microsoft and Coronavirus, and you’ll get the links that will tell you all about it.

Mark
Hooley Dooley, so that’s how they’re putting it out there for people need to be able to find it. I think it’s a very smart way.

Seamus
I think it’s a very smart way and I think smart businesses will take advantage of that. And just call it so 3-6 months it’s going to be free. After that six months you’ll have an idea of whether it’s worth doing or not for your business, but

Mark
Even things like rural companies they want to talk one-to-one with a property or something like that – instead of being face to face or spending the time travelling, this sounds like a great idea.

Seamus
I run a single person business, and I’ve got clients that I’ve never ever physically met and I’ve had for two and three years that I’ve done everything with (I use zoom as it so happens) but I’ve done it all with video conferencing, and we’ve got a really good firm close relationship via video conferencing

Seamus
So to find out more just google “Coronavirus Google Microsoft“. The Verge has a good write-up here