Pocket Meeting: A $5 WebEx Killer?
Sharing your screen with someone while chatting on the phone is one of those things that's much harder than it ought to be. We've tried a lot of different tools and none of them makes us very happy. The newest entrant into this field is Pocket Meeting and it's got some promise.
Context & Ripple Effects
Cisco's WebEx spent early 2009 pushing onto new surfaces — GigaOM covered WebEx arriving on the iPhone in January — while its core desktop product still carried enterprise-grade pricing. Pocket Meeting's launch attacks that gap directly: a confirmed relationship frames it as a low-cost challenger positioned squarely against WebEx.
The pitch is narrow and deliberate — a $5 tool whose confirmed use case is screen sharing during an ordinary phone call, the pairing ReadWriteWeb says existing tools all handle badly. It matters because it treats screen sharing as a cheap utility rather than a seat-licensed suite feature.
First-order effects
- Pocket Meeting gives small teams and solo callers a $5 alternative to WebEx for ad-hoc screen sharing over a phone call, undercutting Cisco on price for the simplest meeting scenario.
- WebEx's 'killer' label puts immediate pricing pressure on Cisco's entry-level tiers: a challenger charging single-digit dollars makes per-seat enterprise pricing visible by contrast.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent conferencing vendors face a bundling dilemma — match the $5 standalone price and cannibalize suite revenue, or cede the casual-meeting segment to micro-priced entrants.
- A wave of lookalike low-cost screen-sharing tools becomes likely, since the underlying capability requires little proprietary technology and the pain point ReadWriteWeb documents is widely shared.
Third-order effects
- If micro-priced tools keep peeling off single functions from conferencing suites, screen sharing drifts from being a product category toward being a commodity feature embedded in phones, browsers, and chat clients — squeezing vendors whose business model assumes per-seat licensing.
- The 'X killer' framing around a $5 entrant signals how conferencing competition shifts from feature parity battles between suites to price-point disruption at the edges of the market.
The trend: Conferencing is fragmenting from expensive all-in-one suites toward cheap, single-purpose tools that strip out one workflow — screen sharing during a call — and sell it at consumer prices.