ooVoo Smokes TalkFusion

First off, ooVoo is not just video email, its video conferencing, contact manager and it's a phone.  You can call land lines, nationaly and internationaly. (ooVoo STANDARD +Phone – up to 500 minutes of phone calls) It's a very nice tool.  I

ooVoo offers video email only up to 5 minutes but the free version's 1 minute videos  is more than adequate.  After all, in over a year of video emails I very rarely get one that is greater than 45 seconds. ooVoo fits my needs well.

I have used Talkfusion video email for a little over 4 months.  At the time, it offered some very good features and was above average in delivery and usability.  In October there was a major upgrade to Talkfusion which was nothing more than leaving a Microsoft ActiveX implementation with WMV and jumping on the Adobe Flash wagon. 

This was actually a great move as there was a lot to  be gained by using Adobe's Flash for video email implementation.  The fact that Adobe spans Windows, OSX and Linux made the development relatively painless for implementers as Adobe laid out the path for disparate platforms.

Though Talkfusion's October upgrade was relevant and useful it just was just not ground breaking.  In fact, its down right mediocre.  The email features such as manipulation of the email IDs is arcaic at best.  The lack of attachments and normal email features was disappointing.  There is no sense of an inbox or an outbox and when you delete the video email it is not deleted from the Talkfusion servers, it just becomes inaccessible to the user (owner).  Further, Talkfusion now has that video and I guess they own it.. So if you become famous they can sell it to TMZ

Talkfusion's video email is either limited to 5 minutes or 10 minutes which is adeqaute.  The system allows the user to uploaded two videos back to back.  This is a nice feature but should be expanded to multiple videos.  A nice implementation would be to accomodate 10-60 second vignette's to be easliy uploaded and ordered as the user wishes...  Like a play list!?! eh..?

The greatest danger to Talkfusion is "Video Email" is going through commoditization.  Not sure if many in the Video Email space realize that but from Talkfusion's position the vulnerbality is increasing daily.  TF will be challenged in the next several weeks to months as new products hit the market.  This will challenge Talkfusion to make radical product changes and offerings. 

Talkfusion's  pricing plan, MLM structure, and lack of real world email features needs to be re-tooled, re-thought and re-introduced to the market place.  There are alot of companies out there for smaller price tags  than the wallet spanking Talfusion price of $1699; including FREE TokBox which is not a bad solution for family ad friends.  Further, the compettiion is getting very strong, I have been in the video communications business on and off for more than a decade and the video companies releaseing alpha products running toward beta is mind boggling. 

Now, I have had my eye on ooVoo since its original launch and now they have come a long way.  Of course, it's not fair to compare them to Talkfusion for a couple of reasons, which I'll discuss later.  For now, ooVoo is in fact more slanted toward Video Conferencing when you hit their page and video email is just not prevalent until you install, dig a little and check out the application.  Flat out, there's a lot of good work here and for the most part its free.  Now, free is free and its only a matter of time until the lack of monetization crushes a product.  ooVoo is really for social networking and video emailing 1 minute (Free Package) message.  However,  for $10.00 a month you can get a 5 Minute video email.  Just 10 BUCKS!!  Furthermore, as I stated above ooVoo also offers Skype like functionality.  And the feature that got me to ooVoo  is the  6 way video conferencing which in fact seems to be worth it to conduct meetings.  I'll be using this tool with my team this week and review it in the very near future. 

Now, as I stated above its unfair to compare Talkfusion with ooVoo as TF is more about marketing your business.  But this is just the hook, and Talkfusion really wants you to build a business whislt buying the product and building a network.  ooVoo is for communications, period. 

So being fair, Talkfusion's first perk is to help you market your business through video email.  The problem with the product pertains to the premise of marketing a product with Talkfusions's video email system. Simply, the tempaltes that wrap the video sport the Talkfusion logo and the "POWERED" BY TALKFUSION.  Yes, they should brand themselves.   However, NOT at the demise of the client whom is marketing their product and brand.  This is cross branding and offers deminishing confusion to the marketing company.  It's all good for Talkfusion and that alone is not a "win+win".  Further, you can not even offer to purchase a whitebrand license as talkfusion doesn't offer it and sees nothing wrong with cross branding.  It's really a debiliatating stance for the end advertisers.

So, the product fails the client and misses the responsibility of putting the customer's product first.  If you are going to offer a marketing solution to a company than offer a marketing solution, YOUR marketing already worked.  Be thankful and let your clients sing your prayers, "Tipping Points" are made from this process.

However, simply this is a misunderstanding by the Talkfusion executive team.  They have a great marketing solution for their own product.  Though, someway, somehow, they forgot that marketing your business with video email was the prupose of their product. IIf this is not their purpose I don't see the reason to purchase the product. 

A company's brand is what the communication medium, in this case video email, should deliver.  Bringing two brands to the customer's potential client is confusing for the client.  Further, shall I dare say it, many people are turned off by MLM and often confused for Ponzie schemes.  So, as the client sees the video of customer product 'A' and clicks on the Talkfusion logo 'B'  we have divergence from the message and a certainty of the client associating MLM with product 'A'.  That's worse than a vampire in Lousisna 9.9 out of 10 times...

However, this is explained easliy by the corporate office and makes sense from their point of  view.  The lack of a white labeling solution is intentional as Talkfusion is a Multi-Level-Marketing product that aspires to build a network of "Home" based business owner's.  The end result is Talkfusion is not targeting business. That's for the commercial version of the video email solution. 

The real customer client sales is in Global Video Talk.  This is where the corporate sales go.  So, really, it makes sense to put a product out there that meets a customer demand of a specific sect of small business where brand is not a concern. So, for commerical video advertsing one should use GVT for video email to grand kids, brothers, cousins nd sweethearts Talkfusion is a good solution, expensive, but a good solution.

One other thought is with ooVoo you record your videos and throw them up on the server and build your own template.  As if you are marketing your company, you can build a nice template wrapper and point it to the video created.  Of course, you can do this with Talkfusion too, however, Talkfusion's packages are $440's and $1589's too expensive than ooVoo's.

Though, in my way of thinking, Talkfusion is not commercial grade and is more directed to single personal users and could be a great success for small business if whitelabeling was allowed.  However, the choice for video email between the two  I have to point toward  ooVoo.  With that being said, ooVoo is a much better product hands down in usability and functionality holding closer to emailing features and a very feature rich address book. Most of ALL IT's free with the features listed below. Or $10 a month which is about $1589 cheaper than Talkfusion.  And further products include landline/mobile usage.

 All in all, Talkfusion is a nice product and it does have advantages, but I can't justify the price, the lack of white labeling options and ooVoo as a video-email tool hits the mark.

tags: oovoo  talfusion  video  video email  email  conferencing  videotools  

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