ReadyTalk was acquired by PGi in 2017. Former ReadyTalk products are now offered as part of GlobalMeet Webcast.
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MaestroConference
Score 7.0 out of 10
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MaestroConference is a web conferencing platform with the capability to run small break-out sessions within the main group. It incorporates voting and social capabilities.
FoxDen tended to work slightly better for very small video conferences. The audio was typically reliable, so it would be ok to use for audio conferencing. It is definitely not ready for prime time: it cannot handle very large conferences. It didn't seem ready to be used on mobile either. I also think it's better suited for a smaller company.
This is best suited for webinars where you want increase participant engagement. Maestroconference has helped us avoid the type of webinar where the presenter has no idea if people are listening and participants often lose interest and end up checking email. The interaction level can become extremely high leading to increased engagement, satisfaction and buy-in.
The number one strength of Maestro Conference is the ability for the host to create "break out" groups where members of the call can interact with each other in smaller groups as if they were in an in-person conference.
Another quality of Maestro Conference that I love is the fact that the host can then "weave in and out" of the different break out groups, listening in, providing support and getting feedback. It's an incredibly tool that Maestro offers.
Lastly I think Maestro Conference has excellent customer service.
Horrible video quality. It basically never worked, and we stopped using the video feature.
Buggy behavior all the time. Dropped calls, loss of screen sharing, rendered unusable most of the time.
Poor response by the vendor to issues. The answer was basically "we know it's unusable, and we're trying to figure that out. There's nothing we can do right now."
The call sound quality was often pretty poor, and we had a lot of trouble with calls being dropped. Over the years I would periodically throw in the towel and go back to Free Conferencing just to have reliable quality. But they only have 3 of 4 breakout rooms and I couldn't conduct the rooms easily. Then I try MC again to see if the engineering had improved. It was like a wave. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
The conductor interface has an annoying glitch wherein we could not change a persons attribute fields on the fly. I would interview my callers and assign them to one class or another based on their answers, and the partner up people into breakout rooms based on their answers. This meant editing the two attribute fields , and it just plain didn't work 75% of the time.
Maestro Conference repositioned its business away from small educators like me, to large organizations like political action committees. The price became too high for me, and it just no longer made sense. I repositioned my product to work with less expensive and less complicated solutions.
The add on features, like recording each conference room, were insanely expensive.
VOIP and MC didn't mix. The MC dialer never worked. Neither did Skype. This meant that my international callers were out of luck. This was FRUSTRATING to say the least. Now I just use Skype. A picture is worth a thousand words.
we have found no other company with the technology that allows us to conduct webinars with this level of interactivity. We've also been watching as the company has added on addtional functionality and are very please with how it is developing.
I believe they selected FoxDen because we use ReadyTalk for voice conferencing and FoxDen represented a cost savings compared to our previous Skype for Business investment. However, in the end, most of our company has abandoned ever using FoxDen and, instead, still uses all of the products listed above (Skype for Business, Google Hangouts, Slack) or just plain ReadyTalk voice conferencing.
Maestro Conference is the only service I know that allows you to create break out groups and allow participants to actively engage with each other and with the host. It is the most like an "in-person" event of any service I have used. And the customer service has always been excellent
When the monthly call with breakout rooms was working well I had a lot of good conversion. When it was not, because of sound quality of dropped calls, I was giving people a poor experience. Since I was using MC as the centerpiece of my TRIAL calls, it was a two edged sword.
