TokBox, a cool new startup we covered in August that lets you set up video chat on the fly with no software downloads at all, gets a nice writeup by Brad Stone in the New York Times this evening. Note the comments in our original post – it got rave reviews from readers, which is rare.
Not a lot of new information in the article, except for the fact that Sequoia Capital has apparently put $4 million into the venture. Rajeev Motwani and Tony Bates (a SVP at Cisco) are also listed as investors.
The article also notes that Roelof Botha from Sequoia is involved, the same person who backed YouTube. “TokBox will face more formidable technical challenges than YouTube,” Stone says, which is exactly right. They’re solving a lot of problems YouTube never dealt with by handling two way, synchronous video communication without any kind of software on the computer beyond Flash and the browser.