Convoq becomes Zingdom Communications

Convoq has decided to pursue different business ventures and will discontinue its web collaboration focus. Below is from Christopher Herot's personal blog. Christopher is co-founder of Convoq.

Convoq, Inc., the company Chuck Digate and I co-founded in 2002, has been renamed Zingdom Communications, Inc. to reflect our new direction and new product line. Chuck has moved on, but over the past five years the company built an extremely talented and cohesive engineering team that pioneered the use of Flash and AJAX in real-time audio, video, instant messaging, and other forms of real-time communications. Our first product, ASAP, put these resources to use in the context of corporate collaboration. Now we are organizing the company around a new opportunity in more personal, one-on-one communication, concentrating initially on the telephone.

Voice communications have evolved considerably since the days of The Phone Company. AT&T has been broken up and reassembled and the locus of innovation has shifted away from the traditional providers of local loops to a new wave of companies who offer services that offer new ways of connecting people to each other. In this new paradigm, connectivity itself has become a commodity, although voice can be transported over the Internet or a wireless connection in addition to the traditional copper, and it is supplemented by instant messaging, SMS, email, and video. The voice on the other end of the line can be a person or a robot. In this world, the issues become finding the right person, allowing that person to control his or her privacy, and providing context that helps a person decide whether to answer the phone and be prepared when the conversation begins.

With all the progress that has been made, real-time communications applications are still a challenge to construct and deploy. Unlike the typical web application which navigates from page to page, a communications app must deal with events at both ends of the conversation. It's not enough to wait for a screen refresh to reflect that the party at the other end has closed the connection, but building a fully interactive AJAX application is a lot of work. Our intention at Zingdom is to provide real-time voice communication through a compelling user experience, and to enable partners to provide that same level of experience in their applications without needing to become experts in either telephony or AJAX. I'll say more about where we came from and were we are going in future installments.

In the meantime, feel free to check out zing.dm.
http://herot.typepad.com/cherot/2007/08/convoq-becomes-.html