Dimdim has made a name for itself in the web meeting space by offering a quality product not only for free, but also open source. This has led to organic growth for the company both in market share as well as in VAR integrations, including such commercial products as TimeBridge (which we cover here) and SugarCRM, and OEM branding for internal deployment in a number of big companies.

Widget

Since Dimdim lives in a browser for both the presenter and meeting attendees, inviting someone to a web meeting has always been as easy as copying the meeting URL to your clipboard and sending it to someone via email or instant message, thus being able to give people a destination page with meeting information. To that end, version 5 pro now offers a very functional widget that can be easily embedded on a web site or deployed on any of a number of social networking platforms, including MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, and Microsoft Live. This widget contains all the information needed for an attendee to see, at a glance, when the meeting is happening (or if it is live already), register or join, and optionally to see a recording or view a transcript if the meeting is over.

Security and Performance

Both free and pro levels benefit from an overhaul of the Dimdim screencasting engine, the part of the client that sends and receives data with the server. According to Steve Chazin, Dimdim founder, the rewrite caused an almost 2x improvement in speed and responsiveness. In addition, Dimdim now supports full SSL connections for pro accounts. This means that web sniffers won't be able to eavesdrop on the session while it is happening.

Synchrolive Co-Browsing

Dimdim diverges quite a bit from its competitors when it comes to displaying web pages during web meetings. Instead of relaying a static image across the conference bridge, the software opens the presenter's URL directly within a controlled window. This means that live web pages, including rich media sites like YouTube, open locally and with no performance or sound penalties, while the presenter retains control of which part of the page is displayed.

Recording, Transcripts and More

Dimdim Pro allows a web meeting to be recorded directly from a button within the live session. Both the recording and the chat transcript are made available immediately after the web meeting is over, based on the organizer's wishes. Pro users can also request for their Dimdim sessions to be customized to show custom logos, messaging and entrance and exit pages if requested. Other features of a pro account include 2-way video support (with more to come), annotation of shared documents, private messages within the meeting and email support if needed.

Update: *Adobe Flash does need to be installed in the browser in order for Dimdim to work.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dimdim_version_5_speed_security_and_widgets.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dimdim_version_5_speed_security_and_widgets.php News Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:00:00 -0800 Phil Glockner A year ago, I wrote about the State of Innovation in India, keying off an article I had written 10 years previously. Rather than wait another 10 years, ReadWriteWeb has decided to make this an annual review. This time, we have restricted ourselves to web technology. We are looking for breakout innovation, companies creating and getting traction with technology that will change and create markets.

Last year we wrote:

"The fundamental issue in India is the risk/reward equation. It is simply too easy for a young developer in India to get paid a lot by an outsourcing firm; then enjoy being headhunted every year for more money. Those of us old enough to see a cycle or two, can see the parallels between Silicon Valley 1999 and Bangalore 2007, when just being able to spell the words of a popular programming language on a resume meant fame and fortune. It is possible that when this comes back to some reality, the motivation to innovate will come to young Indian developers (yes, young; breakthrough technical innovation tends to come from people under 30)."

This has changed, thanks to the global financial crisis. The big outsourcing firms have hiring freezes, and some firms are laying off. "Big" no longer means "safe." Parents in India will need a while to accept this new reality. In America, many parents would advise their kids to go for start-ups when they are young and can afford to take a risk. In India, all the parents have to do is say "Yes" when their bright kid, who is no longer working for a big outsourcing firm, asks to live at home for a year with free food and bandwidth. Last year's article was written before the Satyam scam was exposed, and it rings even truer now that SWITCH has become WIT.

Three kids working together, living at home, with free food and bandwidth, can change the world.

This is a big change. But it is a below-the-radar change. We cannot see the impact yet. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of young developers will do this in India now. Most will not create a great start-up but will just keep their skills fresh and add to their CV. But one or two will do something totally awesome. The class of 2008/2009 maybe the best ever. Let's see.

