Zoom Alternatives Whereby

- There are a lot of different video conferencing tools out there. Now we've concentrated a lot here at Dotto Tech on Zoom, and for good reason. Zoom is an exceptional product. But there are other products. So, this is the first in a series of videos that we're gonna do of alternate online meeting products. And we're going to show you today one of my favorites. Now I had to search around to find it because it had disappeared. I used to love a product called appear.in. It was a simple browser-based meeting tool. So what I mean by browser-based is it lived in the web browser. Zoom and WebEx and other tools, you launch an executable application on your computer in order to attend a meeting. Well, with appear.in it just happened within your web browser. Technically speaking, it meant that the quality of the meeting wasn't quite as good but they were also simple to use and they were just a joy. Simple way to quickly connect, have a meeting with one, two, three or four people or even more if you go with the paid plan, easy to use, reliable, but it disappeared. Appear appeared not to be anywhere. That's because they change their name. They changed their name to, I think, Whereby? It might be Whereby, but that's what we're gonna look at today. Whereby, on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? And when I think of online meeting tools, obviously Zoom is the first one that comes to mind but so many other great tools are there. But most of them are executable tools, where you have a an application that you download onto your computer, and that application creates the connection for your online meeting. There are a few however, that are completely web-based, they just live in your browser. And my favorite for this was always appear.in. They've changed their name, about a year ago I think now, I haven't looked for a while until I wanted to do this video actually. But they're, what are you, what are you doing? Oh, just a minute. What are you up to? That was uncalled for. Where was I? They changed their name, about a year ago. And then when I went looking for them, I had to do some research to find Whereby. So what I loved about this tool, and the tool is essentially the exact same as it was when it was Appear, is just in their free service. They allowed up to four people to have a meeting, they had the simple basic functionality that you needed to run a meeting. But there was very little resistance, you just basically created the meeting, you're off to the races. And the way that they create a meeting in Whereby, is you create a room, it's as simple as that. You create your name, the name of your room, and you it gets assigned a URL, in my case, whereby.com/dottotech. You share that URL with others and they can then come into your room and you can have them join your meeting. Now there are very few controls. There are very few things, you can turn on and off your webcam, your microphone. If we look in the controls here, it's determining exactly where our audio is coming from, what microphone we're using, what webcam we're using. And that's it. Very, very simple basic controls. And then when you start a meeting, you are in one window, one quadrant, and there's your sharing link. You can copy that link, you can share it with others, they can come to your room. And down at the bottom of the screen here, we've got a series of controls that allow us to record the meeting if we choose to, to do very basic simple screen sharing, which is just the absolute basic screen sharing. There's no real additional bells and whistles. As I say, what Whereby is, is it's very simple, very basic, very reliable, and just very easy to do video conferencing. Now when I looked at it, I thought the free version works up to, I think, up to four people yeah, up to four people in the room, and you can have one room with the free account. So I checked out what the upgraded accounts are, if you decided to purchase more to find out what additional features and functionality you'd get. And primarily, you get the ability to have more meeting rooms. So you could name them for different things. So you, and having up to either 12 participants, or 50 participants, depending on which one you choose to set up. And there are some additional features for recording the meetings, for branding, for having integration with YouTube, for obviously, directly recording to YouTube, that sort of stuff. So there's a variety of different integrations here. So I actually reached out to my friends on Facebook and said, "Who's using Whereby? "And can you tell me if you like using it "and how it is to work with?" And fortunately for me, Samantha, my good friend, the tweeting goddess, is a Whereby user. So let's look, so I asked, "can you have a meeting with me "and tell me about how you like using it?" And that's I think how we'll do the rest of today's demo. Let's show you Whereby through the tweeting goddess's eyes.

- I say Whereby.

- Okay, that's great. And you're using this, you're using this for your coaching sessions?

