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Forget video chat: The front camera on my smartphone is a mirror

Stacey Higginbotham — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:00:06 +0000

Here’s one more thing I won’t be needing to stuff in my bag on a night out — a mirror. Thanks to my brand new Galaxy S III with a front-facing camera I’m good to go when I need to apply new lipstick–or more commonly, check to see if I’m sporting a bit of spinach in my teeth. Sure, the camera was supposed to be used for video calling, but so far it’s been more of a grooming aide than a communications tool.

Front-facing cameras on phones are becoming more common in handsets for video conferencing, not that many people appear to be using them for that. The iPhone 4 first sported the front camera in the Apple ecosystem back in June of 2010, while the HTC Evo also in 2010 provided video-calling for Android users. Popular new handsets from companies developing devices for the Android ecosystem are driving up the number of front-facing cameras in the market. The idea was that such cameras would be used for making mobile video calls, but I’m not sure how popular that is.

Skype doesn’t provide data on the number of mobile video calls, and Apple doesn’t break out Facetime stats over mobile devices. In fact, it’s tough to find a company willing to share stats on how much people use video calls on their mobile device. However, I pulled a chart from Sandvine’s global mobile internet report from the first half of 2012 that shows that video calls are a tiny percentage of the overall traffic generated by apps on mobile networks — somewhat surprising given that those apps use more bandwidth than something like checking Facebook.

Perhaps the difficulty in using the carrier’s data network as opposed to Wi-Fi contributes to the lack of users. In my case, it’s a lack of friends who are willing or available to participate in a spontaneous mobile video call, but for whatever reason, video calling hasn’t seemed to catch up with the cameras on their phones just yet.

But even if I don’t make a video call that camera is useful — albeit expensive. My trusty compact can now join my address book, my clip-on flashlight, my paperback and my little note pad in the list of items I no longer need to drag along with me when I’m out on the town. Of course, when the batteries are low, then I may have to choose between adjusting my make up and texting, but perhaps I’ll just use that room I created to bring along an extra battery.

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Ambient video and the changing face of communication

Ryan Kim — Sat, 26 May 2012 12:00:24 +0000

This past week I wrote about Skype competitor OoVoo, which launched a new Facebook 12-way video chat app along with updateds to many of its other apps. While the Facebook app was the headline, what really stood out to me was my conversation with OoVoo chairman Robert Jackman. Jackman told me that OoVoo’s mostly young users — 60 percent of its 46 million users are under 25 — don’t use OoVoo like other people use Facetime or Skype: to make the equivalent of a phone call over video.

Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

”We’re moving to a different way of communicating,” Jackman said. “We’re seeing this long persistant use of video. This is how people are sharing their lives digitally.”

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences. Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

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Oovoo gives Facebook users their own Google Hangouts

Ryan Kim — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:35 +0000

Oovoo, the video conferencing service popular with the young set, is helping Facebook get some Google Hangout-like coolness with a new Facebook app that offers up to 12-person video chats. The Facebook app is part of a big overhaul for Oovoo’s product lineup, which includes a redesigned iPad app that handles 12-way calls and displays four simultaneous video calls as well as a new web app that can also handle 12-way video chats.

New York City-based Oovoo is now up to 46 million registered users who are increasingly using Oovoo to broadcast their lives and spend hours on end with friends. The new products and updates should accelerate usage even more, especially now that Facebook is part of the Oovoo network. Facebook already has a video chat application thanks to a partnership with Skype but that app doesn’t allow multiparty video. With the Oovoo app, users can now conduct 12-way video calls right inside Facebook and they can easily start calling either Oovoo users or other Facebook users. Facebook users who haven’t downloaded the app get prompted to do so the first time.

The iPad app is also a big improvement for Oovoo. It supports four streams simultaneously and 12-way calling. Previously, the iPad, iPhone and Android apps supported six people on a call but could only display one other user live at a time. The iPad app’s UI has also been upgraded to allow one-click Facebook registrations and the ability for users to initiate calls by dragging and dropping contacts into the calls.

