Voxeo Talks

Today we are very pleased to announce the acquisition of IMified, the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform. What does IMified do? In a very simple way, you can think of IMified as:

IVR for IM

Or as VoIP blogger Dave Michels said to me yesterday, it’s “IVR without the V”.

Think for a moment about the kinds of self-service applications that you might write for voice using a platform such as our Prophecy platform (in hosting or premise) or our Tropo platform. What kind of apps might you write? Perhaps apps like these:

• Auto attendants
• Order status
• Package tracking
• Information retrieval
• Emergency notifications
• Virtual agents
• Instant CRM
• Surveys
• Data entry
• Interactive games
• Identity verification

All of those are possible today with voice and we’ve had over 37,000 developers write apps like those on our platform. But today in 2009:

Why should conversations be limited to voice?

The reality is that today people are engaging in real-time communication not only using voice… but also IM, SMS, web chat, Twitter and so many other means. Now, if you provide self-service applications for your company or organization, why shouldn’t you be able to offer those applications in other channels? Without having to have completely separate development groups and efforts?

We think you should be able to offer your application to your users or customers using whatever channel they like… and you should only have to develop the application once. We call this:

Unified Self-Service

And you’ll be hearing a lot more from us on this theme over the weeks and months ahead. We began speaking about this last year with our acquisition of VoiceObjects which lets you develop your applications once and deploy them out to users on the phone, mobile web, SMS, IM and USSD. Today’s acquisition of IMified further adds to that picture by adding to our portfolio a hosted platform for developing IM-based self-service applications.

IMified provides a simple, scalable web-based platform for creating and hosting interactive instant messaging (IM) agents (Bots) that can interact with all the public IM networks, including AIM (AOL), GTalk (Google), MSN (Microsoft) and Yahoo. Building, managing, and scaling an interactive IM application or “bot” has traditionally been a complex and frustrating task. IMified’s platform removes the complexity and provides a simple yet powerful solution.

But rather than read about it, why not try it out? Here are three examples of IM bots that you can try right now. Simply add one or more of these as a contact using the screen name for whichever IM service your prefer:

Weather Bot
Enter your US zip code and get your local weather.
Jabber/Gtalk: myweather@bot.im
AIM: imifiedweather
Yahoo: imifiedweather

Local Search
Find local restaurants in your area
Jabber/Gtalk: local@bot.im
AIM: findlocal
MSN: findlocal@live.com

URL Shortener
Enter a url and have it shortened using the bit.ly api
Jabber/Gtalk: shorter@bot.im
AIM: shorterurl
MSN: shorterurl@live.com

These are obviously quick examples, but imagine what you could do with connecting this type of service to, say, your order tracking system? And rather than “imagining” it, why not head over to IMified.com, sign up for a free developer account and start building that application?

If you would like more info about the IMified acquisition, we’ve put a FAQ online. I also interviewed IMified co-founder Adam Kalsey here:

We’re excited to welcome the IMified team to Voxeo – and we’re looking forward to continuing to offer even more capabilities to our customers to develop and deploy self-service applications across many different channels!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, im, ivr, self-service, unified self-service

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In preparing for our announcement of our acquisition of IMified, we found that we were frequently asked certain questions about the acquisition – so naturally we created a FAQ. We hope these Q & A answer many of your questions and if not, please do leave us additional questions as comments.

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Q: What does the IMified service do? What do people do with it?

A: IMified offers a simple, web-based platform that enables companies and developers to write an instant messaging (IM) application once and connect it to all the public IM networks, including AIM (AOL), GTalk (Google), MSN (Microsoft) and Yahoo.

IMified provides a scalable platform for creating and hosting interactive instant messaging (IM) agents (Bots). Building, managing, and scaling an interactive IM application or “bot” has traditionally been a complex and frustrating task. IMified’s solution removes the complexity and provides a simple solution for building and deploying IM applications on multiple public IM networks using one API.

Examples of applications using IMified’s platform include:

• Information retrieval
• Emergency notifications
• Order status
• Package tracking
• Virtual agents
• Auto attendants
• Instant CRM
• Surveys
• Data entry
• Interactive games
• Identity verification

Here is how it can work (and this is a working example):

• In your Jabber/GTalk IM client, you add “myweather@bot.im” to your list of contacts.
• When you want to know the weather, you simply send an IM message to “myweather@bot.im” with your US ZIP code.
• The IM message you receive back would have the most recent weather forecast for that ZIP code.

The IM interaction could involve a simple exchange of information or could involve many different steps.

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Q: Why did Voxeo acquire IMified?

A: In order to continue providing our customers with the best platform on which to develop Unified Communications and Unified Self-Service applications, we are always looking for ways to extend the capabilities of that platform.

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Q: How will IMified integrate with Voxeo’s existing products?

A: It’s too early to speak about precise integration plans, but you could obviously see some expanded IM capabilities added to our platform.

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Q: What is that status of the IMified employees?

A: The IMified employees are all now members of the Voxeo R&D organization, reporting in to Wei Chen.

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Q: Who are some of IMified’s customers?

A: As the IMified service is currently in Beta, the service has been freely available to developers and so far over 7,500 developers have signed up. We can’t disclose company names, but we can say that companies using the IMified platform include a large auction website, a major weather website, a major discount travel website, and many more…

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Q: What will happen with the existing IMified site and service?

A: No changes will be made at this time. Existing customers will still be able to use their IMified applications with no interruption to service.

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Q: Can developers still sign up?

A: Sure, just go to http://www.imified.com/ to get started. Developer accounts are free.

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Q: How are IMified applications developed?

A: Developing an IMified application is quick and easy. First, create a web application that will interact with IMified’s service via HTTP. Use whatever programming language you like and the IMified web services API as documented here: http://new.imified.com/developers/api Then place your application on a publicly accessible web server.

Next, login to your IMified.com account, add a new application to your account and choose a name for the bot. Configure that application to point to the URL of your application. By default your bot will be accessible to Jabber/GTalk users. You can go into the “Network Settings” for the bot to add connections to the AIM, MSN or Yahoo IM networks.

That’s it! Now users simply add the bot as a contact in their IM service and start interacting.

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Q: When was the company founded? When did it launch the IMified developer platform?

A: The company was founded Feb 2007. The developer platform was launched in Oct 2007.

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Q: What were the terms of the deal?

A: C’mon… you know we won’t answer that! As a private company acquiring another private company, we don’t disclose terms of the acquisition. We can say that the amount involved was greater than $1 and less than $1 billion.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, im, imified, acquisitions

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