a canadian startup

First Demo of imWell — Well.ca’s LiveChat Program and Launch of labs.well.ca

Last night, to a packed audience of Toronto’s Geek community at DemoCamp Toronto 18, Well.ca demoed the very first look at imWell — our very own, homemade LiveChat program. At the same time, we publicly announced our Labs (aka R&D) site called Well.ca Labs — the website is at http://labs.well.ca

(images from tpurves)

imWell was developed by William O’Connor, our newest software developer, based on an initial (and bad) prototype that I made some months ago. William chucked my prototype in the garbage, rewriting the backend server using Comet technology. Though our whole team contributed feedback, almost all the code is by one student and who continues to impress me — Great job, William

I want to tell you why I am excited about imWell — Well.ca’s LiveChat.

There are a lot of LiveChat programs out there, and we’re aware of that. None of them were good enough for what we wanted, and I have a feeling others are having the same problem. The keys to imWell’s awesomeness, in my opinion are the following points:

• it does all the cool stuff that good LiveChat would: dispatching to an available agent, etc. It does this simply, in an intuitive way.
• it’ll work with any Jabber client, and any Jabber server. (We’re hosting the server for people that don’t want to set one up.) This means it’ll work on any platform, and right along your favourite chat program. We only use XMPP standards.
• the client persists across pages, maintaining the history, embedded in your site (no popups, no flash). And you can style it however you want
• it’s looks nice and works well. when you connect, it shows a pic of the person you’re chatting with, and when you transfer to another agent, it will show that agent’s vCard
• it can be embedded into any site with a single line of HTML — no PHP or dynamic code required
• it’s free: we’re  releasing a version that anyone can put on their site and we’ll host it

You can learn more about it, and see screenshots at the labs.well.ca site.

The beauty to imWell is not in what it does: this is not a new problem. No, the beauty to imWell is that we solve the problem in an elegant, simple way. Almost too elegant. And the best way to show that to you is by getting it in your hands. Soon. Register for our beta here.

Thank you to the DemoCamp organizers.