DimDim vs GoToMeeting

Salesforce has announced the acquisition of Indian web-conferencing service DimDim for $31 million. It's very appropriate acquisition for Salesforce. The company wants to dominate on the collaboration market with its social collaboration system Chatter. And web-conferencing and video conferencing (provided DimDim) - are the necessary collaboration components. Besides, DimDim can be used as a solution for online presentations and remote support, built into Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The only thing that seems inappropriate - is difference in business approach of these two companies. DimDim is known for its freemium open-source model, that was very annoying for the key market players - Webex, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect. Salesforce, on the other hand, likes to count money and provide something for free only having counted the profit. Therefore, it's not surprising that immediately after the announcement the free SaaS and open-source versions of DimDim have disappeared from the site. And those users who are already using the free SaaS version - can continue using it only until March 15, 2011. The open-source DimDim version can still be found on Sourceforge.

DimDim - is a web-conferencing service, hated by all its competitors (Webex and Co) for the low prices (combined with sufficient quality of service). How can one compete with DimDim, providing 20-person online meeting solution for free? Moreover it s available as SaaS and Open-Source solution. And recently DimDim unveiled new webinar service, that supports large online meetings with up to 1000 concurrent users for $75 per month. It goes beyond comparison with WebEx Meeting Center, that asks $69 a month for a virtual meeting room with 25 seats (imagine the price for 1000 seats).

Last March, before Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it announced that the GoToMeating web-conferencing tools will be integrated into Skype's client. It could be a logical partnership because GoToMeeting and Skype are often used together to organize online meetings. But then Microsoft bought Skype, and apparently the plan was changed. After all, Microsoft and Citrix (the owner of GoToMeeting) - are more rivals than friends. Anyway, yesterday GoToMeeting launched the new version with its own video tool called HDFaces. Moreover, HDFaces can not just replace Skype for GoToMeeting users, but also compete with Skype in the global enterprise video meating market.

Recently Skype is intending to increase profits by expanding its business services. Skype already offers to business the VoIP service, IP-PBX integration and group video conferencing. And it would be very logical to add web-conferencing to this list, because many Skype partners (like Yuuguu, Yugma, Mikogo) are already earning on it. As known Skype almost 2 years ago added the screen-sharing feature. But it would be a shame to charge money for it. Firstly, it is the very basic implementation of screen-sharing without application selection, screen annotations, granting mouse control... Second, Skype's screen-sharing only works in one-to-one sessions and doesn't work simultaneously with video calling. So, finally, Skype has decided to pump-up and sell this feature and surprised everyone by announcing the partnership with Citrix GoToMeeting.

So, iPad is now available in US and like Avatar is breaking all records (already about 400 thousand devices are sold). The first users have already downloaded several millions iPad applications, but most of them are consumer apps, rather than business applications. As we noted earlier, iPad has a little chance to become a revolutionary business tool. And not just because of the lack of webcam, multitasking, Flash support and security measures. Despite its originality, iPad will compete in the corporate market with an army of netbooks and smartphones (including iPhone). But certainly iPad will be useful for business of software vendors, which have already begun to announce iPad clients to get the customer attention.