This week Convoq launched their flagship personal web conferencing service, As Soon As Present (ASAP).  The launch is a milestone for the web conferencing marketplace which has to date been characterized by enterprise-focused price points, despite software experiences that have not yet graduated into the modern age of rich client interfaces and experiences and presence-enabled communications.

Convoq ASAP breaks a lot of ground in the convergence of presence management, rich media instant messaging and multi-participant web conferencing, and do this with an economics for the mass-market.  For less than $100 per year, users of ASAP can conduct an ulimited number of meetings with up to 25 participants.  Comparative pricing from Microsoft LiveMeeting (Placeware) and WebEx is in the tens of thousands of dollars. 

This approach to the market reflects Convoq's philosophy that real-time, rich media multi-participant online collaboration is ready to be an everyday productivity application, not a stovepipe system that is limited in its use to those "premium" sales calls or online demos.  The focus on making real-time collaboration more common is reflected in Convoq's thoughtful embrace of productivity-enhacing presence and convocation management features, helping either large or distributed organizations gather the right people at the right time in online settings.

If you or your organization makes regular use of instant messaging and web conferencing in a professional (or personal!) context, I'd encourage you to evaluate Convoq ASAP.

As a board member of Convoq, it's very exciting to see this innovative communications service launch -- congrats to the entire Convoq team!  I can also say that while the 1.0 product accomplishes a lot, this team has an incredible vision and roadmap for where to take online communications and collaboration, so please stay tuned.

[Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

Congrats to Chris and Jeremy and all the folks involved with Convoq. I was a beta tester - and it works. [Though it should have been built in Laszlo instead of Flash.]

:-)

2:44:18 PM    

SimDisk-takes on MS & Wins in Houstan

Finally an underdog story, a David to the Microsoft Goliath!!! Little unknown SimDisk takes on Microsoft Office and wins the contract for the City of Houstan!!!

You gotta love the press this generates, and the sheer stubborness and conviction the city of Houstan demonstrated when they made this choice, to go with a little startup.

From the SimDisk web site is their history description:

"SimDesk Technologies, Inc. (STI) was founded in 1999 to develop a revolutionary way to deliver software applications using the Internet. STI offers SimDesk™, an office productivity suite of applications that provide a word processor, spreadsheet, personal organizer, and e-mail client. All SimDesk Technologies' products run on the World Wide Server^TM (WWS), a groundbreaking means for economically and efficiently transporting applications, connecting millions of users to one server.

Using the WWS, SimDesk™ disperses the load so that a task can be completed with a fraction of the bandwidth and server power normally needed. Using a patented proprietary transport layer protocol and load-balancing technique, the SimDesk™ product suite is able to support millions of simultaneous users with a small fraction of the hardware normally needed in networks today."

SimDisk also does some good in bridging the "Digital Divide" check out this article. This article describes the fact that any City of Houstan resident with a PowerLibrary card can use the SimDisk server based software and get access to a server based equivalent to an office suite of software, with word processor, spreadsheet, etc.

Just to give you the scale of difference, this is like $1.70 per user compared to $300.00 per user for MS Office!!!

Apparently this idea has spread to the windy city!

PC Magazine ran an article new challenge to Microsoft supremacy besides that annoyting penquin!!

CNET's "Houstan We Have A Problem With Office" is another great introduction to this underdog story!

If you want to check out Houstan's public library use of SimDisk, check out SimHoustan.

2:33:36 PM