By Nick Patience
Tribal Voice Inc’s deal with AT&T WorldNet announced yesterday is the first major ISP win for the four year-old company started by John McAfee with the PowWow messaging, chat and community hosting software. VP marketing Richard Dym says other deals with ISPs are also expected next quarter. The version AT&T has licensed is the current 3.7 cut, but Tribal Voice plans to work closely with AT&T on other product areas, including telephony in all its forms, says Dym. The next version will feature a component architecture, as the company promised back in June (06/22/98). Back then CEO Joseph Esposito acknowledged that the 3.5 Mb client download was a barrier to its distribution. The new cut will come some time next year, though Dym would not be specific about delivery dates or the version number, hinting that the company would adopt the current vogue for leaping ahead two or three versions, which is a good way of indicating maturity. But Dym says whatever the underlying architecture and new look and feel, the next version will be backwards compatible. The PowWow instant messaging technology is free, but the Scotts Valley, California company charges $50 per year to its peer-to- peer community server, devised by McAfee. It is aimed at affinity groups or families distributed over a wide area. PowWow currently has more than three million users hosted in more than 10,000 communities, although they don’t all pay the fees due to special holiday promotions that Dym says have boosted the number of communities considerably. Neither company would give any details about the financial arrangement, but it would appear that Tribal Voce is granting AT&T a free license for the first year to the community server as AT&T is waiving the $50 for the first year. Tribal Voice was talking about an intranet version of its registration server product – the part that sets up the groups of users before leaving them to their peer-to-peer community activities. At present it runs only on Microsoft SQL Server, and the new version, which was due to arrive in the fall, was to support Microsoft Access as well. But the company has had a re- think, and while Dym says the product is still in development, we should be expecting something that supports the more typical intranet databases, such as Oracle. With AOL’s 14 million users, and its ICQ instant messaging claiming another 21 million, Tribal Voice admits it has a long way to go, even with AT&T WorldNet as its partner. But, says Dym, we’re not ready to allow AOL to own the internet’s phone book.