Oovoo is providing a new way to invite people into chats with Call Link, which allows users to send out a chat invitation via email, text or through social channels. For people who click on the link, they can fire up a new web-based version of Oovoo that doesn’t require a download.

Robert Jackman, Oovoo’s executive chairman, told me by using Facebook and enabling more sharing though Call Link, Oovoo has the ability to foster even more connections with people. And it highlights just how robust the video calling network is. While Skype provides multi-party calling as a premium service for computers, it doesn’t offer it yet for Facebook or its mobile apps. Oovoo was built as a cloud application, said Jackman, and it’s able to scale up quickly to handle more more users and multiparty conferencing.

The service has been on a tear since launching in late 2010. It’s become a go-to resource for teenagers and young adults, with more than 60 percent of Oovoo users under the age of 25. The average user is spending 200 minutes a month on the service, often keeping it on in the background as they go on about their lives.

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ooVoo Releases Multiuser Video Chat App for the iPhone

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:52:12 +0000

Online and mobile video chat provider ooVoo has just released a new app for the iPhone that offers multi-platform video chat for Apple devices. By doing so, iPhone and iPod touch users now have one more way to launch multi-user video chat wherever they are.

The mobile video chat market is heating up, ever since Apple launched its FaceTime app with the introduction of the iPhone 4. Since then, a number of companies have sought to cash in on the phenomenon, including Skype, Tango, Yahoo and others. Like most of these video chat apps, ooVoo works on both 3G and Wi-Fi networks, and enables users to chat with friends on the web and on Android mobile devices.

The big differentiator ooVoo has is the ability to do multi-user chat. The app allows up to six different video chat partners to be logged into a call at once, and it does so with pretty fantastic video quality, even on mobile networks. In that respect, it primarily competes with Fring, which launched a multi-party, multi-platform group video chat app in early April.

There’s one other crucial difference: ooVoo’s user base. The company has long had a video chat application available on the desktop, where it mostly competed with Skype. But while Skype is used by many enterprise users and web-savvy professionals, ooVoo is being adopted by a very young user base, a trend being accelerated with the launch of its Android app. I have two teenaged sisters, and anecdotal evidence from their usage of the app shows that ooVoo is pretty cool with youngsters.

In a phone interview a few weeks ago, ooVoo CMO Matt deGanon confirmed my suspicions that the app has become a popular way for teenagers to keep in touch. According to him, about 57 percent of all ooVoo users are under the age of 25, and the overwhelming majority of that group are under 18. Surprisingly though, those teenagers aren’t necessarily using the app to just speak with their friends; deGanon said young ooVoo users were using the app to connect on social networks and meet new people live.

ooVoo has more than 25 million registered users now, but the launch of the iPhone app will surely drive that much higher. After announcing availability of the iPhone app to its 1 million Facebook fans, it has seen registrations at about three times its usual level, and expects to hit a record for registrations today.

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9 Great Alternatives to Skype for VoIP and Video Chat

Simon Mackie — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:10:22 +0000

While Darrell thinks that Microsoft buying Skype in a $8.5 billion deal is probably good news for video chat users, there will probably be some Skype customers who are worried about the implications of the acquisition and may be looking for alternatives. While there’s probably no one service that provides a feature-for-feature replacement for Skype, there are plenty that offer great VoIP and video calling services, some of which are even better than Skype’s. Here is a list of some of our favorites:

