Another Online ScreensharingTool – and Another Rant About Freemium

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the excitement I felt hearing that Web meeting application Yuuguu was integrated with Skype. Hot on the heels of that I was contacted by the creators of Mikogo, another online meeting, web presentation and remote support application creator.

So what is Mikogo? It’s a desktop sharing tool that allows a user to invite up to 10 participants to view a live screencast over the web. As with other similar applications, only the meeting instigator needs to be registered – the other participants access the meeting via a unique login on the Mikogo website or an inline skype message. Mikogo boasts of having 45000 users in 160 countries. The features Mikogo comes with includes;

• Screen Sharing in Real-Time
• Integration with Skype via Mikogo Extra (only for Skype 3.9 currently)
• Up to 10 Participants
• Switch Presenter
• Remote Keyboard and Mouse Control
• File Transfer
• Meeting Scheduler
• Application Selection
• Recording and Playback
• Whiteboard
• Back Monitor
• Pause Transmission
• Voice Conferencing Service
• 256-Bit AES Encryption

As is so often the case (especially with free products) my interest is less in the product but more in the business viability issues surrounding a free application. Mikogo works as would be expected for an application of this type… I’m a fan of screensharing with Skype integration – it’s a super low cost alternative to Webex and the like. Below is an image showing how easy it is to set up a Mikogo meeting;

And an invitees perspective on a meeting invitation;

Getting back to the business issues however we’re yet again prompted to discuss a freemium strategy. The maker of Mikogo is BeamYourScreen, a provider of Web collaboration solutions – they say that they “provide Mikogo as an easy to use free tool, and by doing so hope to receive a lot of feedback on Mikogo, so that we can take this user experience and apply it to the BeamYourScreen tools to provide even greater service for our customers.”

Mikogo has in fact riffed on this fremium theme over on their blog and stand up much justification for what they do. The real disconnect is that I see little of an upgrade path for these sorts of applications. Users either need a premium offering or will continue to use the free services ad infinitum…

For a comparison, BeamYourScreen runs to USD35 per month for a ten participant licence and a cursory glance at the site could discern no functional difference when compared to Mikogo – perhaps there are some minor differences but for freemium to work as a strategy they need to be really compelling. Phil riffs more about freemium over here – and gives some nice examples of it working in practice. My observation however is that they are the exception rather than the norm.

Update – there is a difference between Mikogo and beamYourScreen – “When using BeamYourScreen, customers have access to several
further features including: Greater number of participants (up to 200
participants in one online meeting), the HTML Viewer (participants join a
meeting directly from within a web browser and can join from any web browser
including one on a mobile device such as an iPhone), setting the initial viewing
direction, adjustment of quality/speed settings, choice of preferred session ID,
session login integration, live customer support via web chat, phone or email,
etc., and more.” My comments however still stand.