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Skype Me A Picture

posted by [personal profile] sbisson at 12:29pm on 01/12/2005 under , ,
Skype 2.0 has just gone into Beta.

It's added video. Is web cam driven video calling over VOIP going to finally be the killer app the video phone folk have been looking for? After all, the folks at Creative are launching a Skype-branded web camera to go along with the Motorola Skype headsets...

Certainly Skype has the mythical multiplier of the network effect on its side as it begins work on popularising video and voice over IP (shall we take a stab at calling it VVOIP?). As I type this there are just under 4 million people connected to the Skype network. All they need is a cheap web cam and a software upgrade, and that's 4 million VVOIP users ready to burn the bandwidth. That's a lot easier to do than when BT, and most recently Alan Sugar, tried to launch video phone services over the POTS network.

Now to get the Gizmo Project folks to add video to their SIP system. Will that give us video blogging for LJ, along with the Gizmo-driven voice blogging service announced earlier this week?
Mood:: 'busy' busy
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There are 5 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
andrewducker: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] andrewducker at 12:36pm on 01/12/2005
I've been doing video over IP for years. I use a little known piece of software called MSN Messenger. I can also use this piece of software to do voice over IP. Oh, and at a push, it can do textual conversations as well.

It can't, as yet, connect to the POTS, but then I have a VOIP service that plugs into a phone that I use for that.
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ext_36172: (Default)

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posted by [identity profile] fba.livejournal.com at 02:05pm on 01/12/2005
The sound quality on MSN renders it pretty much unusable IME...
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posted by [identity profile] megadog.livejournal.com at 02:21pm on 01/12/2005
VOIP is definitely starting to take off even in the most-unusual of places. One of my clients is looking at deploying Asterisk at several sites for non-privacy-rated voice traffic.
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posted by [identity profile] dsgood.livejournal.com at 05:50pm on 01/12/2005
For decades, "videophones replacing voice-only phones" has been on the standard "Just around the corner" list. Looks more and more like it may actually come true. The last step will be when voice-only phones are hard enough to find and close enough to the price of videophones that people who don't want video don't consider it worthwhile to search them out.

Flying cars replacing ground-only vehicles is another entry on that list; been predicted at least since 1943, flying cars have been produced, but the change-over is still "Just around the corner." (I suspect to the relief of traffic police and air traffic controllers.)

In the US, a simple Federal tax code is also "Just around the corner" and has been for at least as long as I can remember (probably longer).

New entrant: The paperless office.
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posted by [identity profile] marypcb.livejournal.com at 05:23pm on 03/12/2005
Abi Sellen - whose stepfather came up with the term paperless office - did a book a few years back called The Myth of the Paperless Office about why it hasn't happened and maybe never will.
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