Edoardo Tosetti and Alessandro Giuliano realized the barriers in adopting unified communication tools for small and medium-sized businesses during their first startup venture, which developed fiber-optic networks for such ventures in a northern Italian city. Poip.me started as an idea for an easy to use, always available communication tool for small-medium enterprises, which incorporates enterprise-level security. Edoardo and Alessandro constituted a team, which was quickly dismantled and reconstituted with Michele Rosso as the product’s designer, who studied the architecture of complex user interfaces in detail during the product’s development, and Alberto Villa, a FreeBSD developer who fully embraced their concept. Poip.me was selected among the five best ideas when they applied to startup incubator PoliHub’s Swich2Product in November 2013, and was later granted a monthly credit of $10,000 for IBM’s SoftLayer – that company’s cloud infrastructure offering – for a period of one year.
Poip.me is currently developing an SaaS solution which allows SMEs have their own private company workspace to organize video meetings, communicate via instant messaging, share files, and make calls to teammates. Essentially, the vision is to create a tool which is easy to use like Skype, but with enhanced security features as required by businesses. Poip.me works through your browser without any need for on-site installation, thus making it easy to use as well as eliminating the need to install updates. Everything is also encrypted, so there are fewer concerns about security. Currently, the market is split into two macro categories – the first being B2C solutions such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Hangouts, which are easy to use and cheap, but lack security and have limited features for business usage; while the second category is constituted of B2B solutions like those provided by large companies such as Cisco, Avaya, and Polycom, all of which provide excellent security features, but with a very high cost and complex setup. Poip.me seeks to bridge this gap, providing a secure service like large companies do, but which is user-friendly and inexpensive like Skype.
Poip.me directly competes with comparable services such as Sqwiggle, Zoom, and Circuit, and is in beta testing, currently offering a free 30-day trial period for new users. Calls are private at all times thanks to WebRTC, the most secure VoIP technology currently available, which forces encryption as a mandatory feature. In addition, Poip.me features three security layers: IBM infrastructure; WebRTC protocols; and proprietary security implementations. And since browsers have shifted to automatic updates, Poip.me will always benefit from the most up-to-date technology: it only requires a browser and internet connection, without any need for downloads. And file sharing is extraordinarily simple, as there is no size limit. Poip.me currently targets small-medium businesses, startups, distributed teams, and professionals all over the world. In the future, they will sell user-based subscriptions, and will provide APIs on IBM Bluemix to allow developers to build their own solutions on top of Poip.me’s services, in addition to providing the facility to conduct a webinar.
To know more, visit: https://www.poip.me/
