Web Meeting Service Startup Takes On Cisco, Microsoft

By Elena Malykhina

Dimdim, a startup made up of entrepreneurs and technologists, on Monday launched a free Web meeting service that’s meant to compete with Cisco Systems’ WebEx and Microsoft’s PlaceWare. The service, also called Dimdim, will be showcased at this week’s DEMOfall 07 conference where new products, technologies, and companies make their debut. The free service is offered as a private beta for now, but will be widely available on registration basis in two to three months.

Dimdim is browser-based and doesn’t require any software to be installed, which makes it easy to use, said DD Ganguly, the company’s CEO and co-founder, in an interview. “A customer once told us: ‘This is just like visiting a web site.’ Anyone who can use a browser irrespective of technical ability can use Dimdim,” Ganguly said.

Dimdim uses a rich Internet application with advanced collaboration features. The service allows people to share their desktop files, show slides, and chat using a webcam. Cisco and Microsoft offer similar capabilities as part of their Web meeting services. Cisco acquired Web conferencing company WebEx earlier this year, with plans to integrate its own voice and video products into the WebEx offering.

CEO Ganguly said what makes Dimdim unique is its open source foundation. “We’re about democratizing collaboration,” Ganguly said.

The service integrates open source components, such as the Google Web toolkit for Ajax applications, the Red5 open source Flash server, and the Tomcat application server, with Dimdim’s open source software.

Additionally, it works on computers that run different operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.

There are three versions of Dimdim available: a free browser-based version, open source server-side software that can be downloaded from Sourceforge.net, and an enterprise version that can be purchased for a fee by small and medium-sized businesses.

The enterprise version is customizable and scalable. For example, it allows hundreds of participants to be on a Web conference at the same time, whereas the free version doesn’t. Dimdim also offers 24/7 support for the enterprise version.

Schools and universities can integrate Dimdim’s server-side software with e-learning apps, while companies can integrate it with customer-relationship management (CRM) apps for a better collaboration experience, said Ganguly.

Dimdim is supported by venture funding from firms that also have invested in Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL. The investors include Draper Richards, Index Ventures, and Nexus India Capital.

Source:

Strategies For Growing A Great Services Business

By Julie Giera,

Of the top 35 global IT vendors, 22 are either services providers or product companies with a large services business like IBM. This shift to services has been accelerating over the past five years among technology vendors looking to drive recurring revenues, deeper customer relationships, and additional channels for their products. Building a great services business is tough for many technology vendors, because the things that contributed to their success as product companies are the very things that can be their downfall in services. Forrester has identified the top ten strategies technology vendors can employ to build a great IT services business.

1. Stick to services that closely tie in to your products’ strengths.
2. Organize for services separately from products.
3. Hire experienced sales people.
4. Limit the services portfolio.
5. Automate the proposal process.
6. Market your message through multiple channels.
7. Limit risk in very large contracts.
8. Develop the channel and deal with conflict early.
9. Weigh a direct service model against a subcontracting arrangement.
10. Know your value proposition: Wal-Mart or Tiffany’s?

Source:Forrester Research

Targeting Mobile Ads

By Andrew Schrock

Mobile-phone manufacturer Nokia expanded its reach with the recent acquisition of Enpocket, now called Nokia Ad Business, a mobile-advertising company that matches consumers to advertisements by considering their tastes and needs. Mike Baker, vice president of Nokia Ad Business, describes this as an “advanced targeting infrastructure.” Baker says that the matching system gives advertisers new kinds of opportunities that could be particularly beneficial for selling tickets to local events, for example, or for offering time-sensitive discounts. If the system is deployed properly, consumers would be automatically delivered ads about products that they want at the ideal time and place.

Context is already a cornerstone of online advertising, as it leads to more-effective campaigns and higher payouts for advertising providers. Google’s Gmail, for example, automatically extracts information from your e-mail, which is used to target campaigns. Facebook uses information saved in personal profiles to present more-relevant advertisements. Similarly, Nokia already has access to critical contextual information about consumers, such as demographics, which Enpocket can capitalize on. Information from Nokia’s OVI Web portal could eventually be incorporated as part of the data set to accurately match up people with relevant ads. For example, user histories from OVI social-networking and media-sharing site Mosh could be employed to track which pictures and movies users are sharing, signaling an interest in certain products.

