Uh-oh, it's budget time and pennies are tight. Lets see what can we cut? The Expresso machine or the Starbucks expense account? Howls of protest and a sure-fire productivity killer. What about our Webex/GoToMeeting bills? No, way we need that for sales. What if we switch to Dimdim, a freemium, open source-based alternative? And right there we have a nice, simple, "no duh" value proposition and one that will be popular in a recession. But, does the software work?
I got a demo last week, and the answer is sort of, mostly. What was really sweet was that there was no download required; one click from the email link and I was connected to the presenter's desktop, could see his face on a video screen, and we could voice and text chat. The "sort of" is for the few minor glitches we experienced (which Steve, the CMO, fixed on the spot) and I think it crashed Safari on me, but then lots of things seem to crash Safari these days. So Dimdim is perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but it seemed very close.
What resonated with me was that they had thought through their proposition for different types of users in a way that made sense for those users and for Dimdim as a business. They have clearly not been drinking the "build a service and don't worry about monetization" Kool Aid. Here are their 3 basic propositions:
Dimdim uses Amazon S3/EC2, and is a classic example of how one can now assemble ventures based on piece parts with some additional code and, above all, a clear value proposition. The service is currently in private beta, due to open to the public in a few days. It is new and possibly a bit raw, but I think they will survive and thrive because their fundamental model is sound.
They also have investors who bring a lot to the table (as well as cash of course):
"Dimdim has raised funds from the founders and from leading global investors including: Nexus India Capital, Index Ventures and Draper Richards. There's a perfect fit between the investor and Dimdim because of the alignment of the investors' experience and Dimdim's vision. Draper Richards invested in Hotmail; Draper Richards and Index Ventures invested in Skype; Index Ventures has invested in a number of Open Source companies including MySQL; and Nexus India's founder Naren Gupta sits on the board of Red Hat Linux - the most successful open source company."
Now about that name...
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The real value of DimDim will be unleashed when enough start-up penetration is achieved. After that point, I believe the development will accelerate so fast to the point that new requirements of the market and business landscape will be transformed into features of DimDim faster than any of its proprietary-software competitors.
Posted by: Emrecan Dogan | April 4, 2008 2:37 AMI think that with DimDim feature, the marketing strategies will be developed into more greated areas.
Posted by: W3G | April 4, 2008 2:57 AM-W3g
Too bad the name is so awful. Am I really going to want to send potential customers to a site called DimDim?
Posted by: Jamie | April 4, 2008 4:07 AMHi, just a huge comment... i have been trying for ages to create a solution like this for a fortune500 company and, alas, they cannot connect to this service, just the same as they cannot connect to Adobe Media Server and Red5... it doesn't matter what ports you open, they have the protocol blocked. And so do alot of public service networks. Sorry, but sometimes instalable, bigname software is the only way to get past corporate IT departments.
Posted by: davidinbcn | April 4, 2008 5:21 AMHi David, I am hearing a lot of this kind of "IT will block this" story on web 2.0 type SAAS coming into the Enterprise. Corporate IT needs to be careful with that kind of stance. There are legitimate security questions. If those are addressed, IT should give blessing and enable. If not, IT is at odds with corporate objectives and you know who will win that one....
Posted by: bernard lunn | April 4, 2008 6:33 AMRegarding the port blocking issue, isn't this all run via port 80, the web port? If you "click from the email link and I was connected to the presenter's desktop", then I can't really imagine that it's not just run via port 80. So, unless some corporate IT department is blocking specific sites, then I don't see the problem.
I could be wrong here though. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Posted by: James Asher | April 4, 2008 8:54 AMHi, the problem is not port blocking, but protocol blocking. They are blocking the RTMP protocol.
Posted by: davidinbcn | April 5, 2008 4:35 AMHaha Bernard, your reasoning is sound, but in the real world an agency of 5 people and one backer inside the company will always be beaten by corporate IT...
Posted by: davidinbcn | April 5, 2008 4:39 AM@Bernard: Where I work the corporate people don't dictate technology, they determine features and required functionality in a general sense. IT is responsible for finding the technology that works with our environment and supports as many of those features as possible.
As to my experience with DimDim: I was evaluating the Community Edition of DimDim and wanted to get information on the official On-Site Business version. The only way DimDim would let us do the evaluation was if we did a 4 week online test and paid a non-refundable fee. The fee was pocket change, but the fact that they wouldn't even tell us how it was priced without starting the process killed this right away. Their target may be the hosted version, but we have reasons the hosted version won't work for us.
