Our inspiration definitely came from IRC, but the learning curve is just too sharp for most employees. If you can dedicate resources to teaching the sales team how to connect to your server and DCC files, that's great. I'd rather have them drag-and-drop with HipChat.
I think you mean 37Signals Campfire. Basecamp is their project management tool. We're working on XMPP support but it doesn't make group chat easy (or pretty). It's even more complicated when you're trying to get companies of 60+ people set up.
after watching the video I don't see anything you do that google chat doesn't and quite a lot of the reverse. I wish you all the best but the reason you're having difficulty in differentiation perception is because the products are all very similar.
Having build a chat system, the real problems don't start until you have scale. I'd hate to be using this in a real work environment only to have it fall over when there's a lot of users. Chat is the only time I've ever had to write Erlang code.
