Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Fri, Jun 12, 2009 @ 01:32 PM
This week we officially moved into our new offices in the Cross Point Towers, Lowell, MA. As we're settling in I'll add more pictures. For now, here are some shots of how the space was transformed for us.
Thanks!
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing
e: kevin@dimdim.com
twitter: @dimdim
facebook: dimdim.com/facebook
Experience the Dimdim Live Webinar! Register at:
http://www.dimdim.com/aboutus/events.html
Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Mon, Apr 27, 2009 @ 03:37 PM
Let's face it, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are boring. Wedged between Monday's painful "back to work" and Thursday's "just one more day."
This contest is closed
Congratulations to our winner @madly59!
We're hoping to improve this week for one lucky winner on Twitter by giving away one Digidesign Mbox 2, and getting the word out about Dimdim's Webby nomination.
This contest differs from our "Retweet to Win" contest (but you can join that one too!) It's not how often you tweet, it's all about
getting others to retweet for you.
Every time someone retweets your contest message, you get another chance to win (only their retweets of your message count.) Here's how the message should look when your coworkers, friends, family, neighbors, dogs, etc. retweet you:
RT <your Twitter name>: Help @dimdim win a #Webby http://bit.ly/Dimdim4Webby & retweet so I win too! http://bit.ly/retweet4u
To be clear, should be your Twitter name. For example, if I was eligible (which I'm not) I'd want to see as many people as possible tweeting 'RT @kevinmic: Support free web conferencing! @dimdim 4 a #Webby http://bit.ly/Dimdim4Webby'
The contest starts midnight (EST) Monday and
goes until midnight Wednesday (EST).
Every time someone retweets your contest message (as shown above), you get another chance to win.
More retweets of your message = more chances to win!
Get as many retweets as you can to increase your chances of winning a Digidesign Mbox 2. The Mbox 2 is some seriously cool and fun audio equipment from the leader in audio, Digidesign. It's their "most popular personal studio system ever."
The winner will be announced via @dimdim (on Twitter) this Thursday.
-k
Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Sat, Apr 11, 2009 @ 05:11 AM
Sramana Mitra continues her work with entrepreneurs in her Strategy Roundtables. Working in collaboration with INSEAD students and graduates, Sramana gives these entrepreneurs guidance in vehicle fuel monitoring, makeup brush cleaning, computer-based simulation solutions and tools, and personalized online career consulting ventures.
[There's a slight echo at the beginning due to one of the speaker's Skype connections, it gets resolved quickly.]
Posted by Kevin Micalizzi on Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 05:00 PM
If you weren't able to join earlier today, here is the recording of today's Strategy Roundtable with Sramana Mitra. Five entrepreneurs had a chance to share their pitches with Sramana and get her feedback and suggestions. It was a very productive hour with great information for all entrepreneurs.
We will be continuing our guest webinar series into March, please check out what's available at our Dimdim Webinars and Events page.
Posted by Steve Chazin on Wed, Dec 10, 2008 @ 12:23 PM
Talk about eating our own dog food - we just held our board meeting on Dimdim. There was 1 attendee from California, 1 from New York, 2 from Massachusetts, 2 more from London, 1 from Mumbai, and 1 from Hyderabad. If we had flown to California, then we would have spent at least $4,000 per person in airline, hotel and car rental costs. By avoiding the travel of 7 people, we saved about $28,000 by conducting the meeting over Dimdim.
This year we have had about 8 such board meetings over Dimdim. So we have saved about $224,000 this year.
On top of that I have another Dimdim meeting with a potential partner in 30 minutes. If I had a face to face board meeting then I would never be able to make it to this next meeting. And so my productivity increases too. Bye, gotta run to the next meeting.
Warm regards,
ddg
CEO
Posted by Steve Chazin on Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 08:53 AM
Folks, today at 2PM ET, Leading entrepreneur and strategy consultant Sramana Mitra partners with ReadWriteWeb to bring you a Web 3.0 product strategy roundtable online, using our web conferencing platform. To attend, simply click this link at 2PM or dial-in to hear Sramana give live feedback to 8 entrepreneurs. If there is time, she will take your questions submitted live using Dimdim. This is going to be fun. We'll see you there!
Dial in: 1-419-400-0203
Conf ID: 918878
Here is the replay!
Posted by Steve Chazin on Fri, Oct 03, 2008 @ 08:37 AM
At 2 PM EDT today we passed a huge milestone. More than 100,000 people have signed up for Dimdim while in our beta phase. And because attendees don't need to be registered to attend a Dimdim web conference, it is even more exciting to report that nearly one million people have attended Dimdim meetings, accounting for more than 500 trillion minutes in Dimdim meeting rooms. That's 100,000 person-years of productive work or play - all while eliminating expensive travel, software downloads and harmful CO2 emissions.
While we pat ourselves on the back for achieving this important milestone we extend our gratitude to all of you for helping us make Dimdim the easiest, most open, and most affordable web conferencing solution on the planet.
