Toktumi and Adify...
Toktumi and Adify are two companies that are worth singling out from this week's announcements at Demo 08 and elsewhere...
Toktumi is an interesting telephony startup. I spoke with Peter Sisson, the founder of Toktumi. He described the service as the "Skype of the hosted PBX market." It is focused on the very small business market, 1 to 9 employees is the sweet spot.
Getting started is easy, Toktumi provides a free phone number and you can use it with the Toktumi client software (PC only Mac is coming) to receive calls and call other Toktumi users through a regular phone. Additional lines are $12.95 per month plus 2 cents per minute and it can be set up in less than five minutes.
It has deals in the works with office retail stores so that you can walk in and buy a Toktumi phone and service. Calls go through its own data center so that you never miss a call. And developers can use the Toktumi API to develop telephony applications for small businesses such as dental or medical offices.
Unlike consumer VoIP offerings, Toktumi provides the advanced features businesses require, and a few they've never seen before. Auto-attendant, call transfer, visual voicemail, instant conferencing, and call waiting are all standard. Toktumi's unique search dialing capability allows calls to be placed by typing a name or keyword of the person or product desired. Mobility is automatic: calls ring wherever you login: at home, the office, a hotel, or your cell phone if you are on the road.
More info on Toktumi
Adify enables publishers to create advertising networks and then manage their advertising inventory in real-time and sell a wide variety of online ads according to geography and time of day. It provides clients with a dashboard that shows the performance of individual sites and individual advertising campaigns.
The company has been winning some large publishers such as Martha Stewart Publishing. But it can also be used by smaller publishers (Silicon Valley Watcher ad network coming soon!). Adify takes a cut of 12 per cent to 20 per cent of the advertising revenue.
Also, the company's platform has been certified by the IAB, which makes sure that its metrics accurately count advertising impressions. Only 12 ad serving technologies have this certification, says Joelle Gropper Kaufman, VP of marketing.
However, it doesn't work with RSS only with display ads on a web page. An interesting beta project is the development of widgets for distributing content between web sites within a network to help drive traffic.
Adify seems to be very well positioned for becoming the standard interface for the management of advertising networks.
More info on Adify.
