Browser-based web-conferencing software Vyew released version 3.0 of their product today which the company cliams improves the often bloated, impersonal experience of visual collaboration with contextual discussions, voice comments, and webcam support among others.

A video demonstration of Vyew 3.0 is available below:

Vyew Version 3.0 includes these new features:

• Searchable Contextual Sidebar Forums - Enable collaborators to have a textual discussion alongside content and visually pinpoint the source of the discussion. Comments can be filtered by user, date and flag.
• Voice Comments - Provide a new medium for collaborators to participate in addition to text comments.
• Application Programming Interface (API) - Allows single-user Flash applications to be uploaded to Vyew and converted to multi-user collaborative applications.
• Webcam support - Conference participants can broadcast live video of themselves to the other conference participants.
• Voice over IP (VoIP) - Presenters can speak through their computer microphones to others in a meeting by clicking the "Push To Talk" button in Vyew. Other meeting participants hear the presenter through their computer speakers or headphones.
• Private Chat Groups - Two or more participants can text-chat separately from the group.
• Quiz and Poll Creator - A tool for creating true/false, multiple-choice and text-input quizzes and polls and for displaying results in graph form.
• User Statuses - Conference participants can click on buttons such as "Raise Hand" when they have a question and "Slow Down" notifying the presenter that he or she is going too fast.

"Finding new ways to improve collaboration is the key to achieving higher worker productivity and quality. Workspaces that blend real-time, asynchronous and visual collaboration such as Vyew are addressing customer needs for easier and faster communication and coordination in context to take collaboration to the next level," said Mark Levitt, VP, Collaborative Computing, IDC.