The video hype is ever increasing where Cisco buying Tandberg and Logitech buying Lifesize are just two examples. I think the video hype is good news and has written about it a lot.

But, as one of our biggest and most famous customers almost reminds me when I meet them, don’t forget about voice quality. Voice quality is much more important than video quality they say. I totally agree with this!

During a video conference business meeting, the important thing is to have very high quality (HD) voice with robustness. The speech shouldn’t be garbled so that the attendants can’t follow the conversation. Also, a consistent high quality is needed to combat attendant fatigue and increase the effectiveness of the meeting.

Video quality is also very important for the multimedia experience of the attendants. However, if the video sometimes gets a little jerky or freezes, the meeting will still continue as long as you hear what is being said clearly.

I can’t resist pointing out that GIPS is uniquely well positioned to enable our customers to provide the desired end user experience since we started out on the voice side and continuously strive to provide maximum voice quality!

Google buying Gizmo5 was first a rumor last week and then confirmed. Both Google and Gizmo5 are GIPS customers so I think this is good news for GIPS.

Google already have the highest quality peer 2 peer calling in Google Talk that I use all the time to e.g. talk to my colleagues in San Francisco. Google Voice is the other part of Google’s voice functionality. I have not used that yet since it is only US numbers for their one number functionality.

To get Google Voice to work for me, I have been thinking about using Gizmo5 as an intermediary where I have the Google Voice number point to my Gizmo5 number than again would be connected to my Swedish number. With the acquisition, I think I will wait and see, this is anyway a thing for techies and not mass market.

I think the biggest thing Google gets with Gizmo5 is PSTN connectivity (and maybe also SIP connectivity). How this all will be integrated with Google Talk and Google Voice, I don’t know. It will be very interesting to see what comes and it certainly seems as Google now have all the pieces to have a very competitive offering with Skype.

Ericsson announced this that week their CTO Håkan Eriksson will move to Silicon Valley and head up of their IP business.

We few people living here in Scandinavia are  proud of having been at the forefront of the mobile development for a long time. It all started with the NMT – Nordic Mobile Telephone – system which success lead to the establishment of the pan-European GSM that conquered the world. Companies like Ericsson and Nokia has been huge successes in the mobile world and continue to dominate the system and phone markets.

The latest example of the big Nordic companies getting their way is the momentum building up behind LTE, the new high speed mobile data standard.  LTE is all about IP communications and we have seen the trend that mobile is becoming more and more IP communications.

We are now seeing other players like Apple and Google (iPhone and Android) having success in mobile. So the fact that Ericsson’s CTO relocates to Silicon Valley to be closer to the action is a clear example of the shift in focus for mobile to be much more driven by the US centric IP communications business.

For GIPS, I think this is good news, the more IP communications that need high quality voice and video, the merrier.

Last week I attended the eComm Emerging Communications conference in Amsterdam. It was very interesting, thanks to Lee Dryburgh and team for putting it together. The format was very nice with no parallel session and a mix of talks and panels. If I found a talk interesting I would listen otherwise tune it out and do work such as email until the next talk.  The topics were quite broad which triggered thinking about new stuff.

Out of the content, I found RebelVox to have a very interesting technology and demo. It was basically introducing buffering into real time voice which facilities a number of interesting features and application in IP communication. One is that you can listen in on a call being left as voicemail and then decide to pick it up.

The Google Wave team was there and did talks and demos. Very interesting and it explained better to me what Google Wave can be used for. All participants in the conference got wave accounts (and no I don’t have any invites) and Google Wave was used as a backchannel forum for the conference. If you have wave search for “tag:eComm with:public” and you will see this. Quite nice illustration of how wave can be used as a collaborative tool.

On the social networking front, we went to a wine tasting conducted over Skype. It was performed by the brother of an attendee that has a wine company in England – Elwood Wines. A Macbook was used for a video call with the tasting guide and it worked just fine – another example of what IP communication tools can be used for.

Talking about wine, Andy Abramson (a big wine expert which showed at the tasting) and Comunicano (where GIPS is a client) won an award at the show for his service to the community, congratulations Andy.

I spent last week up in the Norwegian mountains moose hunting (and yes the hunting was very successful). This is way out in the wilderness, but a couple of years ago a cell tower came to a hilltop. No high speed data though because of limited link capacity out of there.

I brought my new HTC Hero Android phone to test it at this unusual usage scenario. Overall it worked very well. The most impressive thing is that it instantly jumps on a WiFi connection it has seen before. My friend that lives there has WiFi in his house and whenever I was at his house I synched up on email. Data roaming through the cell tower I had turned off. Another nice feature is that it warns for roaming charges.

One complaint I had was that the Microsoft Exchange Synch program was very slow. Don’t know why. The built in Gmail worked much better.

The big thing that happened in our business while I was away (at least for a Norwegian) was Cisco’s bid for Tandberg. In my mind, it further validates video conferencing and our vision at GIPS that anywhere, anytime, high-quality video conferencing is the future.

Yesterday I started testing an Android mobile phone. It is an HTC Hero that we bought to use in our development. The phone itself is very iPhone like was my first impression (without having used an iPhone). Same type of touch screen interface.

I must say that so far I have been very impressed. The things I use most on my computer worked very well from the get go. I started with configuring the Exchange email client. It was very straightforward and as soon as this synced up I had my email, address book, and calendar synchronized at my fingertips. Adding my Google account gave me my private Gmail as well as my Google Talk IM service. Browser worked nicely. All in all, very quickly I had all the essentials working.

