Pricing

Personal accounts with one channel cost $10 per month (up to 10 concurrent viewers) and the company also offers accounts for small businesses at $100 per month (with 10 channels) and an account geared towards larger enterprises at $1,000 per month (which allows for 100 channels with 1000 concurrent streams). Not-for-profits, as well as education and religious organizations can also get access to this account for $1,000 per month.

Compatibility

Because of the company's reliance on its proprietary P2P architecture, however, users will have to install a plugin when they want to watch your streams. Currently, Dyyno doesn't offer a plugin for Macs, so this might be a deal breaker for quite a few potential users for now, though the company expects to ship its Mac plugin soon. While Dyyno works well in Firefox and Internet Explorer, we should also point out that Google's Chrome also isn't supported yet.

Easy to Use, Excellent Video Quality

When it works, however, Dyyno works extremely well and just as advertised. To share any part of your screen, you just drag and drop the Dyyno logo from the desktop client to any window and the sharing session will start. If you want to switch to another application, just drag the logo over to the next application. The video quality was generally excellent and you can also manually set the output resolution (up to 1024x768) and frame rate (up to 20 frames per second). In addition, you can also broadcast sounds from your computer as well.

WebEx

Because Dyyno can easily stream video from any application, including webcams, video players, and games, it makes for a very flexible platform. In addition, Dyyno also offers a solution for Cisco's popular WebEx online meeting solution. This brings all of Dyyno's capabilities to WebEx and makes it easy to integrate Dyyno into a platform that a lot of companies have already invested in.

A Few Missing Features

We did miss a few features, though. It would be nice, for example, if channels featured a chat room, something we have come to expect from similar solutions. It is also currently not possible to embed a video stream on another site. The company tells us that these features are forthcoming, but for the time being, they are sorely missed.

Overall, though, assuming you are on a Windows PC, Dyyno offers a high-quality solution for anybody who needs to stream video from a desktop directly to the web.

For a one-time fee of $5, you can get a URL that allows anyone to view your desktop in their browser with a Java Applet, something most people have, so no download should be required. That URL will work for 24 hours. The smoothness of the transmission was excellent in our testing, something that bigger bulkier solutions can rarely deliver on. WebEx, for example, is a huge business - but the user experience is not a lot of fun.

Pocket Meeting is very lightweight but it does what it claims to do and it does it quickly. It's also easy to switch screens and turn viewers into presenters. That's really nice. We had about 20 people viewing a screen at one time and it worked well, though the company says the technology is best for serving up to 10 people. You can choose to follow the presenter's cursor or navigate around on your own.

There's no chat or voice, and navigation between screens could be clearer. Viewing meetings over a Blackberry Bold is a beta option, though without voice or chat we're not sure how useful that will be. We'd also really like to see a PayPal option enabled for payment instead of credit card. The service is a product of a Texas design firm called Warb, which isn't a firm we're familiar with.

We've been using Yuuguu for screensharing with small groups, DimDim for larger groups. Neither of those is as lightweight and smooth as Pocket Meeting, but they are much more full-featured. In most cases, we'd choose smooth over features.

This product has some more development it needs to go through, but there's promise here and we'd love a quick, smooth solution to this nagging, unfilled need.

If you want to share your screen with someone while talking to them on the phone, this could be a quick, pleasing way to do it.

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...