The innovation we are already seeing in the market today has been despite these and all the other hurdles faced by entrepreneurs everywhere.

Zoho: Finally, the Indian Software Product Success Story

For a decade or more, entrepreneurs in India have dreamed of creating a software product powerhouse, moving away from the labor-for-hire services model to create products that are winners on the global stage.

I know firsthand from working with a few of these pioneers that it is not an easy ambition to fulfill.

India finally has a product success story. We have written about Zoho many times on ReadWriteWeb and included it in our list of top 10 enterprise products of 2008.

The bigger story is the impact this success will have on young developers in India. Role models matter. Kids in America want to become ski racers now that they have seen Bode Miller. It is said that Sachin Tendulkar has inspired a few Indians. In software outsourcing, Infosys was the role model. Today, that role model may be Zoho.

That Big Wide-Open SaaS Opportunity

Indian start-ups that dreamed of creating the next SAP or Oracle faced massive hurdles on the sales and marketing front. Sure, they could invest five times more in R&D with the same budget. But the reality was that R&D was a tiny portion of the budget. The big money went into sales and marketing. The R&D budget arbitrage was not enough to move the needle.

This is totally and utterly different today. We have written about the SaaS opportunity many times. This opportunity is totally location-agnostic. But it is also totally price- and cost- sensitive, and R&D is the biggest cost. Success stories such as 37 signals, Automattic, and Zoho did not win by hiring an enterprise sales force or buying advertising. They "let the software do the talking."

This is not just an opportunity for a few big winners. This is an opportunity for thousands of small companies to go after niche markets. The interesting thing about niche markets today is that they are inherently global and can be a lot bigger than people think. These small niche start-ups won't make headlines and probably won't get VC financing. But they won't need VC financing. What is fascinating about SaaS globally is how few start-ups have been VC financed. Most have gotten to profitability on tiny seed rounds or even with revenue financing from clients.

DimDim and the Cheap Decade

DimDim is another Indian company that made it onto ReadWriteWeb's list of best enterprise products of 2008. It is a classic SaaS story with an Indian twist. DimDim's proposition is as simple as the whole proposition of offshoring: it just costs less. In this case, it costs less than Webex. That's a popular story in a recession.

It is the same pitch that Zoho is making. Take a basic software service we all need -- say, CRM -- and offer something that is comparable to the market leader at a fraction of the price.

That doesn't sound so innovative; more like a classic "fast-follower" strategy, a better, faster, cheaper strategy. That is easy to want, but hard to execute. When you look at a story like Zoho's, you see a simple strategy but lots of small bits of innovation in the execution that make strategy real. Not glamorous, but effective.

Back in 2003, Forbes wrote an excellent piece called "The Cheap Decade." And as we argued here, the boom we went through from 2004 to 2007 was really just flim-flam, fuelled by incredibly cheap credit and blowing up in our faces. So the cheap decade may be starting for real right now.

Zoho and DimDim are perfectly positioned for the cheap decade. There will be others.

On page 2: the future; and what segments are currently hot in India?

HottestStartUps.In Shows the Future of the Start-Up Launchpad

When I was researching this article, many of my contacts pointed me to a website that runs a competition to find the best start-ups in India. Browsing through it was a fascinating glimpse into an economy of over 1 billion souls in the midst of an incredible transformation.

However, more than any individual start-up, what jumped out at me was that this was a far better launchpad for start-ups than anything we have in the USA. This competition satisfies the three golden rules, FTV:

1. Free for the start-up, so that even one with no funding can play.
2. Transparent; the judging rules are open and the process is independently audited; no suspicion of back-door influence.
3. Virtual; no need to be in a specific place at a specific time in order to fully participate.

Of course this has been made possible by sponsors who have actually donated money to further the cause of innovation; it has not been driven mainly by the for-profit objectives of the event organizer.

What Segments Are Hot with VCs?

