Check out this video of GIPS CMO, Joyce Kim presenting on mobile video at eComm in April.

Over the weekend, GIPS was featured on NBC’s San Francisco affiliate KRON 4 Evening News. The piece, which was part of Gabriel Slate’s regular technology segment, highlighted GIPS’ VideoEngine Mobile product, and discussed the future of real-time mobile video communication. Slate was right to focus on the lack of front facing cameras being a real barrier to adoption. It will be interesting to see how the public responds once the new iPhone and Android platforms start to eliminate this barrier, and as tablets become more popular and blur the lines between mobile and desktop computing. At the very least, the fact that mainstream media outlets are covering the trend can only be seen as a promising indication of market potential.

If you have trouble playing the video, you can view it on the KRON 4 website here.

The Net Neutrality debate continued this week with a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that favors large network operators, and arguably could limit consumer’s access to the internet applications and services they crave. In the ruling, the Court decided the FCC does not have the authority to explicitly regulate the flow of internet traffic. Hence, the FCC’s landmark directive limiting Comcast’s ability to block BitTorrent traffic is unwarranted. The ruling could give network operators the precedent to selectively prioritize or block specific classes or types of internet traffic. Thereby, potentially having a profound effect on the further adoption of voice and video over IP services.

The communication space, particularly real-time video, continues to evolve and the options for consumers expand everyday:

-          Earlier this year at CES, several television manufacturers, such as Panasonic, introduced products to enable video conferencing from the comfort of one’s living room.

-          Mobile video is no longer a futuristic concept and networks and smartphone processors are reaching speeds capable of delivering and processing high-quality real-time video transmission.

-          Today, GIPS expanded our product portfolio by introducing VideoEngine-Mobile for the Android platform.

-          One can easily imagine a future generation iPad with a front-facing camera enabling high quality two-way video.

The promise of receiving voice and video from any device, at anytime, anywhere in the world, is becoming a reality.

As video becomes commonplace, the question at hand is—how will consumers receive the flood of packets laden with video frames and—will network operators have a say in determining which packet is most deserving of an unencumbered path through the internet. The debate surely will continue with more still to come from the Courts, FCC and Congress.

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.