- Yeah, I also use it for my team, I use it for my team, I have a team of five so we can all get on the same call together and share screen and chess and it's just really nice we can all see each other at the same time. And I also do it for my workshops. So if I'm doing an online workshop, I can have all the attendees, it's like a classroom. I really like it. And I can teach you a way, share my screen, that has any questions, there's a comment section and everything and I just find it, it's very reliable, hasn't let me down. Touchwood

- It is so simple to use. Now, one thing I liked about it is when you create your, when you created your Appear account, now when you re-create your Whereby account, you just give your own name. So you've given your online moniker, you're tweeting goddess, so you so it was just Whereby.com slash the name. How do you prevent other people from entering at that point there, is it that knocking function where you have to know who's coming in?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Have you have people that aren't supposed to be knocking?

- No, I haven't actually.

- You will, you will after this video.

- I've been on a Zoom all right where that's happened. And it's like, oh, oh hello, right, okay, I better go.

- Oh yeah exactly, okay. Well, the simplicity is the overriding value of this. You can test it out for free and you're allowed up to, I think four people in a call?

- Yeah.

- And the quality, it's a browser-based tool, so the video quality is gonna, it's not gonna be quite as much as you're gonna get from a Zoom or a Skype, which are dedicated apps, but it's still pretty functional. There's a little bit of delay, I think, sometimes when we talk back and forth.

- Yeah.

- It's, there's that that awkward, that awkward kind of delay, but it's not unusable by any stretch of imagination.

- I agree and look, I'm not a techie, I'm great on social media, but I'm not a tech person so for me, it was good at the time. And it just suited me and I just got used to it then, so you know the way you like to stick with the one you know? You that kind of..

- Yeah, exactly. So could you share your screen with me? Could...

- Yeah, I'll just do an example of sharing to Twitter, for example, right? Just to show you,

- Okay.

- The quality of what's it like. So if I go into Twitter, and I'm showing someone how to use Twitter.

- So this works perfectly well for me. Now, what about when you have multiple people in the room? You're limited to 12 people in these rooms?

- Yeah.

- Do we have a gallery view where you see everybody? How does it handle it from that perspective?

- Yeah, I can see , I think I have a picture, I could send you a picture of one I did before.

- Okay.

- But it actually has a picture, I had seven students in the room. And then you see the chat down here at the bottom, there's a chat, you can actually go in to the chat and I can say "Hi Steve."

- And there you could also see the individual people and you can manage people from there, you can turn on and off my camera if I was being disruptive or if you wanted to just for

- Yeah. for that . Or like people don't mute their mics and you get too much crosstalk, you can mute their mics here.

- And I can find

- So you, the feedback or whatever. You know the way when sometimes it's one person, I'd say no to you, it's you. It was funny people were saying Zoom Zoom. I was like, hang on, why is it there's other platforms like, you don't just use zoom like, and I love this one. I love crowdcast for webinars, and I just find this one is really good for just here. I'll meet you in a minute, I kind of thing come to my room. And like, my team member can jump in and say, "Well, this is the problem I'm having" and then I'm able to solve the problem. And then Okay, bye, bye bye. You know it's great. It's just really handy for quick meetings.

- You know, there's some products that you use that just feel right there like a comfortable sweater that you slip on, and you go, yeah, this fits. This is good. I like this. That is what Whereby is and I have to thank Samantha Kelly, so much for sharing with us. I could listen to her talk like. Couldn't you listen to her talk all day long? Now you should check her out. If you don't know who she is. If you're not ollowing her in social Samantha is the tweeting goddess. You can find her at the tweeting goddess, the tweeting goddess, the tweeting goddess.com There will be links below. But she helps clients and entrepreneurs master the art of Twitter as well as other social platforms. But Samantha is one of the good ones and I appreciate her help and support on this particular video. Now, I'd love to hear your comments are is are you comfortable using a tool like Whereby? Or do you need the industrial level product? That is zoom? Love to hear your comments on that and I promise you I read each and every comment even if I don't have time to reply to every one of them. Now I should also remind you at this point that we have an entire series of videos actually a playlist of videos on mastering zoom on how zoom works on how do you configure it. So check that out if you're interested in learning more about zoom. And if you found this video useful, can you do me a favor? How about a nice thumbs up and perhaps sharing it with your family, friends and coworkers who could benefit from learning more about a tool like Whereby And if you're not yet subscribed to this channel, what the heck are you waiting for? Click that subscribe button ring that notification bell and I will see you next time right here on Dotto Tech. Till then, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.