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Posts Tagged ‘presenter-wants’

A new screen-sharing app launched today from drop.io, which keeps adding features to its private file-sharing service. The new product is called present.io and it lets you set up a screen-sharing presentation with multiple participants in just a few clicks. Present.io has a lot in common with drop.io’s chat feature which it added last month, except that it looks like this scales to hundreds of participants and is designed specifically for webinars and group presentations.

Present.io requires no downloads or installs and pretty much instantaneously tracks whatever the presenter is doing on his computer with all of the watchers see on theirs. He can go through slides, open documents via a Scribd embed, play videos, show photos, play music, and move his cursor around, and everyone logged into the presentation sees the same thing. When he is going through slides, he can expand them into full-screen mode to show greater detail, and text chat is integrated into the app at the bottom so everyone can chime in. The service also includes a live conference call line.

It looks pretty slick. Try it out here. One downside is that it appears to be a one-way tool. Participants can’t take control of the presentation to add their own media or drive the presentation, unlike other free screen-sharing apps such as Adobe’s Acrobat.com (which is my personal favorite). Unlike Acrobat.com or WebEx, you don’t see the presenter’s desktop, only the files he chooses to show within present.io. So this would not be something you would use to show something in a browser, which is unfortunate because demos often default to the browser when the presenter wants to go off on a tangent or forgot to add something to his deck. Other than those concerns, present.io is a solid addition to drop.io’s ever-expanding set of features. Below is a demo video describing present.io.

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Aha Mobile, a startup that is developing a car-friendly informational iPhone app, has secured $3 million in Series A financing from Venrock. Currently in development, Aha’s product is focused on safely connecting drivers to relevant information about the world around them via a mobile device.

Aha’s vision is to create an iPhone app that gives drivers the information they need outside the car, such as what’s traffic like ahead? Where is the nearest bathroom? Where can I grab a cup of coffee before my next meeting? Aha’s CEO, Robert Acker, would not reveal many details about the product since it’s still in development and testing but says that Aha will use the iPhone’s GPS capabilities and will use voice recognition technology to operate search queries. Acker says the app will also provide directions to users but will be focused on providing simple directions.

A free app, Aha Mobile will be be driver-focused, but the company won’t reveal much more about the iPhone app that it is planning to release to the public during the summer. Currently, Aha is looking for drivers around the country to test a beta version of its application while it prepares for launch later this summer. People can apply to be a beta tester here and potentially win iTunes gift certificate if they participate in the beta.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The Netherlands-based eBuddy, which markets a comprehensive application that lets users handle multiple instant messaging accounts from the web or their mobile phones, is today releasing an application for the Android platform a couple months after Meebo made its similar product available on there (November 2008).

The eBuddy application for Google’s open mobile OS is now available for free on the Android Market, and users can thus benefit from a single ID to chat with their friends on third-party communication platforms such as Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ and more.

No Skype chat yet, which is a bit of a bummer, but apparently the startup is looking to add that functionality in their mobile clients in addition to all the other ones currently supported. I wonder which startup will be the first to bring Skype chat to Android, since neither Meebo nor eBuddy currently support it and both Nimbuzz and fring, competitors that do support Skype IM through their mobile clients, have yet to make their way to the open platform.

What I like about the eBuddy application is that it has the ability to run in the background, so when you receive a phone call the IM service will keep running and even reconnect you automatically when the internet connection is lost. If you maintain multiple friend lists on instant messaging tools, eBuddy neatly organizes all your contacts in one list so you don’t even need to think about which third-party service you should be connecting to, and lets you seamlessly jump from one chat conversation to the next.

On a sidenote: I can’t grasp why Android Market doesn’t offer a search function on its regular website - only on mobile - but if you ever want to look for applications that are available on Android you might want to check out Cyrket.com. The eBuddy app is listed here.

I got eBuddy, which is backed by a healthy €11.5 million (which currently converts to approximately $15.6 million), to share some numbers to get a feel of the traction it’s getting in the market, and came away fairly impressed.

These are the numbers they pitched me: 20 million mobile downloads of the J2ME mobile client since its launch in June 2007, 5+ million unique monthly mobile users on eBuddy Mobile, and with almost 14 million downloads of eBuddy Mobile Messenger on GetJar the top ranked mobile program on the platform.

Stellar upwards-pointing trends indeed, but this type of hockey stick growth is of course no guarantee that all these new users will be efficiently monetized over the long run. Only time will tell if eBuddy finds a way to turn its successful product into a profitable business.

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