No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Are We Falling Victim to Our Own Success?

The other morning I spotted a story on CNN about a company called Vivox that is offering voice chat on Facebook. Vivox has been doing things like this for some time. The primary focus of the company is on embedding their voice chat technology into video games and online worlds (Command and Conquer and Second Life, among others). The big news was that they were opening a lab group, Vivox Labs, and among the first applications announced was a mashable, open API plugin for Facebook.Now there are other applications to add voice to Facebook out there, and since it is in closed beta, I can't speak on the Vivox plug-in, but to me this seems like a big breakthrough. Vivox claims to already handle billions of minutes per month from existing games, and is offering an API that allows the broader application community to add voice to their applications easily. This doesn't require developers, a subscription to a service, or a purchase of new software. Anyone can leverage this. Many things in Facebook are offline and won't be affected, but the opportunity to revolutionize certain applications on Facebook is huge.

I've been following the web-enabled communications space for quite a while, since my last startup had some offerings in this area. One thing that I have noticed is that while there are certainly exceptions (there was a great mashups panel at VoiceCon in Orlando with folks from Voxeo and IBM, and there certainly are a number of companies starting to look closely at this space), the VoIP community, both vendors and end users, seem not to be, in my opinion, paying enough attention to these alternate service options. I follow many of the popular VoIP bloggers, friends in the R&D labs at service providers and vendors, and many others with an interest in VoIP on Twitter, but didn't see any comments about the launch.

I think sometimes we suffer from being the folks who brought down the old telecom world. As a result, we think we are always on the cutting edge, but the reality is that the edge moves fast. Technology to embed communications right in the browser is combining with cloud/P2P-enabled delivery in a very big way. Web-enabled communication is going to radically change the way voice is delivered to the enterprise. Someday, and someday soon, we'll be receiving most of our "calls" directly from the company website, online advertisements, social network profiles, or even from inside a game or virtual world. Our sales team will be contacting prospects directly using multi-media plug-ins for tools like LinkedIn or Sales Force. These won't be the partially integrated click-to-dial or call-using-an-app-I've-downloaded solutions we have today, but direct, in the browser, zero-download approaches. The game will change, and change significantly.

I think it's time for us to pay a bit more attention. I'll never agree with the naysayers who say that voice (or video) is dead. There will always be a motivation for direct, real-time communication. That said, the voice community needs to remember that what is important is connecting people, not how we do it, and today, many of the innovative ways of doing that are coming from little companies outside the mainstream. Sounds like the VoIP revolution all over again to me.