Boston, MA. - Dimdim, (DEMOfall 07) a free open source Web-meeting company, today launches a version of its Web meeting softwre designed for the open source community called Eagle (Dimdim Open Source Community Edition 3.5) for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems. Dimdim Eage is a real-time, unified communications that allows people to share computer screens to show documents and slides as well as converse via a Webcam.
“With such rich technologies available through the open source community, we see absolutely no need anymore
for proprietary software, large client downloads and ridiculous fees that are being charged for people to meet
freely online,” said Prakash Khot, co-founder and chief technology officer of Dimdim.
New features are:
- Unlimited meeting attendees
- Unlimited simultaneous meetings
- Two-way video chat and webcam sharing
- Multi-attendee Voice-over-Internet-Protocol and microphone sharing
- A simple to use software appliance download that runs on multiple operating systems with no installation required by participants (only the meeting's host)
- New user guide guide and other API documentation
Khot said that Dimdim also improved "useability" by simplifying "microtasks" so that now it takes a single click to access someone's desktop or upload a presentation file as well as a variety of other features.
Dimdim Open Source Community Edition “Eagle” is built on mature open source components - such as Apache Tomcat, CherryPy Application Server, Lighttpd, and Open office and is completely integrated with Web 2.0 technologies – such as AJAX, JSON, and Flash. This allows the delivery and sharing of rich media content without any need for any software installation by the attendee. It uses screen-sharing capabilities that leverage the industry-standard RFB protocol used by VNC, which have been further enhanced to work over HTTP/S and deliver instant computer screen sharing capabilities to anyone with a Flash-enabled Web browser.
So far Dimdim, which labels is current version beta, has 230,000 users of its free Web meeting software.
Dimdim makes money with a hosted $100 version of its meeting software and a more robust, on-premise enterprise version that ranges in price from $5,000 to $18,000 depending on usage. Unlike other Web meeting services such as WebEx, GotoMeeting, or Microsoft Live, which operate as a software as a service (SaaS), Dimdim allows users to download its enterprise application in response to users' needs to satisfy what Khot calls the "3Ps" - privacy, performance, and politics.
"There a concern among some companies that confidential information out in the (Internet) cloud is not completely safe. In addition, Internet performance can't compete with your own networks and certain rich collaborations (using multimedia information) need very sophisticated networks. The third P is politics. CIOs and IT organizations are running Exchange servers and they ask business units, "why can't we run Web server meetings for you? They are highly motivated to operate on-premise services," Khot said.
Dimdim has been selling its enterprise version for about a month to education, financial services, and audio conferencing service for wireless devices, he said.
Dimdim’s executive and technical teams are available to answer users' questions Monday, May 19 at 11a.m. EDT. (Paste into any Web browser at the time of this meeting this URL: http://webmeeting.dimdim.com:80/portal/JoinButton.action?confKey=feature...).
