Updated
Dimdim, the (mostly) free, open source competitor to online meeting companies WebEx and GoToMeeting, is launching its service in public testing mode today.
Chief Marketing Officer Steve Chazin gave me a demonstration of Dimdim’s free service, and it has the basic functions that you’d want for an online meeting: a collaborative whiteboard, desktop sharing, slideshows and audio and video. The video and audio quality aren’t top-notch, but they work. The selling point, of course, isn’t the quality or innovation of the service — as long as Dimdim is functional, the fact that it’s free makes the service pretty attractive. Also, unlike other meeting services, you don’t have to install anything to join a meeting, not even a browser plug-in.
Dimdim started an invite-only test last fall. Since then, the company says more than 375,000 people in 165 companies have participated in Dimdim meetings. What’s really exciting about the Burlington, Mass. company is that it helps widen the market for online meetings — not just to smaller companies that don’t want to pay for WebEx, but also to groups outside of the corporate world. For example, someone in Florida is using Dimdim to teach English to Mexican immigrants before they arrive in the United States.
Back when we first wrote about Dimdim a year ago, we had one big question: How is the company going to make money? The answer is a combination of advertising on the free service, as well as charging for premium and enterprise-level products. The free version is already pretty good; you can host up to 20 people in a meeting. The fees for Dimdim Premium start at $99 per year and cover custom branding and meetings with up to 100 people.
Update: In the comments, Chazin says that advertising on the free service is, for now, just a possibility.
2 Comments
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steve Chazin said:
Thanks for the post Anthony and for meeting with me last week. While we reserve the right to add ads in Dimdim Free, we currently do not show any. And Dimdim Pro eliminates any future ads AND allows customization of the meeting room logos, branding and for larger meetings. With Dimdim, now the world can meet freely.
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Felix said:
What makes dimdim different to spreed? I am using spreed (http://www.spreed.com), a European web meeting service which is available free of cost since the year 2005. In which functions and features are dimdim service offerings different from spreed? spreed web meetings run great on my Mac including OS X screen sharing. In addition to web meeting features such as sharing, collaboration and N-way audio/video communication spreed has desktop remote control, click-to-meet (I find this a useful feature), built-in telephone worldwide conferencing, a polling feature, remote control and supports live video streaming. What features does dimdim support which spreed does not?
3 Trackbacks
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