You chat online, don’t you? Of course, you do, at home and in the office. On the Q.T., yeah? Well, a lot of corporations, too, are veering around to the idea that chat, and Instant Messaging, is a good thing. And quite a few of them are adopting IM with the zeal of a new convert.

Research companies estimate that the market for IM will cross $1 billion by 2009. Now that’s a huge market by any account. So a lot of companies are developing software which will make life a lot easier for IM users, both consumers and corporations. Today, I am going to talking about one such, Indian, company, which has developed a spell check for IM. The company, Aspire Systems, is based in Chennai, and has developed a product called IMSpellCheck.

"MS Word has this facility of instantly pointing out a wrong spelling in the text by underlining the word in red. But they was no such facility in IM services. So we decided to develop IMSpellCheck, which will automatically check spellings as you type," says Shankar Krishnamoorthy, vice-president, software development at Aspire Systems. Aspire Systems, which describes itself as an "outsourced product development firm", deployed 20 people at its Chennai centre to develop the product, and lads had the first version of IMSpellCheck ready to go in four months. The product was developed for Spellaroo, an American company.

What does the product do? I downloaded the software, which is now in Version 2.0 from Spellaroo’s web site. But I am afraid I will have access to the software for only 15 days, after which I will need to pay Spellaroo to get the software to check my spellings while Instant Messaging.

"The software snaps into Yahoo! IM on its own. It has menu items which will enable users to change the settings," says Mr Krishnamoorthy.

Yes, the software underlines misspelt words in the infernal and annoying red so favoured by Microsoft Word. The software also allows for an auto-check as you keep typing that nasty letter, which you will never send, to your boss. Just kidding. You could be writing some florid prose to your girlfriend, too, and you don’t want embarrassing spelling mistakes to crop up in there, now, do you?

Anyway, IMSpellCheck will be a regular money spinner for Aspire Systems. "The IP belongs to Spellaroo, which has tweaked the software a bit. As an outsourced product development company, we just developed and

handed it over to them," says Mr Krishnamoorthy.