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July 31, 2009

So why the name change Mr. Hab.la?

So let’s say I tell you the name of my company is habla, and I pronounce it correctly as ah-bla. If you are a native English speaker who doesn’t know Spanish your chances of knowing how to spell habla are pretty low. Let’s say you luck out, hear what I said, and know how to spell habla.

You go to a search engine and type in habla. We are not the #1 result on ANY major search engine. Now type in habla.com, nope, that’s not us either. Let’s say your in Spain and using google.es, type in “habla chat” or “habla”, you won’t find us.

Moral of the story, habla is a pretty cool name if you know Spanish, and can remember the domain name is hab.la, (and I always pronounce it H-A-B-DOT-L-A). But in a world where word of mouth is still important, and not everyone knows Spanish, hab.la is not the best name in the world. Especially if your going after a US market that is suspicious of any domain that doesn’t end in .com.

Now, we were very attached to hab.la, and our little Habla dudes (cartoon characters). We even tried to buy habla.com, Telpathy, the company that owns the domain wanted 80K for it, which was out of the question – that is unless all of our users donate $4 each :-). Pennies to pay to hold on to the beloved habla brand.

So when push came to shove it didn’t really make sense to try to build a brand around a domain that we could never own, with a word that most Americans can’t spell. As much as I love hab.la, there are a lot of rational reasons why having a .com with a short, easy to spell, easy to hear, and easy to pronounce name makes sense, hence olark.com.

I’ll let the story of Olark.com, and the exciting new things to come keep you on the edge of your seat :-). Oh yea, and if you have trouble spelling olark.com, we own OhLark.com too, Rockin!

-Ben

Filed under  //   domains   habla   name   olark   seo  

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July 27, 2009

Andrew Introduction / Changes Coming Your Way

Hi, I’m Andrew, thought it might be time I formally introduce myself ;-)

Many of you have probably had some contact with me either on our website’s Habla or your own. I joined the Habla team back in February/March of 2009 while attending the University of Michigan as a full time undergrad. My purpose on the founding team has been to provide the best customer support to current and perspective users. As a company, I would like us to be know for our support and dedication to customer service – a company with real people behind our website. That being said, your feedback these past few months has been absolutely essential to our product development and growth. We have been working all hours of the day to turn Habla from a cool side project into a thriving company.

The past month has been a big push for us, we are working hard to create something our customers want. In the next week or so we’ll be releasing lots of new stuff your way, including a revamp of the branding and name (as Ben mentioned earlier). Keep an eye out for our update email.

Remember, you can contact me at anytime at andrew@hab.la. I love receiving your feedback and comments about our service, especially when Habla changes the way people think about their website.

Another cool, unexpected bonus of our hard work – receiving invites from customers to websites for a quick chat on their new or well situated Habla.

I will be in touch through our blog and Habla, keep well!

Yours Truly,

Andrew (Once the Hablador now the Olarkee, or something like that…)

Filed under  //   andrew   introduction   name   new   pre   release  

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December 4, 2007

Livehelp on a site without JavaScript?

My last blog post talks about how you can link to hab.la from websites that don’t support JavaScript (i.e. eBay and Myspace). I’ve taken that blog post and converted it into a tutorial page, here, to make it easier to read and fill out.

In other news, site owners using Hab.la now have two options when it comes to changing the nickname displayed when they are chatting with site visitors.

Using Account Settings

  1. Log into Hab.la
  2. On the “my Hab.la” page select “settings”
  3. Change the ‘Nickname’ value
  4. click ‘update’

Using JavaScript

Replace your existing Hab.la code with the below code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.hab.la/js/wc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
config = wc_config();
config.vars["local_name_override"] = "Your display name";

wc_init("___YOUR__ID____",config );
</script>

Filed under  //   display   ebay   hab.la   javascript   livehelp   myspace   name   nickname   tutorial  

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