Yoga, definitely a spin off or a branch out of series of spiritual activities that originated in India but now practiced by the whole world because of its health benefits. From last few years, yoga becomes a vibrant tradition accepted by people across the world. Apart from vibrant tradition, for many fanatics and practitioners, the set of asanas or exercises has become a source of relaxation and enlightenment. Yoga provides a quick relaxation and its spiritual aspects make one’s mind stress free.

Previously, yoga has been exclusive to the Hindu and few other Indian religions. Nowadays, there is no religion boundaries on yoga as everyone realizes its important in the world and start practicing to keep themselves fit and healthy.

Learn Yoga Online: With the increasing trend of yoga, lots of health and fitness clubs start providing yoga sessions and exercises. Also, it has been noticed that registration of such memberships filled rapidly. But there are many people who don’t have sufficient time for joining such classes and practice yoga because of their busy schedule. 

To cater these numerous people’s requirements, several fitness clubs and companies has started providing online yoga classes that suits their time schedule. Online yoga websites are very helpful and convenient in order to practice yoga. People who are busy at daytime and can’t really rush to gyms or fitness centre for exercises; they can register easily for such classes as per their time schedule and privacy.

Benefits of online yoga classes: ? Don’t need to stick to one time schedule ? Comfort of your place ? Affordable ? Teaches by qualified yoga experts

Yoga helps people to achieve overall agility, strength and peace that they deserve. Due to these health benefits, it is perfect and highly recommended that yoga be offered and taught online.

Divine Wellness, a leading online health resource, offers online yoga class online that will let you learn yoga via high definition video conferencing. Learning kundalini yoga or any other yoga online has never been easier before as now.

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Addiction treatment companies are catching on to the benefits of video conferencing, using the service to provide outpatient treatment to individuals who may have recently moved far away from their therapy service or who choose to undergo treatment from the comfort of their own home.

One addiction therapy company is launching its services by offering free treatment for U.S. military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who may be facing problems of addiction. The veterans can set up online meetings with one of the available therapists and share their struggles on their living room couch, at their kitchen table or from their own bedroom.

 Physical face-to-face communication can be intimidating to some individuals and may force others to revert to their closed-off behavior. Taking away the office environment of an in-person meeting, a video conferencing session might allow an individual to let go of inhibitions and open up to the therapist.

The online meeting service can act as a beneficial form of aftercare for addiction treatment patients, allowing them to continue contact with their therapists and maintain a solid relationship with someone they trust. The web-based platform allows the treated individual to schedule travel plans and still report to the therapist for routine check-ins.

Some illnesses leave workers unable to move or function normally. Other times, an illness may simply be a minor malady that keeps a worker away from the office in order to protect other employees from getting sick. In those scenarios, web conferencing can benefit the quarantined worker and allow him to accomplish a few necessary tasks.

Using web conferencing services can allow a worker with a contagious illness to remain productive when he possesses enough strength to accomplish tasks but still may not be able to return to the office. Dialing in to an hour-long video conference meeting can make a positive difference in an employee’s hectic return-to-work schedule.

If a high-paying client has an appointment to discuss the terms of his contract with an under-the-weather business professional, the sales executive can explain his current condition through a quick, virtual online meeting, which may be a more successful sales approach than a simple phone call. The virtual meeting will show the client that the worker took the time to present himself properly for their meeting and ultimately prove his attentiveness and care for the client.

Vistime is a software product that allows a licensed session participant to invite colleagues, clients or any number or nominated participants into a secure session during which, all involved will be able to simultaneously view and interact with any supported document, image, video or 3D image through a simple and common interface, without the need for the originating software.

Vistime uses proprietary technical solutions like Arithmetic coding and Automatic Media Aspect Adjustment to compress data for communication while still retaining the integrity of the information. This results in high quality feeds to all participants despite poor internet connections. Display a piece of media on all participants monitors in exactly the same manner, irrespective of the individuals monitor resolution, format or size.

All performance driven features are run in an application which is native to the Operating System. The result being smooth low latency interaction over large files (3d, pdf, word, psd).

Using Client Side Input Prediction, vistime intelligently estimates where the mouse cursor is in a presentation and replicates those estimates along to all participants of the session which is very useful in a high latency network. Examples of high latency networks are from Australia to the United States which generally has a response time of 200 – 400 milliseconds, where-as local latency (within the same city) is usually under 30 milliseconds.

