Jul 2, 2013

News Photo Credit: Shutterstock web-based chats are not new, but an Israeli startup called RumbleTalk is trying to take the concept a few steps forward with a built in monetization strategy for website publishers &nbspAvishay Bassa Jun 30, 2013 Photo Credit: Shutterstock Current thinking maintains that the best way to attract a large user base is through community management, especially when speaking about content centered sites or pages. Chat has become an integral tool for this purpose, keeping organizations in contact with their users for customer support purposes, online events and Live blogging. Yanir Shachak and Eyal Misk from RumbleTalk, have latched on to this trend, seeking to create a group chat platform without complex script integration, complex subscription models to various services, or the lack of any option to customize the chat platform. RumbleTalk’s flagship product, based on IM HTML5 technology, allows publishers to easily integrate their chat service into Facebook business pages and websites. Photo Credit: PR RumbleTalk’s platform has a few distinctive characteristics; for example, the ability to include multimedia clips in conversations, like images and YouTube videos. The chat itself is secured by an SSL protocol, is stored in the cloud and can be retrieve and exported to a local file. The fact that this chat platform is cloud based allows users to access it easily through their mobile device or by generating a QR code to continue an existing chat directly from their smartphone. Another cool feature is that participants in the conversation can invite their friends to join a RumbleTalk chat from Facebook’s chat platform. RumbleTalks main advantage over its rivals is the fact that publishers will be able to monetize the chat platform should they include it on their website. Monetization will be made possible through publisher controlled advertising strategies. This feature is not yet live, but will be in the near future. Photo Credit: PR   Ronit Bohrer-Hillel, COO at RumbleTalk, told Geektime that RumbleTalk is much more than just a standard embedded chat script. “Conversations are a form of content creation, and content is generated through engagement. Our vision is to offer business owners the chance to not only implement a chat on their website or their Facebook page, but to also to earn money from the move.” This money , relates RumbleTalk, will come from several monetization venues built into the RumbleTalk platform. For one , the company will enable publishers to highlight ‘sponsored’ words from paying ad customers. These words, if used during chat, will appear as a hyperlink to the advertisers product or website. The current business model of the company calls for the selling of premium chat licenses, allowing for additional features such as independent branding, the creation of CSS feeds, custom designs and more. Photo Credit: PR   RumbleTalk beta was launched in May of 2012 and has since managed to register over 172 thousand publishers. Current reports show some pretty decent figures including 2.5 million unique hits in chat rooms located throughout the site and 30 million views of chat messages. The company raised the latest influx of $110K from family and friends, which they hope will allow them to strengthen the company’s business model while investing in further development. Larger companies and platforms for building Sites such as WiX, Jimdo and Tabatoo offer customers the option of implementing RumbleTalk on their sites. You may have noticed that we at Geektime mainly use the RumbleTalk platform for Live-blogging at our various events.