Graves on SOHO Technology

VUC regular Tim Panton has been very busy lately. He was at Astricon where he gave a splendid presentation on the current state of Skype-For-Asterisk, including a live demo of it integrated with Google Wave. He later gave a similar presentation at eComm in Amsterdam, including a demo to the Google Wave team! Of course, we’ve been using his G.722 capable Java plug-in for web browser access to the ZIPDX wideband conference bridge for several months. That has been a genuinely useful bit of software, allowing anyone with a headset & decent broadband to experience HDVoice first hand.

This past week Voxygen announced the launch of Blabbelon, a new free voice chat service aimed at online gamers. Blabbelon is one of Tim’s recent projects. He worked on the audio portion of the service, specifically helping them implement audio using Skype’s SILK codec.

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I got wind of this by way of Twitter and managed to give it a brief try. The service is implemented in Flash, but the audio quality is very good indeed! They have adopted a push-to-talk operating metaphor as opposed to full duplex audio. This is supposed to be the most useful to gamers who are subject to all sorts of game related sounds beyond the voice chat.

Gaming, either online or offline, has never been my thing. However, I certainly appreciate anything that promotes the use of voice going beyond the old-timey telecom standards. This is the kind of wholly new service that we need to get beyond the death spiral of ever-cheaper minutes. In this case the press release truly can be believed, Blabbelon is a game changing service.

Congratulations to Tim and everyone at Voxygen on the launch of Blabbelon!