Tello, a Pulver-backed startup, apparently has packed it in. I covered Tello pretty in-depth last year (Jan 2006) in a skeptical article titled Tello, a near term solution? Apparently, it was very "near term" as it only lasted a little over a year. In my January post, I wrote, "At first glance, this hosted solution to the IM interoperability dilemma seems like a great idea. However, it seems like a near-term solution to me. If the big IM players get their act together and decided to use the same SIP/SIMPLE IETF standard, which allows for presence sharing, you wouldn't even need Pulver's hosted solution. In addition, many of the IM players have announced federation plans already, including Google."

Further, now with Microsoft federating with Yahoo (and other federation deals), as well as Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007) now in beta, a lot of functionality in Tello can be found in OCS 2007. I also wrote last year, "Honestly, I'm not convinced a hosted service provider that centralizes and consolidates all of your presence information is going to be a "killer app" that people will pay a monthly fee." Apparently, I was right. I will say that users will pay for "unified presence" and "unified communications", but I'm not convinced a hosted/rented presence solution is the answer.