This really is a story about audio conferencing and a meeting I had with Wyde Voice at the VON conference in San Jose yesterday. Unfortunately, its not about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, although that is pretty much what I had for lunch at the show with back to back vendor meetings (bless those vendor candy bowls). In any case, there were a number of great technical tidbits that Wyde offered up about their new wideband audio conferencing technology, but the one that grabbed me the most, that I’ll talk about first, is that they will be offering voice verification as part of audio conferencing, and this is something I haven’t seen or heard about before. Being the speech girl that I am, I like it. It’s like combining peanut butter and chocolate.
Wyde will be offering Porticus Technology, Inc’s voice verification as a server plug in alongside their audio conferencing application, which opens up a different aspect of security in conferencing. Granted if you are doing conferencing with large variable groups of people, as in one time conferences, briefings, etc., punching in the access code for the conference will remain the status quo. But think of the possibilities that being able to create voice prints for employees in companies that regularly use audio conferencing, or special groups such as classes, network marketing entrepreneurs, committees, etc. The groups that could use verification instead of access codes to quickly jump on a conference call can improve speed and reduce frustration, particularly if someone is calling in on a mobile phone. Add to this the security of knowing someone else can’t enter the conference unknown, sounds pretty cool to me.
However, verification isn’t where we started our discussion, but I thought it was the most interesting. Where we started our chat was on who Wyde Voice is and what they are announcing. Wyde voice is a start up company that is backed by Free Conferencing Corporations’ founder and CEO, David Erickson. It’s the result of one of their engineers getting the idea at the VON show two years ago, that they could create a voice conferencing appliance that would support 16-bit, 16 kHz voice quality for conferencing calls, an industry first, at an affordable price. Two years later they had their coming out party at this VON conference.
The new Wyde voice appliances utilize the Asterisk platform, and bridge the gap between PSTN and VoIP environments providing a conference bridge for up to 7000 concurrent users over PSTN networks and up to 3000 on VoIP. Pricing for their VM1000 model is $160 a port and $140 for their VM3000, which provides conference for a great price. In addition to providing high voice quality to begin with, they designed their codec to compensate for current network conditions, such as heavy network traffic, so that quality of the conference doesn’t deteriorate.
Wyde is marketing their products to both service provider and enterprise customers. They see, and I agree, a market opportunity in targeting different groups for conferencing, such as distance learning and social networking sites. The VM3000 and VM1000 are offered as turnkey appliances, which are customizable.
Comments (1)
Nancy: I would love to get your feedback on our audio conferencing service, ZipDX. We are up and running offering wideband conferencing using standards-based codecs. G.722 is the most popular, and quite a few vendors are already selling phones with this technology. Today, Polycom announced their IP-6000 and IP-7000. These are the the newest members of the SoundStation "triangle phone" family; they have G.722. We've been beta testing them for a while with a number of customers and they sound great.
Even more fascinating to me was your discussion of the ease (or frustration) of setting up and getting into conference calls. ZipDX has implemented "no codes conferencing" using Caller-ID. Each participant goes through a one-time set-up process to register their phone number(s); after that, whenever they call in, ZipDX knows who they are and can put them into the right conference. We interface with on-line calendars so we can know who is supposed to be in which conference when. In fact, if you choose, ZipDX will even CALL YOU so you don't even have to remember to dial in.
I appreciate your depth of knowledge here; perhaps we can arrange for you to use ZipDX for some conferences and share your insights. I think you are right about the benefits that some new technology can bring to frequent conference users.
There's more at www.zipdx.com and of course I'd be happy to chat with you (we could have a ZipDX conference call!).
David
Posted by David Frankel | April 8, 2008 2:19 PM
Posted on April 8, 2008 14:19