And lest you think we're resting on our laurels, stay tuned for an exciting announcement from us in less than three weeks. We want to give you even more ways to love Dimdim.
All of us at Dimdim thank you for your patronage and continued support. We're making good on our promise that with Dimdim now the world can meet freely.
Posted by D D Ganguly on Fri, May 23, 2008 @ 02:50 PM
Now that the Dimdim Open Source Community Edition v3.5 "Eagle" has been posted to Sourceforge, we're hard at work on implementing new features. Make sure you get your vote counted on our New Features poll, so we can makes sure that our priorities are your priorities. Currently Mac/Linux screensharing is leading the pack, followed by recording and archiving of meetings. I'm proud to say that both features will arrive soon. Yesterday Prakash and Bharat showed me how far along things are with Mac screensharing - here is a Picture_3 snapshot of that session. (Click for a larger view)
One thing you'll notice in this screenshot is the new "Actual Size" and "Fit Screen" feature we just rolled out today. Many of you requested we make it possible to scale the presenter's screen so you don't need to scroll to see their entire desktop. More great work from our Dev team! Thanks guys!
Please keep those cards and letters coming and fill out our survey. With your help we will continue to ensure that Dimdim is the best web meeting solution on Earth. And if you want to help me thank our hard working Dev team, please simple tell your friends to try Dimdim and share it with everyone. Remember, that with Dimdim, now the world can meet freely.
Posted by D D Ganguly on Fri, May 02, 2008 @ 08:18 AM
One of the things that prides us here at Dimdim is being able to quickly respond to your needs. We read and react to all your emails and we encourage you to voice your opinions. Since our public launch a little more than 3 weeks ago, we heard that you really like Dimdim but that there were a few areas you wanted to see improved. One of those areas is our Open Source Community Edition. You didn't like the fact that the current version is not on par with our Dimdim Free hosted version, you hated the 5 person limit and only one meeting at a time, many wanted more than one video stream, some of you didn't like the server software installers and a few even complained about our documentation. Well, I'm proud to say that your voices have been heard! (and that we've been really busy...)
In the next week we will release a new version of the Dimdim Open Source Community Edition to SourceForge.net. (UPDATE: our new Open Source release is now available) That version is on par with the features of our hosted offerings, removes the 5 attendee limit, enables multiple simultaneous meetings and even adds a 2-way video chat feature. We have also packaged the Dimdim Servers into a single VMWare Virtual Appliance to ease the installation process. You'll also notice much improved documentation and a new admin console.
We hope you will spread the word to everyone that we're committed to the open source model and that our actions here speak louder than words. We're seeing some really innovative uses of our product and we really want to see more. We simply ask you to tell everyone that Dimdim is serious about democratizing the web meeting space and to come and try it. Remember, you don't need to download a thing* to test out Dimdim (just sign up by clicking that orange button on the upper right of this page) and your invitees don't need to join Dimdim to attend your meetings. (and we won't make any of them install a thing either.) And if you want, you can download and test our Open Source Community Edition on your own servers. Enjoy.
*Some of you have also said we've been a bit misleading about this "no download" thing. Please read this article to clear the air. We're sorry if we've caused any problems with our overly aggressive marketing. Blame the CMO.
Posted by Steve Chazin on Wed, Mar 26, 2008 @ 01:40 PM
Blog post by Saurav Mohapatra
The first version of Dimdim was (and the conference server part of the current version still is) a java web application running in Tomcat. We’ve slowly been moving towards more native components in our server stack on a case by case basis. Not to be drawn into Java vs. Other server tech debates, this move is a part of a growing consensus about leveraging the OS provided capabilities to the fullest to achieve high throughput, optimal performance while balancing that out with development cost / learning curve.
For our latest feature, the Screen share capability, we switched to a C++ based FastCGI application behind the NGINX webserver.
The move was done after a lot of thought and exploration. For the traffic pattern of something like desktop sharing, the current java technologies simply did not add up. A typical screenshare traffic pattern transmits around 1-2 mb of data for a 1280 X 1024 for per minute of share for something “heavy” like Powerpoint slide show or Full screen image viewing. Thus we switched to a robust native technology server. The app was written using FastCGI technology and first version ran behind the lighttpd server. As we continued testing, we found better performance especially for longer duration shares with the NGINX web server and thus that was chosen finally as the front server for the desktop screencasting application.
We built on top of the tried and trusted RFB protocol of VNC adding HTTP/S communication layer using libcurl for publishing the desktop stream.
The viewer was adapted from FVNC code base from OSFlash and we added tight encoding to it along with HTTP/S communication layer.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we built on top of existing robust components and application and were able to achieve significant progress in a shorter duration than if we’d have developed the whole thing from scratch.
Now this whole exercise kind of paraphrases and proves what I have always believed about open source. It is an organic philosophy, perhaps one of the best displays of the most positive sides of human nature. You build something based on stuff that someone has been built before and others after you will use the stuff you’ve developed to build their own.
It is a really wonderful philosophy and in this geek’s opinion perhaps one of the best ways to live life.