With an eye toward Earth day, here are some companies that help provide "green" (environmentally beneficial, and fresh, never-published) communications services. These companies help in our global effort to reduce carbon gas emissions by helping users avoid travel.

All three offer are meeting and collaboration tools that either never quite existed before or were once very costly, sold separately and professionally installed and managed. All replace professional installation with quick, DIY Web download, replace complex with simple and restrictively expensive with expansively, inclusively affordable. These companies provide cost-effective, viable solutions to real business problems.

Yugma, Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a web meeting, desktop sharing and collaboration service that does what tools like Webex do except they cost ten times as much, are sold as separate pieces, and are professionally installed and managed. A quick, DIY Web download, Yugma is sold in a "Freemium" model: a subset of free-forever features, a larger set that is free for an evaluation period, and then sold at SaaS scale (i.e. inexpensively) thereafter. I installed it on my PC and on my mother's, and have already saved myself two hours of driving by remotely ("Leave the mouse alone!) setting up her new email account.

Two people on a Yugma conference can:

• see each other's desktops and files
• control each other's desktop applications using remote keyboard and mouse, a la Gotomypc
• draw diagrams for each other ("whiteboarding")
• highlight and draw lines and circles on shared documents ("annotating")
• pass files to each other
• chat
• schedule Yugma meetings
• speak to each other with microphone and earphones

Ten (20, 30, 50...) people on a Yugma session can:

• speak to and hear from other participants
• change presenters during the same session
• record the proceedings

Best of all, Yugma is a lightweight Java client that can sit live on your desktop like instant messaging. Whenever the mood strikes, you can tap your friend's virtual shoulder in Sydney and share what's in front of you, just like people used to do in a real office.

SightSpeed, Berkeley, Calif., is a high-quality, affordable Web-based videoconferencing application. It helps businesses eliminate their travel-related expenses and carbon footprints, whether the meetings saved are across town, across country or across the globe. For instance, the company is based in Berkeley, Calif., but CEO Peter Csathy lives and works from his home in the San Diego area. He manages the company on a daily basis via SightSpeed's video communications tools. Company engineers are encouraged to work no more than two days a week in the office, and to communicate via SightSpeed the rest of the work week. Other employees work remotely but remain fully functioning members of the team using the service. SightSpeed lets businesses conduct multi-party videoconferences, record calls for playback later by those not able to attend a "live" event, share files during a video conference and connect a spontaneous video call between registered users with one click. (User case study available.)

VAPPS, Hoboken, NJ, is a unique audioconferencing service that offers phone conference "rooms" with two important differentiators: a) It conferences a mixed participant group of traditional PSTN phone and Skype Internet telephony users. b) It transmits a richer, more "present" voice quality than can be achieved with traditional phones. VAPPS calls its service "High-Definition Conferencing" because using broadband IP, it admits and delivers a wider range of voice frequencies than the traditional copper-wire phone system ever could. When conferees really sound like they're in the room with you ("s" and "f" don't sound the same, you can tell if the room is furnished and carpeted), you alleviate the ear fatigue common to long phone conferences. You can also better tell who's talking.