In business, the overhead is always the killer – costs you have to pay no matter what, like real estate, or rent, or payroll.

And of course, for a business to succeed the cost must ultimately be paid by somebody else – the consumer.

So, it’s a real competitive advantage if you can reduce your overhead – and not surprisingly, one of the best ways to reduce your overhead is to go online.

Take for instance insurance. Does an insurance company really need walk-in offices? Is it absolutely mandatory that huge numbers of employees are ready to answer phones?

No. And as a result, a company that is exclusively online has a savings that they can pass on to the customer without suffering – for example, by reducing the price of the product.

The advantage of something like insurance in particular, is that there is very little physical product involved. For example, if you insure your car or van, you’ll often get little more than a sticker and a paper that’s stamped. So actual cost of product is very low.

And for a company offering insurance, being online is an ideal way to cut costs and gain market advantages.

For example, take an online UK company called Auto Net Insurance. By being online, not only can they keep their expenses down, but they get a market exposure that is impossible to compete with for a local brick-and-mortar building.

Improbable? Think about it – a company like Auto Net can be seen worldwide. I live in Canada, but if I wanted to shop for British auto insurance (for example, for family, or a planned trip) I could, and without leaving home. And of course I could live anywhere in Britain and conveniently shop.

But the difference is that had I wanted to buy before the Internet, it would have required a local shop to visit, a mailed brochure or form, or an expensive phone call.

ALL OF THESE COSTS ARE NOW SAVED.

This is important – now, for the small cost of bandwidth on their site, they get worldwide exposure, and even though the product may not have a worldwide application, the exposure makes them accessible to a far greater audience in their own country than any single building could have achieved.

In fact, if you consider the expense of putting up enough buildings so everybody in Great Britain had access to their vehicle insurance, and the cost of maintaining those buildings with payroll, phone, and everything else each year, it’s obvious that the Internet provides a huge benefit to companies trying to get exposure.

There’s other benefits too:

• Since their overhead has dropped, they have the ability to either pass the savings to customers (gaining greater market share with lower prices), or add extra features, services, or benefits that they now CAN afford, and that their building-bound competitors can’t – thereby making the product more attractive as well.
• They can also choose to use that overhead savings to promote themselves, increasing their exposure. More exposure = more potential clients.
• Finally, as they get more attention with the benefits they provided, they have a negotiating position with insurance companies, further reducing costs.

The end result? An online company has a huge advantage over a brick and mortar company for certain products. In the case of insurance, you can’t get a much better fit.

But what does mean to you? Of course if you’re in the UK, you can get a Deal right now on Van Insurance! But for everyone else, it’s important to realize just how powerful a business on the Internet can be.

The fact is: if you have a product or service that you can sell online, the Internet provides low-cost entry, and lower operating costs than almost any other business model. Those lowered costs improve the odds of you grabbing (and keeping) market share, growing, and increase your chances of success.

So whether you’re a new business, or a ‘real-world’ business already established, seriously consider the benefits of moving all or part of your business online – in these economic times it can make a huge difference, and a real ‘unfair advantage’ to the competition.

And give us a bit of savings, too!

As I watch the news and see the gloom and doom prophecies out there, I’m reminded that we are in a recession.

That’s the Real World: on the Internet, it’s slightly different matter.

Strictly speaking, things are costing more online too, and it’s harder to make ends meet. But because online costs are very low, it’s harder to be affected than in the real world.

Take for instance transportation costs. For real-world company, any product that has to be transported costs more.

But online, transportation in not always that big the issue (especially for a digital product, or if you’re offering information).

So while not exactly recession proof, online businesses are more able to weather the changes in the economy than off-line ones.

(And yes I’m aware of the dot-com crisis from a few years ago – but I think if they were off-line companies run the same money-hemorrhaging way they were online, they still would have imploded).

And, unlike an off-line business, an online one could be incredibly inexpensive to start with.

After all, for the price of a website you can open up shop.

Or don’t even use a shop – with places like eBay, you only pay for the product you sell, and promotion comes along for free, simply by with marketing on their site.

So let the off-line people talk about doom and gloom. And consider part of your recession proof portfolio to be an online business. Start something soon, and build it up.

