Posted by D D Ganguly on Mon, Jul 23, 2007 @ 11:11 AM
Mark Twain once said, "The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."
So, when we started Dimdim we studied the history of collaboration software to feel its rhythms. In 1997, HotMail burst on the scene and democratized e-mail. Their tag line (‘The world's free web based e-mail') summarized their mission. In 2003, Skype entered the fray and talking over the Internet became pervasive. Skype's tag line, "Now the world can talk for free" described their goal clearly. Somewhere along the way, Instant messaging became widespread as well.
As we stood back and reflected on the above events, we saw that e-mail is all about text collaboration that is not real-time. It's not real time in the sense that the sender and the receiver do not need to be online simultaneously. Skype on the other hand requires both parties to be online simultaneously and enables audio collaboration in real-time.
We concluded that the next step in this unstoppable progression is democratization of rich media collaboration. It is rich media as in audio, video, text (chat messages), and desktop sharing, and virtual worlds. And these would be delivered in an integrated, easy to use browser-based interface.
We see web meeting as the first step in rich media collaboration. We see the future being built on 3 principles:
1) "Just works" usability
2) Open and Integrated
3) Disruptive pricing for business quality service
We at Dimdim think of our community as a part of our team and are eager to hear your thoughts on the future of rich media collaboration. Let's start a discussion...
Posted by D D Ganguly on Thu, Jul 12, 2007 @ 10:53 AM
Our company's name always evokes a comment. Some like it. Others think it's whimsical. And we frequently get questions - So how did you come up with the name? What does Dimdim stand for? Sometimes we put on a serious face and say, "Dimdim stands for Distributed Immersive Meetings. One Dim for you and the other one for me." Some people even believe that story. Here's the real story.
We sat down with 18,000 domain names and promised ourselves that we would not leave without naming our company. We set 5 simple rules:
- The dotcom domain name must be available
- The name must have high recall
- The name must be international
- The sound of the name must translate without ambiguity to its spelling
- The spelling must translate to unambiguously to its pronunciation
Five hours later we named the company Dimdim.
Some folks have started assuming that my initials (DD) stand from Dimdim and call me Dimdim Ganguly. And I feel rather embarrassed when some people think that the company was named after my initials.