By Nick Patience
With instant messaging becoming almost as important a communications tool as email it seems, Tribal Voice Inc will today announce upgrades to its IM offering while also launching a version of the tool for internal corporate networks.
Tribal Voice’s PowWow tool is used as the basis for AT&T Corp’s IM Here instant messaging product it offers as part of its WorldNet ISP service and while it has helped boost the number of PowWow users quickly to about five million, it has also landed Tribal Voice with a lawsuit from IM leader America Online Inc, which last year sued both companies for using the term ‘buddy list’ and originally instant messaging, but the latter was dropped from the suits (5/25/99).
However, the name of the game now, it seems, is not confrontation, but interoperability, of a kind. Last week Microsoft Corp announced its intention to make its MSN Messenger Service interoperable, to some extent at least, with AOL IM. However, AOL didn’t really appreciate this outreach gesture and accused Redmond of basically hacking its code. Microsoft, like some of the other IM companies, simply used AOL’s published APIs and SDK to achieve the integration, but it seems AOL has not removed them from its web site.
The SDK was meant for developers to produce additional services to run on top of AOL IM, but instead they have used it to mimic the IM tool and then build additional services on top. Microsoft is also hedging its bets by working with other vendors through the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) work. A draft proposal is expected from the working group in the fall.
Now Tribal Voice is following Microsoft’s example. Richard Dym, Tribal Voice’s VP marketing says the new PowWow, version 4.0 will interoperate with AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo’s pager service, although the last of those still needs some work, apparently. However, users will need to download the PowWow client if they are to use features that he says are exclusive to it, such as IP telephony, achieved through an agreement with Vocaltec Communications Ltd and text-to-speech conversion. It will shortly support the H.323 protocol. Tribal Voice is also working with the other vendors through the IETF, but mostly by piggybacking on AT&T’s work.
The new PowWow client has been completely rewritten from the previous one using object technology, says Dym and the tool is split into its various applications, such as buddy lists, community, chat and personal profiles. This enables the applications to be launched from the desktop, from the Microsoft Office tool bar or from the system tray. The look and feel has been changed from a fairly clunky look to the de facto standard buddy list pioneered by AOL. Version 4.0 is currently in public beta and will ship as a free download at the start of September.
There’s a lot of potential for advertising and Tribal Voice intends to introduce ads on the tool later this year. The beauty of this model of course, is that they can be targeted fairly accurately, the advertiser will know who the user is and when they are online. At present, PowWow users are spending an average of 49 minutes online per session a total of about 750,000 session hours per week.
Dym admits that at present Tribal Voice collects virtually no personal information for its users but that would have to change if advertisers are to buy into the concept of ads on IM tools. At present Tribal Voice makes its money from its communities, who buy a PowWow server for about $50 and create their own communities, however, that is not the business strategy going forward.
The new strategy is based around the new PowWow for Private Networks (PWPN) as well as the new free client. The PWPN client is what Tribal Voice calls dual mode because it can use both the private server on the corporate intranet and the public ones at Tribal Voice’s data center, depending on the nature of the corporate firewall.
The PowWow User Registration Query Server (PURQS) is used to manage IP registrations, buddy lists and the online presence centrally. The PWPN shares the variety of messaging applications available with the new 4.0 version, including instant text and voice messages, real-time peer to peer text chat, one-to-one voice chat, file transfer and white boarding. The PURQS server sits on top of Microsoft’s SQL database and the whole thing runs on Windows NT and the client on Windows 9x. The main competition that Tribal Voice faces in this space, says Dym, is from Lotus Development Corp’s Sametime corporate application. But he points out that Sametime does not support telephony or moderated communities. PWPN costs $4,000 for the PURQS server and 25 dual mode clients, with maintenance fees on top. Additional clients range from $19 each for up to 50 through to $9 each for 10,000.