VoIP/Phone service

Google Voice. Voice is Google’s phone service, which launched to much fanfare in March 2009. It provides free PC-to-PC voice and video calls, free PC-to-phone calls within the U.S. and cheap calls elsewhere (for users in the U.S. only). One of Google Voice’s most useful features (again, only available to U.S. residents) is that it enables users to have one number that they can use anywhere — any calls placed to that number will ring all of the users’ configured phones. The service also provides a range of useful additional features, such as voicemail, SMS, conference calling, call screening and transcription of voicemail messages.
Vbuzzer. A VoIP and IM service that, unlike Skype, is based on open protocols like XMPP and SIP. It offers free PC-to-PC calls, as well as paid-for PC-to-phone calls, with typically cheaper rates than Skype. It also features voicemail, call forwarding, caller ID, web conferencing and fax service.
VoxOx. VoxOx is trying to be an “all-in-one” messaging app for both the desktop and mobile devices. It combines phone calls, IM, SMS, video chat, conference calling and even fax. It also provides similar “one number anywhere” functionality to Google Voice, and outgoing calls can be placed at competitive rates. While Charlie didn’t particularly like the Mac client when he reviewed it back in January, finding some shortcomings, it’s worth a look. The iPhone app is interesting because rather than relying on VoIP, it uses callbacks — the service can ring you on any convenient nearby phone line.
Viber. iPhone users looking for a way to make free VoIP calls should take a look at Viber, a VoIP app that allows iPhone-to-iPhone calling over 3G and Wi-Fi connections. The app is free, runs in the background, doesn’t have any ads and won’t charge you anything to make calls. Android and BlackBerry apps are apparently in the works, which would extend the app’s reach significantly.
Grasshopper. Looking for a step up from Skype to a more business-oriented virtual phone system? Grasshopper provides many of the features found in expensive office PBX systems for a fraction of the cost, including support for multiple users, each with their own extension, individual greetings, voicemail, web access and notifications by email or text message, as well as the ability to have local or toll-free numbers for people to call you on. Charlie was impressed by the product and its slick web interface when he reviewed it back in 2009. The type of advanced functionality you get comes at a higher cost than consumer-focused offering like Google Voice and Skype, however, with a range of plans available.
8×8 Virtual Office Pro/Solo. 8×8 provides another useful VoIP-based virtual business phone system. It’s available in two editions, Virtual Office Pro for businesses requiring multiple extensions, and Solo for individuals (see Charlie’s recent review). The system includes business numbers, voicemail, call waiting, music on hold, caller ID, three-way calling and the ability to record calls for storage as digital audio files. It costs $49.99 per extension per month for the Pro Edition or $7.99 per month for the Solo edition.

Video Chat

While some of the options listed above, like Google Voice, provide video calling as part of the services they offer, there are also some dedicated video chat apps:

Tinychat. For multiuser video chats, Tinychat is great. It’s dead simple to use, requires no login, and has a clean interface. It’s Flash-based, so it should work in most browsers and up to 12 people can join a video chat simultaneously. The basic service is free.
ooVoo. ooVoo also provides free multiuser (up to six people simultaneously) video chat, and has clients available for Mac, PC and a wide range of mobile devices. It even allows for high-quality video calling over 3G wireless networks.
FaceTime. Apple’s video chat application is no longer just for iPhone users. With the launch of FaceTime for Mac in February, it works on Macs and any iOS device with a forward-facing camera, it makes it possible to place Mac-to-Mac, Mac-to-iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, and iPhone/iPod touch/iPad -to-iPhone/iPod touch/iPad calls. Video quality is high, supporting up to 720p resolution on more recent Macs.

What are your favorite alternatives to Skype?

Photo courtesy Flickr user DanBrady

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Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

ooVoo Takes Multi-user Mobile Video Chat Into the Cloud

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:00:25 +0000

Look out, Qik, FaceTime and Tango! A new mobile application from video chat startup ooVoo aims to provide high-quality, multi-user video chat across mobile networks. With Wednesday’s launch of new Android and desktop apps, ooVoo will let users communicate with up to six different video chat partners, even over today’s 3G wireless networks.

I got a demo of the application on a Samsung Galaxy S mobile phone provided by ooVoo and can say I was very impressed with the quality of its video chat service, even with four parties online and on Sprint’s 3G network. When I boosted the signal by signing on to my home Wi-Fi network, the quality was even better. Check out this — admittedly somewhat promotional — video provided by ooVoo to get a sense of how its service stacks up to Qik’s mobile video chat app on identical phones running on Sprint’s 4G network:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

So how does ooVoo do it? Unlike other point-to-point video chat applications, its service doesn’t depend as much on the device or the network; instead of relying on the handset’s processor, ooVoo shifts the heavy lifting of video encoding and processing to the cloud. As a result, the underpowered processors of most mobile devices don’t get overloaded and slow down while the application is running, and the video is sent and displayed pretty seamlessly.

