One of our partners Island Collaboration, wrote an interesting article on the impact of our words in communication, which only accounts for 7% overall.  Consider the following breakdown:

• 55% of impact is determined by body language–postures, gestures, and eye contact

• 38% by the tone of voice

• 7% by the content or the words used in the communication process

Understanding that we do a lot of communication over the phone, or on a conference call, we really only have 45% to work with:

• 38% by the tone of voice
• 7% by the content or the words used in the communication process

Hermann Thoene, is the consultant behind Island Collaboration, explains how to tap into the 38%:

"In any conference call, you can increase the impact by making sure that you vary the tone of your voice. Try to put emotions into your voice. Work with multiple speakers, play a recorded interview of somebody else"

Hermann, also mentions that we are able to tap into the other 55% of communication, by adding visuals to our meetings. By leveraging technology, such as, video conferencing, we are able to utilize the majority of our communication skills, which is highly determined by our body language.

More on Island Collaboration:

Island Collaboration is a consulting partner working with Batipi providing managed webinar services & consulting focused on presenter training.  More information can be found here: www.islandcollaboration.com

Google announced the opportunity for service providers to sell & support their Google Apps product in January 2009. This is a perfect fit for Batipi, as we already focus on delivering collaboration services. This will give us an opportunity to truly lay a foundation for collaboration tools at your business.

What is Google Apps?

Google Apps is a powerful collaboration platform to run your business email. It also includes integrated collaborative features like instant messaging, VoIP & Video, shared calendar, an online word processor, as we'll as an easy to author website creation tool.

Check out the 2 minute video overview of Google Apps...

How much does Google Apps cost?

This is the best part, after understanding the value that is included in this collaboration suite, you get everything for only $50/year/user. Considering a business with 50 employees, it is estimated you could save your company $30,000/year, by switching to Google Apps. Take a look at this ROI calculator from Google, which compares Google Apps & Microsoft Exchange.

What services does Batipi provide?

We're helping clients to set-up their Google Apps account. Furthermore, this could include email migration, user configuration, administrator & user training, API-based integration with and extension of existing solutions, & custom application development. We also have on-going support packages to meet specific requirements for your organization.

Batipi's conference call Global Meeting service, now offers the ability to fully manage your live conference call directly from a mobile interface, using your iphone.  

The dynamic live call viewer, allows you to fully manage a mobile conference call directly from the web interface. You can easily mute/un-mute attendee lines, dial-out to one or many participants (including international attendees), record, & moderate a question & answer session.  

If your on the go, the last thing you want to be doing is searching for the dial-in number or PIN to join the conference call.  As mobile professionals there needs to be an easier solution.  With the group dial out feature, you can pre-schedule your meeting to have all attendees automatically called at the scheduled start time.  This shows you value everyone's time, and your meeting will start as scheduled.

If your meeting involves attendees from international regions who are on the go using a mobile device, it may not be feasible to expect them to dial into your conference call.  Moreover, the best service you could provide, would be for international attendees to receive an automated phone call connecting them into the meeting, exactly at your scheduled start time.  We offer over 30+ countries that you can dial-out to for free, with no additional surcharges.  See the complete list of countries for free international conference call rates.

Contact our conferencing consultants at Batipi, to have a new Global Meeting conference call account set-up for your business.  No set-up fees required.  Pay-per-use plans available with no monthly commitment. 

In this review, we look at Grou.ps, a free service that allows you to create your own social network, or more simply can be used as a tool to facilitate collaboration amongst group members.  The service is available open source, or you can use the hosted version available from Grou.ps.  This platform offers allot of potential, as you can customize the entire design (look and feel).  This can be a really handy tool to know about, as it only takes less 5 minutes to create & promote your new group to colleagues, for easy collaboration.

Group Collaboration Features

After creating a group, you have the following modules available, you can easily show or hide each, depending on your requirements:

Talks

Forum + mailing lists; for all communication needs of your group.

Wiki

Create web pages easily, share documents and collaborate.

Blogs

Aggregation of blogs that group members own and/or may be interested.

Calendar

Share your agenda. Organize your events.

Video

Your very own YouTube!

Files

Share files, your own Downloads section.

Photo

Share photos; aggregate Flickr accounts or enter them separately.

Links

Share links, bookmarks; aggregate Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit accounts.

Sub Groups

Let your users play with sub groups and engage even more.

Map

A real world map showing members' current location and souvenirs (w. photos).

Chat

Real time chat with group members.

People

Customizable profiles of group members.

As you can see from the features included this can be a really handy tool to initiate workgroup collaboration with clients & business partners where they may not have access to your network.  

Create Custom Design

One impressive feature of Grou.ps collaboration tool, is the ability to fully customize the entire application.  Moreover, you could potentially customize the design layout to look like an extension of your company website.  

Feel free to contact us at Batipi, to see if Grou.ps can work with your companies collaboration requirements.

This is a really handy tool to convert PDF documents to Word files and still retain a high level of quality. You can find it at pdftoword.com.  The whole process takes less then 5 minutes.  Within three steps, upload a pdf file, choose your output format (Word or RTF), then enter your email to have it delivered when the conversion is finished.