Everyone’s favorite videoconferencing software – because it used to be free – is aiming to be one of the big boys with a stream of new features. White Pine Software Inc, the commercial home of the Internet-based CU-SeeMe videoconferencing software, has licensed DataBeam Corp’s FarSite document conferencing application for incorporation into White Pine’s Enhanced CU-SeeMe software. In addition, White Pine licensed DataBeam’s new neT.120 Conference Server to be integrated with the White Pine Reflector videoconferencing server. The addition of these two new technologies will provide Enhanced CU-SeeMe with complete, standards based data collaboration, it said. On the client side, the Enhanced CU-SeeMe WhitePineBoard will enable interoperability with other T.120 applications and will support multi point document sharing over the Internet and Intranets. On the server side, the White Pine Reflector will incorporate DataBeam’s neT.120 Conference Server, which White Pine said is the first software-only Internet server based on the T.120 standard for Multipoint communications. The T.120 Conference Server lets users on any system equipped with an HTML browser participate in real- time, multi point data conferences on the Internet. White Pine said there have been 1.5m downloads of trials of the CU-SeeMe software since this June and that it is selling between 2,000 and 2,500 copies a week through retail channels worldwide. Version 3.0 of CU-SeeMe is due out in March next year. In April, White Pine announced it would launch a Microsoft ActiveX-compliant version of CU-SeeMe, something which is expected to be out towards the end of next year.
