Mikogo is a new online meeting tool that is a free for download and suitable for users who want to run a Web conference. It was developed by a German technology firm called BeamYourScreen GmbH, and is now being employed by more than 30,000 users worldwide. Users will find this Mikogo packed with the fast performance, albeit that the only limitation for Mikogo is the maximum number of ten (10) participants is imposed on each conference session. To invite other participants in joining a Web conference, the meeting organizer only need to provide the meeting ID to the participants and each participant is given fifteen (15) minute to login to the session.

This software is rich in features during a Web conferencing session such as: share each others’ screens, change presenters, transfer files, lock meeting room and etc. Currently, Mikogo also supports Skype, which mean users can start a Web conference through Skype.

Besides, I also embedded a video on “how to use Mikogo” in the below.

Joost has finally unveiled its official site for the China people. A bit surprise that the domain of Joost’s Chinese version is not carry any Joost or Tom’s letter (Joost partnered with Tom.com in developing and marketing the Joost Chinese site), but a new domain name called My100Fun.com. The general thinking is that a lot of startups that come to China building a sister site likely to use another domain name for the site, with number included in the domain name. An example is a startup mulu100, owned by edgeio.com, a classified advertising platform that shut down last year.

My100Fun inherited the same home page design as Joost, featuring some of the most popular English shows on the landing page. However, not that many Chinese shows can be found on this site. if we consider this My100Fun will help Joost to open the China market, it only showed that it is not completely ready yet.

By the way, you also can find the Joost advertisement (as shown in the below) on Tom’s Skype Website.

via [cnBeta]

A three-day Skype outage in August this year and the acquisition of Skype by eBay is now an acknowledged failure, however this doesn’t stop the growth of its users. Maybe the Skype users are not really bother about those stuff other than using it. Today marks another milestone for Skype, they had grown to more than 10 million users that running this software online. And this number is expected to increase everyday. Interestingly, the growth of Skype’s users does not commensurate with its financial performance, albeit that Skype, owned by eBay trying to improve it materially for the past two years.

Skype is back in business after its service outage last Thursday, for a period up to 36 hours, and this caused million of users can’t logged in to the service last week. Though this morning I read eBay’s explanation (English) and (Mandarin), I believed many users still wondering what was the main reason that caused this worst outage in Skype’s five year history. Unlike any other service disruption, Skype said the disruption was due to a large number of Skype users restarting their computers after installing the routine Windows update on the second Tuesday of every month. In Skype’s post, they didn’t mentioned precisely what in particular about the August’s update has led to the Skype crash and indeed this kind of vague explanation on this issue outlines the necessity of another round of explanation.

“Windows Updates” was the key feature of Microsoft’s OS strategy. It cost Microsoft a certain amount of money to set up their team in developing the security patches in a “periodic” time frame in spite of us, as the users sometimes didn’t realized whether these updates really meet our own computing demand. However, for Skype service outage, and their explanation for this was due to the Windows periodic updates nonetheless remained controversial. Will it served as an unexpected boon to some of the Skype peer-to-peer competitors? Well, time will tell.

I just came across an interesting peer-to-peer site that called Raketu.tv that provided by Raketu Communications Inc.. It is an application that combined the popular features of ipTV and social networking. Currently this application is only available in Windows platform, and they did not mentioned when their beta version will be available to run on Mac or Linux. In matter of fact, Raketu Communications that launched in September last year, has so far released a number of applications that all utilized the peer-to-peer technology. My sense is that this company has growing steadily as you can notice that they’ve included the Russian, and Chinese version to their line of products. Besides, they followed the footstep of Skype closely. On the web page, they have released a product that called RakOut and I’ve been quite surprise when they compared their product with Skype face-to-face and published a press release that entitled, “Skype’s out – RakOut with Raketu” that ended with the skype-release.php.

Raketu.tv has so far closed some content partnership deals with several companies, including Media Global Intertainment, (MGI), NamcheTV and KlikVU.com. It seems that the management of Raketu was favorably to further expansion and had consistently pursued a strategy for growth since its first inception. According to this article, “We are extremely pleased to be partnering with MGI and KlikVU.com,” said Greg Parker, President of Raketu. “Through Raketu.tv, users will be able to watch this popular entertainment content, while interacting with their friends from anywhere in the world.”

