Crowds gathered outside the Scottish Parliament surveying the near total eclipse of the sun against the dramatic backdrop of Edinburgh's Holyrood Park. The Astronomical Society of Edinburgh had set up here with telescopes to capture the moment and members of the public were given turns at using the equipment to view the celestial spectacle. The society had teamed up with the Scottish Parliament to host the public event. Earlier in the morning school groups were given educational talks about the physics of the imminent eclipse and advice on viewing it safely. The eclipse fell just over a week ahead of the Scottish Parliament opening a major exhibition and series of events, the incredible power of light, aimed at families and featuring free talks and workshops. For the society it had been all they'd hoped for. This is amazing. I was just so pleased when I got up this morning because obviously I have no control over it. So like all these poor people that missed it in Cornwall on the previous one, this is fantastic. It's a perfect location. We were obviously hoping to have some kind of public event and just to have setting outside the Parliament is fantastic. And I would much rather be here sharing it with friends and colleagues from the society and members of public in Edinburgh rather than going off on a wild goose chase to the fair or whatever, just in the hope that you might see something. So I think this is still an awesome experience. The incredible power of light will be at the Scottish Parliament from April 1st until the 30th and will feature interactive children's workshops and talks. You can get more information on our webpage and through social media.


If you're looking for an alternative to Zoom, maybe you've got some issues with resolution. If you're one of the people like me using e-cam live virtual camera or a virtual camera into Zoom, or maybe you're using Zoom just for occasional calls and don't want to really justify the expense of it, but you would still like more features than you get just with the free Zoom plan, or perhaps you're just finding Zoom. It's getting a little bit bloated with too many settings, too confusing, too much overwhelm. Well, whatever the case, Vivo Meetings could be the platform for you. And in this video, I'm going to talk through some of its features and some of the things that I think set it apart and what really piqued my interest in it. Now, full disclosure, this and some other upcoming content on my channel are a paid collaboration with Vivo Meetings. And what you find is as you start creating content on YouTube, as your channel grows, as my channel has grown, I found that more and more companies have been reaching out, you know, offering me either products for review or asking for collaborations with paid promotions and things like that. And the majority of these just get rejected outright. You know, generally, I'm only going to be talking about something that I'm a big fan of, that I've been using for a long time. But Vivo Meetings was something that was new to me when when they reached out to me. And so I did take a look at it, though. And there was a few things there that really just grabbed my attention because, as I say, I use Ecamm Live Virtual Camera into Zoom and anybody who has spent any amount of time in the Ecamm Live community, where we want to level up our on-screen presence, our online meetings, using all of the production quality that you can get from Ecamm Live, or indeed from OBS or any other of these sort of live production tools, rooting these into Zoom to just have, you know, another level on your on your digital stage, as I like to call it. Well, if you have been in that world, you will know that resolution is the bane of our lives sometimes. And certainly with Zoom, the number of hoops that you have to jump through just to get that high quality resolution.  So that's the right off the bat. If you want to use Ecamm Live Virtual Camera into Zoom, you need to be on a paid plan because you can't actually get this higher resolution. And just to sort of explain what this issue is, Zoom and all of these meeting platforms are generally just assuming that you're using a regular camera into the meeting. And so when that is going into Zoom, that's fine if you're just on camera. But what if you're actually using Ecamm OBS or applications like this to share some information on your screen or to bring in presentations and so on, those are going to have necessarily sort of text on them. And so if Zoom is just thinking that you've got a regular webcam, it's not going to be thinking that oh, hang on a minute, I need to make sure that you've got this high quality resolution. And it saves that specifically for the screen sharing. So this is the issue that we're trying to constantly overcome.  You can then go and enable this in the settings. You can then go and enable this in the settings on the web first, and then your Zoom application settings as well. And then there are a whole series of other checks that you need to have. You need to be in full screen mode in Zoom. Your participants need to be in full screen mode. You need to have all of these other different things that you have to jump through. I mean, so much so that one of the most downloaded PDFs on my website is the Zoom settings guide to help people achieve this, this thing of just having a high quality resolution. So one of the things that really piqued my interest about Viva meetings was you as the host, you as the meeting organizer, just get to simply choose what resolution you're on. And you don't need to be on the highest plan. There are a range of plans which we'll look at a little bit later. But basically, you are in control of that resolution. Now, obviously, there is still a certain bandwidth requirement, but that is to be expected. You know, if my bandwidth dropped right now, even just streaming to YouTube, then there would be a degradation of resolution. But that aside, the resolution is a huge thing. And it just seemed to me that this coupled with a load of other things that I'll go through, it just felt like it's quite a refreshing platform to take a look at. So that's what we're going to be doing today. But I did just want to get out of the way this full disclosure about this is a paid collaboration. But as always, these views are my own. And there's no onus on me to say anything in particular in this. It's just really just my general sort of views. So what I thought I'd do is I'd fire up a meeting, which I've already done, and then we'd go through some of the settings, and the sort of planning of meetings and things like that and go through some of the feature sets, and also their roadmap for future updates as well, because they've been very open and clear about about that. Just a quick chat to everyone in the chat. Hey, Parker, great to see you here. And George, great to see you too as well. Hey, Chris, great to see you here. You're here for the new zoom. Yes, well, it's a great alternative. And Paul, great to see you too. And finally, Jesse, great to see you as well. And yeah, Jesse's in the take one tech academy. And we've been talking about this a lot really as another alternative to zoom. So let's first of all, just pop over to this little meeting that I've got going. I'll just quickly show you the interface. I'm just going to switch my video off on this iPad for the time being. So this is the interface. I'll get into this in more detail a little bit later. It's a meeting platform. What do you expect? Paneled views and so on, or tiled participants there on the screen. So but this is just to give you a little peek at the sort of look of the of the interface. But what I want to do first, though, is I want to go through some of the settings because this is one of the things that I talked about in it was actually in when I did the event last last month, the digital stage revolution, and we were talking about zoom and it was all about, you know, leveling up your on screen presence. And the question or the comment came in from one of the attendees of that event that zoom just seems to be getting so bloated now there is so much that they're adding in all the time that sometimes, you know, it's a it's a mystery as to where to find anything. Certainly when you look in the the web settings, it's just it's just a mass of things. And sometimes it's it's good to have all of these features and options. But other times you just want a little bit of simplicity, don't you? So let's take a look then at the settings for vivo meetings. And I'm not going to go through all of them. It's got the usual things, you know, your account picture, your password, two factor authentication, all of this kind of stuff down on this right hand side to all pretty self explanatory. But the couple of things that want to just go into is audio and video, first of all. So we've got the video, you can choose to whether you want it sort of reverse basically, or as folks would see it. So display my videos as others would see it. So they're going to see it exactly the correct way around. And I prefer to look at it like that as well, specifically because with ecam, you know, I've got text on screen and things like that. So that's how I want it to be displayed to me. Some people prefer to have their image reversed so that it's more like a mirror. But when you get used to sort of live streaming in that then certainly you want to you want to just be able to see it as it's going to go out. Simple settings, though, you know, audio microphone and speaker, and there's obviously a test built into that as well. You know how in zoom, we've got all these different things with background noise removal, echo cancellation, and there's multiple different settings. And then we've got that thing original sound for musicians, which frustratingly, you have to go and toggle on every time. So just without going in making this a zoom thing, but with with zoom, if you want to have just if you've got a good audio setup, maybe you've got a roadcaster, you've got a good microphone or something like that. And you just want to have that high quality audio going into your your meeting. In zoom, there's a bit of a dance that you have to go through to enable all of that. And then it's using this thing called original sound for musicians. But then it's just not toggled on automatically in every meeting. So it's kind of one of the checklist of things you have to do when you start a meeting is click on original sound. If you forget to do that, then there might be background noise suppression that's going to knock out any background sound effects and things like that that you actually do want to put into your production. Here it's just very simple, either noise cancellation on or off. So it's either going to filter out the background noise, or it isn't. And it's just going to let through the unfiltered. So that's exactly what I want. Another simple thing there that we've got in zoom as well, hold down space key to temporarily unmute always a great feature. If you're in other people's meetings, or even in your own and you're just muted and you want to temporarily unmute. And then we've got the ECAM live virtual camera. Now I'm actually looking at this in the in the in the browser. However, just know that there is a desktop app and it looks exactly the same. But I'm doing it in here just because it enables me to sort of zoom it up a little bit. However, one thing to note is by default, the application doesn't allow for virtual cameras. Now that's kind of what I'm talking about, isn't it? Taking a virtual camera like ECAM in to into the application. However, just like in discord where we've got that little terminal code that we can we can type in to enable the virtual camera if I just come back down to here. So I've opened up terminal app. And all we need to do is just come into here. And it's not actually that one. That one's the one for discord, which I've just had to do because discord makes you do that every time. But if I go back up here, this is the little bit of code that we need to add in. So it's this Vivo meetings, frameworks, helper plugin app. So this is the little bit of code. You'll find that link down in the description.  