WebEx has managed to maintain a pretty good lock on the enterprise world with their online video conferencing/meeting service, but there’s one place they’ve always fallen a bit short: small businesses.

The problem? It’s just too dang expensive. Even on the cheapest plan (which supports 1 host with 25 people per meeting), it’s a solid 50 bucks per month. When you’re on a bootstrap budget and every penny counts (and more importantly, when reasonable alternatives can be hacked together on the cheap), 50 bucks might as well be $5000.

Looking to make their first stab into the small business world, WebEx will later today launch WebEx 8, a cheaper monthly service focused directly on companies with smaller teams.

WebEx 8 offers the same functionality as the other plans that WebEx already offers, with one exception: instead of 25 people per meeting, you’re limited to 8.

Beyond that, it’s all pretty much a feature-by-feature match. Namely, you’ll get:

• Unlimited meetings
• Desktop Sharing/File Sharing
• Meeting recording
• Outlook integration

Of course, some of this price shifting can almost certainly be attributed to WebEx feeling a bit of the heat from unlikely foes tiptoeing their way into the arena. With things like Google+’ Hangout feature and Join.me respectively making huge group video chat and desktop sharing accessible to anyone with half a brain, some of WebEx’s key selling points are starting to seem a bit less sound. They’ve still got a few differentiating features (like their rather solid iPhone/iPad apps) to fight back with, but that price had to come down eventually.

The $19 plan should go live later this morning.

Why go through online slides alone when you can do it with other people? If you are one of the 45 million people who go to SlideShare every month to check out slide presentations like this one from Mary Meeker on mobile Internet trends, you are probably going to like Zipcast. Slideshare is launching the new service today with Zipcast buttons on every public slideshow that turns the slides into a Webcast with video, audio and chat.

There are plenty of virtual meeting services on the Web—everything from Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting to Adobe’s Acrobat.com, which have been out for years. But Zipcast is, well, zippier. It doesn’t require a software download or plug-in, and it doesn’t take over your entire screen. Instead, it is just a tab in your browser (thank you, HTML5 Websockets).

Zipcast is also stripped down compared to other existing virtual meeting products. There are the slides, a one-way video stream of the person hosting the meeting, a conference call line for audio, and a text chat window. And if you are board during the presentation, you can skip ahead through the slides on your own. That’s it, and that’s all most people probably need for giving a pitch, presentation, or remote talk.

And to share the slideshow meeting, all you have to do is pass out a regular link—every SlideShare user will get a customized link that looks something like www.slideshare.net/erick/meeting and that can be used over and over again for every meeting that person hosts. Participants can sign in with Facebook and can choose to send their chat comments out to their Facebook streams, along with a link back to the meeting, which is a good way to gather an audience for live events. Zipcast will have its own page with an activity stream showing what meetings are going on right now , along with comments, which could also drive more people into public meetings.

There is no limit to how many people can join a meeting, Meetings can be public or private, but anyone with the link can view the presentation.

If you are a SlideShare Pro member, which starts at $19/month, you can get password protected meetings, along with other bells and whistles. Zipcast will be bundled in with the other SlideShare Pro features such as analytics and removing ads. SlideShare just launched subscriptions a few months ago, and paid subscribers are “doubling every month,” says CEO Rashmi Sinha. She plans on rolling out more premium features for Zipcast such as two-way video and the ability to embed Zipcasts.

With Zipcasts, you can see how SlideShare will start to fold in new products to tackle the enterprise market from the ground-up, using its installed base of loyal SlideShare users to spread the word about new products. Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield recently joined the company as VP of business development to help pursue this strategy.

Central Desktop offers a web-based SaaS collaboration platform that allows business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. Central Desktop is pitched as providing “the richest set-of-tools available for business users with ease-of-use at a price-point, leveling the playing field for small and mid-size companies wishing to do business with enterprise partners and customers.”

The company has over 125,000 users and business teams currently using its tools. Central Desktop said it would use the funding to accelerate R&D, marketing and sales efforts into the SMB market.

Competitors include 37signals, JotSpot, Microsoft, WebEx, Daikana and Huddle.

But while there’s no difference in the cost, Rondee’s Evite-like web interface makes it the simplest conference calling system I’ve seen. The service lets you schedule calls with several little features that make it easier to use.

All you need to do is pick a date, fill out an invitation, and Rondee will email the participants with the number and a pin. Like Evite you can pick a theme, participants can invite others, times can be readjusted by participants, and the service sends an email reminder of the meeting. You can also add meetings to your Outlook calendar in one click.

Participants call into 619-2-RONDEE (619-276-6333) and enter a PIN number (You can pick your own). If you give Rondee your phone number, it automatically logs you in to your conference when you call. Rondee remembers your previous calls and contacts for future reference. Soon they’ll be adding free call recording.

Rondee has plans for putting premium services on top of the platform, such as transcription or WebEx-like screen casting. Competition is fierce, though, with a lot of startups looking to make Cisco regret that $3.2 billion they paid for WebEx. DimDim, Zoho, SightSpeed, Vyew, and Google (acquired Marratech) are all nibbling at their customer base.

Webex is still ubiquitous (I am asked to view a WebEx presentation almost daily), but it’s expensive and bulky. And if you aren’t on a newish Windows PC, there’s a good chance it isn’t going to work properly. WebEx is exactly the kind of a company that is being disrupted by new web startups, who are creating cheaper and better alternatives to older web applications.

A bunch of startups have launched over the last year to provide cheaper and more flexible alternatives, including open source “clones” of WebEx functionality. Teamslide, DimDim (open source), 1videoconference (open source), Vyew, Live Meeting and SlideShare are all competitive with WebEx in one way or another, and all are better at cross platform collaboration.

The web conferencing space is growing increasingly competitive and the high-end WebEX has got to continue to innovate to compete with the much less expensive GoToMeeting, Adobe’s Breeze and a number of free web conferencing solutions like DimDim that are coming to market.

Unlike Salesforce’s AppExchange, which offers API access to a large number of developers and on occasion leads to an acquisition (see the Kieden deal) WebEX appears to be opening a much more limited platform and hiring select outside partners to integrate their services.

SoonR is a company we’ve profiled here before, it allows users to search and access files on their desktop computers from more than 450 types of mobile phones. This isn’t the first application the company has moved to offer via mobile devices, they offer Skype by phone. SoonR has been making a lot of big announcements lately; last week they released what they call the first mobile AJAX service in conjunction with Opera Mobile and the closed a Series A round of funding with $6 million lead by Clearstone Venture Partners and Intel Capital.