Online Conferences Arrive To Skype with Mikogo

Mikogo is an online collaboration and screen sharing tool that is intended to make online conferences easier. We all know a few established players in the industry like WebEx or Citrix’ GoToMeeting but it looks like there is room for competition because different people want different features and different pricing options.

Earlier this week we reported on one of such solutions, CrossLoop, raising $6 million of in round B funding for further development of their solution and the help marketplace where people can use this free screen sharing tool to earn money by providing help on various software or web applications.

It is obvious that it is not easy to compete with established players if you don’t bring something unique to the table and where CrossLoop introduced the help marketplace Mikogo chose another approach and introduced its Skype extension for people to be able to both talk (often for free) and participate in online meetings and conferences using the tool they are already accustomed to using - Skype. With free calls to other Skype users and multiple extras available Skype has already become a very comfortable platform for various business tasks but I have not seen any web conferencing solutions in the extras catalogue but Mikogo - even though such a functionality really sounded like an obvious one. So Mikogo has really managed to bring something unique to Skype, at the same time providing real value to both small business users and private users as well.

Earlier this week Mikogo reported that they had achieved an important milestone for their solution - 50 thousand registered users. Given the fact that Mikogo desktop application does not even require a user to create an account to host or participate in a meeting, the number of people using Mikogo application since its launch about a year ago must be even higher.

One of the best parts of today’s Skype extra announcement is that use of the tool is absolutely free - so web conferencing can be completely free (while the established solutions like GoToMeeting come at a fee which can be quite high per meeting if you only use them once in a few months).

While we are often uncomfortable in the tech blogosphere when something is “totally free for users”, Mikogo actually has a business model as the primary product of the company is an enterprise online collaboration solution BeamYourScreen that is currently used by more than 1,400 corporate customers around the world, including such well-known corporations as Toshiba and Yamaha. Obviously, it offers more features and also supports large-scale meetings without the 10 participants limitation of the free Mikogo product. So the company earns money off the enterprise version, at the same time offering a free solution for the end users to enjoy as well.

The Skype extra for online conferencing by Mikogo is really a very simple tool that works absolutely seamlessly. I have played with it for a while today and am honestly impressed by the ease of use and the feature set - and I have not even managed to find one thing I could want added to the product.

Basically all you have to do is invite any of your Skype contacts (up to 10 people) to join you in a meeting and you can start sharing screen with all of them in a matter of seconds (you can even switch presenter so that they could show something from their desktops as well). There are a number of additional powerful features like selecting which of the applications that run on your desktop you want to share and which you would prefer to hide from those viewing your screen (like you could hide your instant messaging client and email and choose to only show your browser and PowerPoint if you are demoing some web application). It is also possible to use remote control functionality to allow some other presenter to control your mouth and keyboard and do something on your computer.

My opinion is that Mikogo for Skype is a feature-rich tool that is perfectly enough for small-size online meetings, presentations and even webinars. And even if it may not be enough for a large corporation because of the limitation in the number of participants, it looks (and works - what’s more important) as a very good solution for smaller online meetings - simple yet powerful enough. And now that I have this extra installed, I am certainly not seeing myself removing it any time soon.