So open terminal app. And then you literally just copy the code out of the description of this video, paste that in. And then when you hit return, it's going to ask for your your system password, click that and then you are done. And just make sure that either Vivo meetings app is closed when you do that or that you close it down and reopen it afterwards. But assuming that you have done that, then your ECAM live virtual camera will just show up in the list here. So you can pick that. So yeah, that is the first major thing that we want to get out of the way is that you can obviously add in your virtual camera. Another thing then to go through, it's got things like virtual backgrounds. To be honest, I'm not a fan of virtual backgrounds in any platform. So I'm not really going to go into that. It's got the same kind of things as you've got in Zoom. You can upload your own one. You can blur the background, all of that kind of stuff. However, yeah, I prefer not to use those. I think if you are going to use a virtual background, then I would still recommend just use ECAM, use their green screen feature, and then you're going to get a much better sort of key because all of these virtual background things are, I don't think you have a professional look really because of just the quality. And this applies to Zoom, to Teams, to everything. So yeah, I'm not a fan of meeting backgrounds. Another thing, though, that I think is great. And when I did the ECAM Creator Camp workshop with Dan, and we were talking about, our whole session was about online presentations using ECAM into your meeting platforms. And one of the things that we talked through there was this checklist that you go through when you start up a meeting. Keyboard Maestro's got an update. I won't do that just now. Let me move that out of the way. Remind me later. But we talked about all of these different settings that you can go through at sort of start-up. Well, one of the things I like about Vivo meetings is it's got these different meeting modes, as it calls them. And it's basically just an easy way to sort of have some presets set up for these different kinds of things. So first of all, you've got conversation and collaboration mode. That would be just a regular meeting, basically, as you would be probably expecting. So as it says, all participants can activate their webcam. They can share their screen, upload a document, present a document, use the whiteboard, and basically it's just a totally interactive, collaborative meeting. They've then got this other one, which they call Q&A or classroom mode, as it says. Ideal for us. Let me play. Let me read that for you. Ideal for online classes, prayer meetings, company meetings, or training sessions, any small to mid-sized group where interaction is important, but only those you have chosen to present will be able to share any content. So it's basically, everyone can see each other. You're all in there, but you just want to restrict the sharing ability to people who are going to be sort of the main sort of presenters. So if you are doing like a workshop or something like that, you may want to have that so that people can still see each other and interact, but only moderators. And by the way, in this sense, moderators is classed as the host or what you might think of as a co-host. So in Zoom, you have co-hosts. This would be a classed as a moderator. I quite like that term, actually, because, you know, there is a host, but the moderator is somebody's potentially in the background, or at least, you know, just sort of helping to keep people in on track and things like that. So it's actually quite a good name for it rather than a co-host. But in any case, I always kind of think of my co-hosts as moderators in that respect. And so they will be the only ones that are able to sort of present, use the whiteboard and things like that. Next, they've got presentation and webinar mode, which is, as you might expect, more like a sort of webinar. And this, it says, as you can see, there's a waiting room automatically set up. All participants will be joined as muted and they cannot unmute themselves. So that's the thing about a webinar. Usually, when you're thinking about the difference between a meeting and a webinar, webinars, you know, the other participants can't necessarily see each other. They can't come on audio at all. Either it's very much a sort of more like sort of one directional and so on. They've then got this additional one, which is called focus mode. Now, this is probably actually more to do with, it's a sort of hybrid, I guess, between a webinar and a meeting. Because here, they have access to activate their webcam. So it's kind of like a webinar, but where you can bring people up onto the screen as well. So that's the sort of difference. Besides the organiser and moderators, the any participants can be spotlighted by a moderator. So they can still see their own video, but only other participants will see those that, you know, those that are on spotlight. So it is a little bit like a hybrid, which I think is an interesting thing because usually if you're making the distinction between either a webinar or a meeting, you've got two options. Either folks can see each other or they can't in the webinar, whereas this gives you this ability to sort of, you know, bring somebody out of that as well. So I like this idea of focus modes and we're looking in the settings here. So this is what you're setting as your sort of default meeting mode. As you can see here, that's your default, but you can change this on a meeting by meeting basis. And in fact, if I go to the schedule here, this is a different window I've got opened now for where we schedule a meeting. You can see how you can give it a title, the start and the start time and so on, but you've got here where you selecting the type of meeting it is. So if I click on that, you can just choose any one of those. Incidentally, you can also change this in meeting as well. So if I just pop over to that meeting for a second here, we've got going. Let me see. I think I've just clipped the top of that out. There we go that we need to see that bit. So here you can change the conversation style and here we're in this type. But if I wanted to switch this partway through, I could do that. It may be that you want to have a you're doing, let's say you're doing a workshop. In fact, a good example of this would be the workshops that I do in the Take One Tech Academy, link down in the description to that as well. But every month I do a workshop for that and the first hour is basically me delivering content. But then the second hour is where we're just having a Q and A and sort of discussing it all. So actually, you know, starting this out as a webinar mode where it's just very much sort of one directional with me doing the presentation in this example. But then, you know, partway through after I've delivered the main content, then switching it to a collaboration mode where everyone comes on camera, it would be a great way to do that. So I like that sort of flexibility that you can sort of switch from webinar to a regular meeting, sort of mid-view or mid-meeting is a great little feature. So I'll just come back to the settings again here. And we've got waiting room and hold music. So you can choose your music. Incidentally, this is what I'll talk about the different tiers in a moment. I think that this choosing the hold music, the music that plays when people are in the waiting room, I think that that is one of the higher tier features. But anyway, I shall just come through here. Next, we have got in here we've got, where is it? Recording and live streaming. So as in Zoom, you can stream to YouTube from the platform as well. So if you want to start your meeting up in here but then have it be streamed out for people who are just watching, you can do that here as well. The other thing I like here is you can specify the layout. So Zoom is sometimes a little bit limited in the layouts when you are recording or at least sometimes it feels like you don't necessarily have full visibility of what it is going to be doing. Whereas here you can just simply choose what you want. So preferred layout for audio and video recordings and live streams, either the gallery view, the speaker view with the tiles down the side or speaker only. So obviously, if you are streaming to YouTube and you're doing a thing where you've got a class, let's say, or a workshop and you want the participants to see it, but you also want to stream to YouTube, then you may want to just do the speaker only to be to be going to YouTube. And it could be that maybe even you start this as a webinar, you're going into your your meeting rather, and then you're streaming out to YouTube in this speaker view, but then you end the streaming in YouTube and then switch the meeting style to this more collaborative style. So there's plenty of options there. You can also change this one preferred recording and streaming layout when someone is presenting a file or their screen in the meeting. So you might want speaker only, but if that person is sharing their screen, then obviously you want to capture that as well. So you might have a sort of combination of two of two in these. So so yeah, these are just different different options here. And it's not necessarily that, you know, zoom and things can't do these. What I just found refreshing about this was one thing that I'm constantly on calls with people about aside from audio, that's the biggest thing that people book consultation calls incidentally. If you would like to have a chat about anything, you can go ahead and book a call with me at takeonetech.io slash consultation to talk about meeting tech, audio and things like that. But yeah, the people who book calls with me are talking about audio, but another one that comes up a lot is zoom settings and how do I enable this or disable this? And I just found that the settings here, there's never more than a few things on each screen. So it's very easy to find and it's just not not so bloated with other things either. So that is the recording and live streaming. And as you can see, we're actually at the bottom of the list. I haven't obviously gone through all of these, but I just found that it's quite a sort of simplistic approach to things with seemingly sort of everything that you might need for just sort of general meetings. There is obviously still a place for zoom for certain things as well. So it's not to dismiss zoom entirely. However, I just think that for a lot of people, this might be might be all that they are looking for. So with that said, let's just take a look at the scheduling just once again, because this is another thing that's pretty simple. So if I click on the schedule, we did sort of talk about this, but you can set things like whether you want to record automatically. Another feature that this has at one of the levels, I'll talk about the tears in a moment, but it also has the option to automatically generate basically a transcript. The word was escaping me there, so I should have just read it, shouldn't I? So it automatically generates a transcript of the meeting, but it also highlights key terms and things like that as well. So basically when the meeting ends, I just get emailed a transcript and then also the highlights of the meeting as well. And you can set it if you want to automatically live stream. So if you were setting this up, as I mentioned, maybe you might want to set it up as a webinar, for example. So we click on save there and then maybe automatically live stream that to the different platforms. So you can set that in there as well. And yeah, so this transcript concept is something that came up and in fact, that's why I think we started talking about this in the Take