Vyew

Sector: Online collaboration, conferencing

Headquarters: Berkeley, CA

Management: Henry Hon, Chairman and CEO; Dr. Christopher Peri, CTO; Tim Hon, CSA; Scott Jones, VP Sales and Marketing

Funding: bootstrapped

Secret Sauce: There may be an overload of web conferencing and collaboration products on the market but that’s not the point – there’s also an exhausting array of shampoo brands on the shelf of your local drugstore, and most have found a marketshare. However, Vyew is one of the few products that offers a motherload of features at the most appetizing price out there – FREE.

With no downloads, no installations and a richly-featured browser-based collaboration playground, Vyew makes a great first impression. The second impression is pretty swell too, as the product offers the following features:

Storage (25Mb) | Desktop sharing | Up to 20 real-time participants | 1 click screen features | Always-on | White-boarding | User-list mgmt | Free teleconferencing | Text chat | Lock/unlock meeting rooms | Shared pointer | Shared yahoo maps | Supports MS Office, Adobe PDF, photo, and other file formats

Moreover, Vyew lets users upload screenshots and annotate over everything – users can draw over pictures, add comments to document and presentation files, highlight screen captures, and whiteboard brainstorming sessions. Sessions are saved (up to 25MB in Vyew’s remote file storage) as “books” which can be accessed and opened anytime. Users can also track changes and selectively display each users’ edits, . Text-chat with everyone attending a real-time session, or have side conversations with select persons.

Vyew has a long list of possible target markets, SMB, non-profit and education sectors being the most obvious. The main feature Vyew lacks is application sharing, which all of its competitors offer. Considering its position as a Web 2.0 alternative to corporate conferencing platforms like Macromedia Breeze, WebEx and MSLiveMeeting, what makes it a stand out is the price (though plans are in the offing for an ad-free, more fully featured version for paid subscribers).

Our Take: Of course Macromedia Breeze has more offerings and can support more users. But for the SMB market especially, Vyew offers the most bang for the buck.

Seen and Heard: Shoutblog has an informative and interesting video interview with CTO Christopher Peri. Says Guy Kawasaki, “Does the world need another web conferencing product? Maybe. Check out Vyew.”