The Chime application from Amazon has a very limited free tier option (limited to two people) but does have a thirty-day trial. Better yet, the trial does not require a credit card and simply drops to the free tier after thirty days have passed.
Conference Application
You may have lived in a hole or work in a low tech business. In either case, you might not know what Go To Meeting is. This is a tool for creating virtual meetings. A virtual meeting is held online and allows members to share screens while talking on a conference call. Many of these tools allow for recording and either a call-in number or use of you laptop microphone and speakers. These meetings can be crystal clear and provide several communication options to rival being in the same room.
Bells And Whistles
Chime has all of the normal bells and whistles of modern virtual conference applications. It provides the ability to share screens, remote control, recording, chat, and video as well as audio support. There are also chat rooms available and scheduling add-ins. The full list of features can be found at the link above. However, the important feature is the price. The pricing for Chime is roughly half of Go To Meeting at a comparable feature set.
All of that may seem great, but there is more. Chime has the ability to call all attendees when a meeting is started. Rather than check your schedule or pop-up reminders, Chime essentially calls all of the attendees. This can be a great way to get everyone started at the same time. In particular, this is a great feature when the organizer tends to run a little late. Everyone can wait to be called instead of joining a meeting only to be on hold until the meeting starts.
More To Come
The best way to evaluate any new tool like this is to use it. Take advantage of the free trial to try this service out for yourself. However, if you are still hesitant, we will be using this service for our mentor meetings the next few weeks. Thus, we will have some first-hand experiences to share in a few weeks and will post an update. Chime has a lot of promise, but we will let you know whether that is fulfilled in the current version.