One, Take Academy Q&A was because we were looking for transcript options for Zoom. And yeah, those are basically add-ons. So there is one that's sort of built into Zoom. I'm not really, I haven't been a fan of what that gives out. There are other platforms like autorette.ai that you can use with Zoom, but again, that's another subscription on top. So it's just nice to see that at one of the levels it has that built in here. So that's in terms of scheduling. Let's just actually come back to the meeting. In fact, before I do, let's take this in a logical step. We've done the settings, we've looked at scheduling. There's one other feature that it's got built into its menus and that is what they call a connection test. And I thought that this was quite good as a live streamer. We're always looking for, you know, checklists and making sure people go through the correct processes. Well, built into the app is this call diagnostics test. And if you just click on the start, the first thing it's going to do is check your microphone and check your audio. So it's actually seeing live now the levels that are coming in. And it's saying, speaking to your microphone is the meter below moving. It's as simple as that. So click on yes. Next is audio playback. So that just played something back. It probably didn't come into the stream because it came through the same channel as the, as the, as ECAM is on. However, I heard it. So that was the audio playback. Here it's just doing a speed test for us which actually looks a little bit on the slow side today. I wonder what's going on with my internet. Technically, that should be a gig up and down. So that's a little bit weird on my side and might must have to get onto my my provider about that. But clicking on the continue now it's going to check the video. And it's going to just check if we can see video feed. And so we can click on yes there. So I did think that that was quite a nice little thing just to go through just to go through that process of checking on all those things to make sure that yeah, it's the the audio video and connection are all up to scratch. So let's have a look at some other things here. Let me just come over to tell you what I'll do. I'll just check in with the comments because I don't want to neglect what folks are saying. Hey, Bicky. By the way, I saw the picture you posted in ECAM with your camera for your studio. I can't wait to see your setup. That is an awesome awesome camera you've got. This is the problem when I check in with comments. Late. So I lose the context. Some things being glitching for you in Zoom recently. I'm not sure that might have been resolution or maybe something else. The different meeting modes feature is an awesome feature. Yeah, really, it comes down to simplicity as well. That's what I'm liking about it. You know, technically in Zoom, you can go in and change all of these different things, but it just seems to me that, you know, to switch from one to the other, there's a lot of different steps that you have to take rather than just a simple button to to be able to do that. I'm seeing all these options between Zoom, Sessions, and now Vivo. Yeah, so yeah, obviously Zoom, we all know what Zoom is. Sessions is another meeting platform as well. That isn't one that I've actually tried. I know that some other folks have. That's got some interesting features as well. But yeah, there's just other meeting platforms and it's a case of, you know, we all know Zoom, we all know it and it's powers and maybe it's limitations as well. But yeah, these are just some other alternatives and so it's a case of going through and checking on the pricing and the feature set and things like that and just deciding which one is right for you. In fact, what we'll do is after I go checking with these comments, we'll go and look at some of the features as well. Is there a big difference between this and Sessions? So again, I guess they're kind of similarly placed. I haven't checked on the pricing of Sessions of late. I know that there was an offer that's now ended with AppSumo. So I think that that has now finished though. So yeah, in terms of that, I've not done a full comparison but I certainly will. Hey, Chris, I hope you're well too and no problems. Sorry, I'm late. I'll mark it down in my register. So do you know if it integrates with Calendly like Zoom does? Now here's the thing, they are actually working on their own Calendly sort of alternative. So this is another thing. When we think about all the different things that we have around scheduling our calls in Zoom, I mentioned the something like Otter AI which is an AI transcript thing which is a paid add-on or paid service. Then there's Calendly, that's another subscription. So they are developing or have developed their own meeting scheduling platform. But if I just go over to their website, it does also integrate with things like Zappia and this is their one. So they've got Vivo Calender and that would essentially replace Calendly. So this is an appointment scheduler they've got that sort of integrates with Vivo meetings. So there isn't a direct Calendly plugin but there is a what do they call it? It's Zappia integration. So technically you could just link it like that and then link it with Google and all of those kind of things as well. The meeting transcript is yeah and it's great that it's just kind of it's built into one of the tiers. Chris, yeah. Original sound for musicians. Yeah, that's the thing that has been glitching even when turned on. Oh, interesting. Oh, that is interesting. So you've been having some issues when it's been on. Hmm. So, oh great. So our sessions is still on their app Sumo as well. I should probably go and get that and do the do the full comparison then as well. Okie dokie. So let's let's whilst we're just sort of talking about features and functionality let's come over to here and I'll start with where let's just start with the pricing because this is something that sets it apart from Zoom already. So Zoom there are I guess three tiers. There's the pro there's the enterprise and there's the education. I'm missing one there but I mean like the one that I'm on I pay for it annually on Zoom and that works out at I think about $16, $17 a month amortized over the 12 months or whatever. So these are the plans though on vivo meetings. So starting from $2.50 a month so if you're doing like occasional meetings and you're looking for something that is more full featured than then the basic account with Zoom where you've got a limitation on the time of the meeting and so on the duration of the meeting. Then $2.50 a month seems a lot more a lot more manageable. The other thing about this is all of these plans have this resolution feature that was talking about.  I'm just going to come over into this meeting. I'm going to go into my camera settings here. Video settings let's go to audio and video settings and this is the setting. So here you can just choose maybe you've got a poor connection and you just want to say okay let's just use the standard definition or maybe you want to go a little bit higher or if you are doing some sort of presentation where you've got on screen text and things like that then you can just switch into full HD. That is a feature across all of their plans. So whatever plan you're on with Vivo you can actually choose your resolution and that is the thing that for me really just grabbed my attention being in the e-cam community using virtual cameras really being an advocate for just levelling up your on-screen presence by using live production software into your meetings to take things you know all the things that I do on my live streams switching scenes switching cameras all of that kind of stuff then you know using a virtual camera with e-cam into Vivo you can just select the resolution. Now obviously there is there is always a limitation if you've got you know really slow internet really poor resolution you're on dial-up dare I say it I don't think anyone is anymore are they? But yeah the resolution may be lower depending on your network conditions so if you have you know really poor network then it may be that it drops but generally the fact is it's available to everyone on every plan and yeah you don't have all of these other hoops that you need to jump through that some people aren't even aware of in Zoom like you have to actually even if you're on a pro plan you have to contact Zoom to enable it then you have to enable it in your web settings then you have to enable it in your desktop settings then you have to be in full screen a guest has to be in full screen and also your guest has to have the bandwidth as well so it's there's all these different hoops whereas here it's just very clear whatever plan you're on you go into the meeting just enable full HD so this is something that is available to to everyone the other thing that I pay extra for in Zoom is Zoom webinar so Zoom webinar is a separate product to the to the meetings whereas here everybody has the the webinar mode included so that thing where you're choosing the style if you want to run webinars I mean I forget exactly the my plan for Zoom is whatever it is a hundred and forty five hundred fifty dollars a year and then I pay extra for Zoom webinar and that is dependent on the number of participants but I can't just remember how much that is as an add-on but it's like thirty dollars a month or something like that or twenty dollars a month I forget exactly and I also pay extra for extra Zoom cloud storage for recordings as well here though the the recordings are included and then also webinar mode is included as well there is a limit with the participants so 12 participants on this this lower plan but if you're using this for something like you know coaching calls things like that small groups small workshops then that is that is fine though and then as you can see the the pricing goes from<PHONE_NUMBER> to 18 dollars basically 1799 so let's take a look at a comparison chart then just to go through and be clear about what some of those differences are so there is let me see which ones of these are I think are useful as you can see most of these features are just applying to all of them and obviously the link to this is in the description it's pinned at the top of the the chat as well so you can go through and I won't just go through all of these yourself I did actually highlight that the custom hold music in the waiting room so yes that's either a plus or a pro feature that might not be a deal breaker anyway but there you go and the AI transcripts so the AI transcription is a is a pro feature on the pro plan but like I say that's something that I looked into with auto AI and a few others and it was a a pay plan in any case for those kinds of things so yeah that's where that is it's built into that that pro level let's see custom branding I need to look into that one the custom branding is not something that I've looked at and then the recording is a plus and pro feature and above as well so anyway there's a link to this and it is an affiliate link so I'll full disclosure about that too in the description and in the top of the chat but if you want to go and try it out there is obviously as with all these things a 14 day free trial so you can go and test it out and see yet see what's what you think of it but let's jump over to that meeting that I had going because I just do want to talk through the interface really I'm sure you will find your way around very quickly I've got a meeting going at the moment that's basically me my iPad and my iPhone Billy Nomates here talking to himself as usual but this is what the meeting interface looks like so I've got the this is just the app on my computer and as I say that code to enable the virtual camera is is in the description as well the usual things that you would expect I've disabled streaming so that's why this doesn't show up but if I wanted to initiate a stream I could do that here the recording I can start a recording