Dimdim, a startup provides a free, hosted Web conferencing service where anyone can share their desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via Webcam is announcing its public beta today. As of present, there are over 200,000 downloads on Dimdim’s open source version, and its beta users are growing in a substantial pace throughout the world, with the number of 375,000 people from 165 countries. When consider Dimdim before using and deploying it, it is appealing to most of the potential users because it is free, open source and Dimdim’s product is GNU Public Licensed.

However, Dimdim’s business operating model is based on product versioning. While the free Web conference service can only have 20 users/attendees, but its Professional version is scalable up to 100 people, with an annual fee of $99 to $495 per year. These two are the most popular and widely used, with the functionality of 100% Web-based, hosted version, and compatible with Windows, Mac or Linux. Additionally, Dimdim also offered its Enterprise version, which suitably for a very large-scale Web meeting purposes and the onsite software can be hosted in customers’ own servers. As stated on Dimdim’s home page, its Enterprise version is based on commercial streaming and media components, i.e. Adobe Flash Server.

Perhaps how this Dimdim continue to work and thrive is how it solve the integration issue when comes to integrate with some open source content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, Coranto, etc. It should be noted that they’ve already integrated with the popular learning management systems like Moodle and Claroline. Meanwhile, they also released the API to encourage the development of additional functionality and integration.

Dimdim was founded in Feb 2006 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. They have offices in New Hampshire, Canada and India. Dimdim is being backed by venture capital firms which include Nexus India Capital, Index Ventures and Draper Richards.