He won’t say how much the company has raised, other than that the money is from a private equity fund and that ooVoo, with a staff of 70, still has cash reserves. ![]() Schwartz is much more interested in the emerging “netbook” market, comprising devices which range somewhere between a smart phone footprint and a laptop. The relatively limited bandwidth inherent in cellular networks, plus the smaller form factor, means that multi-person video chats will probably not be going on the road any time soon. How about mobile devices? With many reports predicting that up to half of Internet access will be from hand held devices by 2011, ooVoo is aggressively researching how to put its video conferencing on smart phones. The video quality was excellent but the voice sounded a bit metallic – still a few bugs to work out it seems. ISRAEL21c tried a call with five video participants. And we have a pending patent in this area,” Schwartz proudly points out. “It was a big issue but we think we’ve solved it well. Synching up the video and audio channels has not been a piece of cake. OoVoo has had other technical challenges to overcome as well. That leads to higher quality and greater reliability, Schwartz says. OoVoo, on the other hand, brings in the extra bandwidth from a data center it owns in Atlanta. Skype, Schwartz explains, maximizes bandwidth by tapping into idle computers with the Skype client open – yes, that’s right, while you’re sleeping, someone else could be sucking up resources from your computer. In contrast, “ooVoo started out entirely focused on video,” Schwartz says and has, since the company’s launch in 2006, worked to “create an infrastructure to manage the amount of bandwidth available on a dynamic basis.” Adding video hasn?t been as successful and the quality isn?t so high, Schwarz tells ISRAEL21c. While both Skype and ooVoo use the Voice over IP protocol, Skype started out as voice only. Philippe Schwartz, the French-Israeli founder and CEO of ooVoo, readily admits that his main competition is the now ubiquitous Skype, but he says, the two are very different products. OoVoo users can instant message each other while they talk, send files and, come April, will be able to broadcast what’s on their computer screens in real time to all call participants – a feature that could give dedicated screen sharing services like WebEx and GoToMeeting a run for their money. Non-ooVoo users can be invited as well (though they can’t initiate a call) via a browser-based Java applet. Another six people can join the call via audio only. ![]() Each person appears in a video window that flits about the screen in a design similar to iTunes’ Cover Flow feature. ![]() OoVoo (the name represents two sets of eyes joined together) can put up to six people on a call at once. The quality wasn’t particularly good, but who cared, it was free.Ī new Israeli startup aims to wed those two worlds – providing multi-person video conference calls at no cost, for both consumers and businesses. Then along came webcams and Skype and a host of other services offering phone and one-to-one video calls. Needless to say, it was terribly expensive and out of the price range of average consumers. ![]() In the not so distant past, conducting a teleconference between several company offices in different parts of the globe required a dedicated meeting room with large TV screens on the wall and cameras that panned and swayed to capture meeting participants seated at a long table.
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