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Global conferencing provider Dimdim Inc. turned to insiders for a $6 million Series B funding expected to be announced Wednesday. The two-year-old startup will use the funding to further develop open-source products to help geographically distributed users communicate and collaborate using screen-sharing and sophisticated media integration. Investing in the round are London's Index Ventures, which stepped up to lead the deal to boost its stake in the company, along with Nexus India Capital of Mumbai and Draper Richards LP of San Francisco. Dimdim offers free and fee-based Web services for real-time online communications and plans to launch new hosted and enterprise products in the next several weeks. To that end it will expand sales, marketing and support infrastructure in the U.S, Canada and India.  Bernard Dallé (pictured), a partner with Index Ventures--which backed Internet-based
telecommunications services provider Skype Technologies SA, now owned
by eBay Inc., and open source database company MySQL AB, owned by Sun
Microsystems Inc.--says he was attracted to making a small investment
in Dimdim's initial round based on its open-source strategy, and
boosted the firm's position in the current round based on early success."Cisco's $3 billion acquisition of Webex underlined the importance of Web collaboration. Dimdim has the vision to disrupt the Web conferencing market, currently worth over $1 billion, in a similar way as MySQL disrupted the database market," Dallé says. "Since Index's initial investment in Dimdim, the company has impressed us by in its execution and software engineering capability by creating an easy-to-use solution that witnessed very strong adoption and received great reviews." Dimdim co-founder and CEO DD Ganguly says the company was born out of collaboration among its co-founders in February 2006, after Ganguly, Saurav Mohaptra and Jayant Pandit had been sharing ideas for a startup using free Web-based communications tools including Skype and Hotmail while variously located in India, Canada and the U.S. The group sought to create an open-source system to allow users to share work and communicate for free, while following a business model patterned after other open-source companies that offer enterprise versions of their products. Dimdim introduced its first open-source product in September 2006 and raised $2.4 million in a Series A round in January 2007 after receiving inquiries from investors. The company's product allows groups of as many as 20 people to link online and share desktops, show documents and slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast using Webcams without having to download software. The company's first products were introduced to open-source users as downloadable software, but the company launched its free hosted service as a beta version last September, and as a commercial release in May. -- Clifford Carlsen
Comments
From: Heather,
It is phenomenal how many companies have used this service within the past year. I also think its incredible how much money they were able to raise as well. That takes a lot of determination and motivation, so that other companies can have it for free. But, I do think a disadvantage is that it can become very pricey for larger companies, I found a website called www.coolconferencelive.com, that is free for up to as many participants as a company desires.
Posted on:
July 30, 2008 1:18 PM
From: Heather,
Seeing that you have been blogging for a while, I was wondering if you were going to be attending the upcoming Blogworld Expo Conference in Las Vegas on Friday, September 19th- Sunday, September 21st. I am going to be there and I was going to see if you wanted to arrange to meet up. I look forward to your response. Heather P.s. I didnt see an email address on your page.
Posted on:
August 5, 2008 2:27 PM
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Compliments. Geat financing round. I am using spreed.com. It works great on my Mac. OS X screen sharing is supported and it has built-in telephone conferencing. It's free too! Try it out on http://www.spreed.com