Avacast
Avacast Corporation is a company that provides online meeting, webconferencing, webcasting, and all manner of online learning/distance education software and services. These services are provided by the company's sole product, the Avacaster System, which is available for licensing either in a hosted or deployed capacity.
History
Avacast was founded in 2001 by Rob Terrell, Jason Torchinsky and Alec Vance. The trio had previously founded Blip Amalgamated Internet Pleasureworks, an innovative online gaming site that had been featured in Wired Magazine and had declined a buyout offer from the infamous Pop.com in 1999.
The founders had previously worked for earlier webcasting companies, and leveraged these experiences when designing the Avacaster System in 2000. Using the Blip's proven and robust Multiuser Gaming Engine as a base, the first version of the Avacaster System was developed, and was licensed by Digital Planet in 2001.
Digital Planet used the Avacaster System for several landmark webcasts, including a record-breaking (at the time) interactive webcast for ABC TV's reality show The Mole that boasted over 4000 concurrent users.
Since that time the Avacaster System has grown in popularity, establishing strong user bases in the higher education market and, uniquely, among the Native American Nations.
On July 26-29, 2004, the Democratic National Convention in Boston Avacaster gave Media:40,000 potential voters the chance to interact with and ask questions of politicians, convention delegates, and media personalities.
System Details
In its marketing material, Avacast claims that the Avacaster System can be differentiated from competeting systems in the following ways:
• Interface. The Avacaster System is known for its clean, elegant interface that is highly customizible.
• Ease-of-Use. The Avacaster System has proven itself to be far easier for new users to understand and use; Avacaster separates Admin-level features from end-user features to allow for better tailoring of the respective interfaces
• Scalability. Avacaster has proven on many occasions the ability to provide full-featured, including audio, video, slides, animations, polls, interactive q/a, chat, etc. webcasts to very large numbers of concurrent users.