While ooVoo has been providing video chat services on the desktop over the last several years, mainly competing with apps like Skype, the mobile market provides a new opportunity. But the mobile video chat market is becoming crowded — and fast.

With the introduction of front-facing cameras on mobile devices like the iPhone 4 and Android handsets like the HTC Evo and the Samsung Epic, a number of app developers have sprung into action to enable video chat on those devices. Apple released its FaceTime application earlier this year, but startups like Qik and Tango have also been quick to make video chat available on Android phones. And rumor has it that Skype is hiring mobile developers — possibly to port its video chat capabilities to iOS and Android phones.

Even so, ooVoo’s advantages — like high-quality and multi-user chat — should bode well as it competes against apps like Tango and Qik. And ooVoo’s CEO Philippe Schwartz says the service’s cloud-based architecture could help it bridge the divide between multiple fragmented video chat apps available today. Because video processing happens in the cloud, it’s not a problem for ooVoo to translate video sent by desktop or mobile apps from other providers into a format supported by its own apps, or vice versa.

Android isn’t the only ecosystem that ooVoo hopes to conquer; Schwartz says the company hopes to have an iOS app available by February (just in time for the iPad 2 to be announced?), and it is also looking to have its application available on connected devices like TVs in the future. In the meantime, the company is well positioned to reap the benefits of the explosion in mobile video chat.

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Report: The Consumer Video Chat Market, 2010-2015

Alfred Poor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:01:01 +0000

At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January, the home electronics industry was all abuzz about 3DTV. While this was certainly an important topic, most of the press and analysts in attendance missed the much bigger story about television: video chat. As two-way, real-time video comes to a broad range of devices from TVs to mobile phones, video chat will account for 11 billion calls worldwide by 2015. This report is a comprehensive analysis of the video communications and chat market across the TV, mobile and computer markets. It examines key market players, such as Skype, Google, Cisco, Apple and others, and includes comprehensive subscriber, usage and revenue forecasts through 2015.

Movie Clips on Skype? Sure, Why Not?

Om Malik — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:32:20 +0000

eBay and by proxy Skype wants to do just more than IM and voice chats. And that is why they’re pushing the service, and its clients, into new directions — from telepresence to video to whatever they can think of next. (My inner skeptic says they have to keep that user base growing in order to spin out or sell Skype.)

According to NewTeeVee, Skype today signed a new deal with San Francisco-based Jaman that “will let Skype users insert film clips into their conversations to share with friends. The new service will be available on Skype over the coming months.”

The way it’s supposed to work is this: There will be a video button added to the bottom of the Skype client, between the green and red call buttons. That will invoke a window where you will be able to share clips and trailers with as many people as you like. By doubling-clicking on the clip you’ll be taken to Jaman, where you can rent or buy the film. But while I unequivocally love Jaman — its wide array of foreign films helped me through my recovery process, especially when I couldn’t blog — I’m not sure many people would use this new feature.

That said, video on Skype is seriously hot. I was talking to one of their PR people last week and she told me that 28 percent of Skype calls are video calls, proving that video calling is going mainstream much faster than even my best guess. The Skype people, however, think it recently got a big boost because of Oprah.

Oprah has integrated more than 25 Skype video calls on her TV show in the last eight weeks. (Check out how Oprah is using Skype to chat with Jenny McCarthy.) But Skype doesn’t have a lock on the video chat market. A startup called ooVoo in New York launched a video chat service last June that’s connecting over 2 million video conversations per month. It’s now working with laptop maker Quanta to bring HD chat to computers and TVs. Of course, most PCs now come equipped with webcams — indeed, calling and seeing family is one of the most important things we use our computers for now.

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