(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The opening session in the main forum on Thursday was delivered by Bhavin Turakhia of Reseller Club.
He dispensed with the not-a-sales-pitch pretense and straight-up pitched a product, but it was a fairly interesting offer, judging by the questions that followed the pitch.
While Directi offers all kinds of services for hosting providers, he dove right into describing a new offering from the company, called Chat.pw for domains, an instant messaging platform built from the ground up for hosting providers and their customers.
He says the big social media products are considered by many to be the technologies that drive the web. Hosting companies are obviously a huge contributor to what’s going on online, but they’re not really recognized for that.
Chat.pw, says Turakhia, is a chat platform for hosting providers to supply to their customers.
For customers, it’s a productivity tool. It lets them do all the typical IM functions within their organization, and also bring users of other popular IM tools into their group chats. It also features webmail integration, and apps for iPhone and Android, with a blackberry one on the way.
It also has spots where you can include advertising for your own services. And there are opportunities to provide contextual ads within chat, telling users, for instance, that domains related to what they’re talking about. It supports ad tags from Google and Yahoo, but those tags can be replaced by your own tags.
One of the big benefits of the chat platform, he says, is that it puts your brand in front of customers for much more of their regular experience, as opposed to the very occasional encounter an admin would have with their control panel.
As it is built for hosting providers, it is equipped with APIs for adding users, as well as cPanel and Plesk integration.
The program is intended to be free, and provided to customers for free, with revenue generated from advertising a host’s own products (in a revenue-share with Directi) as well as an ad-free premium version with a larger set of features.
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