Website www.hipchat.com | ||
Operating system Type Hosted chat and instant messaging | ||
HipChat is a web service for internal private online chat and instant messaging. As well as one-on-one and group/topic chat, it also features cloud-based file storage, video calling, searchable message-history and inline-image viewing. HipChat is available to download onto computers running Windows, Mac or Linux, as well as Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. As of 2014 HipChat uses a freemium model, as much of the service is free with some additional features requiring organizations to pay per month.
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Founded by Chris Rivers, Garret Heaton and Pete Curley, the trio behind HipCal and Plaxo Pulse, HipChat launched in January 2010, and acquired by Atlassian in March 2012. HipChat is mainly written in PHP and Python using the Twisted software framework, but uses other third-party services.
History
HipChat was started by Chris Rivers, Garret Heaton and Pete Curley, who studied together at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). They launched the first beta on December 13, 2009. HipChat was made available to the public starting January 25, 2010.
On March 22, 2010, HipChat launched a web chat beta which allowed users to chat via the browser in addition to the existing Windows, Mac and Linux client. HipChat's web client came out of beta and SMS chat support was added on April 16, 2010. On May 12, 2010, HipChat unveiled its official API.
On July 19, 2010, the team moved into an office in Sunnyvale, California. Co-founder Pete Curley announced that HipChat had secured $100,000 in funding on August 10, 2010. They had previously relied primarily on word-of-mouth, so this round of seed funding allowed them to start advertising and cover operational costs.
HipChat launched their iOS app on March 4, 2011 and their Android app on June 2, 2011.
On March 7, 2012, Atlassian announced it had bought HipChat and the team would be joining them in their San Francisco office.
Features
The primary features of HipChat are chat rooms, one-on-one messaging, searchable chat history, image sharing, 5 GB of file storage, and SMS messaging for one-on-one conversations. A premium version adds video calling, screen sharing, unlimited file storage, history retention controls, and a virtual machine version allows HipChat to run within corporate firewalls. HipChat also features a guest access mode that allows users outside of your organization to join your group chat via a shareable URL, inline GIF playback, and custom emoticons. The product is available as a mobile client, a web client and a downloadable native application.
In addition to integration with Atlassian's other products, HipChat integrates with services such as GitHub, MailChimp and Heroku. To allow for more third-party integrations to be added, HipChat features a REST interface with several language-specific implementations.
HipChat can provide administrators 1-to-1 chat histories if the customer's company policies permit viewing of employee communications. There is no way for an individual or organization to opt out of this data collection/exposure.