The latest from TechCrunch
- IMHO, Imo Is A Pretty Great Way To Chat. Today Brings A New Design And An Exit From Alpha
- WebMynd Receives 100K TechFellow Award To Focus On Addon Developer Platform
| IMHO, Imo Is A Pretty Great Way To Chat. Today Brings A New Design And An Exit From Alpha | Top |
| It was almost exactly two years ago that my colleague Robin Wauters first wrote about a service called Imo with the title: IMO.IM Is The Best IM Web Service You’ve Never Heard Of . I’ll be honest, I didn’t listen to him at the time (though, to be fair, I didn’t even work at TechCrunch yet). He followed up a few months later when the service added Facebook chat support. But since then, they sort of dropped off our radar. So it’s time tonight to give them some more love, because the service really is pretty great — and after three years in alpha, they’re finally dropping that label. The idea is super simple: Imo is an IM client that allows you to sign in to many different types of IM accounts at once, all managed through their service. Obviously, there are many services like this out there. But the key to Imo is that it’s fast and easy to use. I mean really easy. All you have to do is enter your user name and passwords for the different services and you’re off and running in a way that’s very seamless. And they’ve just launched a complete redesign of their web experience. It actually makes the service even easier to use. Now Imo on the web sort of looks like a blank canvas just waiting to be filled up with chats. Chats that you can drag and drop to position anywhere in your window on the browser. And like t he new version of Gmail launched today, Imo.im can send you desktop notifications for new chats. And like their mobile clients, you can now send instant voice messages of up to 30 seconds in length as well (another feature that has fascinated me recently ). That’s the other key to Imo.im: their great mobile clients. Whether you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, Imo offers a nice, simple way to connect with all your various chat services. Below, find a demo of the iPad app in action. While it may seem a bit odd that the service has been up and running for three years and is just now dropping the alpha label, remember that one of the Imo co-founders is Georges Harik , one of the first 10 employees at Google. He’s learned well. | |
| WebMynd Receives 100K TechFellow Award To Focus On Addon Developer Platform | Top |
| YCombinator -funded WebMynd , which launched in 2008 and was most recently responsible for the browser addon Search Smarter , is today announcing that it is the recipient of one of our heralded 2010 TechFellows Awards , from none other than Paul Graham himself. WebMynd will be using the 100K in financing to concentrate on its new product, the WebMynd Addon Developer Platform. As the Search Smarter browser plugin was pretty popular, with over a million installs across Internet Explorer and Firefox, co-founder Amir Nathoo told us that the experience of building his own app led to WebMynd’s current incarnation (nay pivot ). Nathoo realized there was customer demand for a platform that would allow developers to code apps once and have them work on IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome right away. Nathoo tells us that things were much simpler for app developers a couple of years ago when all people had to worry about was Firefox and the iPhone. Now there are multiple browsers and mobile platforms and a developer needs to tweak his code multiple times in order to port an app, unless he or she has a platform like WebMynd’s or Particle’s to do the dirty work. Nathoo says “The issue for app developers now is how am I going to support all these platforms, and that’s a real pain …Our mission is to get all the great apps that developers are making to be available everywhere.” While WebMynd is entering the space with a focus on amazing browser addons like this one , Nathoo’s future plans include adding mobile app support for iOS, Android and Chrome OS. He plans on monetizing with a freemium business model, charging a subscription rate per platform and allowing developers to use the Chrome extension framework for free to develop, and then charging them to port. WebMynd is offering the first 20 TechCrunch readers who sign up their first port for free. You can check out the service here. CrunchBase Information WebMynd Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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