August 02, 2006
Festoon Unity Video + Voice Bridges Skype + Google Talk
Festoon Inc, formerly called vSkype, has relaunched with two voice-related offerings. One is Abazab, which lets you collect video comments on a website or weblog. The second, Festoon Unity, is a WoIP (video + VoIP) bridge between Skype and Google talk.
Festoon Unity runs in the background, activated by a button from either Skype or Google Talk. The callee must also have Festoon installed, as well as Skype or Google Talk. The nice thing about Festoon Unity is that it really does unify Skype and Google Talk, or so they say. I haven't convinced anyone to download it yet, but apparently you can call from Google Talk to Skype.
Hot damn! VoIP intercompatibilty. To a degree. Although there's no mention of Sightspeed or Gizmo Project, both of which are based on the open source SIP standard. But hey, it's a start, and the alliances are forming. Unity is supposed to be supporting AOL, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger by some time this year.
On their what's new page, a number of features, both useful and frivolous. Besides intercalling between Skype and Google Talk, the new version (beta) has better lip syncing, faster video, and better audio quality. They also now support most proxy servers, including SOCKS and HTTP. And for conference calls, they've improved group audio for better conversation flow. For the kids, they have video effects collectively called EyeCandy, which basically lets you paste your face in cutouts and pretend you're someone else.
Abazab, which is Festoon's new offering, isn't VoIP, but it does let website owners and visitors communicate with voice and video comments. Festoon is very similar to Grouper [Mashable, Techcrunch], and is aimed at squarely at bloggers, particularly the social spaces of MySpace, Xanga, etc. As long as you have a website/ weblog where you can add HTML code containing a Shockwave/ Flash player, you can use Abazab.
Both Abazab and Grouper look like a whole heck of a lot of fun, and advance the cause of a read/write two-way sort of web. And Festoon Unity advances the search for the holy grail of text/ VoIP IM clients. Bravo.
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