I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joe at onlinemeetingrooms.com, and after more than a decade of doing this, I’ll confess I’m still amused with how small the world can be for realtime communication (Joe’s in Dublin, Ireland).

As always, I’d encourage you to check out any vendor directly, but here are a few things I liked:

No downloads
This isn’t critical for everybody, but given that Macs have had resurgent market share, Windows users are mixed in their usage of operating systems, the erosion of dominance in the browser wars, and the increasing number of organizations that secure their desktops, Flash has become the most-common denominator in terms of reaching people.

Low bandwidth requirements
If you want/need to use video, onlinemeetingrooms.com is with the pack of vendors who note that video doesn’t have to be hoggish to be useful.  Why is this important?  If video is important to you, know that live video for synchronous communication is a radically different thing than the nice clean experience you have with YouTube.  On demand video can “buffer” so your experience is good, whereas when you want it to be live, a choppy or latent experience is annoying at best, denigrating and distracting at worst.  And you can’t control a critical part of the end-user’s experience…their own internet connectivity and computing environment.  Onlinemeetingrooms.com gives the host the chance to control the quality of video streams to allow more control over the experience.

Most of the bases covered
Before you think I’m saying onlinemeetingrooms.com is incomplete, let me assure you I’d probably not hand out a perfect score in this category to anyone.  Why?  There’s no such thing as the perfect software solution – there’s only what is best for YOU.  Most users expect to have chat, whiteboards, polls, etc., and onlinemeetingrooms.com has you covered.

Think about how you buy a vehicle… you assume many features, right?  It’s how it works for you that is important.  As the market evolves, many times it’s not that a feature exists in a web conferencing solution, it’s a question of preference, usability, and style.

There are many reasons to choose a provider, and I’d argue many have nothing to do with technology.  Sure, it has to get the job done, but for many it may be more that they value a reasonable price, or a vendor with commitment to technological excellence, or a European locale, or… you get the idea.  For many, onlinemeetingrooms.com just might be a vendor to investigate.