About clones

Welcome back Martin, I think my inventivity missed you.
But I guess the ones who missed you more were Skype's followers.
There is a lot of talking about the new "Skype's clone" and I will report what people say.

"Gizmo-Lacking In Support

Andy Abramson
With Gizmo, like Skype, they use one of those online systems where you enter a trouble ticket. While that may be good for some people (i.e. techies) as a business person and media member, I'm a bit more interested in having someone "talk" with me about the problem, understand the problem, and discuss the solution process."

I guess this is the usual problem: People want everything for free and even expect to have a good "help line"


Tried Gizmo yet?
Posted Jul 5, 2005, 9:55 PM ET by Ted Wallingford

Perhaps coolest of all is its developers’ insistence on open standards (SIP most notably) under the hood, the lack of which will eventually come back to bite Skype, I think. Also included are some really great features Skype doesn’t have—like call recording and a world map showing the approximate location of your call buddies.



The sincerest form of flattery

Martin Geddes - Telepocalypse


Well, I tried downloading Skype-clone Gizmo and making a call.
But it doesn’t work. Just hangs after trying to connect to the login server post-registration.
Remember, it’s not just free Internet telephony that counts. It’s free Internet telephony that just works.

This looks more, as we say a problem of the "handles" than a problem of the "broom".


IM VoIP Clients - Interop is Key

Eric Lagerway - SIPthat.com


Aswath has created a bit of a stir with his recent post regarding Gizmo and Pulver Communicator. Jeff Pulver had something to say about Gizmo on his blog as well. All in all I think we need to remember that the key to creating a good IP communications client will rest in the features and interop. Interop means incorporating open standards like SIP and using royalty free codecs [preferably open source]. With Video it's H.263++ [for now] and for audio it's Speex Wideband. H.263++ provides close to 264/AVC quality with the codec royalty and uses far less CPU. Speex-wb provides for excellent sound quality, so much in fact Yahoo! decided to implement it.
Om Malik, Andy Abramson and of course Stuart Henshall all had things to say about Gizmo.
Remember, when building these new IP communications clients, interop is key. If it you are not building something that will work with the open standards proposed by the IETF you are not building something that will stand the test of time. If you want to deliver something new where there is no standard, then work with someone to create it!

I would just add : There is already a H.264 that works great!


Gone Native?

Aswath Rao - Aswath Weblog

A few days back a new VoIP client, called Gizmo, was released claiming to be a Skype killer. This is closely associated with SIPPhone, which had earlier released another client called GAIM, an integrated IM and VoIP client.

First a summary of what one can do with Gizmo. It gives a nice UI to use the SIPPhone system. The first notable feature is the way it supports the voice mail. The system collects voice mail and then forwards to a specified email. This is in contrast to Skype, which hosts the messages. The second feature of note is the ability to record the conversation. Their website indicates that they have a partnership with Golbal IP Sound. Even though it is not stated on the nature of partnership, the consensus seems to be that Gizmo uses their wideband codec.

As for what concerns me, I am still sticking to H323.
I find it much better than SIP, and more versatile.
The latest versions even allows to solve the problem of the Dynamic IP without the use of a proxy and the integration of all the dream able features.
Without considering security. Which with interoperability must be one of the most considered issue.

May be it is because I am Italian.
We Italians have a tradition to be always on different opinions from the rest of the world.
We love discussions so much!

Some year ago we had somebody who even finished in Prison because He insisted the World was round and the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way.
Thanks to him another Italian discovered America...


On the other hand, Italians were not so stupids, because they found even Americans stealing their inventions and cheating the whole world.
(see "Once and for all the true story of the Telephone Invention")

Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, but still the Americans think it was one of them...