I had a long chat with Mike Jones, president and partner of Userplane, yesterday regarding the company's A/V Instant Communicator technology. The company has developed a audio, video, and text instant messaging solution geared built on Macromedia's Flash Communication Server. Mike's group is one of the pioneers who are developing very sophisticated applications upon the Flash Communications Server, in essence treating Flash as a application development, programming system, app server, and web-based portal technology.

One of the most compelling arguments for looking at this technology is that the free Macromedia Flash plug-in is installed in almost 90% of connected desktops, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And even PDAs.

The A/V IC product is geared toward online community use, such as a on-line dating site or a company's on-line help desk. And because of Macromedia's built-in optimization of streaming, video and audio is handled easily. Flash will recognize a video camera attached to your PC and will immediately start using it, without any real fanfare. While video on PDAs may not be perfect, video works well on all computer clients, and audio and text everywhere. The company has a variety of technical approaches to handle the integration of existing users into the system, so that presence information can be managed.

I didn't dig into the numbers, but Userplane's A/V Instant Communicator sounds affordable, and perhaps more robust than Java-based competitors in this market niche. And certainly lower cost than heavyweight corporate IM solutions. For smaller companies, the product might be an cost-effective replacement for corporate IM.

One of the interesting features is the ability to log video and audio as well as text messages that are sent through the system. Based on similar technology, the company has created A/V Recorder, an application that allows the user to create streaming video that will be delivered, again, through the flash plug-in. I learned that the company has near-term plans to partner with another firm to support a video blogging service, which will enable blog authors to incorporate video recordings into their existing blogs. I plan to test that out here, soon.