Archive for the ‘Company News’ Category

HD Voice for Android Developers – another first for GIPS

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on November 16th, 2009 in Company News, Industry News, Market Trends

GIPS is a company that never sits around. It’s a company that is constantly innovating, developing and leading the market. That’s why the Company announced the availability of VoiceEngine Mobile for Android today. GIPS VoiceEngine allows Android application developers to build solid performing HD voice (VoIP) enabled applications quickly, expertly without reinventing the wheel.

The first company to offer HD voice on Android-based mobile phones is Nimbuzz, the social mobile application company. Nimbuzz is rapidly gaining interest with over one million people signing up to use their service each month and with the addition of Nimbuzz on Android phones – it is only set to grow even faster.

It was only last week that Nimbuzz launched their new offering NimbuzzOut, which allows calls from the Nimbuzz application to any mobile or landline phone at affordable prices whether it’s 3G or Wi-Fi. As GIPS CTO, Roar Hagen said: “Nimbuzz continues to offer their users a distinctive unified social messaging application that connects popular social and instant messenger networks into one simple, user-friendly offering.”

In an earlier post I mentioned that Gartner has predicted that Android will become the second most popular smartphone by 2012 with 14.5 percent market share and iPhone with 13.7 percent market share. Now all I have to decide is whether to leave my iPhone for the new Droid!

Plug N’ Talk Outsmarts Traditional Telcos

John Hermansen
Posted by John Hermansen
on November 2nd, 2009 in Company News, Industry News

A lot of what is written about mobile VoIP centers on carrier resistance to the technology, for fear of revenue cannibalization.  Today, GIPS and Israeli company Outsmart announced a partnership which could redefine the way carriers view VoIP. Outsmart has integrated GIPS technology in their Plug N’ Talk softphone to deliver high-quality VoIP to mobile customers. By offering a softphone that is tied to a user’s mobile account and loaded on a USB memory stick, mobile operators can use VoIP to retain customers and realize revenue from VoIP calls.

Plug N’ Talk is already successfully deployed with Filipino carrier SMART, and is targeted at Filipinos living abroad. With Plug N’ Talk, Filipinos can maintain their mobile numbers and accounts, while enjoying local rates for international calls from softphones to other Smart customers. But don’t take my word for it, check out the commercial. I have no idea what she is saying, but it sure looks fun!

“T’ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It”

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on October 16th, 2009 in Company News, Technology

How to Implement HD-Voice Successfully is the subject of our Telephony Online Webinar on Wednesday October 28. Personally I would have liked to use the above title, as it’s very true.

“T’ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It,” is an old jazz song most famously sang by Ella Fitzgerald in 1939 – about the same time the last improvement was made to voice/sound quality on the telephone.  Never a more true term was said when it comes to HD voice – it’s the way that you do it.

Personally I think HD voice will become de rigueur eventually   – Why would you want to have bad quality when your competitors will offer better solutions? – but trying to cobble a solution together without decades of speech and signal processing expertise is likely to cause a company severe headaches, time delays and frustration not to mention money. So hopefully some of you will be able to join our webinar to learn more about:

  • What is actually required for HD voice?
  • How do you deal with all the inherent issues of IP networks that constantly effect call quality?
  • How do you choose an HD voice codec?
  • Case study in HD voice deployment

As a bonus CommuniGate Systems will also join our webinar to discuss their Unified Communications solution, which offers HD voice, for enterprises and carriers.

In-Stat’s analyst Keith Nissen predicts that the HD voice market is expected to grow to more than $3 billion a year. I’d also add that it offers a first-class communication experience with greater intelligibility, comfort and experience without the audio fatigue that conference and telephone calls suffer from currently.

It’s Friday, so I’ll leave you with this version of the song (click image below) from 80’s bands Fun Boy Three and Bananarama because remember: It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It!

FunBoy

What’s New in GIPS VoiceEngine 3.4?

Henrik Andreasson
Posted by Henrik Andreasson
on October 16th, 2009 in Company News, Technology

A new version of GIPS VoiceEngine is about to be released. Therefore I would like to give a brief overview of some of the most important feature updates. 

