Maxime Seguineau helped found enterprise messaging firm Antepo in February 2000, just as reality was puncturing the hype-filled bubble of the dot-com craze. Back then, IM was mostly for teens and college students, who used free, online chat networks by AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo to keep in touch. Seguineau saw past the crazy colors of ICQ, the cartoonlike appeal of AIM, and the incomprehensible shorthand of IMers, to IM"s promise for the enterprise, which he dubbed "availability based communications," now called "presence."
Today, the demand for presence technology, if not for enterprise IM, is booming. That demand spurred Adobe"s purchase of Antepo in December 2006, with a vision of melding communications and presence features to its development and design apps. InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts talked with Seguineau about the role of IM and presence in the enterprise, the rise of Web 2.0, and the entrepreneur"s next act.