Salesforce.com’s acquisitions binge continues. The San Francisco-based maker of cloud-based customer relationship management tools has added WebEx-like conferencing and collaboration capabilities to its arsenal through the purchase of Lowell, MA-based startup Dimdim.

Announced late Thursday, the acquisition cost Salesforce.com $31 million, net of Dimdim’s cash. Dimdim had raised venture funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Draper Richards; co-founders DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot were also investors.

Founded in 2007, Dimdim developed a freemium, open source, fully Web-based conferencing system with features such as Webcam and audio connections for multiple participants, document sharing, whiteboarding, screen sharing, and chat windows. As Ganguly explained in a 2009 interview with Xconomy, the company’s early mission was to show that a cloud-based multimedia conferencing system could be simple and easy to use. Conferencing systems from WebEx (now part of Cisco) and GoToMeeting (a Citrix product) require users to download client programs before joining meetings.

Salesforce.com says it bought Dimdim in order to add real-time communications capabilities to Chatter, an enterprise social networking platform that’s openly modeled after Facebook. In fact, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff went out of his way in the acquisition announcement to say that the Dimdim acquisition would make Chatter more Facebook-like.

“The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site,” Benioff said in the announcement. According to the company, 60,000 Salesforce.com customers have already deployed Chatter, and the expectation is that the addition of real-time conferencing and document-sharing features will further boost adoption.

Dimdim is Salesforce’s third acquisition in less than a month. The company bought Heroku, a San Francisco-based Ruby application platform provider, for $212 million in early December, and announced just before Christmas that it had purchased e-mail reminder service Etacts. Both Heroku and Etacts were alumni of the Y Combinator venture incubator program.

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In last week’s interview with Dimdim CEO DD Ganguly and chief marketing officer Steve Chazin, I hinted that the 5.0 version of the Methuen, MA, company’s Web-based conferencing software was nearing release. Well, today it’s out.

Organizations tired of paying high prices to use systems like Cisco’s WebEx, Citrix’s GoToMeeting, and Microsoft’s Live Meeting may appreciate the newly improved system, which costs $228 a year for meetings of up to 50 people and is also available on a pay-as-you-go basis starting at $9.95 per month. There’s even a free version for group meetings of up to 20 people.

Ganguly and Chazin gave me a test drive of Dimdim 5.0 last week, and it seems to do everything a conferencing system should do. Dimdim was already good for things like screen sharing, audio and video chat, instant messaging, collaborative whiteboarding, and sharing documents such as Word and PowerPoint files. One of the new features is faster screencasting based on Flash 10—so meeting participants can follow what’s happening on the host’s computer screen without the small delay in previous versions. The software has also been optimized to work better on slower Internet connections, a feature that may appeal to the hundreds of community and non-profit organizations that have turned to Dimdim as a more affordable alternative to high-end conferencing systems.

And the company has come up with a neat system of “webinar widgets,” little interactive advertisements that can be placed inside Web pages to alert people about upcoming Dimdim sessions and allow them to register in advance or join in real time.

With the 5.0 release, Dimdim is pitching its product even more strongly at smaller organizations where leaders might like to communicate with their staff or membership via Web conferencing, but don’t want to pay the $49 per month charged by GoToMeeting or the $59 to $69 per month charged by WebEx. Dimdim’s other big advantage is that it runs inside users’ Web browsers, without requiring a tedious download. (I don’t know about you, but it seems like every time I’m invited to a WebEx meeting, I have to download the WebEx meeting manager all over again—and I always forget to do so until right before the meeting starts, which means I’m always late.)

“At a fraction of the price, Dimdim 5 provides more functionality and less headaches at a time when people are looking to cut costs and make their lives easier,” Ganguly said in an announcement from the company today. “With Dimdim 5, users now have the feature sets and functionality they want with no hassles. No longer do they need to deal with complicated and expensive legacy web conferencing solutions or unnecessary software downloads and expensive support.”

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One sign that Xconomy is in the right business is that there are many more companies building innovative products in our home cities than we have time to cover. Unfortunately, though, our decisions about which companies to cover sometimes come down to little more than intuitive guesses. Back in December 2007, I interviewed the founders of Dimdim, a Methuen, MA-based startup with an open-source Web conferencing technology that provides a low-priced alternative to Cisco’s WebEx, Citrix’s GoToMeeting, and Microsoft’s Live Meeting. But I never wrote up a story about DimDim, because it just didn’t seem to me that the company had much chance of surviving in a market dominated by such deep-pocketed competitors.

