Instant CollaborationInstant Collaboration

Applied Messaging Corp., a startup looking to tap the growth of instant messaging and Web conferencing for team collaboration, stepped into the light for the first time Wednesday at Technologic Partners' Enterprise Outlook conference in Palo Alto, Calif.

Led by former executives from IBM Lotus Software, Sybase, SCO Group, and MathSoft Engineering and Education, Applied Messaging earlier this week launched a beta version of its MeetASAP application, which is designed to let groups of IM users participate in real-time rich-media collaboration sessions.

It works like this: An IM user who wants to have a coordinated meeting with other IM users sets up an invitation using a unified buddy list that MeetASAP creates from whatever IM services the meeting requestor uses. The MeetASAP software then sends out the invitations, but only once all the guests are detected online. The invitations are delivered via IM, and they include a link directly to a real-time collaborative workspace, with no client-side software required for participants.

Once in the collaboration space, participants have access to some of the usual collaborative tools, such as text chat and application sharing, but the focus is on video conferencing. Once a collaborative session begins, MeetASAP detects the various types of video equipment used by the participants and immediately configures it all to run in the Flash format.

CEO Charles Digate says the goal is to make collaboration more timely. Getting at undocumented corporate knowledge that's still in employees' heads is a huge challenge, and real-time collaboration tools can aid in the sharing of such knowledge. The problem is being able to get all the people needed for an ad hoc collaboration session online at the same time. "Finding those moments can be very difficult," Digate says.

Applied, which expects to begin delivering MeetASAP as a hosted service in the fall and as an enterprise software product soon after that, raised $7.4 million in first-round venture funding. It plans to raise an additional $10 million around the time of its product launch.