Saturday, August 16, 2008

Am I being dim about DimDim?

The other day I had a play with Merrolee Penman on DimDim. DimDim is a free software that allows you to have an online meeting of up to 20 people.

Compared to Elluminate
DimDim allows audio and visual communication, white board and desktop share. The main annoyance was that there was a reasonable lag which made communication less fluid, but that might have been the way I set up the meeting.
Compared to Elluminate, DimDim did not appear to have any more to offer.

BUT
the advantage DimDim has is that it is free, whereas Elluminate can only be accessed free for meetings of up to three people. For those who do not have access to Elluminate, I would suggest that DimDim is worth investigating.

My only doubt would be how it performs for people who do not have access to broadband Internet connection.

Question
Why do software companies give their products such funny names? When I heard of DimDim, I immediately thought of TimTam, which is a lovely chocolate biscuit you can buy in New Zealand. What is the meaning of DimDim?


Image: 'The inside of a Tim Tam' joyosity
www.flickr.com/photos/33993074@N00/856727818

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i thought of dim sims and dum dum which is how i feel about technology
rae

Sarah Stewart said...

That's fabulous, Steven - I thought there probably was a reason for the name but was too lazy to go and have a look. :)

Congratulations on providing a comparative FREE tool to the likes of Elluminate. I am very keen to encourage students and midwives who do not access to tools such as Elluminate to use DimDim.

Anonymous said...

Hello Sarah,

We appreciate your interest in our platform. If you'd like to speak to someone at Dimdim about your connectivity concerns, I'd encourage you to contact them at support@dimdim.com, or you can email me at dimdim@consortpartners.com.

You asked about how the company got its name. Here is the real story:

We sat down with 18,000 domain names and promised ourselves that we would not leave the meeting without naming our company!

We set five simple rules:
1 - The dotcom domain must be available
2- The name must have high recall
3- The name must be international
4- The sound of the name must translate without ambiguity to its spelling and hence its domain name
4- The spelling must translate unambiguously to its pronunciation.

Five hours later, we named the company Dimdim.

Keep us posted on your experiences. We are a very open company and welcome any and all feedback from our users.

Thanks for using Dimdim.

The Dimdim team.

Marten said...

I want to suggest you try http://www.showdocument.com - its an alternative tool for dimdim that allows document sharing and Free Web meeting in real-time. all the participants in the session see each others' drawing, highlights, etc. It is free and requires no installation.

Josh