From a customer point of view, the two main additions are an expansion of our HD Voice support for Super Wideband (SWB), as well as support for Stereo Playout.   Let me start by describing the new integration of SWB in VoiceEngine 3.4. 

In order to expand support for SWB, all of VoiceEngine’s core functions now work efficiently at a 32 kHz sampling frequency. Currently, G.722.1 Annex C (or G.722.1C) is added to VoiceEngine 3.4, but the new architecture enables any codec using 32 kHz as the sample rate. G.722.1C provides 14 kHz audio bandwidth using 32 kHz sample rate at three different bitrates: 24, 32 and 48 kbps. However, as this blog has argued before, only supporting a SWB codec is not sufficient to providing high quality voice if the right additional components are not present. The new VoiceEngine from GIPS ensures true SWB quality since it contains SWB upgrades of all core components such as:

  • adaptive jitter buffer and error-concealment unit (GIPS NetEQ)
  • echo cancellation
  • automatic gain control
  • noise suppression
  • voice-activity detection
  • comfort noise generation
  • mixers

In addition, utilization of the new SWB components are only activated when needed, hence the footprints for 8 and 16 kHz modes are not increased compared with the previous version of VoiceEngine.

 VoiceEngine’s other main new feature in is the added support of stereo playout. The existing version of VoiceEngine allows “stereo modifications”, such as panning, but all actions must be performed on the client side. In the upcoming VoiceEngine 3.4, it will also be possible to play out a received stereo-signal packetized according to IETF RFC 3551. In essence, this means that a GIPS client will now be able to play out a dual-channel RTP stream, where a conference server, for instance, has performed some sort of spatial filtering of the conference participants. The end result would be that a user gets a feeling of all participants sitting around a conference table, with their voices coming from different directions. Note that the client is not performing any stereo intelligence, as the actual stereo effect must be generated at the transmitting side. As this feature pertains to the new SWB capability, the new stereo features are activated and deactivated dynamically and no new API calls are required. The only action needed on the client side to enable true stereo playout is to register a certain codec (payload type, name etc.) as a dual-channel codec. 

In addition to SWB and stereo playout, the following features will also be added to the latest release of VoiceEngine:

  • RTP-dump” APIs which allow recording of received and transmitted RTP streams into rtpdump-compatible format.
  • Complete Windows 7 and MAC OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support.
  • Automatic ducking or stream attenuation is a new feature in Windows 7 that is intended for VoIP. By default, the operating system reduces the intensity of an audio stream when a communication stream, such as a phone call, is received on the communication device through the computer. The latest VoiceEngine 3.4 fully exploits this new functionality in Windows 7 and allows the user to define a certain audio device as the default communication device.
  • Possibility to build 64-bit versions of VoiceEngine for MAC OS X.

As the Technical Area Manager for voice technology, I can say that I am personally very excited about these new features, and look forward to seeing (and hearing) them enable some really cool and innovative products.

Emerging Communications eComm, Amsterdam

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on October 9th, 2009 in Company News, Industry News, Technology

eComm-long

Once again GIPS is sponsoring eComm but this time it’s in Amsterdam. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the conference in California earlier this year, here’s a little more information about the show.

It’s not a tradeshow, it’s not a sales pitch stage and it’s definitely not boring. If you’re a thinker, an innovator or entrepreneur it’s a great place to meet people wearing the same hat – it’s bubbling with ideas, products and futurists  and gathering all these people in one room is no small feat.

While shows like DEMO are great – it’s like trying to get into a nightclub, when you’re underage, don’t have the right attire or if your names not down you’re just not coming in….unless you want to pay nearly $20K. eComm is different; it’s that afterschool gathering of the Mensa Science club with brilliant minds from across the globe in one large conference room discussing emerging communications.

This year, Jan Linden GIPS vice president of engineering will talk about video conferencing with a focus on H.264 SVC. (Above is Jan’s presentation earlier this year on the iPhone.) So if you want to learn more you should seriously think about attending. Our CTO, Roar Hagen will also be at the show too.

It’ll be the best conference you attend this year.

