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.

InSTEDD has built a product called InSTEDD Geochat, which is a service combining SMS, Twitter and email. However it is SMS-only interaction for users, as most don't have browsers. Driving the system is a "semi-structured" API with an extensible pipeline. However the idea of this system is that the participants don't need to be concerned with all the technology behind it, they can just interact with the system using SMS.

Interoperability is an issue, but this is being addressed with an InSTEDD service called Mesh4x. It syncs data from diverse applications, sources and devices. It works via HTTP, files and SMS. It supports open standards, such as FeedSync - an open protocol that describes data formats and algorithms used to version information in a mesh. Interestingly this is a Semantic Web application, with RDF as the default data representation.

The next challenge is using this data for collective action. "Today it takes a lot of coordination to get two organizations working together", said Jezierski. So they have been working on a system called Evolve - described as an RSS Reader for groups by Jezierski. It aims to provide collaborative decision support around streams of information. The service tries to sift through data and identify emerging health-related events. It also has an automatic feature extraction, for data classification and tagging. There is a human input and review module that "allows users to comment, tag, and semantically rank the elements (positive, neutral, or negative)." The overall theme is that it is a mix of machine and human intelligence - the machine can recommend a course of action, but people trigger the actions.

Jezierski has worked in the commercial sector before and he noted that "doing stuff to help people in Cambodia is way harder than running the London Stock Exchange". He said for example that for Twitter to reach wide adoption in these places, much work needs to be done to enable it. In particular he thinks a "better shared language" for technologies is needed for third world work - much in the same way that web 2.0 evolved a specific language in the tech world (tagging, user-generated content, etc).

The InSTEDD Innovation Lab is another project. It's a "socio-technical" lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and mixes InSTEDD's own team with various other organizations, to work on technologies that help society.

Overall it's clear that InSTEDD is doing some great work to bring collaborative software and systems into countries that need it the most - for disaster prevention and recovery, healthcare, and other essential needs.

We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It's still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don't have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.

However, we do have some thoughts we'd like to address overall.

First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube's advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the 'milk for free,' something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.

Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.

Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend's wall. There's no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook's own original 'walled garden' approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.

Tekarma was built by a team that includes a number of former eBay executives and engineers. The idea for the site, as Tekarma's Alex Kazim pointed out to us today, was to provide a comprehensive homepage for every product that would allow users to get tech support, read FAQs, and discuss the product with other users. The content on the site is completely user-generated, though Tekarma also uses Shopping.com's APIs to pull in product specs, which, however, can later be edited by the users.

Features

Every product page features four main sections: FAQs, Reviews, Web Resources, and Surprises. Surprises is actually one of the most interesting sections here, as this is where users can share information that is often left out of standard reviews such as the ground clearance of a car that a buyer would only notice after using it for a longer period of time.

While Tekarma features a price-comparison widget, Kazim told us that shopping is not the focus of the site. Instead, Tekarma, at least in its current iteration, focuses on providing support after a user has already bought the product. In the long run, once the site has more content, Kazim envisions that this may shift a bit, depending on how the users end up utilizing the site.

We liked Tekarma's user-interface, which makes browsing the site extremely easy. As Kazim pointed out to us, the team incorporated a lot of the lessons it learned at eBay into Tekarma's interface. One nice feature, for example, is that the service displays a list of your last search results in the left sidebar. Thanks to this, you don't have to constantly click the back button when searching for a specific product.

Good Start - Now All it Needs is More Users

Overall, while Tekarma is not necessarily revolutionary in its approach, we think that it has enough compelling features to set it apart from similar services like FixYa or product-specific forums. At the same time, though, Tekarma, like most services that rely on user-generated content, will have to attract a sizable number of active users to add content and fill the gaps in its current catalog.

Invites

If you would like to try out Tekarma and maybe add some of your own expertise to the system, you can follow this link. It will be valid for the first 100 readers who sign up for the service.

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...