The established players in web conferencing better look out — scheduling startup TimeBridge is launching a new conferencing service that it says can save companies around 80 percent compared to established products like Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting.
The Berkeley, Calif. startup already has 300,000 users for its service, one that’s particularly useful because it integrates [...]
The Berkeley, Calif. startup already has 300,000 users for its service, one that’s particularly useful because it integrates with existing calendar products like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Chief executive Yori Nelkin says many TimeBridge users are using the service to schedule web meetings already, so it makes sense to add conferencing to flesh out the product (and to create a revenue stream among the pay services). Almost 60 percent of TimeBridge users employ some kind of conferencing service, and of those, 21 percent use GoToMeeting and 14 percent use WebEx (an interesting inversion of the general perception of who’s the big fish and who’s the underdog).
TimeBridge’s web meeting service costs $8.95 per month — less than WebEx and GoToMeeting, though more than the free offerings from Dimdim. Nelkin says he can charge so little because the customer acquisition cost is so low. In other words, he doesn’t have to spend any money marketing the service, since it’s an obvious switch for existing TimeBridge users. I wasn’t able to try the service myself (oddly, Nelkin briefed me over a TimeBridge conference call line, but we didn’t use the web meeting tool at all), but TimeBridge says it offers all the basic features you’d expect from a web conferencing service — screensharing, a white board, and so on.
Nelkin adds that this is the next step in building TimeBridge into a full collaborations service, rather than just a scheduling tool. In that vein, the company also launched a scheduling feature last month.
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