Shindig, the state-of-the-art virtual meeting and event tech, today introduced yet another in its array of unique, highly differentiated features: Breakouts Plus.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221103005319/en/
Breakouts Plus represents a substantial advance in managing or fostering private group conversations between participants in a larger virtual experience.
- It allows the host to place participants in conversation groupings of up to 12 participants
- It allows for sorting (same with same), assorting (all different), or customized assigned grouping all with a drag drop interface to edit and adjust them to better curate the experience
- Groups are not arbitrarily timed, compelling participants to sit through unwanted conversations of set durations, or cutting off active conversations that participants wish to continue. Rather the host can choose to either end the groupings, rotate through other rounds of groupings, or allow participants to engage with their grouping only as long as they wish, allowing participants the freedom to return to a freeform “lobby” experience where they are free to talk with others at will
- Breakouts Plus private conversation groupings are not isolated and cut off from the event as a whole. With Breakouts Plus the speaker retains the ability to at any point in time share content and/or address all in their private breakout chats. They can play music, exhibit a slide show, make announcements or provide any additional instructions to all the “breakout conversations” at once; prompting and guiding the experience as they desire.
While many video conferencing platforms offer random breakout rooms, and/or pairing of participants in totally isolated video chats, these have a number of significant drawbacks.
First, many platforms don’t allow the dynamic entry of criteria to be used for sorting groups; ie such that they can be altered or changed by individuals in real time. Shindig addresses this by allowing sort criteria fields that can be edited at will.
Second, other platforms don’t allow flexible custom rule-based grouping of either participants with same criteria (ie all of one locality with others of the same locality) or an assortment of criteria such that all in a group are different (ie buyers with sellers, recruiters with candidates) or the option of a custom drag and drop visual arrangement of participants in groupings.
Third, other platforms don’t allow for speakers, content or announcements to be shared from a stage by the host simultaneously with all in more traditional breakout rooms. On other platforms, breakout “room” conversations are entirely isolated from the entire experience and unto themselves.
Fourth, other platforms typically force ALL participants to go into breakouts. They don’t allow individuals to opt out or continue in a dialog that is already ongoing. And they typically compel all to remain in their breakouts for specific arbitrary time periods.
And fifth, on other platforms, there is no sense of other breakouts or the rest of the virtual experience. There is no ability to move around from group to group or to mingle with those who have left their assigned groups.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221103005319/en/