Phonetopp bringing Web conferences to smartphones

If you've ever been tied to your desk or scrambled to find a WiFi hotspot just so you can tune into a Web conference, you'll be interested in knowing that Phonetopp, a Silicon Valley startup, is putting the finishing touches on a service that will bring the Webcast experience - and a little bit more - to your smartphone.

The technology utilizes 3G mobile Web connections and segmented streams of the various elements of a Web cast to deliver a near-real time experience. That means you won't be seeing the chat, attendee list and presentations on your mobile phone at the same time, even though any of those pieces is available using simple on-screen navigation. Keeping those elements separate maximizes the screen size and keeps the latency down. The audio portion of the Webcast taps into the phone's voice service.

The company said the key to the service is a cloud-based, thin-client architecture on the phone, which allows the hard work - the actual streaming of the Webcast - to be processed on virtual servers that send the data to the phone. And by using intelligent push technology, the only data that's sent to the phone is fresh data. For example, if the difference between two slides during a presentation is merely the addition of a bar graph or an extra sentence to a previous slide, then that's the only information sent to the phone.

That's all good - but a couple of the more impressive features include the ability to rewind the presentation and archive it to the cloud for immediate access and playback. (I can't help but think how helpful this would be for quarterly earnings calls, which are usually available or replay hours later.) In addition, the Phonetopp service is hidden from other participants - no one would know if someone is watching the Webcast from a PC or a mobile phone.

But is there a demand for such a service? In a survey of more than 15,000 Microsoft, WebEx, Adobe and Citrix customers, more than 62 percent told Phonetopp that they would like to be able to use their smartphones to tap into a Web conference.  More than 20 percent of the respondenet said they particpate in a Web conference at least once a day while 37 percent said they're on a Web conference at least once a week.

In a release, the company highlights Gartner research that puts the web/audio collaboration market to be $5 billion today. In 2010, Gartner estimates web conferencing will be available to 75 percent of corporate users as standard facility alongside email and calendaring.

The Phonetopp service is being announced today but won't go into private, invitation-only beta until mid-December. It will go into public beta in the first quarter of next year. It should go into a full-scale release in the early summer. Pricing for the service is still not final but the download would be free and the monthly access is expected to be less than $10 per month.