All communications and files in use within sessions are double encrypted using a combination of Secure Socket Layers and 256 bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption mechanisms.

As a session originator, control or restrict the ability to print or save media file(s) by your attendees.

Vistime supports a distributed infrastructure. so if one server goes down it takes a few seconds for the client to be able to join another server. If you are on a critical session call with stakeholders across the globe, rest assured you can complete your meeting as planned.

Avoid requiring complicated software packages on every desktop and save on your training and software costs.

Vistime has an open plugin system to enable extensions for company service integration (IDOL, SharePoint), file support (domain specific formats ) and interaction behavior (3d/2d/video).This extensible plugin architecture and performance orientated method of client operation is what makes vistime a truly unique architecture.

Vistime’s flexibility is its main strength. This makes it well positioned to easily incorporate the latest technologies including web technologies effectively. At its core, the client is a lightweight and effective viewing/markup system able to quickly manage a large amount of content. The content may be acquired from a web service, an application or added by the session participants themselves’ (drop file). As a front-end for a web service ( cloud computing ) vistime is guaranteed (by design) to present the dynamic data from any source as effectively as possible.

The Web Conferencing Council occasionally negotiates unique deals for the readers and followers.   For August, any Web Conferencing Council member, reader, or contributor can get up to 3 free Professional VIA3 web conferencing licenses for 3 full months.  These licenses include a full featured version of VIA3, free support, free training, unlimited workspace storage, and unlimited meetings.    VIA3 is FIPS 140-2 security certified, and HIPAA compliant. 

To redeem this offer, sign up for a free account at https://www.via3.com/Forms/Register/Register.aspx, and enter “Web Conferencing Council” in the referred by field.   Your account will automatically extend from 15 days to over 90 days.  (Limit 3 free seats per organization, not applicable towards any current license holders.)

AN AVERAGE of 241 people tune in to watch council meetings screened live on the internet.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council invested £120,000 last year in a new conferencing and voting system which allows meetings of the full council to be broadcast online.

It costs a further £16,000 a year to maintain the ‘webcasting’ service.

Figures show the live broadcasts have attracted an average of 241 viewers, peaking at 476 for the council’s historic budget-setting meeting in February at which a package of £36 million cuts was approved.

Viewing figures have since dropped to 102 for a full council meeting in March, 242 for the council’s annual meeting in May and 107 for the most recent full council meeting on July 7.

Critics say the council has made the system too difficult to use and does not publicise it enough.

The number of people watching replays of meetings ‘on demand’ at a later date peaked at 854 for the budget-setting meeting but fell to just 86 for the meeting in July.

It is not known how many of the archive viewers also watched the live stream, or how much of the replays they view.

Councillor Paul Shotton, cabinet member for transformation and resources, said: “The webcast service allows members of the public who for whatever reason are unable to attend city council meetings to watch at a convenient time.

“It brings democracy out into the community reaching audiences beyond the city council chamber.

“We’re very happy with the number of views each meeting has had so far and we’re eager to explore realistic ways to expand the system.”

Staffordshire Moorlands District Council axed its webcasting system in December to save £13,226.

It had generated 1,498 live views in the year before it was axed.

Matt Burke, who runs a community website for Tunstall residents, said the technology used to stream the meetings requires visitors to install new software – putting many of them off.

He added: “I feel the budget meeting when the decision was made on Tunstall pool attracted a lot of viewers because it was promoted through Twitter and local websites, not because of the council.

“It isn’t publicised very well and it takes an age to find out where it is.

“They have invested in technology that works, but it does not work for everybody and isn’t future-proof.”

Former Liberal Democrat councillor Kieran Clarke was on the cabinet when the purchase of the new system was approved.

He said: “The sound system we had in the council chamber at the time kept breaking down.

“It was past its sell-by date and it was felt that if we were replacing it, we might as well include the webcasting system at the same time.

“There was never any discussion of how many people it would be aimed at, just that we felt it was something we had to provide.

“The meetings can seem strange, confusing or boring to people who don’t regularly see them.”

Conservative leader Abi Brown said: “Cabinet and other meetings should also be shown live because I think there would be an interest.

“The more meetings that are shown and the more people that watch, the better value for money we’ll get from the system.”

