ICQ founder has a new message

High-tech start-ups are forever knocking on the doors of potential customers. For salespeople at Dotomi Inc., an online advertising company in downtown Boston, one of the surest -- if improbable -- door-openers is their chief technology officer.

''When you walk into an advertising agency with Yair, it's like you're walking in with a rock star," said John Federman, president and chief executive. ''They all want to meet him."

Yair (pronounced yah-yere) is Yair Goldfinger, a rail-thin 33-year-old Israeli with a shy manner and hair that falls to his shoulders. Goldfinger is known in high-tech circles as a founding father of instant messaging, the Internet chat technology that has become ubiquitous in offices and homes. If you spend your days bantering with co-workers via IM, you can thank Goldfinger. And if your kids are up half the night IM-ing their friends, he's the guy to blame.

Goldfinger, who favors blue jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts, seems decidedly uncomfortable in the role of cultural icon. He gives every impression of being more at home in a server room, or in a basement -- which is where he and three Israeli friends invented the instant messaging technology known as ICQ, in 1996. ''We came to realize it might be easier if I could log in somewhere and see if they were logged in, too," he recalled. Their company, Mirabilis, sold ICQ to America Online in 1998 for more than $400 million.

Goldfinger these days is engrossed in a new technology, direct messaging, which he sees as a cousin to instant messaging. Dotomi's idea is to fashion website banner ads that address consumers by name, offer them travel deals to their preferred destinations, and serve up discounts on their favorite products -- all with their permission. ''There's been a void in how companies talk to consumers," he maintained.

Could such a permission-based advertising model grow as big as instant messaging? ''It has the potential for sure," Goldfinger said, shrugging. ''It has the potential to be bigger. This is a business."

To understand how Goldfinger's first company and its technology are viewed in Israel, think of Apple Computer in the 1970s.

''Mirabilis is a household name in Israel," said Meir Shlomo, Israel's counsel general for New England. ''They were our Apple story, the Cinderella company that came up with a new technology and got bought up by a big American company. My kids, they couldn't live without ICQ. It's become what the telephone used to be for us."

In many ways, Mirabilis became the template for a new generation of Israeli technology companies that specialize in research and product development and expand globally through alliances with sales-oriented American companies. ''Mirabilis was the first big sale of Israeli technology and know-how in the high-technology market," Shlomo said. ''Ever since, everybody in Israel wants to be like Mirabilis."

While instant messaging is popular and user-friendly, it's not without critics. ''People who spend their days instant messaging lose the intimacy that comes with face-to-face dialogue," said Kerry Patterson, chief development officer at VitalSmarts, a training and consulting firm, who coauthored a book about technologies that inhibit communication. ''When people send instant messages during meetings, it's simply unforgivable."

Goldfinger admits to having qualms about some of the lifestyle changes wrought by instant messaging. ''When we were kids, we used to go out and play with our friends," he said. ''Now kids rarely leave the room. But at least they have a virtual social life."

Born in Tel Aviv, Goldfinger grew up excited about the emerging field of computing. His older brother sold computers to businesses. ''I got free computer time during the weekend," Goldfinger recalled. ''I started to play, then I started to program." He wrote his first program, a business accounting application, at age 10.

After graduating from Tel Aviv University in 1992, he served in the Israeli Army. When he got out in 1996, he began growing his hair, playing ping-pong, and writing code on personal computers in the basement of a friend, Amon Amir. Goldfinger programmed the user interface and database for what would become ICQ (for ''I seek you"), while Sefi Vigiser designed the graphical interface. Together with Arik Vardi, whose father, Yossi, put up $10,000 in seed money, they formed Mirabilis.

Almost immediately, Goldfinger and his cofounders decided they needed to get their technology on the Internet and establish a network of servers close to their customer base. They flew to Silicon Valley in the summer of 1996, rented an apartment in San Jose, Calif., and slept on the floor on mattresses from the Salvation Army. They set up shop in a room of another company. With a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists passing on their technology, they raised $3 million from angel investors, and moved to New York in early 1997.

By that time, they had sent copies of ICQ to about 20 friends, and it began spreading rapidly over the Internet. The technology had about 12 million users by mid-1998, and it was on the radar of US technology giants. ''We came to the conclusion that we had two options -- trying to grow with our own resources or selling to a bigger company," Goldfinger said. They sold to AOL, where ICQ remains the preferred instant-messaging platform internationally, though a separate product based on the same technology, AOL Instant Messenger, is more popular in the United States. Goldfinger worked for AOL for two years.

In his current venture, which he started in 2001 with Israelis Eyal Schiff and Tamir Koch, Gold-finger is the founder and chief technology officer of Dotomi. While he is based at its research office in Tel Aviv, which has 25 employees, the headquarters is in Boston, where there are 17 employees, because its chief executive, Federman, lives here and because it is closer to the US market.

On his twice-monthly trips to Boston, Goldfinger likes nothing more than to work with the development team at Dotomi's offices. But he'll sometimes accompany Federman on sales calls to the advertising agencies that place Dotomi's direct-messaging ad packages on websites.

Last fall, Goldfinger visited a couple of San Francisco agencies to explain the technology and its privacy protection techniques. But when word began to spread that the ICQ inventor was there, employees began spilling out of their offices to shake his hand, Federman recalled. ''The ad industry is IM-crazy," he said.

Federman noted that Goldfinger is a reluctant rock star: ''It's not his comfort zone. He's happiest when he's sitting down coding, when he's in front of a computer creating technology."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.