Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live

by denismars • 14 years ago

61 46 14 years ago

dodoflying• 14 years ago

It seems many functions are not implemented yet. I'll like to see if there is a white board to let users freely draw anything.

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

Or an iPad app that let's you connect to a meeting room and draw on a whiteboard with a stylus. :)

denismars6• 14 years ago

We're currently working on the iPad app and should have it out in the coming months. Whiteboard within the app would be really cool :)

jdludlow• 14 years ago

How do you make money if it's completely free?

We have ideas for moentization that does not include charging people to user our service.

Ads or harvesting user info or what? Does anyone know where they are going with this?

denismars6• 14 years ago

We have something that we're going to release in the coming months that will answer this question. And it does not include Ads, harvesting user info or charging users to use our service. It's something completely new and exciting.

hansef• 14 years ago

Nice! What are you guys using for encoding and transport?

tejaswiy• 14 years ago

Awesome! Would be great if it had an API and let us include the service in our apps. Although .. not exactly sure how that would work.

zgohr• 14 years ago

Note I am not affiliated. See: http://www.tokbox.com/opentok/api

jakubw• 14 years ago

I like how it displays the weather in each participant's location, now I can shorten the usual opening chit chat to a minimum.

_ouxp• 14 years ago

This is nice if you already know someone & have a rapport, but if that's the case, you can often skip it any way. Though distasteful to some hackers, small talk has a valuable function, and I wouldn't design a feature in a social application that would prevent it. Though in this case, you'll probably just get people switching from "what's the weather like, Bob?" to "How bout that weather, Bob."

semerda• 14 years ago

Used it few times today. Simple, fast & easy to use. So far it's awesome! Well done Denis & Arend.

7952• 14 years ago

Love it. It is a little easy to guess the URL of other peoples meetings.

vlokshin• 14 years ago

http://meetings.io/features

[...]Just visit our front page and create a meeting room and your done. [...]

Minor typo -- "your" should be "you're"

denismars6• 14 years ago

fixed - thanks for the heads up :)

gte910h• 14 years ago

What video codec is that? Man it looks nice.

denismars6• 14 years ago

h264 vid with speex audio

dgcliff• 14 years ago

This just flat out doesn't work in my browser (Chromium). I even disabled the adblocker to see if that helped. It's telling me I chose "Deny" when I was never given an option. A pop up that doesn't work?

AlexCP• 14 years ago

I have the same problem, I'm using Chrome. It might be related to linux.

denismars6• 14 years ago

For some reason linux machines have their global flash setting with peer assist defaulted to "deny" on all sites. To fix this go here http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay... and enable peer assist for meetings.io. This should solve it.

ben0x5393• 14 years ago

That flash applet showed "Always ask" for "oi.meetins.io". I changed it to "Always allow" but it does not seem to make a difference.

tlack• 14 years ago

It tells me I need to update to Flash Player 11, but the Adobe site tells me I'm using Chrome and that will keep Flash updated on its own. Frustrating! I'm using Chrome 14.0.835.186 on Windows 7.

tawhaki• 14 years ago

Chrome 14 is a really old version. The current stable version is 18. Try to upgrade it.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

I thought Chrome's silent updates were supposed to keep everyone running the latest release?

carb• 14 years ago

Great execution, but I wish that websites would stop using the same stale layout. It almost made me not try the app just because it feels like zero effort went in to the presentation of the webpage.

untog• 14 years ago

I think this is just a case of MVP-itis. They can make their page more distinctive later.

rdl• 14 years ago

Looks cool -- do you do Fun NAT Tricks to be peer to peer through firewalls?

vr000m2• 14 years ago

do you use Websockets? and the new WebRTC? The jobs section does allude to webrtc but there is also a lot of AIR/Flash related stuff (AFAIK webrtc doesn't use RTMFP for transport).

denismars6• 14 years ago

Currently using RTMFP via flash to make p2p work on all browsers and os. We're working on a WebRTC implementation but its still very early days.

vr000m2• 14 years ago

Yes, it is certainly early days for webrtc. It is scheduled to ship by the end of the year (at least from the standards perspective).

samirahmed• 14 years ago

One note: The summary email after ending a session gives me times in PT. I assume meetings.io knows my location (if they know my weather) so it would be better if it use my local time.

Other than that this is one of the most exciting apps I have seen in a while, simple and elegant.

cdrxndr• 14 years ago

Nice, quality imagery on the demo pages. And looks like they have a pretty full feature set already available.

But the title is rather telling - do they make a compelling argument why I want Google Hangouts without Google? Do you hate using existing GMail contacts without having to grant complete access to a 3rd party site? Do you often invite people from Facebook or AOL to your business meetings?