The digital system purchased by the council includes microphones for all 44 councillors to speak into at meetings, as well as touch-screens to register votes and a projector screen to show members in the chamber what is being streamed online.

The council’s development management and licensing sub-committees, which decide planning and licensing applications, also meet in the council chamber but are not currently screened live.

Development management meetings will be made available to view live “in due course.”

Scrutiny committees and cabinet meetings are held in different rooms which do not have cameras.

The other category of video communications is enterprise video conferencing and Telepresence, generally represented by Telepresence rooms and large capital IT infrastructure for dedicated video conferencing equipment. Such systems are generally positioned for mid to large enterprises with not insignificant capital outlay and IT staff.

Both these types of video communications offer tremendous value based on their characteristics but there is an unfilled chasm between them.

There is a broad category of business users underserved with video conferencing solutions that offer the security, reliability and quality that they need. These business users can be small businesses as well as small and remote offices of larger businesses. Additionally, the business users extend to the ‘edge of the enterprise’ – every desktop user within an enterprise that can benefit from video communications.

Such applications also need an ease of access and deployment available at an affordable price. Enterprise grade security and reliability is essential and these combined features make such solutions distinct from the two available categories listed earlier.

Video communications qualifying for this middle tier is possible today and can be available to every desktop in the enterprise – i.e., beyond the executive suite and Telepresence conference rooms – as well as within the reach of small businesses.

The underlying premise of such a transformation is the relatively recent emergence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) based platforms and cloud based computing. High Speed Video has pioneered the use of such technologies for video conferencing and Telepresence, thereby creating a solution in the middle of video chat and hardware based Telepresence room and video conferencing systems.

The full whitepaper (by Jim Cantalini, President of High Speed Video) is an informative read for organizations debating the merits of video conferencing, and can be viewed and/or downloaded here.   This whitepaper details the current situation for video conferencing, the economic basis for video conferencing, personal and professional video conferencing, a discussion on current solutions, and some industry use cases.

As your business expands, so do your avenues of contact.  Although it is often said that increased distance is to blame for the breakdown in communication, the secret is unity – or in business terms, unified communications.

By bringing everyone together through a unified communications (UC) platform, you’re literally taking out the middle man, and integrating your various communicative services into one single interface.  Pulling together a host of different communication modes including video conferencing, mobile communication, email, voicemail, instant messaging and voice calls, means that you only have to answer to one solution – unified communications.

With more and more businesses interacting on a global scale, it’s common for people to be working from home or utilising satellite offices as a means of staying in touch, regardless of physical location.  Connecting your team onto one platform ensures better team collaboration – allowing online meetings to be scheduled more easily or for spur-of-the-moment reviews to take place.

Quite simply, unified communications can do wonders for your business, including:

-          Telephony.  Connecting various phone devices means you can call your co-worker by name, and not by extension;

-          Presence.  By identifying a person’s availability, it will be easier for people to know when you’re in or out of the office, without wasting time running around trying to locate you.

-          Instant messaging.  Talking as a pair or in groups wherever you are means less restrictions, as well as making file sharing simpler.

HR 1722 was signed into law by President Obama Thursday afternoon. Also known as the Telework Enhancement Act, the bill aims to increase the work-at-home opportunities for federal employees.

The bill instructs federal agencies to come up with better defined policies to promote telework. Some of its key features are that it requires each agency head to:

• Establish a policy under which eligible agency employees may be authorized to telework 
• Determine employee eligibility to participate in telework
• Notify all employees of their eligibility to telework

Some of the requirements the bill sets forth for the telework policy include:

•  Ensuring that telework does not diminish employee performance or agency operations
• Requiring a written agreement between an agency manager and an employee that outlines the specific work arrangement agreed to
• Providing that an employee may not be authorized to telework if that employee’s performance does not comply with the terms of the agreement
• Not applying to any agency employee whose official duties require, on a daily basis, direct handling of secure materials determined to be inappropriate for telework or on-site activity that cannot be handled remotely or at an alternate work site

The legislation directs the Office of Personnel Management to come up with teleworking guidelines.  Agencies must designate a Telework Managing Officer and must seek to better integrate teleworking into Continuity of Operations Planning, the procedures for keeping the government operating during emergencies.

You can read the full summary of the bill for more details.