Conferencing News

Eric Chen, CEO of Persony

24 May, 2007

Conferencing News: Today we are talking with Eric Chen the CEO of Persony, Inc. a software company with a unique new design for web/video conferencing. Eric has 14 software patents including one for Apple's QuickTime VR. His last web conferencing company called Presenter was purchased by WebEx in 2003.

CN: So Eric, looks like you have a little experience in moving images around the Internet. What have you done different with the Persony product?

Eric Chen: I think web conferencing is as powerful a tool as email and should be as easy to use and as inexpensive. So I took a chance and decided to develop a new application based on two of the most ubiquitous technologies on the Internet--Adobe Flash on the client side and HTTP servers, such as Apache, on the server side. As a result, we created a web conferencing solution that doesn't require a client download and can be hosted by any one with a web server. This was when Flash was relatively unknown and sites like YouTube did not exist. Now Flash is the de-facto standard on the Internet. Adobe supports it across all platforms and since it only uses HTTP port 80 it easily passes through corporate firewalls.

CN: So what are the main advantages you designed into the Persony VShow software?

EC: The first advantage is because it is Flash based there is no software download for the attendees. The other advantage is that a service provider can use a standard web server to offer web conferencing services at a very low cost.

CN: There are other Flash based products on the market including Adobe's Connect, is your product different somehow?

EC: Yes, Adobe Connect requires special software on the web server and is quite expensive, the Persony VShow software works with any off the shelf web server. In fact the web server does not know it is being used to host web conferences. We are creating Flash movies on the fly and uploading them to any standard commodity web server and the attendees are just watching Flash movies. Because we can use any commodity web hosting service for our VShow software, any service provider can get into a web conferencing business for very low cost. With our one-time license fee model, typical ROI for a service provider is 3 months and after that the margins are very high, over 90%.

CN: What about tech support issues?

EC:We have large resellers who have deployed a branded Persony web and video conferencing service to over 30,000 of their clients and we receive a couple of technical calls per month. The calls are only from moderators and usually a question about installation, not operation. There are no panic calls from clients trying to get their attendees to see their web conference.

CN: You mentioned Video conferencing, is VShow more that just a desktop sharing program?

EC: VShow is fully featured with six different versions from a desktop share LE model for 10 users up to our PRO-100 AV version for 100 users that includes video conferencing for up to six web cams viewed by all 100 participants. We have pre-registration with and without password protection, polling, full recording and playback, remote control and list goes on.

CN: Sweet. What's next for you?

EC: Let's do another Interview in a couple of months, we have some real surprises when we release our Web 2.0 version.

CN: C'mon, how can we find out more?

EC: Rumor has it we will be presenting the new Web 2.0 product at the Wainhouse Collaborative Summit in San Francisco on June 5th. We hope to be at the table with all the crowds.

CN: "Rumor has it?" You own the rumor! ...Thanks, Eric. Continued success with Persony and we'll see you at WR's Summit in San Francisco.

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