Fixed Mobile Convergence & the fg microtec Connection

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on October 6th, 2009 in Company News, Industry News

There are a lot of acronyms in this industry and it gets to be a bit too much sometimes but Unified Communications (UC) and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) are two well-known acronyms and areas of growth in communications. According to ResearchandMarkets the Fixed-Mobile Convergence market (FMC) “could generate revenue of 900 million EUR ($1.32 billion) in 2013 in Western Europe’s five largest markets, and so accounting for 4 percent of total mobile services revenue.”

So it was great to be able to announce a partnership today with fg microtec who are making waves in the UC/FMC space.

Last week fg microtec (I really like the understated lowercase name) announced a worldwide partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN) to further develop Siemens’ OpenScape MobileConnect platform.

fmc-diagramm

The OpenScape product family includes open IP telephony, fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and IP-based unified communications (UC) solutions, which will allow Siemens customers to use their mobile phones intuitively with the OpenScape MobileConnect platform.

The fg FMC client will run initially on Windows Mobile devices such as HTC and Samsung. It will allow mobile phone calls to move seamlessly from a cellular to a Wi-Fi network, creating one telecommunications network.

fg-FMC-client

The GIPS User Experience (That You Didn’t Know You Had)

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on October 2nd, 2009 in Company News, Market Trends, Technology

There are hundreds of millions of Internet and mobile telephone users across the globe that have experienced GIPS voice and video technology roughly the same amount who don’t know they had the experience. It has been a seamless and enjoyable experience  (unless the conversation turned sour…sorry we can’t do anything about that) allowing people to connect more clearly and on a far richer level than the tired old telephone that currently sits in the corner of your office or home – rarely used.

A brief history…The telephone that Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876 and made the first call was ground breaking – it was born out of Bell’s passion and teaching to help deaf people to be fully integrated into society. Nearly four decades later the first transcontinental call was made from New York to San Francisco. There were other improvements but pretty much nothing had changed until recently.

AGB

GIPS and HD voice popped along but it still remains pretty much an undiscovered technology to the majority of people around the world. On the one hand that’s a depressing story on the other hand it’s great – a huge opportunity lies ahead. From everyday phone calls, conference calls to emergency services – vast improvements are available and the tide will turn – especially as we migrate from the old copper wire to IP networks that run underground.

But HD voice is not the end of the story, it’s only the beginning. Video chat and video conferencing is becoming more prevalent. As people become more familiar with Skype, Gmail and Yahoo video chat – the more at ease people are with video as a communication channel.

So while we have GIPS engineers across the world, coding, de-bugging and tinkering with the perfection of HD video and voice communication – their biggest goal is not writing cool pieces of code it’s the user experience.

So it was nice to see some outside validation of GIPS’ efforts recently. In a company interview with San Jose Mercury reporter Mike Swift, he wrote:  “In short, the [GIPS video] technology is good enough that you start to forget about the technology, and concentrate on the conversation.”

It was very nice to read and I couldn’t have said it better myself. As our engineers recognize we aim to please our customer and their users. The experience is what matters – that’s why our engineers spend their waking lives trying to figure out how to make the experience both simple and better for users. It also allows our customers to focus on their business by relying on the latest video and voice technology keeping them one step ahead of the game: “Yahoo says its video chat traffic is up since it launched its latest version of Messenger with the GIPS technology … people in video conversations … now spend double the time per call as people on audio-only calls.”

So from Mr. Bell’s telephone call back in 1915 when Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson, (his former associate) talked and “heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago,” we now have video and you can see more clearly and communicate far better than before.

That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Back in 1915 the charge for a telephone conversation between New York and San Francisco was $20.70 for the first three minutes, and $6.75 for each minute thereafter. That same five-minute call today from San Francisco to New York cost would cost the equivalent of $756 in today’s money. Today we can video chat, have HD calls for much, much less.

Poll Reveals Polarized Market for Video Conferencing

John Hermansen
Posted by John Hermansen
on October 1st, 2009 in Company News, Market Trends

Last week, GIPS sponsored a webinar on H.264 SVC and its potential impact on the video conferencing market. During the webinar, we asked the roughly 350 participants how often they participate in video conferences or video chats.  I found the results quite intriguing.

