Tomorrow, July 1, 2009, is when we add a distinct kink to the rather straight-line evolution of conference calling technology. As of tomorrow we will launch an event which will highlight the massive shift from "scalable media" to "scalable interaction".

Until now, conference calls have meant one-to-many — a host (or panel) talks and everyone else listens. Sure, guests and participants can be ‘unmuted’ so they can contribute, but that quickly turns to chaos if you switch to an open mike. It’s a fact: the telephone is a pretty lousy way for more than a handful people to interact in any meaningful way. From my perspective, this puts large conference calls in the same class as podcasts, MP3s, YouTube videos, and even radio & television: these are passive media where the audience consumes the media stream. And it's not the best way to learn, inspire, engage, or market. 

I saw the power of interactive learning first-hand when I taught Calculus in graduate school: students who worked together in groups learned and retained far more of the what was being taught, and did many times better in the finals. But the conference calls I’ve sat through over the years have been the opposite of active learning: hundreds of people, completely disconnected from each other, listening to the same speaker, without any way to interact with each other or to discuss and apply what they were learning. At best, people are sitting and listening ... and more realistically, they are checking email or updating their Facebook page during a typical call. They’re not engaged. 

If you’re a conference call host or organizer, I have some “what if?” questions for you: 

What if you could host workshop-style trainings on the telephone – complete with breakout groups, one-on-one coaching and total awareness of who is on the call? 

What if you could answer questions by “passing the mic” to people who “raise their hands” at any time during a call – without the chaos and awkwardness that ensues when you “open up the lines”? 

What if you could take orders instantly and any time simply by asking your listeners to press a button on their phone? 

It’s these questions that inspired us to create MaestroConference – a new conference call platform that’s built from the ground up to enable human interaction during a large-audience teleconference. We believe that human interaction is key because it leads to better engagement and more active learning. 

MaestroConference is optimized for the specific needs of authors, educators, trainers, coaches, thought leaders, marketers — anyone who wants to engage with large audiences via phone and hates the “one to many” model of traditional conference call systems. July 2009 marks the beginning of the end of these traditional, boring conference calls.

And today also marks the end of our "quiet period" of non-blogging!

More to come ... stay tuned!