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Dimdim, the free, open-source web meeting company, has raised $6 million in a second round of funding.

The concept is pretty simple — like WebEx, but free. Dimdim offers all the basic tools that you’d expect from a web meeting service, including a collaborative whiteboard, desktop sharing, audio and video. It doesn’t have too many bells and whistles, and some of the technical kinks still need to be worked out; I’ve run into a few display and usability glitches myself. But even if Dimdim isn’t perfect, it works. And since you don’t have to pay to use it, that counts for a lot.

Chief executive DD Ganguly says Dimdim has been used by more than 500,000 people in more than 180 companies since it launched in private testing mode in 2007. What’s particularly exciting is how, as Ganguly says, Dimdim “democratizes” web meetings. Sure, the phrase reeks of hype, but it’s also accurate — without WebEx’s cost, Dimdim can take web meetings out of just the corporate world and make them a broader tool for communication. (My favorite example is still the person in Florida using Dimdim to teach English to Mexican immigrants before they come to the United States.)

I’ve been doing my own small part to promote the company, too. Whenever a PR person or CEO suggests using WebEx, I point out WebEx’s lack of Mac compatibility (what’s up with that, anyway?), and immediately suggest Dimdim as a free alternative. People are even starting to take me up on it.

The funding comes from existing investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital and Draper Richards, and follows Dimdim’s $2.4 million first round last year.

Ganguly says most of the new funding will go toward marketing. The Boston start-up’s next moves will also involve taking its technology into different markets, starting with video later this year. That way, people can take advantage of Dimdim’s video or chat services on different Web sites, for example, without having to create a full web meeting.

Dimdim plans to make money by offering a premium service. Advertising in the free version is also a possibility.

Update: As a WebEx spokesperson notes in the comments, I let my whining get a little over-the-top. According to the WebEx system requirements, the service does support Macs, but without remote access. I’m not sure if it’s remote access or some other issue in my case, but I’ve never been able to get WebEx meetings to work on my Macbook, and other Mac-owning VentureBeat writers have reported similar problems. In my limited experience WebEx has not been Mac-friendly, but I definitely overstated the case.

A San Francisco-based company with plans to help the developing world snuff out its kerosene-burning lamps and replace them with cheap, solar-powered LEDs and compact fluorescents has finally unveiled its production models and announced the details of its for-profit business plan.

We’ve followed the progress of D.light Design from a Stanford design competition in late 2006 through its launch in the non-academic world, to the present moment. Started by two Stanford MBAs, D.light has been working on light designs cheap enough to be affordable for families making as little as a dollar a day, but with a big enough market to create a sizable company.

The problems with kerosene are numerous: It’s polluting and harmful to the health of those who regularly use it for light, it can start fires that injure or kill people, and surprisingly, it’s also relatively expensive — according to co-founder Ned Tozun, kerosene is a $38 billion market that can suck up to 30 percent of the income of families that have to use it regularly.

Unfortunately, that’s quite a lot of people, in part because areas that are ostensibly powered by electricity actually only get a few hours a day of current. D.light, along with similar companies like Mightylight, uses the figure of 1.6 billion people, although its initial target market in India includes “only” 72 million families.

D.light is unveiling three light designs. The one they brought to show me (far left, below) is most faithful to their original design: A nearly unbreakable plastic casing enclosing a bright, ultra-efficient LED, with a connection for a single-watt solar panel that can charge it throughout the day. The light has several settings, allowing it to last between 12 and 500 hours on a single charge. There are two other designs: A CFL-based light that charges if there’s electricity available, and a small lamp that also has a solar panel. The various parts, including the sealed lead-acid battery, are all replaceable with standard parts.

The basic idea D.light has is almost identical to Mightylight. Because of target consumer group, though, price, rather than innovation, is the most important point. D.light’s units range from $12 to $25 for an individual buyer, far below Mightylight’s $45 lights. (Another company, Selco India, is also making solar powered lights, as well as various overseas startups.)

However, Tozun said D.light still might not be cheap enough for some. “We’re cognizant of the fact that there are some families that just can’t afford the lights, no matter how low you price them,” he told me, suggesting that there’s potential for a micro-finance model to help the extremely impoverished gain access to light. There are also non-profits helping to buy the lights.

But for the families that can afford the D.light’s products, Tozun says there’s no shortage of demand. He told me that two people sent to India to scope out the target market were nearly mobbed by villagers who had been tipped off to their arrival — only to find out that they had brought none of the lights with them to sell.

Now, about that “for profit” part. It’s easy to be skeptical that D.light can make money, even on its bare-bones design — even with the founders moving to China and India to help with manufacturing and distribution. Tozun says they’ll make money, but didn’t want to discuss specifics. However, a little basic math isn’t too difficult. If D.light manages to sell 10 million units for an average of $18, using a conservative, ultra-slim 2 percent profit margin, it will have made $3.6 million. For the company’s target market of over a billion people, just multiply by a hundred; and, as with every startup, there will be opportunities to diversify.

Tozun says there’s plenty of room for other entrepreneurs, provided they’re able to understand the particularities of developing markets. He pointed out income generation, or “anything that can help these people make money,” as well as mobile phones and communications as especially hot areas.

D.light’s founders are headed out in the next week or two, and the company will be based out of China and New Delhi, India. Its investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Indian firms Mahindra & Mahindra and Nexus India Capital, social investment firms Acumen Fund and Gray Matters Capital, and Michael Marks, the chairman of Flextronics, but the company has not disclosed how much money it has taken.

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?