VCs miss many great market segments, and entrepreneurs who chase segments that are hot at the moment are usually a day late and a dollar short. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what is getting funded these days in India. Here are the spaces that have already seen a lot of activity:

• Micro-financing. To some, this elicits a big yawn and a "Yet another micro-financing site?" response. But the blow-up of big banks in last few months indicates that a fundamentally new model may be needed. And India, with its huge unbanked population and technically savvy elite, is where innovation is likely to come from.
• Mobile ad networks. I am a skeptic of these. Nobody has found a way to capture attention on a tiny screen without being totally annoying. Maybe somebody will. They probably will, and it will have to have something to do with location. But it is likely to come from Asia, where mobile is more widespread than in the USA. Mkhoj is a Kleiner-funded entrant from India in this space.
• Personal outsourcing. We wrote about this in our article last year as well, and some of the companies, such as iYogi (disclosure: I have an interest in iYogi) and TutorVista, are doing quite well.
• Better, faster, cheaper SaaS clones. Zoho (which is bootstrapped) and DimDim (funded by VC) will inspire investment in many other segments.

Here are some bleeding-edge segments in which investors are taking an interest and in which India may be well positioned:

• Voice recognition. Voice recognition is hard. It is even harder in multiple languages. The official census in India from 1961 recognized 1,652 languages! Voice recognition is still the killer app for the mobile phone, and it is growing at a crazy pace (with over 3 billion mobile users currently). Ubona looks interesting, with some serious IP but also a pragmatic local market-entry strategy. Mscriber looks like it has a good market strategy, too.
• Mobile payments. In India, people live on their mobile phones, and when you are talking about billions of users, the dollars add up, even if in very small increments. Obopay is one company in this space.

Best Exit: Naukri

Naukri, usually described as the Monster.com of India, may not have the innovation to make techies gasp, but VCs salivate at its return. Naukri rode the outsourcing boom perfectly, exiting via an IPO in November 2006 that was oversubscribed 55 times (ah, remember those days on NASDAQ?).

What Have We Missed?

In a nation of over 1 billion people, where technology is the best route to wealth, we are certain to have missed a ton of amazing innovation. Let us know what it is.

(Photo by Thomas Roche.)

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

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:

1. Big company - cut your Webex/GoToMeeting bills by 50% or more
2. Established online venture that needs online meetings to close sales with end users - no hassle revenue share
3. Start-up with enough techies, but no cash - use the open source base with normal GPL rules (and thus grow the platform for Dimdim and everybody else)

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...

ionRSS.com

My new Silicon Valley Watcher blog, called ionRSS (eye on RSS, geddit?) is in beta mode right now. There are still some i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed, but it's basically primed for action. The site's tagline is The Business of RSS, which tells you all you need to know about the focus of the blog. I'll be covering RSS over on ionrss.com and continuing my focus on Web 2.0 on Read/Write Web. Where there is any crossover, I'll cross-link.

p.s. bonus points if you can figure out the other pun of "ion" in an RSS sense. Hint: alternative RSS format...

Digital Web Magazine Article: Web 2.0 for Designers

Also a new Digital Web Magazine article that I co-authored with Joshua Porter has just been published. Josh and I are going to be writing a column on Web 2.0 Design over the remainder of 2005. Our first article is entitled Web 2.0 for Designers and it introduces 6 key Web 2.0 trends that we see impacting the Web Design profession. I'd love to receive your feedback on it.

WebMD's mission seems to be to help "navigate the complexity of the healthcare system" and so it necessarily has a broad reach - from doctors to patients to providers. So perhaps Gordon is right and innovation will come from presumably more focused and agile Healthcare startups.

Rajesh Jain from Emergic has a similar post about IT in the Healthcare system. He quotes from an article in The Economist, which says the healthcare industry must get patient information "out of paper files and into electronic databases" and make it interoperable. But more than that, decision-making should be moved to the edges of the network (i.e. "by patients in consultation with their doctors") and not centralised. 

The Economist's conclusion is similar to Gordon's - the goal is ultimately "to enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about their own health."