“These new enhancements come at a time when Blue Jeans has captured over 30% of the worldwide video conferencing services market. The company is also seeing greater than 25% growth month over month and has recently closed $50M in new funding to invest aggressively in sales and marketing, international expansion, and continued product innovation,” said Stu Aaron (pictured above), CCO, Blue Jeans Network. “With every new feature, partnership, and customer, we continue to disrupt and extend the reach of the video communications market, proving that today the most powerful tool for business is still the human face.”
To enhance the audio experience, Blue Jeans has partnered with InterCall, one of the world’s largest audio and conferencing service providers to integrate Blue Jeans Network video with InterCall Reservationless-Plus audio conferencing. By merging best-in-class audio and video, the two companies are creating a global collaboration platform that makes meetings easier to schedule, join and experience regardless of whether people connect from traditional phone lines, mobile devices, or by video. Additionally, Blue Jeans has also introduced new audio quality enhancements that address low bandwidth environments, and counteract common causes of echo and other audio disruptions.
On the web conferencing and content sharing front, Blue Jeans has added built-in chat capabilities, enabling meeting attendees to more effectively communicate by sending reminders to speakers, conducting side-bar conversations, exchanging commentary, and more. Blue Jeans is also offering a new screen sharing “widget” that allows presenters to view other meeting participants simultaneously while they are presenting content from their desktop. This feature helps presenters to gauge the audience’s reaction to their presentation, and adjust their delivery as needed.
Finally Blue Jeans is extending its mobile offering to support Android-based tablets and smartphones with a native app that will be available tomorrow in Google Play. This complements the existing Blue Jeans iOS app which is currently the 180th most popular iPad business app in the Apple Store. Today nearly one-third of Blue Jeans meetings have at least one mobile device in them. IDC projects that smartphone shipments will surpass 1.8 billion mobile phones this year and Android will represent a 75 percent market share.
Blue Jeans also announced today that it has hired James Campanini, a former Cisco and WebEx executive, as VP/GM EMEA based in London. This move capitalizes on a rapidly growing presence in Europe. The UK already boasts nearly 700 businesses consuming approximately 10 million minutes a year on the Blue Jeans service, making it the second largest market for Blue Jeans behind the US.
