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.
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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.
The afternoon session is focusing on infrastructure and enabling technologies. Fusion-io was one of the brashest presenters, saying its silicon-based ioDrive "will turn disk drives into boat anchors." It has a capacity of 640Gb and does 100,000 seeks per second! 
The CTO and cofounder, David Flynn (on right), said a disk drive only does about 100 IOs per second — so, his ioDrive is 100x of that. "We talking about the equivalent performance of 1000 disk drives," echoed CEO and cofounder Rick White, pointing out the mechanical drive is just inefficient. The solution, he said: "Put it on silicon!" With this product, "we can now put the performance of a SAN onto every server." And, holding up the product, he said it "puts the power of a SAN into the palm of your hand." For more details on what Fusion-io is up to, check out the press release.
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
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