To be honest, I was also influenced by a tale told to me around the same time by Christopher Herot, co-founder and former chief technology officer at Convoq, aka Zingdom. The Lexington, MA-based WebEx competitor had failed ignominiously after collecting $30 million in venture capital.

Well, 15 months later, Dimdim is not only surviving but by all indications thriving. I was clearly wrong in my assessment; whatever problems had hamstrung Convoq weren’t weighing down Dimdim. So when I heard that the company would be coming out with a new and improved version of its software soon, I decided to try to make up for my misjudgment by inviting Dimdim CEO and founder and DD Ganguly and chief marketing officer Steve Chazin to visit Xconomy again. They graciously accepted.

Ganguly and Chazin walked me through Dimdim’s basic features, which include everything you’d expect from a Web conferencing system, such as document sharing, whiteboarding, screen sharing, chat windows, and Webcam and audio connections for multiple meeting participants. It all worked so seamlessly that I had to keep reminding myself that it was completely browser-based—with no need to download annoying desktop software or browser plugins, the way you must before joining a WebEx meeting, for example. (The one exception: screen sharing requires a small plugin, since a browser can’t by itself take over a computer’s entire screen.)

Ganguly and Chazin also filled me in on Dimdim’s progress over the past year, which includes some pretty impressive uptake statistics—the company now has 2 million users, who spend about a million minutes in Dimdim meetings each week. Large communities such as developers of the open-source Drupal publishing system and the open-source Moodle learning management system are using the platform for their design and planning meetings. And some big companies—like an unnamed but prominent national tax preparer—have incorporated components of Dimdim’s system, such as the chat and document-sharing systems, into their own websites.

Next week, Dimdim is expected to introduce the 5.0 version of its system, which will include a slew of upgrades. (I got a look at some of them during Ganguly and Chazin’s visit, but promised I wouldn’t write about them until they’re finalized.) In anticipation of the rollout, I asked Ganguly and Chazin about the founding ideas behind Dimdim and the role the application is playing inside organizations both small and large.

Xconomy: Thanks for coming back in, and giving me another chance to write about Dimdim.

DD Ganguly: We actually wanted to thank you, because after you told us about Convoq we spoke with Chris Herot. They hadn’t put a lot of focus on a free version of their product, so distribution and the cost of customer acquisition became a very big problem for them. Partly because of your suggestion, I really started focusing on the free part of Dimdim. And if you look at the usage numbers, that has really helped. We are working with some very large firms today, and getting on the short lists at others, because they are quickly able to try out our software.

X: So let’s start from the beginning. What is the founding philosophy behind Dimdim?

DDG: What’s intensely personal is oftentimes the most universal, and that’s what we experienced with Dimdim. [The founding team] wanted ways to collaborate with each other. We had documents we were creating, prototypes that we wanted to show to each other, and each of these requirements led to certain kinds of features [in a Web conferencing system]. But there was nothing available that was easy to use and free. So we saw a bigger need for this. We sent out exactly 14 e-mails to people who had shown some interest in open-source Web conferencing, and we asked, “What is your interest on a scale of 1 to 10,” and they came back with numbers ranging from 8 to 100. We said “That’s enough market research for us!”

X: Why are customers attracted to Dimdim, when so many alternatives are available?

DDG: As we have made progress, what we are seeing is that customers are coming to us for three reasons: ease of use, open source and open APIs [application programming interfaces, the tools programmers use to make software systems talk to each other], and affordability. What has been very interesting is that when we went out to talk to customers, I thought they would talk about affordability first, openness second, and ease of use last. And consistently, they come back in exactly the reverse order. Ease of use is far more … Next Page »

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In February, Waltham, MA-based Novell acquired SiteScape, a Maynard, MA startup that had created an open-source Web conferencing platform called ICEcore. At the OSCON 2008 open source conference today in Portland, OR, Novell announced that it’s spinning off ICEcore as an independent project under a new name, Kablink. The Kablink software, which has new workflow technologies contributed by Novell, needed a new name “to avoid confusion in the marketplace with first generation technologies,” Novell said in an announcement.

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