Web communication startup Orgoo gets a facelift (we have invites)

May 27, 2008 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Orgoo, a Los Angeles startup that’s trying to become the hub of all your online and mobile communciation, is gearing up for a public launch scheduled for late June. As it opens up to more users (more on that in a second), Orgoo has redesigned its interface and unveiled some other new features.

We first wrote about Orgoo almost exactly a year ago, and the redesign (see screenshot below) is a big improvement over what we saw then. In addition to just being prettier, the new look packs more information onto the page — and when your selling point is integrating web communication features like email, instant messaging and SMS text messaging into a single page, layout becomes crucial.


There are other additions. Orgoo now allows your computer to both send and receive SMS messages, and it has integrated the video chat feature the company unveiled earlier this year into the main site.

As we’ve noted before, there are other startups trying to accomplish the same goal — for example, I’ve been impressed by Digsby’s IM-style interface, which seems more convenient than a standalone web page like Orgoo’s.

Still missing from Orgoo is compatibility with a user’s social networks. Co-founder Sean Rad tells me the company is working on a feature for sending and managing a user’s messages on Facebook and other social networks.

VentureBeat readers can check out the service themselves. We’ve got 500 invites, which you can use by going here. And once you’re an Orgoo user, you can invite six of your friends. Check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Orgoo has an undisclosed amount of angel funding.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • mark p
    I see a couple of problems with a service like this:

    1) trusting all your usernames/passwords to a startup; who knows about the security of this data

    2) feature overload

    3) getting people to move from what they're already using - seems like for most people, google is already doing some of this, and headed in the general direction
  • Melanie
    Digsby and other IM clients do have video chat...
  • Oops right, what I meant was that a lot of these email/chat/SMS integration startups don't have a separate video chat function that they've created, but some support the video chat offered by the IM clients that they integrate. I'll reword the article to make it clearer.