Gary Campbell was the founder and director of a custom, scratch build web conferencing platform.
The Web Conferencing software platform was nominated by the British Columbia Technology Industry Association as best start-up in 2006 by 900 members. The web conferencing platform was used to host over 500,000 business meetings. Over 4 million people used the custom designed built from scratch product. PC Magazine provided an expose of the product (earned media, not paid). The company and product was profiled in a publication by the Honorable Colin Hansen (June 15, 2006) “British Columbia Technology Sector Profile” as a success story. The product and company also appeared in Frost and Sullivan, IDC Research and Wainhouse Research publications (web conferencing research papers and comparisons).
This web conferencing software platform was unique in many ways. The product could be “skinned”, meaning that all colors, buttons, icons and graphics for the user interface could be branded (custom themed). Another unique feature was that the web conferencing platform provided private 1:1 and separate group audio conversations to occur while listening to the podium speaker. This allowed people to discuss / comment / question the podium presenter privately while the speaker was talking. Another unique feature was voting, when a podium speaker was talking, they could ask a question and get immediate feedback with a vote tally. The doodle board was also popular, screens could be marked up participants (if enabled) to provide a truly interactive meeting.
A Verizon branded version was used internally (internal and external users could join meetings). It was rolled out to tens of thousands of internal Verizon desktops. The web conferencing system was also used by Health Canada, Engineers without Borders, Purple Hearts, some 50+ colleges & universities. The Canadian military used the product for group based tank battlefield simulations, it was used for real time auctions to sell heavy equipment (live auction bidding component) and also sell homes auctioned off during the real estate crash.
Servers were .NET C# based, client was OCX based, first on the scene with a Windows 7 one click web install, with openSSL (since at that time, Windows did not provide SSL layer services), VoIP audio mixing, webcam, PPT presentations, screen-casting, recordings, voting, web tours and a multitude of other features ahead of its time were provided.