LOGMEIN TAKES ON GOTOMEETING AND WEBEX

Microsoft, I.B.M., Cisco Systems and Citrix have some new, plucky competition when it comes to Web meeting software.

LogMeIn, a small company I profiled earlier this month, has released its own online meeting and collaboration tool, join.me. As usual, LogMeIn has tried to undercut its much larger rivals by dishing out a free service that requires less configuration set-up. Both home and office users can conduct meetings with up to 250 people — free.

To use the software, you go to the join.me Web site, click to share your computer and then get a code. You can send that code to anyone you like and off you go. People receive a phone number for holding conference calls, can send instant messages during presentations and can share control of a screen.

Cisco charges $49 per host, per month for its popular WebEx software. Citrix also charges $49 per month for GoToMeeting.

LogMeIn charges $29 per month for a “pro” version of join.me that has meeting schedulers, personalized access codes, and some others bits and bobs around account management.

It may seem nuts for LogMeIn to give away this type of software, particularly since it has to spend money managing data centers that set up and hold connections between people.

But the company has worked the free approach to its advantage before.

LogMeIn’s most popular products allow people to tap into their home or office computers while on the road. With such remote access software, people can use a laptop or a smartphone to browse their computers, finding important presentations, e-mail and photos.

LogMeIn feeds up 100,000 downloads a day of its remote access wares and about 95 percent of those downloads are for the free software. The company makes its money by selling a more sophisticated version of its software to businesses, which tend to use the product for remote support of their customers. [Republished from the New York Times]