How ContactAtOnce! Complements Public IM/VoIP Clients

If you’ve used the consumer-facing ContactAtOnce! IM window you’ve seen the familiar icons of the 5 most popular IM/VoIP providers (Skype, Yahoo IM, AOL AIM, MSN Messenger, Google Talk)… you may have wondered what they do and why they’re there. And you’re not the only one because my colleagues and I get that question quite a bit. So…here’s an explanation…

First, to be clear, ContactAtOnce! does NOT compete with any of the public IM/VoIP providers. Collectively they have hundreds of millions of happy Web-savvy users (I happen to be a registered user of all 5!) and each is backed by an industry giant. Why are the users happy? Because they’ve experienced the benefits of “presence”, “instant communications”, and “free calls” - all of which serve to simplify their life.

From our POV, the last thing the world needs is another public IM/VoIP provider. Our vision is to help the millions of happy IM/VoIP users get even more value from their favorite IM/VoIP service. We accomplish that by blending together a number of underlying commodity technologies – IM, VoIP, live Video, Click-to-call, email, and call tracking – and wrapping them with a proprietary application built to meet the requirements of not only the consumer but also advertisers and the publishers of the websites on which consumers find said advertisers (e.g. directories, search engines, classifieds, etc.).

You can read more about the proprietary application and the requirements of advertisers and publishers in the solution and product sections of our website. But back to the consumer side of things…

The first experience a consumer will have with ContactAtOnce! will be via our consumer-facing, browswer-based, AJAX-powered IM client. Why, you ask, create a browser-based IM client instead of just picking one of the many available clients? In a word, REACH. Advertisers value reach. They don’t want to limit their audience. Had we picked an existing IM client – be it Skype, Yahoo, AOL, or any other – we would have limited the advertisers’ reach because not even the most popular IM/VoIP client has a fraction of the install base that browsers do. So…we built the browser-based client to maximize the audience reach.

As mentioned earlier, our vision is to help the millions of happy IM/VoIP users get even more value from their favorite IM/VoIP service. When those users first encounter our browser-based client while contacting a specific advertiser/merchant (e.g. Acme Corporation) from an ad or listing on a publisher’s site, they will be presented with buttons which enable them to add ‘Acme Corporation’ to the buddy list of their favorite IM/VoIP client. And, in so doing, they can then use their favorite IM/VoIP client to contact ‘Acme Corporation’ in the future.

So there you have it…that’s our vision.

If you try this feature out today you’ll notice that it is only partially implemented – we still have work to do. But now you at least know where we’re headed. Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!