Dimdim was a

software company A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry. Types There are a number of different types of soft ...

that provided a web-based platform for realtime collaboration and meetings. Dimdim provided web conferencing service where users could share desktops, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk, and broadcast via webcam. It was compared to the WebEx 2.0 web conferencing application. Dimdim was acquired by Salesforce.com for $31 million on January 6, 2011.

Investors

Dimdim was financially backed by

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a Europe, European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Sinc ...

, Nexus India Capital and Draper Richards.

Open source

Dimdim was made available primarily as an enterprise edition and as a Virtual Machine appliance, but an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

community edition has also been made available to developers under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

(GPL), giving them the option to install and host Dimdim in their own networks. The most recent open source version, released in December 2008 and hosted at sourceforge.net, is V4.5 "Liberty". However, no installation instructions were provided, and the software had several arbitrary limitations, leading some to describe it as "crippled". Distributions of the system for the installation to several OSes, Virtual Machines and the corresponding documentation are available in several archives on the SourceForge.net Dimdim site. Dimdim can be integrated with the e-learning platforms

Moodle Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects in sc ...

, Claroline an
Docebo
the collaborative suite Zimbra and the CRM software SugarCRM. Unlike Dimdim's web-hosted services, the Dimdim open source server does not restrict the number of attendees or simultaneous meetings allowed. As of December 2010, at Dimdim's website, there was no download available for the open source version and the only way to download it was from SourceForge.net. Dimdim's acquisition FAQ states that the company would no longer be contributing to the open source project. As of January 2011, an open source fork called miDmiD had been started.

History

An alpha version of Dimdim was released in fall 2006, followed by a private beta launch in fall 2007. The company's first public beta was in April 2008. Version 4.0 beta was released in July 2008. Dimdim formally exited beta in December 2008 with the launch of version 4.5. Fall 2008, Starin Marketing, Inc., an American company that supplies products to the audio visual market connected with Sundar Subramanian and worked to develop an on-site turnkey solution that provided multi-user collaboration combining Dimdim software with products Starin offered. The most recent upgrade of Dimdim 5.5 was received with much criticism and numerous complaints of it being an alpha product. Various major changes took place in the interface of the system and its integration API with other systems.

Acquisition

On January 6, 2011, Dim Dim was acquired by Salesforce.com for US$31 million.

Revenue streams

As of 2010, Dimdim provided for hosted meetings, similar to GoToMeeting. Free meetings were made available for up to ten users. Professional meetings with collaboration tools for up to 50 users were also made available for US$25 per month, and webinar hosting for up to 100 users or 1,000 event attendees was available for US$75 per month.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.dimdim.com/ Web conferencing Software companies based in Massachusetts Privately held companies based in Massachusetts Companies based in Boston Software companies established in 2006 Companies disestablished in 2011 Defunct software companies of the United States Salesforce