Did you ever imagine that you could actually talk to more than one person using your phone? Well, conference calls allow you to. This means you and your friends can communicate from different places at the same time, and even listen to each others voice without having to put one on hold. Now with the invention of video conference, you can even look at each other while talking.

Telephone conference:
A conference call is a telephone call where you can have more than one person listen in to the audio portion of the call. This is designed so that you can also talk during the call, or the call can be set up so that the person you called merely listens in to the call but cannot speak.

Conference calling can be very useful for remote business meetings. To use conference calling, your network needs to be able to provide this service, and your phone should be able to support it. You may also have to add this service to your subscription. In conference calls you can call the people you want to talk to and add them to the call. In some cases the participants call in to the conference calls either by dialing a conference bridge, which is a special kind of telephone that can take multiple calls, or you can do so by using a special telephone number set up for this purpose. This is a very good way of socializing, as you get to meet a lot of new people. Conference calls are mainly used by businesses. By paying some extra charges, you can avail a three-way calling service where you can add a second outgoing call to a call already connected at the same number.

Video conference:
Video conference is one of the greatest achievements of telecommunication technology. This allows two or more locations to communicate via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously. It is called visual collaboration and is a special type of groupware.

The technology behind this is digital compression of audio and video streams in real time. Codec which is coder/decoder performs the compression. Up to 1:500 compression rates can be achieved. The resulting digital form of 1's and 0's is then further subdivided, and then transmitted through some network like ISDN or IP. Audio modems are used in the transmission line that uses POTS or the plain telephony network in video telephony, as it converts the digital pulses to or from analog waves in the audio spectrum range.

The other components which are needed for video conference are:

• Video input - allowing you to take pictures or videos of the person such as a video camera or web cam
• Video output - where the image can be seen, such as a computer monitor or television
• Audio input - microphones
• Audio output - where the final voice can be reached, usually loudspeakers associated with the display device or telephone
• Data transfer - analog or digital telephone network, LAN or Internet

Online conference:
A web conference or online conference, unlike a phone conference, has visuals. Web conferencing can be a useful tool in your own work. You can conduct meetings at any time where everyone can participate equally just like in a conference room meeting. You can exchange architect's sketches, storyboards for a new advertising campaign, a graph of sales figures, and even medical x-rays, with everyone viewing the same thing at the same time. In a web conference, every participant would be able to see what you are showing at that moment. Another benefit is that you can pull and share any document on your computer into the conference anytime you want to. You can easily demonstrate a website or any software, or show slides through a PowerPoint presentation, as if your colleagues were sitting in your office. And while doing this, you and the other participants can simply talk with each other as you would in an ordinary phone conference.

Communication made easy!
Everybody wants to keep in touch with people they associate with, anywhere in the world. Phone conferencing, video conferencing and web conferencing has made this possible and has made the world smaller, thus reducing the gaps between people. Thanks to these technologies, communicating with anyone anywhere in the world has become so much easier!