E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

There Is Nothing More Interesting than Competition, Is It?

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

Yes, folks, indeed, it seems like competition around VoIP clients is sky rocketing because it looks like we have got a new competitor in the market. Just recently I talked about VoipBuster and Jajah, Gizmo and Wavigo as pretty interesting competitors against Skype and it seems we have got a new competitor in the market: vSparrow.

As the web site indicates vSparrow is yet another P2P VoIP client that would allow you to speak free for “PC-PC and with just 2 US Cents for PC-Proper phones and 4 US Cents for PC-Mobile phones (this tarrifs will be available everywhere in the world)\”. And that seems to be a pretty good deal to me. But hang on because it gets better. vSparrow will also remain as Freeware and, more interestingly, it will remain Open Source, which will then also make it a very good competitor against Gizmo, currently available as Freeware and open source.

So the competition is about to get tougher than ever before and although we may have to wait a little bit before it is widely available for download (Planned for 1st of September) vSparrow will certainly grab some attention, if it hasn’t done that already. So another competitor is in the making and certainly, us, end-users, will be there to try it out and judge for ourselves if it would be able to make it or if it would just be another attempt to get us even more confused than what we may be at the moment with some many VoIP clients becoming available as we speak. Of course, in its due time I will be weblogging about the experience of using this new VoIP client and see how it goes. So more to come later …

In the mean time, let’s see how long it takes before we get another competitor in the market trying to make its way into our desktops to give us the ultimate VoIP client experience.

Wavigo Goes Podcasting

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

If in the last couple of days I have been mentioning how a number of different applications have been having significant updates / upgrades, it looks like it is not going to stop there any time soon. The next one in the queue seems to be Wavigo. Just recently I received an Newsletter e-mail from the Wavigo Team where they just announced a recent upgrade from Wavigo to version v0.9.0.7b.

And you may be wondering what is new in the new release, right ? Well, there are a number of things that I will be detailing in the next couple of minutes but first let me state what will make the upgrade just worth while on its own: Podcasting. Indeed, Wavigo now offers Podcast support, which means you can subscribe to your favourite podcasting services and get the content to play directly into Wavigo through the Media Player, so you will not longer need to play around with different options from different tools, specially, if you are not using a portable .mp3 player.

With Wavigo you just have got the chance now to make your experience a whole lot more multimedia than ever before listening to the podcasts you are really interested in with just a single click. It cannot be easier than that, can it ? I have just upgraded myself to Wavigo‘s latest version and after configuring the list of podcast feeds it seems to be working really well. Very easy to get it going and with the same quality as you would expect from such a service. Really nice !

But what other improvements are part of the latest release, you may be wondering. Quite a few, actually, and some of them rather interesting as well. Here you have got a list of the ones that were mentioned on the Newsletter e-mail:

“Wavigo introduces support for Podcasts – oh yeah – so now you can search, subscribe to podcasts, have them automatically loaded and played in Wavigo.

New fix for those who have the “contacts always appear offline?” problem – we have now tested this across many countries and configurations.

Updated support in News, Sports and Stock information feeds.

New file sharing features – share while you’re listening to music in Wavigo.

New popups that notify you of incoming calls, IM’s, file transfers, users requests and more.

and a whole lot of other stuff…..”

So, as you can see, there are plenty of other interesting features to have a look at. One of my other favourites from the latest upgrade though is the ease of use from the new file sharing features. You would be amazed about easy it can be to share files with others while you are interacting with them. Pretty much the same way as you have with Skype. So another good reason to check out Wavigo. If you haven’t upgraded yet to the latest version I am not sure what you are waiting for. Go and grab it while it is there and start enjoying its many new capabilities ! … I wonder now what would be next. What other technology would they be putting together into an already packed, featured rich, IM client? I guess we will soon find out but for the time being let\’s go and enjoy the current release

Video4Skype Now Video4IM

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

If you remember, not long ago I talked here in elsua about how Skype was entering the world of videoconferencing with the availability of two different plugins: Video4Skype and vSkype that folks could install directly into their computers and start using them right away with Skype.

Well, it looks like Video4Skype has been renamed as Video4IM and it is now available for download as Video4IM at the same location as before. I must say that I have downloaded it and installed it and I didn’t notice a single glitch in the quality of the image that I normally was getting when it used to be Video4Skype. So I am suspecting that the change of name is due to the fact that very shortly we may have other VoIP clients that could be using those videoconferencing capabilities already via Video4IM, specially when they are asking Video4IM users to provide some further feedback about other potential platforms that could be used.

So this looks like another space we would need to watch out over the next few weeks as we may have have some new developments for other VoIP clients very soon. If anybody out there who is reading this could confirm it with some more facts I would really appreciate it. I would love to see this particular plugin integrated with other VoIP clients that out there, specially with Gizmo, since it is Open Source, as it would be a nice add-on for an already robust alternative to Skype.

Oh, by the way, just in case you haven’t noticed it, if you haven’t checked out vSkype just recently, you may as well want to go ahead and do it because, lately, they have been releasing some new upgrades that make this other plugin for videoconferencing with Skype ever so much more worth it than ever before. Highly recommended, to say the least !