Wednesday, October 20, 2004

VoIP: DUNDi, Peerio

DUNDi, covered by the VOIP WebLog:
... simplifies the process of connecting users directly, and is able to completely bypass the PSTN ...
In other developments, Om Malik and a few others are pretty excited about "Peerio". While I got all pumped-up from their enthusiasm, going through the Peerio FAQs, I failed to understand what the excitement was all about. I'm waiting for constructive detailed analysis of this thing to share in the excitement ... Here are a few questions I'm asking:

I thought SIP was all about enabling Peer-to-Peer communications. Peerio is compatible and will interoperate with SIP ... which FWD, SIPPhone and EarthLink offer, so what other magic peer-to-peer mojo are they using for a Peerio user to do a P2P session with another Peerio user? Peerio will offer a PSTN gateway which the pure-play SIP players don't ... okay ... but Skype does ... but Skype isn't SIP or open ... okay.

I think the main thing is that they're building a software platform that developers can reuse to build SIP/VoIP apps, part of that platform is open source, another part of it could be licensed to build their ware into embedded devices, which is pretty cool ... i guess. I guess they're trying to further develop the array of entities that could initiate SIP calls? Instead of having to buy a separate ATA device, or license and use one of many clumsy SoftPhones, you could use their software foundation to build your own SIP client, while extending the potential realms of what type of hardware that client might be? I'm really thinking out loud here.

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