Wayne
Posted by: Wayne Pierce | April 5, 2008 8:54 AMWayne, thats the way IT should work IMHO. If that was how Dimdim worked with you, I think they need to adapt their policies. The Red Hat model is all about service and ease of adoption. As with Red Hat, you always have the ability to take the underlying source on GPL rules and do what you want. And another company can package and distribute the source and offer better service. So companies like Dimdim ultimately succeed ot fail based on quality of execution and service. Which seems like a good thing for customers.
Posted by: bernard lunn | April 5, 2008 10:00 AMBernard, thanks for the post. On the thread around port blocking Dimdim tries preferred ports and if not available can back down to http over port 80. Our new screensharing feature does that flawlessly inside a browser frame.
Wayne, please forgive our growing pains. As a small company we've been trying to focus on getting our product into great shape while working to realize business opportunities that don't distract us from that goal. That said, our focus on early paying customers had led us to more reasonable pricing model that I'd be happy to discuss with you. My email is steve @ dimdim.com
Posted by: Steve Chazin | April 5, 2008 5:57 PMOn the port blocking issue, My companiy's service offers optional video with our web conferencing package. It is similar to DimDim in that there is no download and just a click to get in.
We have not had any companies that were not able to access a conference due to ports or protocols vwubg blocked. What has happened is some that are not able to see the webcam video due to the RTMP protocol being blocked.
That is a concern for some companies understandably, so they just run without the live video.
Anthony Russo
Posted by: Anthony Russo | April 8, 2008 7:43 PMConferencing Consultant
Great America Networks Conferencing
arusso@ganconference.com
www.ganconference.com
Skype: anth.russo
I've been in the desktop sharing / web conferencing business since 2000. (I'm Founder/CEO of http://glance.net -- a simple desktop sharing service.) When we launched our service, there were perhaps a dozen other companies in the business. WebEx (bought by Cisco), Placeware (remember them, before it was Microsoft'ed into clunky LiveMeeting?), Lotus Sametime (bought by Lotus), Latitude (bought by Cisco). Today there's scores of competitors. (We try to list them all at http://www.glance.net/site/whatis/competitors.asp -- including DimDim.)
Over the years, a handful of the newer companies have tried various free models. DimDim, Convoq, Yugma, WebDialogs all come to mind. Thus far, none seem to have found much success with their free offerings. Convoq closed their doors soon after launching a free version. (See the excellent post-mortem analysis by their Co-Founder Chris Herot in his blog at http://herot.typepad.com/cherot/2007/12/convoq-and-zing.html ) WebDialogs did a freebie for Skype called Unyte. A short while later they sold themselves to IBM (where some branding genius rechristened them "IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte"!). Yugma now seems to be adopting a similar Skype strategy. DimDim's variation brings to mind RedHat's model, untested in the web conferencing space.
In the neighboring space of audioconferencing, a number of free services popped up in recent years, including freeconference.com, freeconferencecalls.com, powwownow.com (what a name!) and many others. Lift the covers and you'll find that most are 2 to 5 person companies. Their model is built upon telcom regulatory arbitrage. They get a fraction of a penny per minute, which the long distance carriers by law must pay them to terminate each participant's long distance call.
Their free model allows them to grow to 10s of million of minutes per month, but not without its challenges. Last year several major long distance carriers (Sprint, AT&T, others) blocked calls to their services, causing widespread outages. After lifting those blocks, many refused or delayed payments, starving out the tiny companies. The Wall Street Journal ran a great center column page A1 story on their saga last spring.
That industry has also had its share of problems with overbooked bridges and poor audio quality. Most of them don't post a "contact us" webpage.
Interestingly, despite the huge volume of calls going to those free audioconferencing services, Wainhouse.com reported last fall that paid audioconferencing service providers have actually been growing at 40% per year!
So... why? Why do paid service providers thrive in a "free" market?
From what I've seen, the free services mostly appeal to consumers, marketing pyramids, non-profits and small businesses having limited resources.
Web demos, online meetings, webinars, conference calls -- these are expensive endeavors. Put a handful of business people in a web meeting for an hour and you're talking some serious cash to pay for their time. The cost of using a business class conferencing service to connect them? Not much in comparison.
If you're in sales, you know the cost of a single botched web demo can be enormous. It might have taken a month to schedule it. All that can be ruined while wasting precious minutes trying to connect.
So it's simple to see why most companies continue to pay a fair price for business class services. They get what they pay for.
Posted by: Rich Baker | April 9, 2008 2:28 PMIs Dim-Dim really open source?
Posted by: Kessom | April 29, 2008 7:10 AMAll I could find under Open source was a much older version. I also noticed that the word 'open source' which earlier appeared in their tag lines had now been dropped.