EQO to support Yahoo IM, GTalk, Skype, AOL, ICQ

By Vivek Puri | October 5th, 2006 at 11:37 am ET         

EQO has announced release of new version of EQO Mobile, which will now support instant messaging to Skype, Yahoo IM, Google Talk, AOL IM, ICQ, Jabber, and MSN Messenger. EQO has also extended it’s suport to over 300 mobile handsets with support for quite a few handsets from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson among others. EQO is located in Vancouver, Canada, and funded by GrowthWorks Capital, and BDC Venture Capital. EQO IM service is similar to what iSkoot and SoonR offer.

EQO started off by providing Skype on mobile, where people can call their Skype contacts through their mobile phones. EQO has been trying to gain traction with Social Networking giants lately. They had introduced EQO Me “widget” in August that can be added by users to their profiles in MySpace, Friendster, Tagworld, Hi5, Xanga and Multiply.

EQO Users can now synchronize contacts from multiple IM buddy lists and multiple IM accounts, check presence, create personalized profile, express their mood and location by uploading pictures and text directly from their phone, exchange web-to-phone, phone-to-web and phone-to-phone text and picture. Off course EQO still provides the ability to make and receive mobile VoIP calls using Skype

EQO feature set is great on paper but I don’t see EQO’s business model. Just like any other IM startup, they are not charging their customers for the service. It will be interesting to watch how many of them can survive for how long.

I wanted to try out their service but they dont support my phone. Their site does seem a bit buggy with no support for persistent logon. I will be on lookout for their reviews and will post updates soon.

Links:
EQO

Tags: StartupSquad, IM, Widget, EQO, Chat