Salesforce has acquired DimDim, an open source web conferencing service, for $31 million. The news is all over the web, now. DimDim mostly targets the WebEx market - corporations that spend tens of thousands of dollars each year offering them with a cheaper solution. They also have an ‘educational version’ for the higher education market and have created a decent brand name, competing with WiZiQ (pronounced Wiz-IQ).
Salesforce plans to integrate this product within Salesforce.com and use DimDim’s real-time communication technologies in its social collaboration platform, Chatter.
Clearly with this move, DimDim is out of the education arena, unless anyone has ever heard of Salesforce selling to educators. The post-acquisition scene is that DimDim has frozen all the accounts. They are not taking anymore registrations - neither for the free account nor for premium ones. They will not renew any paid ones either, after they expire. They will let their API users use it till their accounts are up for renewal.
Is the thought that where will all these users go after this, upsetting? Clearly not!
With this move, if Salesforce does not come up with an educational offering, DimDim’s educational customers stand stranded. We suspected this to happen at some point in time for a simple reason that web conferencing solutions are inherently different from synchronous teaching solutions, both in terms of features and the business model (and pricing).
Let’s look at some facts:
WiZiQ focuses only on education - We are a part of Educomp, India’s largest education company. WiZiQ features that stand out for educational users:
- Designed for 1-to-1 student-teacher interaction or even for a very large audience (say more than 1000 students in a class)
- Special controls with teachers such as no private chat among students and a feature to block a specific student in the class
- Complete support for PowerPoint animations and sounds in slides
- Unlimited number of attendees in a class - even for free teacher accounts
- A smooth whiteboard with all the tools that a teacher needs - say to teach physics, math or other science classes
Business model and price designed for the education industry:
- If you want to use WiZiQ for free: Become a teacher on WiZiQ for free and use WiZiQ teaching tools to teach. Have unlimited attendees even in the free account. More can be learnt at http://www.wiziq.com/premium/
- If you are a Premium member: Start your membership at $9.95/mo/teacher. Have unlimited attendees in your class. Use features to teach, connect with new students, set up, list and sell online, asynchronous or face-to-face (in-classroom) courses and classes on WiZiQ. More can be learnt at http://www.wiziq.com/premium/
- If you are an Organization: Run your teaching business on WiZiQ from end-to-end. We offer organization accounts with co-branding, multiple teacher accounts, unlimited attendees, advanced features and immense flexibility to stimulate your teaching business. We offer customized packages for Universities, Colleges, Schools or other Large Size Organizations that have different set of needs. More can be learnt at http://www.wiziq.com/premium/#org
- If you use Moodle for your courses: Give Live Online Classes in Moodle with WiZiQ Live Class Web Conferencing Moodle plug-in. Schedule and give classes, upload content, view recordings - all inside Moodle. http://org.wiziq.com/moodle/
- If you use your website or an LMS (other than Moodle) to run your teaching/training programs: Schedule and Give Live Classes, Upload Content, View Recordings – All from your own website or course management system using WiZiQ's Virtual Classroom API. http://org.wiziq.com/cms/
Now with these facts in perspective and plans designed for the education industry, it is clear that WiZiQ is a better option. To validate this point even more, look at a quick comparison between WiZiQ and DimDim in the following presentation:
So, we welcome all educational users of DimDim to WiZiQ with a promise that we will serve them well.
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