With the announcement of 24H Laundry and the sponsored posts I have been doing on support center stuff with HDI, I was reminded about a company call White Pajama (now Contactual) that provides capabilities for a fully hosted (and virtual) call center. The whole idea of people being able to work in their undies and pajamas from home sounds like it would be a cool tech idea.

Contactual has a terrific amount of intellectual property and one should really check it out. As MercuryNews.com wrote last year (Oct. 2004):

The story of San Mateo start-up White Pajama may go down in the books as one of the quirkiest in Silicon Valley.

The quick tale is this. Mansour Salame, co-founder of White Pajama, raised something like $40 million in venture capital from well-known firms like Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners. Salame was ousted from the board (and lost everything). But he came back from the dead so to speak. He bought the company back for essentially $100,000 by buying debt that White Pajama defaulted on (and I presume, going after the VCs).

As MercuryNews continues:

Back at the helm, Salame is part of a small group of entrepreneurs who managed to steal their companies back -- Steve Jobs at Apple Computer is among the others.

Salame is an entrepreneurial hero to some I'm sure and may go down as legendary. The company renamed itself Contactual last year. This past April, Contactual announced it would receive the Global Excellence in Technology of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan (one of the leading industry analyst firms). Worthwhile to check Contactual out. Impressive technology and under new classic management.

Steve Shu