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Open source to steal Web conferencing market
10 comments- TAGS:collaboration, Dimdim, Web conferencing
- IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology, Open Source, SaaS & Cloud Computing
Lousy Web conferencing tools can undermine your ability to communicate, such as what happened to Hewlett-Packard a few weeks ago. As such, many companies use pricey services in the cloud to assure their online presentations, whether for training, sales or PR purposes, are easy and accessible to every interested person.
Since I began working full-time from my office in June 2000, I've had thousands of briefings, most simple conference calls, but also hundreds of hours experiencing most, if not all, online presentation tools. Over the years I've built a mental list of my favorite ones. Moving toward the top of my list is Dimdim, a free, open source alternative to the paid subscription services available.
Steve Chazin, chief marketing officer for Dimdim Inc. in Lowell, Mass., tells me the service logged 100 million minutes of service in the past year, which is a small slice of the billions of minutes Wainhouse Research estimates are used annually in North America alone. But if my experience with Dimdim is indicative of its potential, its market share will only increase.
What I like best about Dimdim is it requires no extra client code on my machine. If you have Adobe Flash running on your computer (and only 1% of you don't), Dimdim works great. It has most of the features you look for in an online conferencing and collaboration service. You can schedule events, handoff control of white boards, share documents and Web pages during an event, record meetings and more. Dimdim also works seamlessly, as they say, with Microsoft Outlook, Sugar CRM, and Zimbra.
Unlike many free services, Dimdim doesn't generate its revenue through advertising. You can use the service for up to 20 people without charge. If you have more attendees, you'll need to upgrade to the Pro version that starts at $99 per year. The company also offers a private label version for unlimited users where pricing is implementation specific.
The free version of Dimdim lets you record a meeting and review it in about 18 hours, Chazin says. But if you need the recording as fast as possible, you'll want to upgrade to the Pro version, which handles the process in about two hours. And currently Linux desktops cannot share their desktops with other users.
But these are minor nitpicks for a slick, simple and, don't forget, free Web conferencing service that is going to grow fast and put downward pressure on the pricing from the dominant online collaboration services today.
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