VentureBeat

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.

Yesterday, we reported the hightlights of the latest DEMO conference, writing stories about the most significant technologies being announced.

They included ThePudding.com (our coverage), MyQuire (our coverage), Tubes (our coverage), Glam’s Digg feature (our coverage), Fluid Innovation (our coverage), CashView (our coverage), Vyro-Games (our coverage), LiveMocha (our coverage) and MetaRadar (our coverage) and more (our coverage).

Here’s a review of a few other companies and technologies that we didn’t get to, but which are worth a mention: 360Desktop, MuseStorm, DimDim, YourTrumanShow and Shoutlet.

360Desktop — The Australian company wants to expand your desktop view. It produces a 360° panorama out of the base screen, so that if you direct your cursor to screen edge, your screen backdrop turns with it, and keeps turning — giving you much more space to store your icons and other windows open at one time (see image at left). This may not sound like much at first — but the desktop is a valuable piece of computer “real estate” that nobody has yet figured out how to monetize. 360Desktop is the latest attempt to do so. Their program starts by offering you a 360 degree picture as wallpaper. The added space provides ample room for the numerous open windows and icons that vie for space on the average person’s desktop. There’s also enough room for banks of widgets to be installed — miniature webpages that load up say, today’s version of the New York Times or a current weather forecast.

Although the 360Desktop will continue to function normally while users are offline, it’s the online time that’s valuable. One way for it to make money is to give let say, a car company create customized desktops that include advertising. The risk, of course, is that users will balk at having even subtle advertising invade their desktop. Those wary users will be able to build their own, without advertising. 360Desktop is launching into closed beta testing now, and founder Evan Jones plans to move the company to the U.S. in the coming months, taking on an investment from a local venture capitalist in the process. The Australian variety, he notes, “just don’t understand.”

MuseStorm — The Israeli company produces web widgets, which are tiny self-contained web pages that can be seeded around the internet. MuseStorm’s focus is on giving advanced analytics functionality to publishers, thus allowing close tracking of how web surfers interact with the widgets they see. Since we last wrote about the company in July, they’ve been hinting of more to come. The new version allows widget customization, produces automatic embed code for them to be placed on social networks, and advertising. The most unique feature, however, is “interaction metrics,” which allow publishers to see detailed reports of exactly how surfers used their widgets — for example, rolling their mouse pointer over a headline or scrolling through content.

MuseStorm is the only widget platform we know of that gives its users such close oversight of their widgets, although we expect their competitors to catch up quickly. After all, there’s real money flowing into the space. 3Guppies, a Seattle mobile-blogging company, launched yesterday, saying it has $20 million in venture capital from VantagePoint Venture Partners; their service uses a widget to connect to social networks through a user’s mobile phone, allowing them to check on and update their social networks.

DimDim –This is an open-source replacement for WebEx we wrote about earlier this year. Started by Deb Dutta Ganguly, who sold his company Advanced Internet Management back in 2001, the video meeting service is finally launching its free service at DEMOfall. Like other web meeting software, DimDim can be used for broadcasting live video to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously. However, according to Ganguly, it’s the only one that doesn’t require any sort of installation by the user to run. The team has spent the months since our last mention working on time lag, so that if you’re in the U.S. having a meeting with someone in China, the difference isn’t notable. The feature list is heavily dependent on what the service’s lead users have so far requested; Ganguly says that open source is all about accepting the innovations of users. And, since DimDim is open source, it will be free for anyone to run.

DimDim wants to make money from clients needing assistance with larger applications — for instance, a university wishing to hold a live meeting for a class of several hundred students. The company will also provide hosting for meetings, starting at about $99 a year for the service, with dynamic scaling provided by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. WebEx, by comparison, charges $39 per month, making DimDim a serious threat to its business.

YourTrumanShow — This company launched a few months ago as a place to upload video diaries today launches VideoMap, a fun widget that lets you use video as a means for exploring and expanding your social network.

Take a look at this screen shot:

The widget creates a clear and easily navigable map of your social network with you at the center and your friends as nodes. Clicking on one of your friends will extend a map of their friends, and so on. VideoMap scrapes the videos that your friends (and their friends) have uploaded, and when you click on any of these people, you can browse through their videos and play them without leaving the widget.

In an alternative mode, seen in the screenshot below, the videos themselves become the nodes. Again, you start at the center but it’s your uploaded videos that surround you. Now, when you click on a video, the widget displays other VideoMap users that have uploaded the same video. Clicking on these people will let you explore their videos, instead of their friends. It’s an innovative way to find others who share your interests and discover new content at the same time.

