Rumours are beginning to circle the web regarding Skype offering an integrated video call option in a new release soon.
Festoon, which recently changed its name from Vskype, offers a current alternative but the name change must be taken as a signal that Skype are going their own route.
Further according to Skype Journal, an independent Skype blog commentary, last September they posted extracts from Skype’s Product Development Road map illustrating the planned video release in October.
Now with the unforeseen introduction of the Sony’s IVE, ‘Instant Video Everywhere’, application (a collaboration with Glowpoint) it must surely force Skype’s hand.
Sony’sEric Murphy: “The launch of the IVE service as a free, unlimited useservice is a communications watershed moment for consumers – aninstantaneous, easy-to-use application that brings people together by literally putting them in the same room.”
With some 200,000,000 downloads, Skype has grown exponentially and has developed to a point where Ebay purchased them last month for an estimated $2.6 billion. Skype is the no.1 name in Voip and video is a natural progression, for Sony to beat them to release must be seen as a major coup.
The concern would be that Skype’s product is rushed to the market place and the application not impress in the same way it did when first released!
Ok I probably aint the first but definitely wont be the last to comment on this but Riya the photo search people that uses face andtext recognition, are supposedly being lined up as the next Google acquisition.
Firstly, this seems like a pretty sensible move on Google’s part and great business sense. Yahoo clearly got a major step up on the big G with Flickr and is in danger of completely loosing out in the photographic market. Secondly this software is hot, from the stuff of science fiction novels little more than a decade ago this can completely revolutionize the waywe store and retrieve photo’s. The fact is Flickr is damn good and theproof is in the massive community but if we could automatically tag photo’s when uploading them with peoples names and places then it would take the only headache out of the equation.
Don’t get me wrong, there is an awful lot of crap floating around again in this Web 2.0, dot com part 2 or whatever you wanna call it but this is a good example of what all the fuss is about. The figure quoted at the moment is along the lines of $40m which for a fresh, venture capitalist, start up is good business all round.
By Bish
|
Published: 13/11/2005 – 22:36
|
Posted in Web2.0
|
Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, has had an overhall recently and with it comes some pretty cool expansions to the feature set. While the ability to search peoples bookmarks for various file types has been around for a while, they have now introduced the ability to play the music files that are listed the popular section of the site.
Check out the London Symphony Orchestra’s cover of the Super Mario theme and Nina Gordon’s interpretation of Straight Outta Compton by NWA.
del.icio.us/popular/system:filetype:mp3