from there you've got a whiteboard as you familiar with in other platforms too now start sharing one of these that I liked was just really quickly being able to get into either sharing your screen files and so on but I like this option just really easy to access right there which is share an additional camera so if I wanted to come in here and let's see if I get the right one no not that one there you go so if you wanted to just share you know a top-down camera and you still wanted to be on the screen as you can see I've got my my other camera there so I like that idea I've just been able to to quickly come in and and sort of share a secondary camera if you wanted to and I'm just going to stop sharing that for the time being but that was just a nice little feature that I know technically you can do that in zoom if you go through the sharing and so on but it was just a very easy way to add that in and that's something that you know although I use e-cam virtual camera obviously but often in calls there is a need to just say hey let me show you this from another angle or you know the top down or whatever so so yeah it's useful to have that right there mute and camera no point to going into that too much you can see all your different cameras gives you a a preview that's a nice little thing that you do see the preview of all of your cameras so if you're not sure which one it is if you've got multiple cam links plugged in so I do the usual thing here send a reaction raise your hand and so on then over this side this is all the stuff related to participants I don't know about you but in zoom I find that now the bottom bar is getting a little bit full with things and sometimes it might not I know when I'm speaking to people they're not sure where things are whereas over here you've got the central things which are the sort of core functionality over on the right is things related to participants so you can create a poll just directly in here you can set that up in advance as well in that scheduling page so yeah you can do that there then you've got chat so this is where you can obviously set what you want in terms of here public and private chat public chat only so this is something that we talked about again in the the workshop that I did at e-com live creator camp where we're talking about the different types of meeting you have and the different permissions that you have for chat so if you're doing something that is like a really close group of people that you know know each other then allowing public and private chat I think is fine you know you don't mind if somebody sends somebody else a private message whilst they're in the meeting however if you're doing anything where the people are essentially strangers to each other maybe it's like an event that you're running you really only want to have public chat or chat with moderators only or disable it you don't want people to be able to just direct message people privately who maybe they don't know because there may be people then who get unwanted attention and so yeah you definitely don't want to have that enabled as it is those different conversation styles this is one of the things I like about this is once you select one of these it's kind of handling that for you anyway so it's making you know the chat so that people can only chat with moderators co-hosts whatever you want to call them so there is that but you can just come in and change it here as well again this is you know common across lots of platforms but I just like the implementation of it next you've got participants so this is your participant list if you want to make somebody a moderator so again just to clarify that is kind of like a co-host if I just click on that person now they've got the little star next to their name that means that they are a moderator a co-host you can just click on that and remove that permission sorry iPad promoted and demoted and then you've also got here you know pin spotlights so if you want to spotlights someone make them full screen you can do that all in here send them back to the waiting room if they've been an naughty boy or girl I will remove them from the from the meeting you can also initiate a one-to-one meeting here as well so let's say that somebody was a moderator and then somebody in the group was experiencing an issue the moderator could then go and say well let me just initiate a one-on-one meeting and it basically takes them into a little breakout room they can sort out whatever they've got to do and then and then bring them back so it just seemed like it's got all the functionality that you would need it's got the invite there so that's going to give you a link to to share out as well with with other folks then we've got meeting details so that's a quick way as well to get to the meeting details if you want to share the the link out to the meeting I won't do that right now because this is a live meeting and then you can also just see that's the number of participants but you can open and close the participants panel from up there as as well in terms of views though you've got the obvious gallery view which is what we're in right now you can also change that to be a sort of left side bar so you can see the participants down here the bottom side bar view like that as well so you've got a few options there in terms of what you do when you are in gallery view you can change the the page size so the number of participants on the screen at any one time and you can also toggle on and off the self view from here so this is something that you know if I'm on a zoom call with somebody then or multiple people that might want to hide my own view so that I don't see myself so that the other people take up more on the screen so that's nice and easy to get to from here as well so I can just toggle off show myself and this one automatic P2P view that one is basically saying that if ever you're on a call with just one person it's going to default to you only see them which is great actually because if you have it in zoom for example where you hide yourself view the next time you go into a call you will also be hidden whereas actually you may want it that you're only hidden when you're on a call with two people with you on one other person but when you're on with multiple there may be a reason why you want to see yourself so I like that sort of little bit of granularity there with that with that and then obviously changing light and dark mode you can override the system theme but I should leave that dark for now and here you can manage and create breakout rooms as well so you can automatically assign or set those up from there so if you've got a bigger group and you're splitting people off then you can do that from there you can also get into the settings here so you can get into all the full settings and you can also change that recording layout as well so that recording layout we talked about earlier if you want to do part of the meeting where it's you as the main speaker but then you're going to go over to the Q&A maybe partway through you want to switch over that recording so you can do that just there as well so as I say in general I just liked the sort of functionality that you've got here and some of the implementation of this looks it's just a nice implementation nice clean interface so Chris you should do a comparison between app sumo and setup set up so I use both of those actually and they are different so with set up you are paying a monthly subscription and you get access to over 200 great utility style apps I should say that there's a link to set up an affiliate link in the description as well but basically you're paying a single fee and you're getting access to all of the apps and I find that it is a really really well curated list of apps and so if anything is in there I generally know that it's a great it's going to be a great quality app you know anything that's yeah if it's not if it's not going to be a useful or great app it's not going to be in there that's not to say that I use all of them I don't use every setup app at all however if I'm looking for something I'll generally go and just check if there is one in there and it's you know I know that a lot of the apps that I use before set up are in there and so when I've when I signed up to set up it's like oh great that you know I start menus is in there yeah all of these other ones that have been a staple on my computer for years are included so that's what set up is it is a single subscription to over 200 utility style apps you have a sort of little mini app store built into your computer then which is basically what the app store should be because the problem with the app store he says just trying to grab set up and open it up the thing with the app store is that the Mac app store is there's just so much in there and you never really know if something is great or not however with set up you have this set up app store app that basically sits on your computer and it's so easy to just go and grab things and install them the other thing that's great about this is and here are you know just some of the some of the apps that are on there I won't mention Downey I did mention I did do a whole video about Downey about downloading videos from from the internet and that caught me a little slap on the wrist by YouTube because they don't like you telling people how to do that but anyway it's got all of these different utility apps and if I wanted to add one of those I could just literally click here and then click on install and it would install it on to in fact this one is actually just an iPad app so there is iPad and iOS apps in there as well let's choose one that I haven't got it's better touch tool so I could install that from here and it would just install directly on my computer the other great thing about set up is because you've got access to all these apps there may be something that you only need to use once but it's going to be you know save you a lot of time well you might come down here and choose the particular app that you want let's look convert and calculate in notes I don't know what that one is exactly some sort of calculator let's say I just needed to do something quickly I could go and download the app do whatever it does and then offload it again and it hasn't cost me anymore because it's all part of the set up subscription so that's what set up is AppSumo is something which is often for web based applications rather than desktop apps although not always it is also desktop apps as well but often it is software as a service type things and usually it's something that is on a subscription model themselves and what they're doing in AppSumo is they're giving you the option to sometimes you get like a lifetime deal instead of signing up for the monthly plan and the sort of apps that usually feature on AppSumo or by their nature usually kind of fairly early on they're early on in their development they are startups and they're looking to get you know a big user base upfront and so they're giving really good incentives to people to sign up to these deals because they just want to expand their user base and so you don't really tend to find really really well-established companies and applications in AppSumo it's very much like a sort of startup type place and so that's the reason for them being on there obviously if you I mean one example of this I'll give is an application I use called Radar or a service I use called Radar for social media planning now the regular price for it is $50 a month however I got into that when it was on AppSumo and I got a lifetime deal for $50 so basically for the cost of one month they gave me a whole lifetime access to it because they were just trying to rapidly grow their user base so that's kind of the difference generally AppSumo is software as a service that's usually a subscription thing but you often get the option to just get a lifetime deal on it and often they are sort of web-based apps as opposed to you know Mac-based utility