How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 6)

Sramana: After you reacquired the company in 2005, what were the strategic steps you took to build the business? 

 Nick Balletta: In 2005 we had to make a couple of key decisions. We had a couple of different platforms because of the various machinations of the company. We decided to make a concerted effort to do a platform integration and consolidation, which resulted in our clearly defining our feature set. We based that on automation and scale.

We noticed that from a Web conferencing perspective, the existing vendors have some limitations. When you do a Web conference your personal machine is the engine for the presentation. That is great for driving a PowerPoint or performing desktop sharing. Typically, the audio component requires a conferencing bridge. However, when you get into larger audiences there are scaling issues. Some people say that is 400, others say that is 300, but there is a breaking point with WebEx or GoToMeeting. It does not scale infinitely.

Once you get above a certain number of people on a call it really is a broadcast. There are economic issues with that because you have to pay for an attended bridge. Our architecture is different. There is no browser plug-in, and we are browser agnostic. Another key difference is that the PC is not the engine behind the video chat; we have a data center and that is the engine. You log in through your browser, and we have banks of Web servers and streaming servers. We can scale to much larger audience, and we stream the audio component as well. Large, live crowds is our sweet spot. We do video very well. Where other guys to small webcams, but we do large broadcasts.

Sramana: How do you position yourself in comparison to On24 and ViVu? Those two are scalable. 

 Nick Balletta: From a head-to-head perspective, I feel that On24 is our closest competitor. We differentiate on two fronts. Over the past 18 months they have migrated to virtual trade shows, and we don’t think that it is going to scale. We just partner with other companies in that space. Second, we focus purely on webcasting.

Sramana: In terms of channel partners, what are you exploring and why?

 Nick Balletta: We have a couple of value-added remarketers. They have core competencies in other businesses which are complemented by webcasting and they white label our services. Broadridge is one of those companies. They have an application where they distribute financial proxy information to shareholders. A year ago they integrated with us to provide virtual shareholder meetings where a shareholder can be authenticated and vote their shares in real time. That is a market that has a $300 million opportunity. We are slowly but surely seeing this take off. Next year Intel will do only a virtual shareholders meeting. Cisco WebEx has a product called Live Streaming. We are the underlying technology for that.

Sramana: What is your perspective about lightweight solutions such as ViVu.TV? We run the 1M/1M program on ViVu. They are an excellent events platform for us.

 Nick Balletta: There are a lot of technologies out there. We are definitely enterprise focused, and we work in highly secure environments. Our clients are those who need automation and scale. We really focus on our flexible signal acquisition capabilities. We do stuff live very, very well. A lot of folks do on-demand only and some are live, but when it comes to handling the extremely large audience, we find that not a lot of people can do it.

This segment is part 6 in the series : How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta
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