Unyte: The First of Many Chance Encounters at VON

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It’s already started.  On my way to our first meeting, Howard and I bumped into Will Stofega, who was getting a demo of Unyte, from WebDialogs President and CEO Lou Guercia.  Unyte is a collaboration application for Skype.  It lets you:

• Share any application on your desktop, or every application on your desktop
• Collaborate with Skype users and non-Skype users alike.
• Easily invite people to collaborate via email, or from within Skype. 

In my head, I was comparing this simple browser based service with Microsoft LiveMeeting, which we use virtually every day to make presentations to customers, investors, and press people.  LiveMeeting has a lot of bells and whistles which Unyte doesn’t have.  It can, for instance, record meetings, annotate slides, and perform countless other tasks… none of which we use however. 

Unyte has been in beta for some time.  Since putting it up on the Skype homepage, Lou Guercia told me, they’ve had 150,000 users try it for free.  They’re just about to go commercial with very aggressive pricing that will definitely make this an attractive alternative to Webex or Microsoft Livemeeting.

That’s what a chance encounter at VON is all about…

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.