Vivox has announced it will power WorldFriends Networks’ Phone service, which will allow WFN’s half-million global users to communicate with each other via live text, voice or video chat.
WorldFriends Networks is one of Asia’s largest online dating service providers and operates in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 500k members.
WFN claims to be the industry’s first online dating service to provide its user community with an integrated Web-voice-video-Instant Messenger communications platform.
This is not the case so I called Vivox CEO Rob Seaver to learn more about their product. After all, Userplane has been around a long time, offering chat and video to thousands of websites. Remember Lemontonic, who tried to build a dating service based on Microsoft’s Instant Messenger engine? They’re gone. DateNumber is gone as well. Actually, they have shifted focus on the more lucrative auction market.
The primary selling point to dating sites is Vivox’s ability to provide communication solutions tailored to context of dating site. IM voice video presence, groups increase the stickiness factor of sites, and Vivox let’s the user control the pace of communication. Members can move from mode to mode without giving up too much information about themselves.
Vivox provides a rich instant messaging client that people can use to communicated regardless if they are logged into a particular service or not. I have a problem with the fact that the last thing anyone needs is another IM client. Rob tells me that their service can work with any client, albeit with reduced functionality.
Vivox’s technology will allow users to conveniently communicate with each other via instant messenger programs, regardless of the branded IM service they may currently use. As a result, WFN community members are no longer hindered by disparate IM applications and can interact with each among the most popular IM networks including AOL’s AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ.
Recently, Vivox announced $6 million in venture capital funding from Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital. The Company, which newly launched from Pulver.com, provides online communities with application specific embedded communications services. Vivox will use this capital infusion to support its sales and marketing organization, and drive development of its hosted platform.
Vivox has a lot of experience with VOIP, and claims to have come up with a cost-effective solution that can be tailored to the varying needs of dating sites.
Over the past two years, Vivox has served behind-the-scenes as the industrial-strength platform for FreeWorld Dialup, a Pulver company that provides VoIP service to more than 500,000 subscribers.
Not exactly Skype, but impressive none the less. If they put some of that $6M into marketing I can see their market share growing considerably.
Online dating services will now be able to offer graduated contact services, e.g., allowing for live voice communication between members, without requiring them to expose personal details such as phone numbers. And for the 10+ million online gamers participating in massively multiplayer games, Vivox creates a more vivid game experience by adding user-customized voice services – such as guild or group-based voice chat – that are a fully-integrated and seamless aspect of the game environment.
Push to talk is all the rage right now, analogous to Nextel for websites. Whether online daters warm up to yet another chat client remains to be seen. There was mention of video capability, which could prove interesting.
I think Vivox is smart to go after the massively multiplayer game market (MMO). I’m sure they’ll pick up a few dating site customers, but the MMO market will be much more lucrative.
I get a demo next week and I’ll report back what I find.
Press release.
[tags: world+friends, vivox]
