important. Steve has done a lot of work over the past year to simplify the user interface. We have a company where the chief marketing officer actually is a rocket scientist. [Chazin was once a principal engineer overseeing missile radome design at Raytheon, and also spent time at Avid and Apple.] He creates these very specific screen shots for the engineers that are not just a bunch of fluff, and that is what has really improved Dimdim’s usability.
X: Do you think there’s more demand for Web-based conferencing systems like Dimdim in today’s economy, when there’s more pressure on companies to control travel budgets?
DDG: People are using it more as a complement for travel rather than eliminating travel. Until we get to the vision of the Holodeck, we will still have face-to-face meetings. There is value to these meetings and interactions. What we are seeing that’s really important is that [Dimdim is being used by] people who were not really engaged in travel anyway. A lady who sells health insurance in a one-person shop uses Dimdim to show insurance plans to customers. She was not going to travel anyway, and now she can get more clients. It’s not about replacing travel so much as taking the collaboration process to the next step.
Steve Chazin: It’s also being used for a lot of things you would never travel for. A webinar is a good example. There’s not enough content in a webinar to get on an airplane, but if you just want to get 300 people around the world together for an hour, it’s great.
DDG: We’ve also found Dimdim to be a godsend for board meetings. The nature of many board meetings is that nothing very strategic is discussed. It’s just an update on here’s what we’ve done in marketing, in sales, in research and development. When we want to have a really important discussion with an investor, we call them. I calculate that we have saved something like $280,000 in board meeting travel expenses just within Dimdim by using our own software.
X: So, it sounds like you’re getting uptake on the corporate side, but what about other types of users? I would guess that the free version of Dimdim is bringing in users who wouldn’t have considered using a Web conferencing technology before.
DDG: One of my favorite examples is that of a church group that used Dimdim for a session on Christian homemaking. It was a Texas-based church, and the presenters were ladies who had written presentations for groups of other ladies who were stay-at-home moms. It was obviously a very non-technical crowd. They gathered in a basement, and as a group they could see the slides and see and hear the presenter and then have a public discussion. It feels almost more like interactive TV than like a Web conference. Instead of just being a business collaboration tool, it is used by people we would never have imagined. The World Health Organization, Amnesty International, the Obama campaign in Chicago. We have the religious side completely covered: Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. We see a number of users in language education. As soon as one person in a community uses it, five other people see it.
X: A lot of people are used to using Skype now as a free alternative to long-distance telephone calls. Why would someone choose Dimdim over Skype?
SC: With Skype, you are asking somebody to install a piece of software. My dad would never install Skype. But if I send him a link to a Dimdim conference in an e-mail, he will do that. The second reason is that Skype breaks down after the two-way video connection. If you want to do a three-way conversation, you can’t really do it with Skype, because of the peer-to-peer architecture.
X: When we met in 2007, you were talking about the open-source nature of Dimdim, but you didn’t really talk about the open APIs or allowing other companies to build Dimdim into their own applications. How did that idea become part of the product?
DDG: That was prompted by something key that I’ve learned from our chief technology officer, Prakash Khot, who says it’s a really bad idea to try to build a platform first. It’s much easier to build applications, and then have customers ask for APIs, so that the platform emerges from the applications. If you look at our applications, there is a video and audio widget, a chat widget, a document share widget, and so on. Each of these components has an API, so that you can use the entire platform, or just the single component.
One example of how people are using that is the largest tax-advice company in North America, where the collaboration starts with a chat session between the consumer and the tax expert. Then at any point the tax expert can click on the consumer’s 1040 and show that form to the customer. They integrated the chat widget into their portal, and then they integrated the document sharing ability with their content management system.
SC: There are at least half a dozen companies expanding their products through Dimdim. Timebridge, which has a way of syncing Outlook calendars, rolled out a way for people who are organizing a meeting to meet right now. FreeConference.com offers desktop sharing services. Tutorjam and Myngle are two others where part of the product is really Dimdim.
X: How does pricing work for the non-free version of Dimdim?
DDG: It’s a subscription-based model, depending on how many users you’re talking about. [Subscriptions start at $99 per year for meetings of up to 20 attendees, and go up to $495 per year for meetings of up to 100 attendees; the enterprise version of Dimdim, priced separately, can accommodate up to 1,000 people per meeting.–Eds.] Recently, about three weeks ago, we did something interesting—we made the cost for the on-site and hosted versions the same. What we have found is that even though we pay for bandwidth and machines for the hosted version, for the customer-installed version invariably the support costs go up.
X: Okay, so you increased the cost of the customer-installed version so that it’s the same as the hosted version. Now that there’s no cost incentive to install the software, do you think the on-site version will eventually disappear in favor of the cloud-based version?
DDG: It won’t. The mainframe has been dead for 20 years now, but it never quite disappears. The on-site business is not going to disappear, because there are people who have a religious commitment to running their own applications.
