I need to figure out how to have up to eight people with laptops and webcams in a teleconference together.  And do it cheap.

What is out there, that works?  I figure if anyone knows, it's the hive.....

Bump!  Nobody has had to deal with this before?  Or just nobody who slums around in GD?  

skype?

remember this   getting you to do it is neat..

then your friend does it   thats also neat and you will have many great "look at me " moments

its the other 6 retards that will  make your life a living hell.

Hop on chatroulette ?

Wait, so you want to basically have all 8 people able to see and hear each other?

Not going to be cheap, if at all possible.  I haven't run in to anything that will work like that.  I get what you're saying - just never seen it.

Plus - thinking about it logically - if each person's audio / video stream is 384k (the lowest we generally use on our Polycom units at work to get things to function normally) ..... that means whatever's conferencing everything together has to be able to send out nearly 3 mbps per viewer - for 8 people you'd need a 24 meg pipe or so.  Not happening for cheap.  

Polycom *does* make stuff that will do this, but Polycom & cheap don't go together well.

Its late and i've been dealing with this crap all day, so this probably makes no sense.

It makes a lot of sense, actually.  Thanks for the input.  I would still be interested in learning how to do videoconferencing, if you have an opportunity to post some info.

I wonder how many people you could do at once on Skype, I've used it but never tried more than one connection at once.

Maybe running multiple instances of skype and arranging them on the desktop?