Nearly 70 people responded to the question, with 38 percent claiming they use video conferencing/chat at least once a week. 41 percent said they never or hardly ever use video.  I think this reveals a real dichotomy in exposure to and usage of real-time video. People who have been exposed to video conferencing or chat applications, like Yahoo! Messenger, tend to use them quite frequently. However, there is still a substantial portion of the population who has yet to fully experience what video conferencing has to offer.

Conferencing_Poll

In one sense this means that there is still a need to educate the market on the benefits of video conferencing, and to demonstrate that quality has improved significantly over early implementations. Yet it also means that there is enormous potential for growth, since it seems that all is needed for video communication to take off is for people to come in contact with it.

Granted, this was just a snapshot of a group of people in a very unique industry, so it may not be completely indicative of wider usage of the technology. With this in mind,  GIPS is currently conducting a survey of more than 1,000 business professionals in the U.S., Japan, S. Korea and Hong Kong to determine in which regions video conferencing/chat is being widely adopted, for business and personal use. The results of the survey will be released later this month. Stay tuned!

GIPS New HD Voice Logo

John Gallagher
Posted by John Gallagher
on September 28th, 2009 in Company News

HDVoiceGIPS-logo

Telecommunications is a vast industry but one thing our company can claim with 100 percent certainty is that GIPS is synonymous with HD voice. It’s not just because the company has developed the wideband codecs, which are an integral part of providing HD voice, it’s because our whole company lives, breathes and sleeps media processing- whether it’s HD voice or HD video.

When a company licenses GIPS technology, they get the entire remedy, not just the codec, to deal with the IP gremlins that live out in the network. The result is an HD voice call… something the codec alone cannot guarantee.

IP-Gremlin

Those gremlins – network congestion (getting on a London Tube at rush hour every few seconds would be easier), packet loss (just think of trying to find your luggage with no identity tags, no specific baggage claim area at Heathrow during an airport strike ), echo (Yodeling through the grand canyon to communicate with your friend at the other end ) and jitter are just a few of the network issues that must be overcome to provide HD voice.

We’ve had a number of requests from customers that want to identify their product with HD Voice. So we put together a logo that should make it clear to everyone that they are using HD voice.

We hope you like it.

H.264 SVC Goodies

John Hermansen
Posted by John Hermansen
on September 21st, 2009 in Company News, Market Trends, Technology

A couple weeks ago, a reporter asked me why video conferencing has never really taken off. I actually had to pause and think about this one, instead of just spouting whatever nonsense came into my head first. So many times I find myself cheerleading the industry in which I work, without really thinking about its limitations. I came up with a few reasons, some having to do with market demand for such solutions, and some technical.

On the market side, I think we are seeing some of the old barriers to adoption that expensive hardware presented being broken down with the introduction of lower cost, flexible desktop conferencing solutions. However, it is on the technical side that I believe there is the most promise. H.264 SVC is quickly becoming the industry standard for video coding. SVC helps overcome two big problems that have plagued video conferencing. One, it maintains video resolution in multi-party conferences. It used to be that if you were in a conference with a bunch of HD-capable endpoints, and someone joined the conference using a desktop machine or other device using standard definition VGA or worse, it dumbed everyone down to the lowest resolution in the conference. SVC is different. It allows participants to send and receive HD quality video to and from any endpoint that is capable of displaying HD. That means those on HD-capable endpoints can see each other in HD, even if is someone else joins the conference on a mobile phone.

Second, by dividing a video stream into a base layer with additional “enhancement” layers, SVC can maintain quality in the face of packet loss.  Users can be guaranteed a consistent experience when the base layer is protected during periods of heavy packet loss. Even if enhancement layers are lost, basic information still arrives at its destination. This means that, instead of the blockiness and comet tail effects that accompany packet loss in traditional solutions, SVC delivers a basic level of visual quality, with only minor reductions in frame rate and resolution.

To further illustrate these points, GIPS is offering a number of educational goodies on the topic.

On Tuesday, the 22nd (tomorrow) we will be hosting a webinar on H.264 SVC. You can sign up here.

We will also host a couple of demonstrations on our website that clarify the above points. The new content should be available here tomorrow.

Finally, for those looking for more technical details, we will publish a white paper. Again, the content will be available here tomorrow.