I love it when a presenter confidently struts onto center stage and does a big, bold shout-out to get people to sit up straight and listen. "WebEx is history!" D.D. Ganguly, DimDim’s CEO, yelled to start his presentation — which brought applause from a lot of people. And DimDim just might be a credible challenge in the web conferencing or screen-sharing space, with its free, open-source, hosted service. It already has 125,000 customers, I was surprised to learn. 
There’s no software to download, and anyone who uses a browser, said the CEO, can very easily show their slides and/or their desktop, plus talk, listen, chat, and broadcast via webcam. The service is free to consumers, though the firm will sell an enterprise edition — but at a fraction of the cost of other web conferencing apps, the company said. What’s more, since it’s an open-source app, it can easily be customized and enhanced by developers. To date, DimDim has raised $2.9 million from the founders and VC firms Draper Richards, Index Ventures, and Nexus India Capital. The CEO played a video of Draper Richards’ Howard Hartenbaum saying that, after investing in HotMail and Skype, this was an "obvious next investment." That’s some pretty heavy endorsing he’s doing there! Makes me think we should be paying attention to DimDim.
Category: Venture Capital/M&A/Angels (Page 37 of 53)
The first presenters this morning are aimed at small business users, focused on making your life a lot easier to manage when it comes to meetings and conference calls. Tungle calls itself a "fast and easy meeting coordinator." It’s a lightwieght plug-in, currently for Google Calendar (others coming). 
It uses "the magic of P2P," said the CEO Marc Gingras, to share your data only with your contacts. It has a feature called the "Tungle space" so you can easily see the availability of others to schedule a meeting. The demo was impressive, with a great UI. "It’s free and will remain that way," said Gringas. Use promo code "DEMOfall" to get it in limited release. Full launch is later this fall.
Vello is the conference that calls you. You just select the participants, hit send, and everyone’s phone rings and the call begins. Imagine that! No more stragglers calling in five or ten minutes late… The COO, Mark Dzwanczyk, invited the audience to turn on their ringers and did a demo, and multiple phones immediately rang. The service boasts high-quality audio, Outlook integration, flexible billing, and a true business-class solution.
So you shoot crappy videos, too, huh? Okay, then does MotionDSP, another of the first session’s presenters, have a deal for you: FixMyMovie.com. It dramatically improves videos you upload from your phone, your digital camera, or your webcam. It’s based on patent-pending military technology — so, it makes sense that one of their investors is InQTel (as in CIA). The company’s raised less than $1 million, but already has more than $1 million in revs. The demo of their new consumer service was extremely impressive — the technology increases resolution, reduces noise, and corrects color and lighting, said CEO Sean Varah. "It’s one click to enhance."
Well, what a cool beginning — Digital Fountain, the first presenter, uses some cool surf videos shot in Hawaii to show off its new Splash content delivery. I was lovin’ it. Though it won’t be available till January, it sure sounds great. 
It will deliver entertainment-grade video over any network, eliminating common problems like poor video quality, small picture size, slow loads, and frequent buffering. Splash uses Amazon Web Services to "deliver a low-cost, extraordinary consumer experience," said CEO Charlie Oppenheimer
The Bayview Lawn at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina was buzzing bigtime starting at 6:00 last evening to kick off DEMOfall 2007. Georgeous weather, sumptuous food, great friends, new people from all over the place, and tech talk flying in every direction. Does it get any better than this? I was so busy meeting new people and getting pitched, I didn’t even have a chance to shoot many photos. 
Okay, one decent shot, and here it is: (from left) Marc Orchant, newly of Blognation…Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder of Mindtouch (who just who strolled over from his offices)…Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods…and Luis Villalobos, founder of Tech Coast Angels. [Man, I love the mixes I can put together at these events!] But if you want to see more photos, just check out these from Brian Solis, who does much better than I ever could. (Brian, you da man.)
But what new stuff did I hear about at the party that I like? Well, for starters, Naomi Wall, content dev chief at MetaRADAR, told me they’ll be introducing a "media masher" that brings all your rich media content together, bridging the gap between websites, desktop apps, and mobil devices. And I also was glad to run into the guys from mSpoke in Pittsburgh (yes, some of those smart Carnegie Mellon dudes) — Sean Ammirati, VP biz dev (a colleague from Read/Write Web, who I’d only met online up till now), and Dave Mawhinney, CEO. They’re launching FeedHub, a whiz-bang new technology to help with your RSS information overload. We’re talking a personalization engine that dynamically adapts to your reading habits. This is a space I’ve been following, and I just knew we’d be seeing some solutions to this problem soon. Bring it on, baby. A bloke from Manchester, UK, told me about YuuGuu, which lets you instantly share your screen in real-time with anyone, anywhere. Blimey, dude! The founder of LongJump told me about his firm’s online catalog of apps for small business, which can be customized via drag-and-drop. Then, lo and behold, I met a storage startup! Fusion-io of Salt Lake City I learned will be introducing a revolutionary stroage architecture that puts SAN or NAS on silicon (high-density NAND), with access rates comparable to DRAM with the storage capacity of disk. DEMO says it "may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch" at their events. Yikes! Then, on the way back into the hotel bar [yes, the party continued inside, till God’s knows when], I ran into the the founder of iForem, which has a subscription-free service to store,protect and share intellectual property — an online safe deposit box for businesses and consumers, with a trust account. And then the folks from ideablob (site to
go live later this morning) caught me — we were the last ones on the lawn! — and told me their new venture is funded by
Advanta in Philly [how do all the PA startups find me?] This site is an open
community for small businesses, where members vote on new ideas and get
valuable advice and feedback from one another. And get this: you can
actually win cash for your idea.
As the evening continued, I had a great chat with my longtime buddies Steve Larsen of Krugle and Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods, solving all the world’s problems. Then, it was beddy-bye time so I could get up early and write this post. More soon!
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