Nokia believes that, by leveraging such information, it can offer higher response rates than current online marketing campaigns can, because the company delivers a message that consumers want to hear, where and when they want to encounter it. Contextualized advertising would also be more integrated into the services, so it might seem less irritating than a distracting pop-up window online, for instance. Initial response rates to contextual mobile advertisements are high, partly because of the novelty of the medium. According to Enpocket, the company’s recent mobile campaign for Land Rovers was wildly successful: 70 percent of people who were exposed to the campaign chose to download videos that promoted the automobiles. Baker says that consumers may be paying more attention to the ads purely because they are so novel, and he admits that this number will likely go down as the mobile-advertising space becomes increasingly saturated, as has occurred in more mobile-friendly markets like Asia.

Some consumers might perceive directed, contextualized advertising as an invasion of privacy. Some demographics might find the fact that their personal information is being shared annoying. Gary Pearl, CEO of Community Hotspot, says, “There’s a certain segment of the population which will accept it, and another segment that won’t.” He sees online and mobile business as being in a constant flux between subscription services and advertising-driven revenue.

At the moment, hardware is the biggest obstacle to delivering contextualized mobile advertising broadly. According to Nokia, there are nearly one billion Nokia mobile devices worldwide, or nearly twice the number of PCs. However, relatively few of these mobile devices are capable enough to handle the kind of contextual campaigns that Enpocket would like to deliver. Currently, campaigns rely on technologies such as SMS and WAP to deliver messages to devices that couldn’t otherwise provide a compelling multimedia experience. As more and more multimedia-friendly phones are sold, this will become less of an issue.

Nokia’s sheer market share ensures that its decisions will be closely watched and mirrored by the industry. Philip Stanger, CTO and founder of BluBlast, a company that specializes in ads for mobile networks based at specific locations, such as trade-show and showroom floors, views this favorably. If Nokia Ad Business takes off, it could create a more consistent business model and standard software-development tools for ads, potentially benefiting mobile-advertising companies of all sizes. “One of the big problems in the mobile space has been lack of standards and coordination between any of the systems,” Stanger says, citing lack of developer support. “It’s a nightmare developing [multimedia ads] for 50 different phones.”

Source:Technology Review

The Road to Success is Long for the Mobile Internet

by Carl Weinschenk,

The mobile Internet is in trouble. It’s hard to escape that conclusion when a well known analyst — Yankee Group president and CEO Emily Green — says that it “pretty much sucks.”

Actually, the prime topic of this InternetNews story from the first Mobile Internet World conference last week in Boston was a speech by Tim Berners-Lee. Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium and is called the father of the Web so often that it seems like part of his official title. Lee expanded on Green’s eloquence by saying that people are reluctant to move from proprietary formats and protocols to explore new vistas. He said, according to the story, that new standards, “contextual” content, location-based platforms and “user awareness” — which probably refers to presence — will improve the mobile Internet.

Green’s eloquence also is expanded upon in a Yankee Group study, “Mobile Internet Utopia: Imagine if Supply Could Satisfy Demand,” that was released at the conference. The release on the study said that the mobile Internet “should already be” worth $66 billion per year, but has only reached $9.5 billion. Indeed, the firm says that even the $66 billion figure is conservative because it only refers to access revenues.

Whether the mobile Internet closes that gap or not is by no means certain. Clearly, there are many attractive applications and platforms available. A post at BizznTech, for instance, describes five: Gmail Java applications for mobile phones;Google Maps for Mobile; Opera Mini; Fring and ShoZu. During his remarks, Berners-Lee demonstrated a GPS-enabled watch that also monitors heart rates.

A commentary at TelecomTV looks optimistically at recent announcements in the mobile Internet arena. The biggest news, he says, isAndroid from Google. The piece outlines what the company is doing, but says that a couple of issues — changes in the landscape likely before it is ready and the questions about the strength of Linux-based system — could limit its impact.

Our sense is that we are at a crossroads. There is no doubt that the Mobile Internet will generate a lot of money — indeed, even the paltry $9.5 billion noted by Yankee is a lot. The InternetNews piece refers to “the long tail,” the idea that applications from many little providers will add up to great bundles of revenue. One question is whether this model will work — we worry about technologists’ mastery of economic theory — or whether a “killer app” is needed. The more basic question, however, is if these and other applications will appeal to non-geeks.

Source:IT Business Edge