MeBeam

IconDial, so can you

IconDial is a service which has was launched a few months ago, is now back online, and should remain so, as we have managed to finally find a way to make it sustainable.

In exchange for listening to a short 10 second advert before the call is made, you can make free calls to any land-line or mobile phone in USA.

IconDial will soon be expanding to other countries, and will be offering new features, such as voice-mail, address books etc.

Check it out at, www.icondial.com

The World's Fastest

Many moons ago, myself and a small community of early adopters, set out to design and build , literally

"The world's fastest video phone"

At the time, this was a powerful mantra, because video phones back in those days, suffered from jerky, photo like video and terrible audio to video synchronization.

The project, called WigiWigi, was, without a doubt, a labor of love.

It was not uncommon for me to release dozens of versions of the project every night, with each one ever so slowly inching towards faster and faster frame rates, until it was common knowledge, that WigiWigi, was without a doubt the world's fastest video phone.

The late Russel Shaw of ZDnet, covered my work, by writing an article about our first commercial release called Vwho.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=1040

The challenges were massive, everything was developed by hand, in both C and assembler. Audio compression, Video compression, network protocols, P2P layers etc, were all written completely from scratch, and optimized to the point, where, even today, the WigiWigi engine, still beats the pants off, virtually all of todays video phones.

The WigiWigi project, was a very satisfying chapter in my and the amazing crew of testers and community.


Today, "The World's Fastest...", is still at the core of everything I do.


Recently, this goal was immortalized, by a group of kids, who are known as sport stackers, who use MeBeam, to show off their skills to each other, and trying to break speed records in this unusual, yet, very cool, past time.

SportStacking, is the art of stacking and unstacking, plastic cups, into different formations at a blindingly fast pace.

Steven Purugganan, who is currently the world record holder for this, along with his friends, use Mebeam, to display their skills and try to smash record times.

MeBeam, is used, because, it allows people to communicate using video, at real-time speeds, without jerky, grainy movement.

Check out the following recordings of MeBeam sessions, to get an idea of how fast MeBeam and these guys are.

I shall call him MiniMe

Meet MeBeams little bro, MiniMe - a portable version of MeBeam that you can use on top of your blog , web page, or forum.

Please keep in mind, this is a pre-alpha release and may not work all the time.

MiniMe can handle 4 people in your room, but will generate an unlimited number of sub-rooms automatically.

To add MiniMe to your site, copy and paste the code at the end of this post, and remember to name your room.

<object width='323' height='460' id='zuhzy' align='middle'>
<param name='allowScriptAccess' value='always' >
<param name='movie' value='http://www.mebeam.com/minime.swf'>
<param name='quality' value='best' >
<param name='scale' value='noscale' >
<param name='salign' value='t' >
<param name='flashvars' value='room=blogroom'>
<embed flashvars='room=blogroom' src='http://www.mebeam.com/minime.swf' quality='best' scale='noscale' salign='t' width='323' height='460' name='zuhzy' align='middle' allowScriptAccess='always' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' >
</object>

Who you gonna call ?

In my previous post I spoke about the launch of our new operator service which effectively gives any jabber based instant messenger the ability to make a multi person video call to anyone on any other Jabber client.

Although, this is a huge step forward, we still have a long way to go, before video conferencing between any internet device is seamless and easy to use.

The next piece of this never ending jigsaw, is the ability to make multi person video calls using Skype and also be able to make and receive multi person video calls to Jabber clients.

As of June 1 ( god willing ) , a new service will be released, which will allow you to do just that.

There is still a few days to go, but you can as of today, add the contact name Mebeam, as shown below, to your Skype, and be part of the multi person video service for Skype as soon as we're ready to roll.



.

Hello Operator - I need an outside line

A few months ago Andreas Monitzer wrote a plugin for the Adium instant Messenger,
giving Adium users the ability to make multi person video calls to not only to other Adium users, but anyone else using a Jabber based instant messenger.

The plugin, which makes use of our MeBeam service, was very well received, and made the front page of Digg.

Since then, other Jabber based instant messengers have also developed plugins, such as Coccinella, Miranda, Google Talk etc.

Today, I am happy to announce, our new Operator service, which will allow anyone using a Jabber instant messenger to make a multi person video call to anyone.

So if your using Pidgin, WengoPhone,iChat,Trillian or any other Jabber instant messenger, simply add
operator@mebeam.com to your contact list, type the word call followed by the jabber id of the person you wish to call and the operator service will take care of the rest.

For example to establish a video call from your Pidgin instant messenger to your friend john_smith who is on Google Talk,
simply type in the following into the operator chat window.

call john_smith@gmail.com

That's all there is to it.