A recent post in Guy Kawasaki’s blog, Signum sine tinnitu, prompted me to post this piece.
He recently discussed Web 2.0 startup, Vyew, (pronounced VIEW), based in Berkeley. I found this very interesting because here is a company that has done almost no PR and definitely zero hype generation, yet the true viral nature of the Web has enabled this company to gain momentum the organic way. Good for them! It is a tremendous feat indeed.
In the 90s and early 00s, I distanced myself from the PR madness that created and popped the last bubble, and the last thing we need in the economy, are marketers that exploit the essence of Web 2.0 and its ideology for their own benefit.
Guy’s intro was very compelling…
If most venture capitalists werenāt liars, weād tell you that if we had the opportunity to fund Google, we would have passed. Seriously, who would have thought the world needed another search engine in 1995? Fast forward to 2006. Does the world need another web conferencing product? Maybe.
While writing this piece, I decided to see if anyone else was blogging about Vyew, and then I found an interesting summary written by Ken Molay on his Webinar Blog.
He too offered a convincing quote:
Citrix GoToMeeting should be very worried.
I actually signed up for Vyew in December and have used it for cross team and client discussions and reporting/obtaining feedback. Prior, I was paying $$$ using raindance and before that, WebEx.
Don’t get me wrong, both services offer incredible feature-sets. However, Vyew seems to distill the key ingredients into one killer package necessary SMBs. They’ve put a lot of effort and, to be honest, the price is right – FREE.
In all honestly, I initially stumbled onto them after participating in a very cool online training program through their main business, Simulate, http://www.simulat.com
Vyew is a Web 2.0 conferencing and always-on platform that facilitates instant visual-based communication and collaboration. Vyew’s multimedia workspace enables shared viewing of presentations, files, photos as well as desktop snapshots without the need for client downloads or installations. Vyew also provides all necessary tools to host effective and dynamic webinars including whiteboarding, annotating, text chatting, and phone conferencing.
Within seconds, users can start an online meeting session, where up to 20 participants can share, annotate, and save files/photos (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .jpg, .pdf, etc.) in real-time. Vyew enables whiteboarding, one-click screen share and capture, client-less operability and session persistence – which allows users to start/stop/save any presentation, anytime. Meeting participants can also communicate via instant text chat, pull up Yahoo! Maps and share Google searches.
Vyew is currently in public BETA and now available for instant conferencing. Additional information of how Vyew stacks-up against the competition can be found online at http://vyew.com/content/Main.ComparisonChart
That is truly the question – whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or fortune seekers), or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die: to sleep.
Broadband has changed the way we interact – no one can deny that. But is Web 2.0 really 2.0 or just 1.10125? We are not really revolutionizing the way we use the web. So what if we have these small applets that save time communicating to the server (bypassing requests to and from so that interaction remains local). This is basically taking us back to the old days – when things were local. This is no Color TV revolution or Alex Bell saying “can you hear me?”
Solis’ revelation about WebEx resounds my hatred for the latency when meeting with it – there are better alternatives. Is Vyew one of them? I will check it out for myself. But I also believe that as the Internet takes hold – costs of using it should also decrease. Long distance calls are a clear example of the Web (what ever iteration we are in) lowering the costs of interaction.
My three cents! (two of them are free).