Comms4Business News

Watchitoo made news when the National Basketball Association powered its season kick-off ‘Facebook Townhall’ using the technology. The league wanted to create buzz and reignite interest in the players and the teams by connecting them from various locations and enabling them to interact with fans. The platform allowed thousands of viewers the chance to comment, ask questions and see their heroes by simply clicking on a link that took them to the custom branded event, seamlessly embedded in the NBA Facebook page.

Watchitoo offers a feature-rich, powerful video conferencing solution that enables real-time collaboration. Up to 25 web cams can be active on stage at once, collaborating around nearly any form of rich media whilst thousands can actively view and interact via chat. Any viewer can become a participant and any participant can then be switched back to a general viewer. Additionally, moderation controls are available to view and test a participant’s volume levels and camera functionality.

“The Watchitoo platform is very flexible,” said Peter Nice, Head of New Business at Imago Group, “It can be integrated onto a company website to encourage community collaboration, host conferences and live events; it uses Flash to deliver content and also features an accelerator to support live HD video to android smartphones, iPhones and iPads; and it can be branded, allowing users to invite third parties to take part in conferences.”

Watchitoo provides solutions for education, training, events, entertainment and corporate applications. The growth of distance learning in the educational field and the need for training sessions for home working staff is becoming particularly important. The difficulty of travel for business meetings during the forthcoming Olympics will highlight the need for a communication solution that Watchitoo can easily provide.

“We are excited to partner with Imago to expand Watchitoo’s distribution worldwide,” said Rony Zarom, CEO of Watchitoo. “We think there is a great need for our innovative and uniquely engaging platform”

Marketing Watchitoo via a SaaS model, Imago will be targeting its network of resellers throughout Europe and South Africa for whom there will be commissions on subscriptions to the Watchitoo platform. The minimum contract for the standard monthly rental packages will be over 12 months but single event packages for large audience events will also be available and resellers will have the opportunity to provide AV set-up and moderation services as part of the package.

Peter Nice said: “This is a service that will have wide appeal to a broad range of organisations, meaning that our resellers will be able to target their entire customer base, receive ongoing revenue and easily extend the use of video conferencing as a business support solution throughout the enterprise.”

Andrew, who has already won a string of high profile prizes, has made the shortlist for the Channel Entrepreneur of the Year award. The award, which will be handed out by trade publication Comms Business, will be presented in a ceremony that recognises excellence and innovation among IT resellers, vendors, distributers and service providers.

The winner of this, and other prizes at the Comms Business Awards 2012, will be announced at an awards dinner at Lancaster London on 21 June.

Having started Node4 at the age of 23 and growing at an impressive rate, Andrew has already been recognised as European Data Centre Entrepreneur of the Year last year at a separate awards ceremony.

He said, “I am overjoyed at being recognised in this way and being nominated for this award. It’s always an honour when you are shortlisted for prize within the industry you are passionate about.

“Entrepreneurship is about listening to the demands of the marketplace, finding the product or service that caters to that need and doing so in a way that pleases and surpasses the expectations of your customers. In everything we have done at Node4, we have taken every care to remain relevant and cutting edge with our offering and solutions such as the n4Cloud have helped a number of companies to take advantage of the many benefits of the cloud. As the technology evolves, our challenge will be to maintain our reputation as an industry leader.”