apps so that's kind of the core difference there but yeah it's a great way to get an amazing deal on software when you're getting a lifetime deal for something that otherwise would be a subscription that's me, big Billy no mates here in the northeast of Thailand talking to myself day in day out into this camera the AppSumo deal so this Vivo is not in AppSumo it was the other platform that is in AppSumo and I'm not sure what the deal is with that but yeah that is in AppSumo though yeah I think as long as I don't make a video about it Rich I might be alright but yes I can't recommend Downey at all please don't use it I never use it it's terrible allegedly better touch tool is so the thing is I used to use better touch tool before it was in or before I even had set up when I was using a laptop with a touch yeah I was using my touch thing on and actually I was using a trackpad at that time so yeah better touch tool is for adding gesture support and things like that to your trackpad however I only use a mouse these days and I was using the Mac mini which didn't have a trackpad but now that I've upgraded to my MacBook Pro the new M3 MacBook Pro which has a trackpad I should definitely be putting better touch tool on it but because I use a mouse the thing is I never build up the muscle memory for those gestures as to when I use the trackpad but I've yeah it is a great tool nonetheless is there an AppSumo so I can wear to parties there should be if there isn't there should be they're missing a marketing opportunity there for sure so this has been a sort of overview of Vivo meetings one thing I do want to just highlight first of all is that they do have an upgrade plan going on for this or a rather a development roadmap and what I love about that and you can find this on their website if you go over to their homepage it is right down here on their halfway down their homepage they've got their affiliate program video tutorials and their roadmap as well so if you click on the roadmap that is going to take you to here this is all the things that they've added in 2023 so you know often you get you know release notes and things like that so you can see these kind of things from companies but what I like is that they also have you know what they're currently working on and what's coming next you know often companies are a little bit reluctant to say what's what's in the pipeline what's coming however they are they do have a list of you know this is what they're working on right now so Richtesc billing for storage so if you want to increase you know add even more storage in snooze notifications mobile chats and UX improvements messaging and what's coming up next so they've got some other things here and obviously you know I'm sure companies are always open to feature requests as well and what's coming later as well so additional virtual backgrounds so I mentioned I'm not a fan of virtual backgrounds and that's because generally I don't know whether they all use the the same you know underlying frameworks or whatever but yeah I mean I find that zooms virtual backgrounds are not not great teams is the worst which surprises me that yeah they're the worst but yeah here as you can see they're working on virtual backgrounds 2.0 to give better image processing to give better quality for those backgrounds but yeah that's just to show that they have this roadmap coming now I mentioned that I'm doing some other things with Vivo meetings and one of them is we're actually putting on a free workshop so this is called the meeting tech mastery workshop and by the way this is open to everyone you don't need to be a Vivo meetings user to come along to this workshop this is actually happening next week Monday to Friday it's in the form of basically an hour hour and a half session every day and you'll if you go to the link which is in the description and also I've just dropped it into the chat as well you can register for this as I say it's a completely free event and day one is going to be focused on video and lighting day two is going to be all about audio so this is you know platform agnostic you know whatever whether you're using Zoom, Teams, Vivo meetings whatever then or sessions or whatever then all of this will still be relevant so that's day one and two it's all about leveling up your audio and video on screen in your meetings day three is going to be about presentations and immersive presentations I'm a big fan of doing something other than just you know sharing a slide deck and you being a little window and the slides being over here and just talking to slides and we'll be talking about you know how to present effectively whatever platform you're on day four is going to be more of a deep dive into the Vivo meetings platform obviously this is for their existing user base as well as new potential customers so I'll be going into more of a tutorial about the platform itself going into some other things that we haven't talked about here as well so whether you're an existing user or not day four will have you covered on that and then day five is going to be talking about the power of live production software into your meetings I'm obviously a massive advocate of using Ecamm live but whether you're using OBS VMIX or anything else it's going to be talking about these platforms and these this software and how it can really enhance your meeting for me the real thing that these platforms like Ecamm and OBS add into your meetings is that it gives this fluidity which is otherwise missing you know we've all been in meetings where somebody says okay I just want to share some figures with you let me go and click on screen share let me find the application oh no it's not that one it's this one where is it and all of these things all of these little minute little interruptions actually break the flow of the meeting when you can just sort of seamlessly go from you know speaking into the camera and oh let me just show you something let me just pull this up on screen and I'll just flick over to this scene or I'll flick back again you know that adds this real fluidity which actually means that the the tech is getting out of the way of you communicating that's what we're trying to do we've got some sort of value that we want to give to our meeting participants whether you are an educator whether you are you know a salesperson whether you are you know whatever whatever the case is you've just got something that you're trying to impart some information some knowledge some some value that you're trying to give and so we want all the tech to get out of the way and that's what I'm a huge advocate of and so that is what I'll be talking about on day five is how live production software can really enhance your meetings now I say it's a five day workshop there's actually a bonus session on the following Monday as well and that is going to be basically a Q&A in a Vivo meeting where you can come along experience the platform if you're not familiar with it but also then get any questions answered as well so that will be definitely a sort of two way you know you can come on camera if you want it'll be a regular meeting and then we can have a chat if there's anything you want to know about video audio lighting live production software or you know whatever it is or the platform itself so that is the process there will also be downloads associated with every day as well so if you go ahead and register then you'll get all the details and you'll be be away there on all through next week incidentally this is obviously a live stream on YouTube it's going to be probably up for some time after next week so if you are watching this after this date you can still go to the website you can still register you can still get all the downloads and you'll also get access to all of the replays and you'll get access to the replay of that live Q&A session as well so even if you're watching after the fact you can still go and register and get all this value for free as well so that is a little bit about the workshop and what I'll do is I'll just check in with the chat just again hello Alonzo great to see you here and you name in the chat great to see you is it possible to integrate vivo meetings with OBS Vmix ISO feeds out NDI maybe the integrating with OBS and Vmix yes so if they've got the virtual cameras out which they do actually I don't know I've pretty sure Vmix does but I definitely know OBS does so yeah it would just be a case of going and putting in that virtual camera code if you're on the Mac on the PC I'm not sure about the the virtual cameras thing but certainly it would work in the browser in the browser you can use use any camera as well so that's what I'm doing with Vivo with Ecamm on the Mac so I'm using the virtual cameras in terms of ISO feeds out it doesn't have ISO feeds out it's one of the things that I've I've been obviously talking with the founders and the folks there at Vivo and it's one of the things that I've specifically requested because I would love to have the isolated video out of a Vivo meeting to be able to then use that in my Ecamm productions and that's something that yeah you can't do that with Zoom either at the moment unless you use another third parties another service which is Zoom ISO used to be third parties Zoom bought them but that is another another monthly subscription as well so yeah to answer your question no there is no isolated video feed out of Vivo at the moment but I've definitely I've definitely requested that myself we're on the same page M3 yeah M3 max all the way and it's great I mean anybody who's watched my live streams over the past few months will know that quite often I was saying the phrase oh dear my computer is glitching came up a lot whereas actually I'm on an M3 max I've got my discord running I'm in a voice channel there I'm streaming right now to YouTube obviously I'm also recording this I'm also in a Vivo meeting and I've also got other stuff on the network in the meeting as well and touch wood not a single glitch so far so yeah really impressed with the M3 max laptop hey Chris it's getting late oh yeah thank you for staying up I appreciate you and oh great I look forward to speaking to you next week yeah so that is anybody would like to book a call yeah I do offer consultation services but obviously if you want to just figure out if I might be right to to help then you can go ahead and book a discovery calls that's a 20 minute call we can just have a chat yeah if there's something that I can fix there and then then I'm happy to do that too but yeah if you want to just have a chat to figure out if I might be able to help you then you can go ahead and book that Dan the my biggest concern is in trying these is I'm already spending money on zoom and there isn't any platform proven to take market share do you think this has longevity I mean this is zoom there's no no denying you know zoom is ubiquitous it is the market leader it just depends on what it is that you are what you're looking to get out of it and if you're looking for something that is you know as I say maybe a lower price point maybe doesn't have some of the resolution issues that we have with zoom if you are sending your links out to people and people are joining what it does mean is either those people that you're sending it to would be just joining in the browser so when they click the link on the email it opens up in a browser which might not be an issue for for folks at all or obviously you know they can download the app so if you're in a team for example and you're all on vivo meetings then you know that would be another use case if you're you know in your entire team you're on it but yeah I mean there is no getting away from the the market share that zoom has but it was just when I looked at all of these sort of features of this that there are these certain things that I think tick boxes for for that would tick boxes for a lot of people certainly not for everybody necessary but necessarily but that is just a case of going