Team Blog

In today’s global environment, remote teams have become experts at sharing the pain of working around time zones, by starting early every other week or by taking the late conference call from home. When working on multiple projects this means late and early calls most days of the week and Sundays (because it is already Monday somewhere).

With TimZon the communication is asynchronous; this means you can do it on your own time. As soon as you have an idea, feedback or just something that you want to share, you can simply start TimZon and record a video. Your correspondent will also get it on his own time, without loosing any value of the message. You can add more information through comments, links and diagrams if needed.

Please share your virtual (distributed) team experience with us and how we could make TimZon a better tool to help you in your daily communication.

Thanks,
The TimZon team.

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Understanding more about each other is key to creating a cohesive team.
This is especially true when working over great distances with little chances for personal interaction.

The best way to create a shared personal experience is to meet face to face.
Unfortunately this is not always feasible and practical. And with the current economic climate, travel budget is often the first thing being reduced.

While Email has become accepted a the primary form of business communication, it doesn’t convey emotions and can be very inefficient for project collaboration.
And we won’t mention here the spiral email overload effect…

Timzon combines the advantage of the asynchronous communication with a more personal interaction through video.
Many studies show that the majority of information conveyed in a conversation is non-verbal.
Video is the perfect alternative to face-to-face, in order to convey all the subtle emotions that would be lost otherwise and are key to a successful communication.
also, unlike traditional video email solutions, TimZon presents the communication is a neatly organized discussion thread.
You can at any time invite another participant to the discussion and they will get at the same level of understanding than the original team by following the discussion from the beginning.

Please share your virtual (distributed) team experience with us and how we could make TimZon a better tool to help you in your daily communication.

Thanks,
The TimZon team.

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We started TimZon to facilitate the communication of ideas remotely.

While the previous release was successfull in providing just this, a major redesign was necessary to make it more accessible to all and overall a better experience.

Thanks to your numerous feedback, we are releasing today a newer and much better version of TimZon that will revolutionize the way we are communicating. We think you are going to like it…

Organize your discussions:

By adopting a more conventional email-like interface you can now sort through all the discussions and at a glance see to what is new.

In the discussion list, you can now directly Archive or Delete one or multiple discussions.

Don’t worry, you can easily Restore a discussion from the “Deleted” group or move an archived discussion back To Inbox from “All discussions”.

Use the star to flag discussions that are important to you and find them easily in the “Starred” folder.

Synchronized events:

Because sometime more information needs to be shared than what can showned in video, we’ve added the ability to share text comments and whiteboard while recording a new video.

Simply click on “Beta: add time-stamped information” under the video recorder and add synchronized events.

By the way, you can now add links in text comments and they while be showned as hyperlink.

RSS feeds:

Get update about your discussions directly from your preferred feed reader.
Select the “Settings” menu to access your personalize feed.

What’s next:

We have several improvements in the works to make the TimZon experience more enjoyable, but we would really like to hear from you to know what features you would like to see added to TimZon.

Please feel free to contact us through the About page. Your feedback is important to us.

Google apps users can now directly get their domain recognized by TimZon by bookmarking the folowing URL: http://timzon.com?domain=<your_domain>

Example: http://timzon.com?domain=timzon.com

You can now sign up for TimZon even if you don’t have a GMail or Google Apps account.

Any email address will work.

Once in TimZon, you will be able to add and invite your contacts using the big green “New Contact” button in the Contact tab:

Same as before, If you sign in using your GMail or Google Apps account, all your contacts will automatically be retrieved from Google contacts. (We do not store your contacts information or send email to your contacts unless you decide to invite them to Timzon).

Please do not hesitate to contact us for any question, problem or suggestion:
customer_service@timzon.com
or
http://getsatisfaction.com/timzon

We are very excited, TimZon is now in the KillerStartups Top 3 for this month (and this year too).

Vote for us:

We’ve just made a small change to simplify the management of email alerts from TimZon.

From the settings menu, you can now select how you want to be notified of discussion changes:

Also to star or un-star a discussion, simply click on the star (easy) on the left of the discussion subject.

• Vote for us at KillerStartups.   …”Such a solution makes for coordinating efforts across dissimilar time zones, and bringing together distributed workforce via the web in a setting as live as it can be.“..
• TimZon for Education and E-Learning
  
• In Spannish - Discute temas usando vídeo con tus contactos  [ English translation ] …”All answers are threaded perfectly and stored in the same discussion, perfect for consulting different opinions.“…
  
• In French  - Conversation professonnele sur TimZon   [ English translation ] …”When working with teams around the world, the problem of time zones quickly becomes an obstacle to progress on projects. This is when TimZon comes into play.“…
  
• In Swedish - Enkelt, smidigt och med tid att tänka.  [English translation  ]  …” I almost had tears of happiness in my eyes when I imagine what creative teachers and students can do together.“…
  
• In German - Video Kollaboration  [ English translation ]  Thank you for all the great reviews.  

   

While online and distance education have long featured course delivery via video, facilitating student/teacher interaction through video without that communication being public is something we think schools, universities and students might find very useful.

While teachers in video is nothing new, we think that TimZon opens entirely new opportunities to foster a rich education experience by putting the student in video as well.

We’d love to hear from people in the learning community about how TimZon could help.  Please drop us a line or give us some feedback .

Thanks!

The TimZon Team.

Several of you have voiced their concerns about the service not entirely clear so we’ve gone live with a major redesign for usability that also looks much better.

We hope you’ll give this new TimZon version a spin and that you’ll experience a whole new type of collaboration.

As always, your feedback is important. Let us know what we can do to improve. (We read the comments to this blog).

Thank you for your support,

The TimZon Team
http://www.timzon.com

We’ve just deployed an updated authentication functionality to make is easier to sign in to TimZon.

Several users couldn’t connect to TimZon in the past because they were not using the Google calendar service. We’ve change this, where only a regular Gmail or Google Apps account is necessary to login to TimZon.

TimZon only uses your Google contacts information to validate you identity and give you the ability to invite you contacts to TimZon.

If you couldn’t sign in earlier, feel free to sign In again, it will work now even if you are not using Google calendar.

Should you experience any issue please do not hesitate to contact us or report a problem at: http://getsatisfaction.com/timzon

TimZon released on OnGwt at: http://www.ongwt.com/post/2008/11/17/TimZone-powered-by-GWT

Thank you to the OnGWT community for testing our solution.
GWT is an excelent technolgy, we are very excited about it.

We’ve released TimZon in Beta test.

Go to: http://www.timzon.com to try it.

After signing in with your Google Account (GMail or Apps), you will be able to:

• View, Create and delete discussions.
• Record high quality videos directly from your webcam or Import YouTube videos in a discussion.
• Invite any of your Google contact to a discussion (You can add, remove and edit contacts using GMail contact manager).
• Simply “Star” discussion to get updated on any new contribution to this discussion.
• Feel free to comment on any video and share those with participants to the discussion.
• To facilitate communication accros languages, Video titles and descriptions can also be translated to any of the 24 languages currently supported.