Why Pay For Web Conferencing?
Posted by Matt on September 28th, 2007
Among the many DEMOfall07 companies launching their products, YuuGuu and DimDim have released their offerings into the web conferencing space. In short, web conferencing allows users to share (or screencast) a presentation, even their whole desktop, with their colleagues over the internet. Common problems that are faced in this space are high cost, required downloads, and laggy response time. YuuGuu and DimDim are joining the few web conference software companies that offer their service for free. Both services also offer a unique conference bridge for every meeting, allowing a phone conference on top of the screencast. Current main players in web conferencing are Webex, Adobe Acrobat Connect, Citrix GoToMeeting, and MS LiveMeeting. All these are paid services.
YuuGuu
Up first, Yugioh YuuGuu. The product was just launched recently and, after a few minutes of playing around with it, I like it. Granted it doesn’t have the features some of the paid offerings have (it lacks the ability to screencast just a certain application), but what it offers for free, it does well. Simply add your YuuGuu buddies to your “buddy list”, start a meeting, and click “Share”. YuuGuu even allows users to hand over mouse and keyboard control to any member of the meeting.
DimDim
DimDim is another free web conferencing app and its open source, allowing some flexibility. One thing that separates DimDim from YuuGuu is that it doesn’t rely on software downloads as much, which is very nice. Users have the ability to upload and share a presentation to DimDim’s Flash-based service, in which case nobody has to download anything. However, if the presenter wants to screencast their whole desktop, the presenter alone would need to download DimDim’s software. DimDim however does not have the ability for presenters to transfer mouse and keyboard control to other meeting members.
Why pay for something if you can get it for free?
Web 2.0 is all about free. Free everything. Free images, music, videos, and, most importantly, free software applications. Paid services are a thing of the past. If you are a early startup looking to offer a paid service, look damn hard into a way to offer the same service for free. Cut unessential features, rework frameworks, or just fire somebody. Really, these days people expect free paid products.
hemel
September 28, 2007
Thanks for the suggestions. Yuuguu’s web share live at Demo will be generally available shortly - if you download the Yuuguu client it will automatically update with the web share feature - so you won’t have to upload anything to a server you can share your screen & chat instantly with anyone who hasn’t got a Yuuguu client. Best Philip @ yuuguu
Matt
September 28, 2007
Thanks for the comment Phil. I am early waiting to take a look at Yuuguu’s web share. A few of my friends and I have played around with the current product and would love to see how this new feature fits in.