SmallBizResource Blog -- Networking & Communications

Business Travel is So Exotic (Not!)

Posted by Naomi Grossman Tuesday, Sep 25, 2007, 10:29 AM ET

As a kid, when I heard the phrase traveling for work, a series of thrilling images would immediately populate my head that always involved meeting interesting people, going to exotic places, and doing lots of exciting things.

As a grownup, the reality of business travel is anything but. It's more like long lines, lots of boring meetings, and tons of waiting around that ends up translating into wasted time.

While face-to-face meetings are important they certainly are not always necessary. Small business owners would do well to start using Web-based conference calls, many of which are free or fairly low cost. Web Worker Daily really likes Yugma and its high praise makes me think that a lot more small business owners will be able to save even more money on travel.

WWD writes: "With the free version, you can invite up to 10 participants into a virtual meeting with you, share your desktops back and forth, whiteboard and annotate files, and when you set up a session, a free teleconferencing session and number are generated for you. Another very cool feature of Yugma is that you can embed it into your web site."

For Skype users, Yugma has a Skype edition. Also, as WWD writes, "And, keep in mind that Yugma’s ability to share desktops makes it ideal for web workgroups who might want to have a techie person in the group diagnose and analyze any system or application problems in real time."

Sounds like more of you will be able to stay put for a while.

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