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March 14, 2014

Veeting Rooms Brings Collaboration, Quality and Security to Video Conferencing


Every day, technology enables the world to become a little smaller. Video communication, for one, brings people together from different locations to communicate, collaborate and share. It cuts down on traveling costs and time, increasing productivity and efficiency. Solutions like Skype, ooVoo and Google Hangouts make it easy to keep in touch with anyone anywhere in the world.

Businesses need more than just video capabilities, though – they also need the other human elements, like being able to collaborate on a document, share notes and have scheduling options. Luckily for them, Veeting Rooms is here to help.

Veeting Rooms – a play on word for virtual meeting rooms – is a new player in the WebRTC space. Launched at the end of February, Veeting Rooms takes video conferencing to the next level by focusing on security, collaboration and quality. I caught up with Philipp Baumann, one of the founders of Veeting Rooms (the other is Fabian Bernhard), who showed me Veeting Rooms in action and talked about why this solution is different from other video conferencing platforms out there today.

The large enterprise market is typically dominated by companies like Cisco, Polycom and Avaya, but Veeting Rooms isn’t after that market. It’s targeting SMEs, which are looking for easy-to-implement, feature-rich tools that don’t require a large IT department to manage.

Baumann explained the company turned to WebRTC because it works nicely, it offers great video quality and it’s easier to manage data on the backend. It also fits in with the company’s mission to provide an easy-to-use solution for SMEs, since all users have to do is click to join a meeting in a browser – no downloads, no plugins, no hassle. 

WebRTC is just one of Veeting Rooms’ differentiators. The collaboration features offer real-time interaction between users, such as making notes on a document, sharing files, chatting and setting up an agenda. For me, one of my favorite features is the “private notes” section. As someone who usually takes notes during video interviews, it’s always really awkward to write in a Word document because the video disappears – that’s the pro and the con of using video for a conference: people have full visibility of if you’re paying attention or not. Word usually hides the browser, meaning I lose any indication of facial response and my view of the video conference – something that’s not the end of the world, as the other side can still see me, but it’s kind of like texting while in a conversation. I feel rude.

Fortunately, this isn’t a problem with Veeting Rooms. The “private notes” section allows users to take their own notes, which can be saved and sent to their email after. This is great for anyone set with the task of taking notes or minutes of a meeting. Sure enough, after our conference, I received an email with the PDF Baumann shared as well as a document of my private notes. 

The other differentiator is Veeting Rooms’ emphasis on security. It hosts its service and data in Switzerland primarily for the country’s strong data and privacy protection laws to ensure information is not shared with third parties, and all communication is encrypted.

There are different plan options for Veeting Rooms – Free gives you free 30-minute meetings for up to five video participants and 10 audio users.  From there, it moves up to Basic, Professional and Professional Plus. Details on those plans can be found here.

In the future, the company plans to introduce new features, such as calling in from office phones and APIs to integrate Veeting Rooms with existing tools, as well as introduce a solution for non-WebRTC-compatible browsers, such as Internet Explorer. 




Edited by Cassandra Tucker
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