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Cisco today unveiled new versions of its popular WebEx and Jabber communications tools at its customer conference in Miami. There are new features, beefed up mobile clients, and a better experience for the low-end users with free versions too. With today's announcements, Cisco is finally pulling together the various pieces of technology that it purchased several years ago, and offering a compelling reason to look closer at its offerings.

There are dozens, if not more, vendors offering Web conferencing services. They mostly fall into two price tiers: $50 or more per month, with various fees, and next to nothing that offer few features. The higher-priced spread is great on features but requires some setup, the low end can be quick to use but not very robust.

That middle ground is where YourOfficeAnywhere.com is trying to claim, and while I haven't used it for very long, it has some promise. For $10 per user per month, you get a combination of three separate services:

• A cloud-based file storage
• Web conferencing, including Web camera, screen sharing, audio conference bridge and whiteboarding
• Text chat, group messaging, and activity streams

The online meeting space continues to see lots of innovation, especially at what you can get for free.

There is a new service from FreeConferenceCalls.com called FreeScreenSharing.com that says exactly what it does and some major feature enhancements to YamLabs (for Yet Another Meeting).

There are lots of free or inexpensive Web conferencing services available, but how about this interesting twist from AnyMeeting.com where you can sell tickets to your participants? It seems like a nifty idea, especially if you run your own speaking business. As we wrote about them last month AnyMeeting is an otherwise free Web service that has a lot of the features found in the higher-priced spreads: polls, invitations, text chat, and recorded sessions for later playback.

If your business is looking to webinars to reach potential customers, Bob Darabant of Astaro has a couple of tips that might keep your cast from falling flat. Hint: Making it sales-focused is probably not the answer. Darabant, VP of Astaro Americas, has a handful of suggestions for making webcasts work for VARs – but these apply pretty well to any business that might be pondering a webcast.

Yesterday Cisco announced that it will lay off 6,500 employees and sell a manufacturing plant in Juarez, Mexico to Foxconn to shave off an additional 5,000 employees. This follows Cisco's decision to discontinue its Flip camera products and its Eos video/social platform.

It wasn't long ago that Cisco was expanding into new markets and burning through billions of dollars acquiring companies like WebEx, Tandberg and Flip. So what happened?

Cisco long has had its own exemplary in-house news site called @News. Last month they upgraded and are now rebranding it as The Network here. So what can you find there? At first blush it looks like many other Web-news portals, with a set of top stories from major tech freelancers such as Steve Wildstrom (formerly of Business Week) who has written an interview with Internet luminary Vint Cerf and another story on big data; Elizabeth Corcoran, the former Valley Forbes bureau chief, and John Dodge, someone like myself that got their start in tech journalism back at PC Week in the 1980s.

With the announcement yesterday about Facebook's Video chat feature, there is more interest surrounding ways that you can share the apps running on your screen as well as your mug across a video link. There are dozens of Web conferencing products that I have cataloged here and I will mention a few of these services that are completely free and can be used to set up a video link between at least two computers with a minimum of fuss and bother

MightyMeeting becomes one of the first software offerings to support the new HP TouchPad. The vendor offers free and low-cost screen-sharing instant meeting service and competes with a crowded market of other low or no-cost screensharing services, include Mikogo.com, Join.Me, Twiddla.com and Vyew.com.

You dial the conference call number. Or you can copy and paste it into Skype, or just click the link in your phone's e-mail app. Then you have to enter your 12 digit conference ID number, or whatever this particular system calls it. If you're on your phone and away from your computer, maybe you jotted it down on a piece of scrap paper. If not, you need to switch back and forth between your dialer and the app that the ID number.

You punch in the number. You wait. Nothing happens. You realize you forgot to hit pound at the end. OK, pound. The robotic voice on the other end slowly, carefully reads the whole number back to you. Are you sure this is the number you meant to dial? Yes of course it is, stupid robot! You hit "one" to confirm. You wait. Sorry, this access code is incorrect. Please enter your 12 digit conference participant ID access code number followed by pound now. Arh, that wasn't the right number after all. You try again, this time remembering to hit pound. The robot repeats it back to you again and you confirm. Finally, you enter the conference call, a bit late.

Pleasantries are exchanged, the conference gets rolling and then...someone's call gets dropped. Everyone waits for them to dial back in and run the access code gauntlet.