You may find that the single best investment you’ll ever make.

With the recent surge in gas prices and cost of travel, it’s become quite obvious that the time for virtual meetings is now, and is only going to increase with time. So it’s with quite a bit of interest I took a look at a e/pop, a video conferencing product by WiredRed Software.

The Holy Grail of tech support and long-distance business networking, videoconferencing allows you to deal with others remotely, and avoid the expense of actually being there. While there are solutions out there that are low-cost, many of them are problematic to use, and have significant delays and installation issues.

In contrast, e/pop appears to be designed primarily to make it easy to use, especially for the basic and beginning computer users.

Overview

The product consists of several parts:

• A server package, which installs behind your firewall to actually organize the video conferences.
• Software that connects to the browser (Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher), to allow specific users to manage the server and its services.
• Software that allows others to connect and upload information (such as work with a virtual white board and upload files), or allows them to view the conference and hear it through their browser.

The software does this by providing different access levels, each with different options for participation:

• The host level allows you to manage the server and control who has access and what they’re allowed to do (think conference moderator).
• The presenter, a member of the conference who has the ability to upload files, use the white board, and participate actively.
• The participant, who is allowed to view everything, but not change or upload any information.

It’s these levels that provide different opportunities for business. For example, the host can set up several conference areas and invite others to drop by for a specific time or on-call visit. The program makes it simple to do by keeping track of who’s online and available for conference.

On the other hand, once the conference has been set up, presenters have the opportunity to provide information, work at a white board or even take control of the other computers (with their permission of course), in order to troubleshoot or access information.

Finally, the participants, who do not have privileges other than viewing the conference, benefit in another way: ease of use.

Benefits

It’s this last level which I think provides the most usefulness and power to this product. Participants do not need to pre-install any software – you simply provide them a URL to join the group, making it incredibly easy to have people participate. This also opens up a lot of opportunities for the product. For example, you can set up troubleshooting forums that others could log into and get help actually on their computer, such as troubleshooting a particular software program.

I once worked for a radio station software company that this would have been ideal for, since every tech support call involved the support personnel walking the customer through the steps over the phone, working blind, and racking up phone charges (in contrast, you don’t pay any extra for bandwidth using e/pop).

As another example, I now work in Internet Marketing, and many products involve a single person discussing a product, service, or opportunity, and with many visitors logging in to view the presentation. Using e/pop, all you have to do is provide users with a single URL for them to login and join the conference – a huge benefit when you’re offering a product to those who aren’t technically knowledgeable.

Product Contents

The package includes a standard videoconferencing white board with the ability to participate, edit, as well as use video and audio (using standard sound cards and USB cameras). There’s a great deal of flexibility with the display design: place the video front and center, or place video images to one side, while the white board takes the main page of the display, for example.

However, an unusual feature is the ability to have quality video, up to 30 frames per second. Less frames might not seem a big issue, but anyone who’s watched jerky video for a time understands that it means you lose touch with the person you’re talking to. So higher frame rate video has the potential to make it much easier to interact.

Another interesting feature is the ability to allow control of your computer to be taken over. As I mentioned, a company offering a high-end software product would actually save significantly using this program for technical support – being able to view the program on the client’s computer, and optionally being able to troubleshoot, patch, upgrade or reinstall could be a huge boon to raising technical support efficiency, and improving customer satisfaction.

Summary

Overall, I found e/pop to be a real contender in the videoconferencing market. With over 3,500 organizations already using it, a positive review by PC Magazine (who advertised it could be installed in five minutes), and a flexible pricing schedule (from $350 a month for five concurrent users and going up to as many as a hundred users with no additional charges for bandwidth), it is a solid product.

Additionally, the ease of install for end users, and the ability to troubleshoot computers remotely is, I think, the ‘killer app’ feature of this product, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes its most popular use in time. Nonetheless, it’s also an ideal tool for companies seeking to connect remotely among their members, and avoid the inconvenience and cost of travel.

Transportation will never get cheaper or easier, so videoconferencing is a tool that must get better as people need it more to save costs. I’m glad to see that WiredRed has provided a tool that looks like it’s well designed, and provides a solid professional business option for videoconferencing – and at the same time is easy to use.