YourTrumanShow still holds out hope of becoming a destination site, and will so launch a celebrity-diary series in pursuit of that goal.

Shoutlet — Produced by Sway, a Chicago company, Shoutlet is a tool that allows users to distribute content across multiple media (RSS feeds, podcasts, SMS texting and widgets) and track results in real time. It’s designed for marketers and PR professionals. BuzzLogic, another company we’ve written about, allows marketers to assess the influence of blogs and their communities, but does not offer the sort of distribution that Shoutlet does.

There are a ton of “video player” companies out there, and they’re starting to blur.

It takes a lot to impress these days. A video player in 2007 should be able to upload any video file — from your desktop or from the Web — and then have it run from any Website from a widget.

Just when we thought innovation was running out, we hear about Kyte, a video player that allows live video and chat communication over the Web and mobile phones, and is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It is the latest investment by Howard Hartenbaum (pictured left), the early investor in Skype (see our blog about him here, and Mercury News story here). Hartenbaum has been on a tear recently. We mentioned his investment in the new behavior advertising engine, Wunderloop, yesterday. He’s also an investor in DimDim, the new open source competitor to WebEx, which we’ll get to in a sec.

We first heard of Kyte a couple of weeks ago. We followed up with Daniel Graf, founder and chief executive of Decentral.TV, which owns Kyte.

Graf, who is jealously guarding Kyte’s distribution, until public launch sometime this quarter, has delayed release. The product is in closed testing, so we haven’t gotten our hands on it. You get an idea, though, by perusing examples on the Web (click on image below, for example. There are others here, here and here.)

These Web examples are just half of it. The other half is mobile.

Here’s how it works: The Kyte player is your own interactive TV channel. You can distribute it on the web, or through the mobile phone. On it, you can host videos and photo slide-shows — uploaded from your computer, or elsewhere on the Web, such as YouTube. The most recent content shows in the player, but you can use a back arrow to see earlier content. The example above is player of MySpacer Justin, 26, of San Francisco, and his videos are interesting.

Ok, so what? Well, Kyte appears to do everything. It lets you brand the player as your own. It gives you drag and drop tools to make uploading files easy. You can overlay questionnaires on the player’s screen. Friends can follow your channel on their phone. There’s an IM mashup, too, so friends can respond with messages instantly, and other people watching the video see those messages in real time and can respond. Photos are transferred real-time, says Graf. In other words, if I have Jason’s player on my phone, and he has it on his phone, we can not only live chat about it — more significantly, if Jason turns on camera and takes photos, I can see his surroundings live. “If you see a hot girl on the beach, boom, you can ask him take more shots,” says Graf. [Clarification: He wants to make videos live, too, but that will take some time]

Graf stresses the significance of Kyte as a “full-blown interactive application on the phone.” While Skype, and IM work real-time on the web, this is a real-time, or live video and chat over the phone and the Web. The players get their own URL. You can also open your player channel, so that others can load information too.

Kyte has just signed a deal with a major European carrier, which makes this easier; but it can work without a carrier. The big question remaining for Graf is whether he can actually get this product out of the door!

For now, Kyte supports Java-enabled phones. The product is developed on Flex2 and the latest versions of Flash.

We’ve talked about other mobile video players, including Radar, which transfer mobile videos and photos on mobile phones, but none do this live.

Graf raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hartenbaum’s firm Draper Richards, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and several others.

DimDim, meanwhile, is an open-source version of Web conferencing software WebEx.

It is Hartenbaum’s other investment. DimDim is free, and so plans to disrupt WebEx — just as Skype undercut telecom providers. WebEx charges a significant $39 a month, which is out of reach for many cost-conscious companies. DimDim is still mulling its business model, but plans to place ads in the video, and/or offer premium services. (If you’re an employee being forced to watch a boring training video by your company, perhaps ads might break the monotony?) There are other competitors in this area, but DimDim is the first to go open-source.

It is the second startup of CEO Deb Dutta Ganguly. He founded Advanced Internet, which he sold to Computer Associates in 2001, and built a team of 1,000 people. DimDim is ready for use now, though your firewall may get in the way (DimDim is fine-tuning some of these compatibility issues). This month, downloads are reportedly hitting 2,000 downloads a day.

DimDim has raised $2.4 million in a first round from Hartenbaum’s Draper Richards, along with Index Ventures and Nexus India Capital. The DimDim financing was first reported by PE Week. WebEx controls more than a third of the Web conferencing market, according to research by Goldman Sachs cited by PE Week. Microsoft follows, with 13 percent.

The company is based in Burlington Mass. Our big question for this company is, how do you make money?