More than a month after the event, being a DEMO God winner is keeping client iotum front and center in the minds of the press. They will be one of hot new apps featured at VON this week along with another client, SightSpeed.
The participation of SightSpeed at THE Voice on the Net (VON) conference is timely as video is the emerging new category this year. reports are something big about video will be made at VON by some industry thought leaders. AOL will likely be another entity making some kind of video related noise this week I hear, and I fully expect to see others want to get in to the game in a bigger way. Yahoo is making some indications that we will finally see Yahoo In and Out here in the USA and on the Macintosh.
First is was CU-SeeMe back in ’93, then iVisit and ICUII in the late ninties. I’ve lived my entire Internet life videoconferencing. I never understood why someone would go into a chat room without video. I was excited when Yahoo tried to do video but needs a tremendous amount of work, unusable at present. Interesting to hear about Sightspeed, I’ve heard of it but never heard of a community building up around it. Seems like it was always on the sidelines compared to the other major videochat clients.
Funny that multi-point videochat is not what VOIP clients are very good at but yet that’s the next big thing. I never use the phrase VOIP, it’s the next generation of videochat, plain and simple. Talking about VOIP is kind of like talking about UDP, nobody cares except the VC, and the heady executives, certainly not the end user. A few companies will make a mint selling vox services at 2 cents a minute, Yahoo MSN and AOL will add better video, which is what most people want. New modes of comunication are as important as cheap phone bills.