Seems they should ditch the "hangout" with coworkers (a la the defunct SocialEyes), and focus on "meetings". But then Google isn't their foe at all - it's Cisco.

Feels a little me too with the "Hangout" and "Telepresence" allusions, but no convincing reason why I should use this product. Will check back in, but it's a tough gig getting people to use browser-based conferencing (so many little hassles both tech and cultural), and corporate is pretty strongly wed to WebEx/TeamViewer/GoToMeeting.

jrockway• 14 years ago

Will check back in, but it's a tough gig getting people to use browser-based conferencing

We use Google+ Hangouts for our conference rooms at Google. It works much better than the system we're replacing, but the video quality is not quite as good as the multi-million-dollar Cisco telepresence systems. (Those are basically room-sized screens that have tables in front of them so that when you sit at the table, the people on the other end of the conference look exactly the same size as they do in real life. The effect is quite convincing, even with US-to-India latency. G+ hangouts still seem like a meeting.)

The ability to share your screen to the projector (and attendees) without cables is the best feature, however; something I've not seen anywhere else.

DanBlake• 14 years ago

Some competition for us, I like it! You will soon find the major disadvantages of using flash p2p. We completely abandoned using p2p for tinychat.com as it caused way more issues than it solved.

The one bit of advice I will give you is to choose what you are trying to do. If you want to be a meeting site for teams/business, do that. If you want to be social, do that. Trying to do both will make things extremely difficult and likely alienate both sides.

nl4• 14 years ago

Can you talk some more about the problems with P2P in flash?

I've never used it, but have always been fascinated by that feature. I imagine for your case it could have saved reasonable amounts of bandwidth too, so presumably the disadvantages really must be quite major...

rogerjin• 14 years ago

The product looks great. I'm personally curious about their product roadmap with regards to where they plan to expand on beyond video meetings in the long run. Good luck guys!

gsharma• 14 years ago

Design looks great, but can't get the meeting working. It is stuck on that flash permission dialog. Neither allow or deny work. I am using Chrome 18 on OS X Lion.

feras• 14 years ago

Good idea. I did a similar website in a weekend using opentok API : http://bit.ly/IScw8F .

It was cool to use the website with family and friends since every one was using different services like MSN and yahoo chat. But i had issues with opentok coz it uses Flash p2p which was causing a lot of issues even when it was running on Chrome.

meapix• 14 years ago

it doesn't work in chrome in linux.

bri3d• 14 years ago

I think group video is one of the interesting places in the mainstream Web where pure technical chops can still win over usability, elegance, and featureset. Hence, I think it's going to be hard to compete with Google (who are still very strong technically) here.

I love the idea and feature set and the site is beautiful, but I won't switch from Google Hangout just yet - the Google Hangout/Video Chat system, while far from perfect, delivers more efficient CPU usage, better video quality, and fewer drop-outs for me than Skype or Flash RTMPT P2P solutions like meetings.io.

I'll certainly keep tuned for future products, though - again, the site is wonderful and the product perfectly targets a pain point for me. Nice work.

ben0x5393• 14 years ago

Doesn't work with flashblock, stuck in a "Loading" loop. Are noscript and flashblock still that niche that they aren't being tested against for the core feature of a web product?

Disabling flashblock out of curiosity and entering a name gives me "oops, you clicked deny" and a "start setup again" button that prompts me for my name again. I don't get the option to click "allow", which I guess is a flash thing that's not being prompted for some reason. Edit: Saw the reason in an intervening comment. Okay, I guess.

nl4• 14 years ago

Are noscript and flashblock still that niche that they aren't being tested against for the core feature of a web product?

Of course they are "still" niche. Any browser plugin that isn't installed by default is niche - hell, any configuration change in a browser is niche.

In related news, Javascript is often required for modern web applications.

If using some plugin to disable features of your browser is something you want to do that that is great, and your business. But you shouldn't complain when it disables a feature of your web browser.

ben0x5393• 14 years ago

Graceful degradation has been a thing for a while and of the minority of websites that actually require javascript for their main use rather than for some flashy UI enhancements or advertisements, plenty remember to go "you need javascript for this site". And you pretty much have to do sneaky things with a flash object to begin with to hide the really obvious button to enable it that flashblock substitutes.

If the site just silently fails, I'll often enough assume it's just broken and move on rather than try to debug it.

I'm most likely not the target audience for this product in particular so I don't want to be snarky or anything, I guess I'm mostly surprised that so many web developers and HN submitters still browse with permissive vanilla browser settings.

thomaspun• 14 years ago

Impressive! Congrats on the launch, Denis! You may want to consider putting a "share your experience" call to action (like EXEC) if the meeting was long or how we can improve if the call was short. I was really impressed and wanted to share at the end of meeting page but didn't see anything there.

Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live

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