VentureBeat

Orgoo, a Los Angeles based start-up, is about to release a futuristic Web-based message tool that brings together all your IM, voice, text and email into one place.

It is still in early testing mode, but we got an early look at the product.

The cool thing about Orgoo is that it lets you switch seamlessly between formats — IM, voice, text and email. You can do things like send an IM as an SMS message, for example. No other company has thrown all of this together in one offering.

Orgoo is the latest company to realize that users want many of these things in one platform, and to store and manage it in one place. Orgoo lets you store all your IM, SMS, email and voice messages all on one screen (see screenshot below; note that it provides icons to show that a file is, for example, an IM message). Orgoo offers you a chat room to have conversations with multiple people, and offers a URL to each chat room (similar to Campfire). Within a chat room, you can enable live video streaming too, for video conferencing. For all this, there’s no download. Orgoo’s main challenge is latency. In our test, the service took a while to load emails. Orgoo is working to compress the code — loaded through the browser — by 60 percent, in order to speed things up.

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When you sign up (you can apply for test account), Orgoo prompts you to enter your logins for pop email accounts and IM clients, and lets you import your contacts. The company is still ironing out some bugs, but hopes to launch an open testing version sometime over the next couple of months. It has a WAP version for mobile users. Orgoo will also not have off-line access, though it is working toward this.

Co-founders Sean Rad and Shahzad Tiwana, students at USC, started the company two years ago. Michael Kantor, who was on the founding team of InfoSpace, was brought on as chief executive in January. They’ve raised a small amount of angel funding, and are looking to raise a first round of capital.

See our our related story today about IM, and how Orgoo fits in.

(Disclosure: Orgoo’s Sean Rad once contributed an article to VB. There are no financial/business ties between Rad and VB).

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