VOIP and IM World Update

Jul 19, 2006
in VOIP

Congrats to the Sipphone team (full disclosure-portfolio company and I am on board) for getting the Gizmo Project client out for the Nokia Internet 770 Tablet (see Andy Abramson's blog for more on this).  Nokiascreen This is quite exciting as the company is executing on its vision and roadmap to extend its SIP and IM service to many devices and networks, particularly wireless ones.  Our other vision was to focus on standards-based interoperability for IM and VOIP.  To that end, the Gizmo Project 2.0 release allows users to have dual log-in from one soft client to either Asterix based PBXs or other SIP-based networks.  On the IM side, it seems that the world is slowly moving into the interoperability direction as Yahoo and Microsoft are in limited testing for federation of their respective networks and as LiveJournal added XMPP/Jabber based-IM to its network of 10 million users.  As Om points out, it will be interesting to see how federation in the IM and VOIP space continue.  As I have mentioned in the past, most of the number 1 players have no reason to federate, but I do believe as a number of smaller communities and networks spring to life, that the little guys will be able to federate and create a standards-based IM and VOIP service that rivals the larger players.  Doesn't open standards win eventually?

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This post was written by who has written 357 posts on BeyondVC.

3 Responses to “VOIP and IM World Update”

  1. rita Jul 19, 2006 at 2:13 pm #

    I see this as another “feature-adding” kind of project. SIP is heavy and flat. You will hit scalabilty and performance issue sooner or later. Things will get worse if you want to have more complicated services than IM. We need more hierachical lightweight applicaiton layer for IM and many other services all-in-one.

    Reply
  2. stan the open standards man Jul 20, 2006 at 2:04 am #

    hello rita, not sure if you’ve heard this or not, but every single piece of hardware made by nokia, linksys, and d-link and all the infrastructure for all the telcos in the world is SIP today or is being converted to SIP. hard to argue with that kind of validation.

    true, in the past SIP has not provided the best performance, but it’s being used today in very large scale environments and will continue to acquire adoption.

    Reply
  3. Steve George Jul 20, 2006 at 8:25 am #

    It’s a bit hard to understand what Rita mean’s by “heavy and flat”. It’s so generic it could mean anything.

    While there’s been criticism of the SIP standard in the past it seems to me that they’ve got it under control. STUN makes it easier for users to use it through NAT. And the newer codecs make it more efficent.

    At the end of day it’s a standard. And as we should have all learnt by now a bad standard is better than a good proprietary system – for consumers anyway!

    Reply

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