Voxeo Acquires Multimedia Collaboration Solutions Provider Clackpoint

Voxeo has acquired ClackPoint, the a real-time multimedia collaboration platform provider that is used by more than 100,000 people each month for online voice, video and text virtual conference rooms to connect and collaborate with colleagues, friends, and social networks.

Attendees can access ClackPoint’s virtual conference rooms using any telephone, Session Initiation Protocol-enabled Voice over Internet Protocol device and service, Skype phone and instant messaging clients, and ClackPoint's own Flash-based phone and IM Web client. Additionally, ClackPoint's application programming interface lets developers and enterprises add these capabilities to new and existing applications. ClackPoint also provides prebuilt widgets that work with existing applications and platforms, including Google Wave. 

“Until recently, online real-time collaboration was accessible only at large companies and via stand-alone applications,” Jonathan Taylor, Voxeo's CEO, said in a statement. “ClackPoint makes it easy for anyone to start a free, online, collaborative meeting, using any Web site, application, platform, or service. The ClackPoint team and their technology are an ideal match with our vision of Unlocked Communications.” 

ClackPoint is Voxeo’s eighth acquisition in the last two years. The acquisition builds on Voxeo’s strategy to enable Unified Self-Service and Unified Communications applications across voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM and the mobile Web, and aligns with Voxeo's May 2009 acquisition of IMified, the world's largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform.

As part of the acquisition, Voxeo also gained ClackPoint's "Karaka" Skype-to-XMPP gateway that connects Skype and XMPP/Jabber clouds. This allows companies to bridge presence and instant messaging between Skype and XMPP (ex. Jabber, Google Talk), including full support for group multi-chats.