"Video phone booth" in North Lake Tahoe area? [telecom]

Feb 02, 2011 1 Replies

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Just wondering if anyone is aware of any kind of Internet-based "video phone booth" service in the North Tahoe/Truckee area -- that is, a place where I can go, sit before a video screen (maybe with keyboard also) and have a video conference with 3 or 4 individuals in a large business firm on the East Coast -- they can see me, I can see them, we can talk -- at some modest hourly rate? (I'd call $200/hour adequately modest; the East Coast firm will have its own facilities in house.)

I've contacted local upper-end resorts, hotels, conference centers: a couple of them offer to "set up a conference room" to do this, starting at $2000 up; the rest have no services.

I have two MacBooks, a residential LAN, and a decent Internet connection (maybe 2 MB each way) in my condo here, so I might be able to cobble up a home-brew setup -- but I've never done this, and don't want to invest time in learning how.

Thanks for any pointers. (Reno, maybe? -- but I'd rather not make the drive.)

You have all the pieces you need to do a video conference with Skype or iChat.

I can report from experience that Skype is very easy to set up on a Macbook and do video chat. My daughter uses it all the time. We've also used it in a situation like yours, most of the people are in a conference room, there's a Macbook at one end of the table so the remote person can see and be seen. Different versions of Skype interoperate well, so any computer with a camera running Skype on Mac, Windows, or Linux will work at their end.

Even if someone has a video studio, the hassle to set up a conference is surprisingly large since there are so many slightly different ways to do it. If you can arrange for both ends to do Skype or both ends to do iChat, it's much easier.

R's, John

"Video phone booth" in North Lake Tahoe area? [telecom]

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