Video Calls Made Easy with Talky
As a startup, video calls might not be such a big deal. Especially if you all work from one cubicle on the streets of Yaba or one dorm in the hostels of UNILAG. Why would you have the cause to do calls when you can just walk up to a member of your team and tell him how you feel? But when you work with a dispersed team, collaboration is key. Any tool that facilitates that in the simplest of ways is gold.
My team is of four working from different locations in Nigeria. We have meetings every now and then to report progress, reassess strategy and discuss ways forward. To make this work, we started with Google Hangouts. But this is Nigeria and the internet speed hustle is real. In a thirty-minute meeting, we spend about twenty minutes trying to get the connection right. The last ten minutes is spent on repeating the same thing just because the network is not strong enough.
Then, we went on to Imo which has no support for PC. Then, on to Skype, UberConference etc. We ended up doing voice conference calls for the meantime. After a while, we discovered Talky.
Talky.io is a very simple video conferencing tool that allows you to choose a room name and get a unique link you can share with your team mates. The URL is as simple as talky.io/room-name. Surprisingly, you need no sign up, no credit card and no download to make use of this awesomeness.
There are two simple ways to get started:
- Visit the website, www.talky.io, get a room name and share your room URL with your team.
- Choose your preferred room name, e.g. medium. Add it to the talky.io URL like this: talky.io/medium. Share with your team mate.
If you are still wondering what a room name is, it’s just like a unique video call URL you create to give others access to your call. And you don’t have to worry about intruders joining your call because of coincidence in room names. You can lock the room with a passkey.
Also, when the meeting gets visual and you need to show your colleagues what you are looking at, there is a screenshare feature on Talky for that. There is a chat feature for texting while calling. Maybe you need to quickly share a link or something.
Before this turns to some boring tutorial or review that I was not paid for, I’ll stop here.
In the coming weeks, I will also expose more cool cheap/free products that we use to get the work done in my startup. Stay tuned.
