Last month, video-conferencing service ViVu raised $3million in a Series A funding round, and some are suggesting that their interactive video-as-a-service (iVaaS) could be the WebEx and GoToMeeting (Citrix) killer.

With Vivu’s service, users can create, publish, and manage video-conferencing events from the site, and access meetings from computers or even smartphones. Their software is Flash and Java based, so it runs in most major browsers and there is no legacy hardware or software involved, which is an added convenience, and currently the service is available for $49.95 per month for unlimited meetings. Users can make appointments for video meetings, and these arrangements can then be integrated into Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. There is also Twitter integration and an instant messaging platform.

Example of ViVu's Conference Interface

ViVu’s interface is very unique, and resembles a physical conference set up—with visible thumbnails for every participant—and the service accommodates up to several thousand participants. ViVu has provisions for rich media-sharing, and there are screen-sharing capabilities as well.

Editor of The Webinar Blog, Ken Molay, reviewed ViVu’s service last month and was overall pretty pleased—he did note some errors, but attributed them to the service’s relative immaturity and surmised that once ViVu fixes these kinks, it will be a serious contender in the video conferencing market. Of course, ViVu’s aforementioned venture funding indicates Molay isn’t the only one betting on their platform, and it will be interesting to see how web conferencing heavyweights like WebEx (Cisco) and Citrix respond to “iVaaS.”