It may sound anachronous today, but not too long ago, you had to pay money to use email. The default email company (circa 1995-96) was Prodigy, till Hotmail came along and changed the rules of the game. Something similar happened with Skype, which has all but sounded the death knell for conventional international telephony. And now, a ‘made-in-India’ product is attempting to do to web conferencing companies (WebEx/GoToMeeting), what Hotmail & Skype did to their respective competitors.

DimDim is an ISV that has created an open source web conferencing solution. It has been founded by a bunch of Indian software professionals who worked previously at CA. The company is US based, but a major part of the product has been built by their engineering team in Hyderabad. I was given a private demo from Boston by DimDim’s founder DD Ganguly (seen here in the screenshot), sometime last month and I must say, I was really impressed with what they have built.

DDG describes DimDim as not just a web conferencing software but a rich media real time collaboration platform. Built completely on open source technologies, it does everything that Webex or GoToMeeting can and much more. I will take the liberty of decribing myself as a fairly advanced user of web conferencing softwares, for we (at Uzanto) use GTM everyday. What I found most stunning about DimDim is that, it is browser based and requires no installations for conference attendees. Many a times, we need to make presentations to clients who are sitting inside their corporate firewalls; coaxing them to install a software on their computers is a procedural nightmare. With DimDim, all that pain is gone.

DimDim’s capabilities are built around the concept of microflows, which are small bits & pieces of interactions (in different media formats) between participants in a collaborative online meeting. Thus it allows you to show presentations, applications & desktops to anybody over the internet. You can chat and share live videos using your webcam (currently one way, but soon to be both ways) and talk with others in the meeting. Other features include whiteboards and something called a question manager, which seems to be some kind of a moderated interviewing mechanism (I didn’t witness this). The demo I saw worked very well and as I mentioned earlier, I was simply overwhelmed by the fact, that this product is entirely browser based.

DimDim is currently in alpha and users can download its source code and install it on their servers for free. Presently only IE is supported for presenters while attendees can be on IE, FireFox or a Mac. Going forward, the company plans to have two ways of generating revenues- a reasonably priced hosted solution & a paid, enterprise level full feature solution.

The online collaboration space is hot property these days, with the advent of collaborative work requirements across multilocational teams. DimDim appears to have created a very powerful proposition at a very opportune time. Their commercial success will depend largely on how smartly they are able to market their product. Given the professional background of its founders, that should well be within their reach. Watch out for this product in future!

If you are a casual investor in Indian stocks, you probably use the stock tracking services provided by online banks or investment portals and find them adequate. But if you are a serious investor and you care for detailed investment analysis & forecasting and how that data is presented, you don’t have many options. I suggest you should check out Stockhive, which is a web based investment tool for people who are seriously into stock investing.

Stockhive is the creation of Yogi Kulkarni, a software developer and investor. Stockhive is heavily focused; it covers only stocks and nothing else (like mutual funds or debt instruments). It is not exactly a financial portal, but an investment decision making tool that works really well. Yogi dreams of building this into a community of avid investors. In fact, the name Stockhive draws inspiration from bees… and the idea that you can produce great results in a community of equals. The site is funded partly from Yogi’s own money and partly by seed capital from Ayatana Holdings & Thoughtworks.

When I saw Stockhive, my first reaction was- what is the need for this when you have fairly good investment portals like IndiaBulls, MoneyControl, Equitymaster et al? Yogi thinks that the investment tools on these portals are designed for the least common denominator and hence suffer from many shortcomings. For starters, the really good ones among those (specialized financial databases) cost a bomb (over 60K per year). Free sites like MoneyControl, ShareKhan, ICICI Direct, etc provide a lot of information but do a poor job of presenting the data. That’s because their main source of revenue is paid research reports & trading commissions and hence there is no incentive for them to do any better. The financial information they provide on their sites is there only to give an impression of a ‘complete’ package. As I am writing this review, I can understand Yogi’s argument and I think he has identified a unmet need in the stock investment space.

So what all can you do with Stockhive? You can create a free account and make a watchlist of the companies to track. The company’s financial data is presented in a very compact and intuitive manner. A detailed walkthrough of the financial capabilities is beyond the scope of this review. But something to note is the heavy attention to detail and the focus on usability and effective presentation of data. The interface is AJAXified to a large extent. Features planned in the next release include filters/queries for the shortlisted stocks, community features and portfolio tracking. Its future revenue model will be based on graded subscriptions plan with differential service levels. Stockhive currently has 800 users.

There is one aspect in which Stockhive could improve. I feel that a good product is a necessary but insufficient condition for a successful venture. It is equally important to market a product really well. In this regard, I find Stockhive’s homepage bare and minimalist. More content needs to show up there, to get a grip over first time website visitors. The idea is not to make it look like a financial portal but at the very least, give the impression of a live, kicking & responsive product. Somehow, I don’t get that feeling when I am on the current homepage.