Instant Messaging Joins the Firm (continued 2/2)

Although it is not (yet) legal to place buy and sell orders over instant messaging, Communicator's software lets financial professionals discuss sensitive information between two or more banking institutions or even one-to-one with individual clients. The company's Hub Instant Messaging protocol—based on an agreed set of rules put forth by the financial institutions it serves—creates what Mr Schlinkert equates to a “gated community”. First, there are no aliases, such as Phillygal29 or Jambo NYC: everybody must log on with real names and passwords that have been assigned by an authorised system administrator.

Second, users can access the network only from designated computers. So, when a note pops open on a person's computer screen from Henry Paulson at Goldman Sachs, there is no doubting the fact that the investment bank's chief executive is on the other end waiting for a reply. And third, all dialogue is recorded and contained within corporate firewalls that encompass several institutions. Thus, if a broker at Morgan Stanley criticises a cohort at Lehman Brothers, their exchange cannot be seen by anybody outside the fixed user group but is still kept on record.

Developers at FaceTime Communications in Foster City, California, are out to carve a different niche in the corporate instant-messaging market. Rather than forcing employees to scrap their favourite messaging software from Yahoo!, AOL, or Microsoft, FaceTime presents an “overlay application” that acts as an intermediary, passing messages between any number of proprietary networks. It does not matter which type of messaging application is being used, because FaceTime's software is “network independent”, explains Mehdi Maghsoodnia, who founded the company in 1997.

Mr Maghsoodnia compares instant messaging with the telephone: it should not matter what type of device one is calling from, but rather whether a caller is who he or she claims to be, and if the conversation is secure from eavesdroppers. Besides, he adds, with so many competing instant-messaging protocols now in use, it would be fruitless to attempt to unify all the rival networks. Ultimately, FaceTime enhances rather than displaces the dominant instant-messaging software. This is helping Mr Maghsoodnia to forge valuable partnerships with Microsoft and AOL, which will eventually add data-encryption, content- security and trusted-partner features to their own messaging software.

If ordinary two-dimensional text messaging in real-time is not enough, then Cincro Communications, a company based in Falls Church, Virginia, that began with a contract from DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), might be the answer. In 1996, John Ko, Cincro's founder and chief executive, was designing “fly-through” visualisation software for the Pentagon. His program let spooks convert digital satellite images into 3-D imagery and then share snapshots in real-time with operatives around the world. He realised, however, that the technology—which military reconnaissance experts are using in the hunt for Osama bin Laden—could be used collaboratively to view images, documents and even audio or video files over the Internet.

Today, his idea is the force driving Cincro's six-member programming team. With $500,000 of their own capital and $1.5m in government research grants and licensing fees, Mr Ko and his crew are developing Zanvas (zoomable canvas), an instant-messaging program that uses text as just one aspect of the real- time experience. An architect vetting last-minute changes can call up blueprints into the Zanvas window and visibly underscore various components, while the client scrutinises the revisions from a personal computer located elsewhere on the Internet. Thanks to its Java-based software, only the sender need activate Zanvas; recipients can join in using a standard web browser.

Mr Ko thinks that ISPs, such as Earthlink or AOL, represent a handy market for his fledgling firm. The leading ISPs have tens of millions of instant-messaging devotees. Many, he hopes, will pay a little extra to add Zanvas's virtual whiteboard and collaborative 3-D workspace to their instant-messaging software. One problem is that slick colour images and CD-quality sound on the company's instant-messaging service could provoke even steamier gossip around the coffee pot.