The founder of Panama, David Hayden, was also the founder of the search engine company Magellan, which missed its IPO window and sold out to Excite. He then founded e-mail outsourcing company Critical Path "and when Critical Path stock tanked, his bankers sued him for tens of millions in loans," according to Mixergy. After that his deposit was seized on the headquarters of his next company, a social search engine called Jeteye.

"Panama's ambition is to host world's conversations," Hayden said. Most voice over the Internet is synchronous and the majority of text is asynchronous. That is, most voice is happening in real time via VOIP. Most text is either read and then commented on or text messages are exchanged. Why can't the sterility of the Internet be humanized by adding asynchrony to the mix?

Some might say it is because voice isn't scannable. You can't take a quick look and decide whether you'll listen or not. It's zero sum with asynchronous voice. You either listen or you don't. As overwhelmed as we are said to have gotten, and with podcasts arguably having declined as a result, is anyone going to really take more time and more opacity as a positive?

Panama's answer to that is the barrier to a call is the threat of getting drawn in, which would in fact take up more time. By users sending voice messages when they can and recipients listening when they can, they might actually save time and add a bit of humanity to the process.