Positioned as a one-stop provider for peer-to-peer technology in Internet calling and TV, Raketu is no doubt want to capture a bigger market than the leading and famous player in the market, such as Skype and Joost. Suppose the Internet calling and ipTV market is such big that a new firm should not adopt, develop, and market these two lines of products under one roof, I personally feel it is not a good business strategy. Sometimes I made mistake in my blog writing, I always like to compare a new startup with an established player, or a strong player in that particular field. It seems that Internet calling, peer-to-peer, ipTV, video sharing, social networking, some other web 2.0 ideas, every new start-up want to venture into these fields. I do not want to call this company as a copycat of Skype, still, I believe it is not. But I really like to observe a lot of new startups that prepared to do the greenfield market development in order to build a customer base.

Skype Pro finally launched in Europe. For this product, I have posted a post in last month entitled, “Skype Pro To Be Launched.” In that post, I did talked about how I feel about the product to be launched, and whether it will eventually success in the market or not. In less than a month, it has launched in its first target market, i.e. the selected countries in Europe. It is currently only available in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

I maintained my perspective on the launched of this Skype Pro, why Skype charge for as minimum as €2 per month is for the purpose of market penetration. As the VP & GM of Telecoms at Skype, Stefan Oberg said, “With Skype Pro, we’re making it easier for our 171m registered users to buy our paid for communications products. Skype Pro lets you call landlines and mobiles all over the world for exceptional value. The combination of Skype’s free features with Skype Pro is very compelling. Along with zero per minute calling, Skype Pro includes free voicemail, a generous discount on SkypeIn numbers, attractively priced Skype devices plus five euros of SkypeOut(TM) credit when you sign up for five months. Skype Pro is a simple and cost-effective way for people to keep in touch with one another the world over” According to this press release.

An apparent benefit for Skype Pro launched in the market is about the monopoly power that Skype might achieved with this €2 per month, their pricing model. Another benefit of implementing this pricing model is the knowledge that eBay could gained from launching a paid-service to the users, once an user starting to accept that paying to get a premium service is worthy, eBay will gain their confidence in rolling out a ton of products that label with a price. Some argued that right timing is a decisive factor for a product to be success or fail in the market, but regardless what will be the outcome of this product launched, I think eBay must learn how to use the Skype Pro’s market reports in order to better modify the behavior of their customers.

Skype will soon to launch its new all-in-one package that called Skype Pro. I believed it will be in the market when the respective technology is stable enough and, or Skype has attained a certain number of potential users they got from the email invitation. On the Skype Pro’s home page, an interested user can enter his/her email address to know the date of availability of this service and most important, it allowed Skype to assess the market reaction to the price and price sensitivity for this service.

The reason for Skype to launch this Skype Pro is solely about market penetration. According to the news release by Skype, the pricing strategy consists of a premium subscription package (Skype Pro), one feature of which removes per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines and includes a small connection fee. Moreover, this Skype Pro will also include free Skype Voicemail, €30 off a SkypeIn number, exclusive discounts on hardware for Skype, up to €15 off the Unyte Desktop Sharing extra, two free avatars from CrazyTalk, and two free ringtones from Emotive, as these are all listed on the Skype Pro’s home page.

I’m thinking now what is the likelihood for the Skype’s existing users to buy this service at a price of €2 per month? Will the users think this is expensive or the value worth the price? And since most of Skype users are favor to the free services that offered by Skype, I’m interested to know how Skype going to deal with the users when the Skype’s product characteristics could be labeled as free.

I previously have posted a post on The Venice Project. The Skype founders have officially renamed The Venice Project to Joost. It is not surprise for me that the founders of Skype, i.e. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the duo that brought the world Skype and Kazaa, have chosen a name that is also 5-letter words for their new online-video start-up. According to an article from the cnet, they chose Joost because they like the ring of it. However, some blogs I read are all wondering why they have changed its original name from theveniceproject to Joost. These people are worried that the name changed would affected the goodwill that the venice project built for the past months. My own view is: When I looked back all the three companies the duo built for the past years, they tend to used the “5-letter words” as their new venture’s name. I’m thinking whether they tend to believed that 5-letter words does bring their new venture the luck factor. In today’s world, I know it’s childish and absolutely ridiculous to make a comment on this, but it’s still no harm if they selected a shorter name as the final name for their dot com startup and since most of the well-established players such as sun, google, hp, msn, ask, just to name a few, they all have a short name. And I wonder the luck factor really take a major role on a new startup when there’s so much uncertainty in the market right now.

Simply put, I really like their idea. I wish them good luck.

Update: I deleted a paragraph that I believed was out of the topic being discussed here. I made a mistake. Sorry for any inconvenient caused.

Update 2: I put a screenshot below that I found on the Joost web page. I think it will well illustrate the feature-rich of Joost.

Source: http://static.joost.com/screenshots/J_08blog_Nettwerk_overlay.jpg