through looking at the feature set looking at what you've got already trying it out for a free trial you know try some of the meetings see the experience you get with it you know send out some meeting links to people and see the experience that they have and how they they feel about that and then and then yeah we will and and make that decision it's a bit of a bit of a tricky one for me to say because I do appreciate it's not for everybody and it's the case of evaluating all the pros and cons of each one if I switch platforms I want to make sure it will be around and in a year is what I'm getting at yeah so it's interesting I'm not sure the I can't remember the exact founding date it was it's been around for several years already so it's not it's not like a new kid on the block as I say it did actually start out on AppSumo a few years ago so so it had its its you know startup phase earlier and now they're just building out functionality and features and so on so so yes one of the things I will say to that you know is yeah when we were looking at these kind of things with a meeting platform it's not necessarily something that you're embedded into in quite the same way as some other services you know if you were going to be translate transferring over you know a complete database or something to another service and then you're you're really sort of embedded in it meeting platforms don't really have that sort of limitation I'm not just to just to give you another another perspective on this if it is something that can add a cost saving and feature benefits then ongoing active development with new features coming in all the time there's some just added it last week as well so it's certainly under active development but yeah it's not like it's not quite the same level of buy-in as that let's say for me kajabi kajabi like my whole business is based on kajabi I've got all my courses there and things like that so if something towards what happened to that the the cost of you know mentally and time-wise to shift over to something else would be massive whereas actually a meeting platforms more kind of what you're doing at the time if that makes sense I don't know as a valid point or if that helps you in your evaluation process at all okay so with that said if anybody's got any further questions about vivo meetings obviously bring them along to that free workshop whether you are vivo meetings user or not or interested then yet you can certainly check out that workshop anyway there'll be plenty for everyone but if you have got any other specific questions drop them in the comments in to this video but a much much better place because I'll be honest with email with comments with social media it's a fire hose of of information coming in or fire hose of messages so a much better place to actually put these is in fact in the discord and that is another thing that is free to join so go to takeonetech.io slash family join the discord if you're not familiar with discord don't worry it's easy to pick up and there's some simple steps that I talked through in terms of how to get yourself set up but that is a much better place to go and get your questions answered because there first of all there is the structure of being able to see categorized different conversations but also you then have the ability to get answers from other people not just me so whenever someone drops a comment in the the comments of a video chances are it's me that's seeing it nobody else whereas obviously in a community you're getting the the things from from everybody else the comments and feedback from everyone else who are often vastly more wise than I am hey Michael great to see you and another UK folks so thanks for staying up Dan so he's saying he used cloud presenter and Vivo meetings with clients no real issues as it's just a URL I send them out so oh that's great also you're using Vivo as well are you fantastic Vivo like Alec thank you very much okay okay with that said then and on on that note I will wrap it up here but I look forward to seeing you again next time and a big thank you to look at this still haven't adjusted this scene with my massive head in it a big thank you to my channel members I just remembered two more to add into there who joined just last week or so so I'll add those in next time thanks for watching I'll see you next time


President Sarnay, distinguished guests, it's a pleasure to have you here tonight. Our meetings today were business-like and productive. The spirit of hammockability and goodwill that was so evident throughout our sessions bodes well for the future. One of the benefits of such meetings as we had today is that they provide the opportunity for leaders to get to know each other, and in this case it was a delight. President Sarnay is the leader of a great nation, sophisticated in the ways of politics and economics, yet a person with the heart of a poet, truly a renaissance man. Having been in the profession I was in for a good part of my life, it's an honor to have here this evening an individual whose interests lie not just with politics, but also the arts. We believe in freedom not only because it reflects the most moral system of human interaction, not only because it leads to economic progress, but also because it nourishes the artistic and creative spirit of man. President Sarnay has said, literature and politics are inspired in the conscience of liberty. When one thinks of Brazil, it's difficult not to hear the sound of music or the sight of joyous dance. Of course Brazil is much more than that, and the sounds of construction and building are clearly evident today. After speaking with President Sarnay, one cannot doubt that the richness of Brazil's soul is alive and well. President Sarnay has faced great challenges since his first day as president. Following the tragic death of Dr. Tancredo Navas, a powerful event in the life of your nation, your countrymen and, yes, the rest of the world, look to you. Even in the best of circumstances, this would have been an awesome responsibility during this time of great transition. It required a truly remarkable leader, a man of vision and principle. President Sarnay, I am certain that you agree that on occasion the magnitude of problems faced by a head of state seem a bit overwhelming. If you will permit an informal American expression on such a formal occasion, I usually put it this way. When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember your original purpose was to drain the swamp. Yet a true leader is one who does not lose sight of goals and ideals. He keeps the spirit of his people high and the course set in the right direction. And tonight we honor just such a leader. With exceptional diligence and strength of purpose, you are bringing your country, your beloved Brazil, into a new era of prosperity and freedom. Rui Barbosa, a prominent Brazilian statesman and intellectual at the turn of the century once said, Some sow their cabbage patch merely for tomorrow's meal. Others plant an oak tree as a shelter for the future. Will the first dig for themselves, the others plow for their country, for the happiness of their descendants, for the well-being of mankind? President Sarnay, let us pledge that the American and Brazilian people will plant oaks for a better tomorrow and that they will do it together. Now, would you all join me in a toast to President Sarnay and the people of Brazil? Mr. President, Mrs. Nancy Reagan, as this will be our last opportunity on this trip, to be together, I think it is a time for gratitude, a time to convey our thanks for the warmth, the hospitality, the kindness and the spirit of friendship that has pervaded this state. During dinner, the lady I was sitting next to told me of the American habit of making a wish when you see the first star. There is only one star that I can see up there in the sky tonight, so I think that we should all perhaps share the same wish, the wish for permanent friendship between our two countries. We've had many proofs of the kindness of the President of the United States, but we did not expect his esteem and kindness to extend as far as providing us with this unforgettable evening and a sky with one star and no clouds. When arriving here this evening, Mrs. Reagan pointed to the moon, and I thought to myself, I've seen that girl somewhere before, it was two evenings ago in Brasilia, and again that is a symbol that we share. And I repeat what I said this morning, two souls, one feeling. You spoke of alligators, Mr. President. In Brazil we have piranhas, and we also have a saying in times of strain and difficulties when swimming in rivers full of piranhas, the only way is to play alligator and turn on your back. I'm deeply moved, Mr. President, by your kind remarks that reflect the spirit of friendship and cordiality of this memorable visit to Washington. And I think this reception this evening is the crowning achievement of this visit and this feeling of friendship and cooperation. I will never forget your words. I will never forget this evening the friendship of this memorable visit to the United States and Washington. I have brought word of a country, Brazil, a country in transition, setting out to answer its most noble historic calling, to be a full democracy in which political freedom is reflected in the economic and social life of the nation. The United States is the land where freedom and the participation of the people have brought forth the most extraordinary material and social progress in history. An example to be always pursued. During our meeting with you, Mr. President, I found a partner willing to listen in an open and interested manner. And I'm quite certain that this will lead to further improvement in the longstanding and permanent friendship between our countries. I am very happy to be able to print out your personal and decisive mark in the style and substance of the President and the history of the United States. Your talent for imprinting your personal and decisive stamp on the form and substance of democracy and on the very history of the United States is surely an unmistakable demonstration of your statement which the people of the United States have overwhelmingly acclaimed. And I would say it in a far more eloquent fashion if I didn't have to lose so much time with the translation. This is a moment of friendly celebration marked by the warm hospitality extended us by our gracious American hosts. May I also, on behalf of Marley and on my own behalf, pay tribute in the name of the Brazilian people to Mrs. Nancy Reagan for her tireless work and efforts on behalf of the young. The contribution of Mrs. Nancy Reagan to this country, especially in the example that she is in the face of the solidarity of that love of the wife by the husband, which is an extraordinary example of the American nation and all of us. Mrs. Reagan has met with the admiration and solidarity of the entire Brazilian people. And since I have come to the United States, I have become more aware perhaps of another contribution given by Mrs. Reagan to all mankind. The example she has set of love as sharing of love as an expression of solidarity. The love of the wife for her husband is an example to all mankind. Mr. President, the speeches of dinner or lunch are always long for as short as they are. I want to raise my cup in this garden of roses. With a great feeling of heart for the greatness and for the prosperity of the United States. For the personal happiness of your silence and of your wife and for the success of your government in the benefit of this great country. Thank you. In closing, Mr. President, because after dinner speeches are always too long no matter how short, may I in this rose garden propose a toast and ask you to join me in toasting the long standing friendship between the people of Brazil and the United States, the greatness and prosperity of the United States of America and to your own personal success and happiness and that of Mrs. Reagan. God save America.


Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the Stockswush LLC's newest class on entries. This is a very exciting class because it focuses on specifically how do you enter a stock, just like this beautiful door here. How do you enter through the door where you walk straight through? In stocks, it's not quite as easy. Sometimes it's tricky to get the entries correct in a stock when you are taking a position. It's a very specified way to trade when you're looking at trading stocks in the market. And your entry counts, where you are entering the stock really, really matters for a correct position size and for you to get the proper risk to reward. So welcome. My name is Melissa Armand. I own a company called the Stockswush LLC. This class, again, is about entries. And if you'd like more information, you can go to my website, www.thestockswush.com, or feel free to email me at Melissa at the stockswush.com for more information. You can also go to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Skype, and like me at any one of these places. So this is a class designed by me, Melissa Armand. It's on entries. It's a course focused and intraday technical entries. Learn where and how to accurately take a position in a stock. Understand risk and proper sizing. Learn how to do ads to the position to maximize profitability and trading gains. And this is very important because if you take a position in a stock too late, you could still make money in it if you're in the right direction and the trade is going your way. However, you may not get the right risk to reward. So learning how to do entries really matters for paying yourself properly in the market. And not only to make money, but also to exit something, if in fact it's not working to understand where the entry is supposed to be and what a stock needs to do to hold itself so that it does work. It is good. It is going to continue to work because the worst thing you could do is stay in a trade too long, where you actually could have exited and saved yourself money in the loss when you realize that something isn't working. And if you understand what the correct way to look at something is, you'll understand the incorrect way to look at something in reference to the entries. So let's start out today with a quote. It's a quote from Confucius.  And you know, the interesting thing about trading the market is that I love, love, love the stock market. It took me a long time to find something that I love to do for living. And once I did, I just never looked back. And even though at the beginning of my career trading, it was challenging for me because it was losing until I figured all these things out. The entries that I'm teaching the class, my gap strategy, everything at the beginning, I still loved it. I loved every second that I traded. And obviously that love turned into success for me as I started to figure all this stuff out. And then again, to make real money in the market. And now I've been doing this for six years. So I think it's important for people to find a career that they love. And if you have a job that you don't love, then it's time to consider maybe something like trading, because trading is fun and it's very exciting. And it's actually a great career because you don't have to work a lot of hours in the given day. And you get paid very well as well. So we're going to talk in the entry class about entries. Entries in what? Entries in gaps. Okay. So they are gap entries. Here is a golden gap. This is BBBY. This is back from the 26th of June. Nice gap here. Beautiful move. And you can see here how this had the big, large move down that happened early in the morning. Actually set the low of the day, I think around 945 or so very quickly. And then the stock ended up reversing. But it was a nice, nice bearish gap that had a good setup in here and a good entry. If you knew how to trade it, which I did. Now looking at BBBY for the core trade, if you did BBBY back here for the actual entry on the day that it first got back here at the beginning of this calendar year, which was in January, it was early January 2014, you could be in a core trade for BBBY. And actually $60 was the first target. And it continued and went down here and actually broke $60 and went all the way down to $55. So you can imagine if you had the correct entry in this trade here in BBBY back early in the year in January, how much money you could have made. Now this did take six months. But look at the profit here. It's pretty amazing, isn't it? It's really something. And this is a really nice move for a stock like this to happen in this time period with no backup, no let up at all. I mean, it almost just plummeted. So when you were trading, okay, when you were taking a position as stock, there's a level of commitment there. You have to actually be committed to the trade, to the trade itself. Why do you have to be committed because you're risking money? So that commitment comes from a definitive placement where you were actually taking the position and you were taking it and you were in the stock. Sometimes when I take a position and I'm taking an entry and something, it's almost like I attack it. I just pounce on the thing. And this comes from having a commitment to trade. You must have a commitment to trade in to get in the position. And part of this has to do with obviously understanding what to do. And this is what I'm teaching in the class. It's very important. How can you be committed to the trade if really don't know what you're looking at and don't even know if you're taking the right entry? It's also about decision. Decision. I decide. I am deciding right now. I like this. I have 100% conviction. One of the biggest issues facing traders is the decision on their entry in a trading position. Gosh, this is really one of the biggest things. And the second biggest issue is how much risk they want to take in the trading position. This needs to be defined and it needs to be defined clearly. I'm ever amazed since I started teaching people how to trade, how much difficulty people have in sizing. This is how much risk they want to take in the trading position and sizing is a big, big, big, big factor. And I never thought that that was going to be something big when I taught people because I personally really have never had a problem with it. But I have a background in math. And so I really am good with mathematics and arithmetic. And I can figure out a lot of things in my head. But you do have to get good at that with trading. I actually have a quiz for the entries class. It's a quiz, a math quiz that people have to do that take this class. And it helps you get good at numbers in your head. And it's one of the things that I realize that people need to become stronger traders. So you've got to get to the position where you want to take away the anxiety of where to enter a trade. And how you're going to do that, you have to learn what to do. Okay, you are taking the trade, you are taking the monetary risk. Boom, you're doing it. So the only way to get away from the anxiety, okay, of the fact that you're taking the risk is to have the level of commitment to make the decision to know where to enter it and to believe that you are correct. This will help you have less losses. If you've got more focus, you have less losses. Okay, and also you will not take as many entries. What happens is many people do this. They aren't sure exactly of the entry.  And they're in and out of something five times on the same direction, by the way. And they didn't know where to put the stop. And all of this is churning and burning their commissions too. So you can really see how it's problematic for your P&L, even if you end up going on to make money in the trade, you churned and burn yourself up and down in five different positions, and it ate up your commissions to your commission costs and just takes away from your profit. And if you lose in the trade, then it really takes away from you have the losses in the other commission costs. And they cannot up. So a lot of people have losses in their trains, even if they get something in the right direction, even if they're looking at the right peg, because they're in and out of something a couple of times because they're not exactly sure where they should be in it.  And I know this, I know people are doing this this fact of I, if I put a camera in front of traders and videotape them to see it, it's probably crazy some of the activity that people have when they're doing in and out of stuff. And so I don't I don't trade like that. I don't trade like that at all. Okay, I'm very definitive. So you will make more money with the right entry. You will. And so it's important. It's important to get that entry right. It's important to understand that you will make more money with the right entry. And it's also about seeing it live in the market. I'm extremely good at seeing entries at immediate lifetime in the market. It's a skill that I've developed. And I actually think I'm one of the best people out there that can do this. I don't know anyone actually personally that can call entries live as well as me. It's something that has to do with me and grain that I'm reading the price. And I think it's the amount of hours that I've spent actually trading, even though it's been six years and six years is that long in a lifetime of traders that are trading for years and years. But the number of hours that I've spent observing charts, trading live in the market and doing it way past that mark of 10,000 hours or whatever it is where you need to do something to become an expert. And because I've spent so much time trading the open, specifically that morning period of the day, I've gotten really good at it. I also think I'm just meant to do it. I mean, it's just one of these things that I'm just meant to do because I do it so well that there's almost no other explanation for how good I can see and call things in my time. And I think it's one of these things that you can get good at. But you definitely have to learn it. Seeing entries live in the market is one thing that traders need to learn. And since, you know, I know from doing this and meeting up with people, it's one of the most challenging things that people struggle with. People can learn a strategy, they can learn how to look read a chart overall, the directional bias, but people really, really struggle with the entries. I think it's one of the reasons people like being in the trading room with me. So this is the reason that taking a class and redoing classes with free retakes is helpful. And the entry class, you get free retakes, you can redo it. You can redo it as many times as you need to once you sign up for it the first time. And it's helpful because you get used to seeing things over and over and over again. You've got to get used to the patterns of the setup so that you can press the button when they happen live. And you have to learn what to do so that you can press the button to make money. Because if you don't press the button, you won't make money. Position sizing correctly for profit and less loss. Ooh, here's the one I was talking about earlier. Not every trade can be taken with the same size. Boom, that's it. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. You will have a P&L that is swinging right and left all the time if you have the same position size in everything you do. Can't trade like that. Proper position sizing according to risk is a learned skill and it's important in your trading. It matters so you don't risk too little or too much. You can't risk too much in one trade and then the one trade fails and then your risk not enough in the next trade and that trade goes on to work. See how it screws up your P&L. It really matters so you don't risk too little or lose too much. I'm serious about this. It matters so you make money with less risk and trade with less stress and with more conviction. And all you need to do is learn how to do it. That's all. Now, I also talk in the class about doing ads to maximize gains. I also talk about this too. Very important because sometimes a stock will be setting up. It gives you opportunity to take more of the position. The target still makes it worthwhile for the rest of your board and you've got to learn how to do this because you can make more money doing this. So learn also what is confirmation. What is confirmation in a trade? What is the confirmation that something's okay to take at the setup? Learn what an entry really is because many people don't know what is right or wrong or where to put stop. And you've got to learn that. You know, you just have to learn this because otherwise you will maybe only take 100 shares of something. Something that could have taken 2,000 shares of. Or you'll take 2,000 shares of something that you should have only taken 500 and it will reflect in your monetary results. Even if you get the trade direction right, you have to get the most bang for your buck in the trades that you take. Why? Why? Why am I saying this? Because you don't get amazing trades every single day. Some days you get amazing trades and some days you get okay trades and some days you don't get anything. So when you get the good ones, okay, the really, really, really good ones, the highly rated professional gaps, the ones that rate high and they're on the scale, you have to take advantage of them. You have to take advantage of them. You have to get the most bang for your buck and you got to know what those are and those the ones you're doing ads on and those the ones that you're going in aggressively and you have to know the difference. I mean you just, just do. Success comes with having the information of what to do. And this is so valuable. If someone would give me all the information that I have right now that I used to trade six years ago, my life would be so different. The last six years of my life would have been so different. But it didn't work out that way for me. I taught myself and the market really taught me a lot as well and it was a live experience. But I can't tell you how valuable having information is. It's extremely valuable. And that's why I charge people for my time when I teach the class. It's my time and the information. And information is extremely valuable in reference to trading the market because if you have the right information that a stock is going to do something on the given day you can use that to make money. Now how much money will you make? Well it depends how much you risk. But if you have the right information and know something's going to work, if you have a lot of money you can risk it and you can make a crazy amount of money. And so people pay for information. They want the information. They want to know what something's going to do and they want to know if it's going to work. So also in the class we'll talk about how to use price information with precision. Something that I do a lot, very, very important. Time is vital in entries as well. Okay the timing that you actually take something matters. You can't just take something in any second of the day. And I'm also going to talk about examining position sizing. Okay position sizing is important as well. When you are in a train again and you want to take something you have to know how to figure out where to put the stop, the size of the bar so you know what your size and your risk is going to be. And so we look at this in the class too. And again it's about defining risk. How much money do you want to risk for a train? How much money do you want to risk per day? How many trades do you want to take a day? You need to know this. Calculated risk requires preparation. This guy here is completely prepared. He's prepared to go and get the cheese. He's aware of the fact that this might hit him on the head in his goal to grab the cheese and get the cheese. But he's prepared. He's prepared if by chance he misses. Getting that cheese fast enough before this jiggy comes back on his head he will be protected. And if it happens to hit him just a little teeny weeny bit before he grabs the rest of the cheese he'll make it out a lot. And so he's prepared. He's calculated the risk. It's worth it.  And so he's going to go for it. He's got the helmet on. He's all ready to go. He's calculated the risk and he's prepared.  A lot of people I know that are big into risk taking risk have fat fingers. That means they don't size themselves. They take too many trains. They over train. They don't use stops.  And a lot of people have it actually. And it's just a killer to your trading. You can have a fat finger. And we're also talking to class about money management again very important have a plan of action of what you want to do and how much you want to risk. Now let's look at some gaps here. This was Microsoft. Microsoft happened back here. You can see it had a beautiful move at a bearish gap. Very nice gap. This is a kind of thing you would have wanted to do to train to take a correct entry. And if you did it went down to a beautiful target here at $31. Nice trade. Let's look here at Sina. This is a bullish gap. This is not a bearish gap. It was a bullish gap here. This had several entries in it on the day. Many stocks that play out that are good professional gaps will have several different entries in it. Personally I like to take the morning entries because I find they have more profit. But a nice bullish gap in this Sina here as well. And Cruss. Cruss had a bearish gap here. This is back in May. Look at the move that this has had. Beautiful, fabulous. Look how large and extended that is. Again many many different entries can be found in a bar that looks like this. Because the stock pretty much ran all day. Closed almost at the low. This doesn't happen often but when it does you really want to be able to get the most out of this. And in early season which is coming up in July third quarter there will be a lot of opportunity to get several different entries in stocks on the day because a lot of stocks are going to have big moves exactly like this Cruss in the early season. It's just typically how it works because you get more gaps and there's more interaction. People are looking at things so they're watching things and they're more invested in what's happening with their money. And in the summer particularly people don't have any problem just dumping their positions in stocks if they want to because they just want to get out of stuff. And they'll maybe wait and reinvest their money in the fall. Entry should not be taken like a bet at a casino.  He is no concerned at all for the amount of money that he's risking of the buttons that he's pressing. And you don't want to be like him. He needs a little bit more maturity here about what he's doing and it's really not going to casino when you trade. So learn what is the right thing to do. Years ago I used to go to the library to study. I remember that in college you go to the library use the computer you'd study. You know now every day everything is unvirtual for people. But you really got to get serious about this like back in the olden days where you'd read your charts, you'd study your books, you take a class. I'm very old fashioned in my teachings and reference to the way that I teach people off to take notes and they have to focus and listen and think about the things I'm saying. And it's important and that's how you integrate information into your brain by the way. So risk to reward. Where are you taking a trade? How much are you risking? What is the framework or infrastructure in the chart for taking the position and have you to find your risk in the trade? We're going to go over this in the entries class. Risk to reward is important. You want to make more than one to one. For every penny you want to risk you want to make more than one penny. You have to determine this. This has to be set pre-set before you even take the trade. You have to figure it out and calculate it. And having the right infrastructure is similar to having the right foundation of a home. If you don't have the right infrastructure foundation which is a strategy in reference to your entry then you don't then you're not in a solid foundational home. You're not in a solid home. You're in a you're in a teepee. You're in an igloo. You're in something that could break or fall if the wind blows over. You want to be in something that has a solid foundation and therefore you have to look at the bigger picture. And part of the bigger picture is deciding that hey I want to trade. I want to be a good trader. I want to do this for a living. I want to make a lot of money. I want this to be my retirement savings whatever and you got to say I'm going to buckle down. I'm going to learn this stuff. I'm going to embrace it. I'm going to live it. I'm going to love it and then this is going to be part of my life. And that's a bigger picture really with the market for me and what I'm teaching people is to embrace it. Trading is really for income. Whether it's part time income full time income or again retirement it's up to you if the choice is yours. You do need to know that before you go into your trading and determine your risk or where you're getting out of a trade even as far as holding to a target or a longer term trade. But overall on a weekly or month on your annual basis you should know why you're doing this. Trading is for income. There's a purpose to it and that's why I have to take it seriously. And learning how to take correct entries helps you get longevity and consistency in your trading. And you won't make it if you don't have consistency. And how are you going to do that? Not by getting it out of a trade five, six, seven different times in a day. You have to take it and hit it and attack it. Which is similar to the way that I take my trades in the morning. Very specific, very defined, very detailed. No question. Conviction in your entries helps you stay on track with your trading which means staying in the right course, staying in the right path, going down the right road, doing everything you need to do so you can get to the money. And if you want to make money trading then detail is required. Very specific. This class is very detailed as all my classes are. And it's a great course. So if you're interested in the entries course email me at melissa at thestockswish.com. It is a class focused on intraday entries and gaps. The class to the class is 1499. Email me at melissa at thestockswish.com if you want to sign up. And feel free to reach out to me if you like more information. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for coming. Have a wonderful evening.