I came from a Symbian phone (Nokia E71 that I liked), but I must say that this feels like a new world. I can’t see the old fashioned Symbian phones competing with iPhone and Android for the smartphone experience of the future.

By the way, the HTC Hero works very nicely as a phone too. Stability seems to be there, no hangups or reboots so far.

The one thing missing is voice and video calling over IP. With an unlimited data plan and a good voice and video over IP application, not much need for traditional calling. But we will get there soon …

Last week I visited our San Francisco office for one of our regular management meetings. I enjoy visiting our biggest office and seeing the great people there. I am always taken by the energy and innovation one can feel by just being in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

During such trips I try to meet with some of our customers to better understand their needs and how we can serve them. One day, while driving from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley to visit one of our larger customers, I saw a huge billboard promoting Google’s voice and video chat functionality. Considering Google’s traditionally laissez faire attitude toward advertising, it was interesting to see them devote resources to a billboard, and encouraging that the company chose to focus on their Google Talk product. 

This experience, as well as the subsequent customer meeting, made me realize how important video is for the future of communications. Very soon, video conferencing functionality is going to be everywhere.  I believe that Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is key to enabling this growth, as it allows a variety of end-points with different capabilities to connect with high quality. However, as I have written before, it is important to realize that providing world class video is about much more than a codec.  An application needs a host of media processing elements to work with the codec to provide even passable video. For instance, it is crucial to the end-user experience to buffer and de-jitter video, while syncing it with audio.  While video is going to explode, it is also GIPS’ position that voice will continue to be an important building block for communication. Video chat without audio is pretty much meaningless, and as video quality improves, there will be even more demand for high quality, HD voice. So as the market continues to evolve, and new technology emerges, many of the same principles that have been true for providers of voice services will continue to apply.

It has been a while since I posted anything. Since I am located in Sweden, not much happens during the summer except vacations. But as summer winds down, I am back in the saddle. While I was out, a number of interesting news stories broke. The rest of the world moves along. 

Perhaps the biggest news involves the first major customer GIPS ever signed.  In the midst of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Nortel has been selling off its major business units, and today, their CEO, Mike Zafirovski left his post. Given that heavyweights like Ericsson, Nokia, and Avaya have been the buyers so far, it looks like Nortel had some pretty solid stuff. It will be interesting to see how the new carrier-centric Nortel will perform, but I think they will be just fine.

The continuing saga involving Google Voice, Apple, and AT&T is also intriguing. In one sense, I think the developments are a positive sign because they signal a new approach to voice communication. Any resistance to these kinds of applications is just a sign of growing pains from old institutions trying to adjust to a new paradigm. From GIPS’ perspective, the continued innovation in the mobile VoIP market can only be a good thing, and should lead to some technological progress in the long term.

These are just a couple examples of interesting stuff that has been happening in the last month or so. I guess it just goes to show you how quickly things move in the modern world.

I certainly welcome the recent push for HD Voice, especially as GIPS has been providing HD Voice for almost 10 years now. Many has now used HD Voice in applications such as Skype, and more usage is needed to establish this new quality level in a wider market.

The HD voice discussion has led to surfacing of an old issue, namely the focus on the codec. Tsahi writes in his blog that the codec is the main obstacle to HD voice. However, he points out that HD voice is much more than the codec, which I can’t emphasize enough.

HD voice is all about high quality which puts even tougher requirements on everything else like noise suppression, echo cancellation, gain control, etc.  In fact, once you have solved all those problems the codec becomes important and will be the limiting factor for the quality given everything else is taken care of perfectly. The important thing to understand is that the codec is just one small piece of the quality experience.

Of course, there are nuances also since the robustness of the codec to things like packet loss is important.

INTEROPERABILITY is one very important factor with the codec that probably is why it is so prominent in all discussions. I do think we will have to live with a multitude of codecs though. A few years ago, I thought we had more than enough codecs, but apparently not since they keep coming …

We at GIPS are seeing more and more desktop video calls being made as enabled by GIPS customers’ very nice video solutions.  However, adding video to the picture has introduced another degree of complexity in terms of hardware setup and usage scenarios.

When the desktop VoIP breakthrough occurred we saw the same phenomenon, but for the audio devices such as microphones and speakers. Also various versions of Windows created problems. Especially acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) was put to a tough test with the various setups, as a result AEC technology developed to handle the varying scenarios robustly. There is still a problem that the user may need to select the audio devices in Windows, this is something most users don’t know how to, don’t want to know, and shouldn’t need to know.

Last week I got a new Macbook computer, the reason was to get real usage experience to understand our customers’ issues on Macs and help us support our customers better in creating the ultimate end user experience. The Macbooks are apparently very popular for video calling.

Having been a PC users most of my life (my previous Mac experience was that I wrote my PhD thesis on a Mac back in 1995), I must say the Macbook impressed me in many ways.

One of the first things I did was to place a Google Talk video call to our VP of Engineering. I was at home in Stockholm on broadband and he was at home in San Francisco, also on broadband. The call was just perfect and the only thing I had to do was adjust the volume slightly up. The built in camera, mic, and loudspeakers worked perfectly.

I guess the Windows world has some way to go on ease of use.