Yugma, Vyew, CoolConferenceLive.com, and openacircle.com all offer free conferencing but they all take a different approach to this problem. The last time we counted (2006) there were 200+ real time collaboration tools, so my guess is that the number is somewhere around 300 of these tools/services out there. The majority are offered as a SaaS and many are offered on the Freemium model, meaning basic services are free and you pay for premium services (no ads, more storage, more bandwidth, or additional users, meetings etc.).

[More:]

I will start with CoolConferenceLive (CCL). This tool is not even out of Beta (although for a SaaS that is not saying much as many of Google’s tools have been in public beta for over 3 years), and is called coolConfeenceLive.com, not the best name, but hey, most of the good ones are probably already taken with 300+ vendors in this space. However, the did get the “easy” part right, and all the functions I saw (and tried) in the briefing worked flawlessly and were very intuitive.

Their business model is revenue through ad banners, no cost to the user (but if you want a yearly subscription and do not want the banners I think it is $300). CCL focused on just the basic services and making them easy to use. The tool is built using Flex 3 and Flash (Adobe tools).

You go to the site, your meeting host gives you a participant code (much like in an audio conference), you fill out a short profile (can upload a picture if you want) and boom, you’re in the meeting. You can see slides or any document, however there is no white boarding or annotation so it is strictly broadcast. You can do quick ad-hoc polling, there is also chat and whisper (chat with one person in the meeting only), and you can upload and play an audio (MP3) file (for example music before the meeting starts). A somewhat unique features is Notes, so that someone in the meeting can take notes on the meeting and with one click send them to themselves, to specific people outside the meeting or to all those that attending the meeting… a useful feature.

What is most interesting about this tool is not so much its features or cost, but the CEO and his marketing targets. The CEO is a corporate coach and motivational speaker who wanted to use a tool like this but could not find one that fit his needs. Don Straits runs www.corporatewarriors.com, which is a unique placement service for executives that uses multimedia technologies instead of a traditional resume. Don has applied that same “out of the box thinking” to CCL and is going after not the enterprise market, but the consumer market that no one has tapped yet. This is the market of people that are not yet using conferencing either because they don’t want to pay (no CC online), it was too complicated, or they did not know it was available. Although he would not reveal his marketing approach (which is what will make this offering unique (since everyone says their tool is viral), over the summer they will start doing a unique marketing campaign each month.

Yugma

I saw Yugma a year ago at Web 2.0 Expo, and actually used it then to do a webcast from the show floor. This year I learned that Yugma means “unified collaboration” in Sanskrit. I saw them again this year at the show and got some updates both on the company and the technology. Yugma is about 50 people, and it sounds like they were venture funded and are privately owned. About 30 of the people are in India and are developers. What is most interesting is the number of subscribers and their business model. Yugma is free for the first 15 days and you can do a conference of up to 10 people.

Yugma claims to have 160,000 subscribers, which is not bad for being out there a little over a year. However, when I asked how many were using the premium (paid) services, I was told only 2-3%. Which by my calculations is about 4,000 people. Premium accounts are $10/mo. for 10 attendees to a meeting. Which means that Yugma is generating revenues of $40K/mo. or about half a million dollars for this year.

Some of the premium features you get from paying/subscribing include: a shared file space for storage, a shared cursor in the web conference (so 2 or more people can write at the same time, or you can pass the cursor to another person). You can also do session scheduling and recording with the premium edition. Evidently Yugma should have another new version out over the summer, but new features in the current version includes:

- The ability of the session host to authorize the people attending the conference
- You can also now share a single application instead of just the whole desktop
- Skype integration is free, and with the “Skype Edition “you keep the same Yguma level as you have paid for, but Skype is also used for “chat.”

Vyew

Has been around for a few years, I saw them last fall at the Office 2.0 conference, and again this year at Web 2.0 Expo. Vyew does support annotation as does Yugma, so they both differ in that way from CCL. Like a number of other vendors (RHUB for example) Vyew offers their software also as an appliance for the enterprise. Vyew offers premium services in their “Plus” and Professional” subscriptions which are $6.95 and 13.95/mo. respectively. Plus increases the number of meeting participants to 25 and Pro increases it to 100 and eliminates ads as well as increasing the number of Vyew books you can create. A Vyew book is really a persistent meeting space where you can post or store all types of pages (documents, presentations, photos, etc.). Vyew is also evolving and offers some new features:

- A faster and more stable desktop sharing engine
- The ability to import a background and customize your VyewBooks
- Sidebar mode for meeting comments

Future versions (out this summer) will include the ability to record meetings; the ability to send an e-mail to a Vyew Book (each space is assigned a specific address), and better integration with your desktop. Like OAC (below) they have started to integrate synchronous and asynchronous collaboration functions. Unlike CCL they offer a sophisticated whiteboard with annotation, which CCL believes most people don’t want because it is too sophisticated a function. Although they do screen sharing, unlike WebEx or Adobe Connect, they do not do application sharing, which again CCL believes is a more sophisticated function than most people will want to use. Vyew also offers free teleconferencing, while many of the real-time collaboration vendors do not. Even OAC is integrated with FreeConferenceCall.com, so there is a toll cost to be part of the audio conference, although there is no real cost for the audio conferencing service itself.

OpenACircle

This tool I wrote about when it was in Alpha version about a month ago (see my blog called “Easy Web 2.0 Collaboration”). They are due to go into beta in a few weeks, so it should be available any day now. Last time I spoke to them they had over 4,000 people who had signed up to be part of the beta test (which is pretty good for an unknown company with no marketing or advertizing). To get your name on the list go to the web site and sign up. OAC will also have a premium program at some point, but while in beta everything will be free. I imagine that they too will also charge for more storage, and maybe to even expand the size of your circle (currently a circle is limited to 12 people), or maybe even make public circles (all circles now are private and can only be seen by the person that owns the circle and those that are in it), or Circles with no ads and that can be customized to a greater degree.

Summary

All in all, you have a lot of different free, almost free, or very inexpensive web-based SaaS options for web conferencing. Some of them are starting to become hybrid synchronous/asynchronous collaboration tools, which I think is very cool, and better supports the way people naturally work. Ther are probably 50 other vendors that I did not mention in this blog, and we know that there are about 200+ vendors in the real-time collaboration space (not counting resellers), with WebEx (Cisco) as the current market leader (by revenue). However, WebEx is one of the most feature-rich and expensive web conferencing tools you can buy. If you are an enterprise it might make sense, but if you are a consumer, or an SMB, some of these tools with lower (or no) costs and less features just might be the ticket for you!