Facebook users preview Lypp – Free Conference Calls and Group Calls
Last night Lypp released a preview of the free group calling service to a few select people on the Lypp Facebook group. What followed was an all-out assault on the service, which is kinda what we were expecting. The service stood up the initial avalanche of calls and never missed a beat.
There were a few people who posted some blog entries regarding their experience and in some cases, lack of experience. Here are a couple of the message threads from Facebook and my responses.
Danny Robinson writes…
"Sweet! signed up and made my first call in 30 seconds. couldn't be easier to use."
Well that's one satisfied user, tens of millions to go!
Markus Goebel writes..
"So, Erik, what's the difference between Lypp and GTalk2VoIP? As I see it they do the same yet for months. Maybe Lypp is more convenient to use?"
Markus, thank you for your feedback although I think the differences between GTalk2Voip and Lypp would have been clear had you been able to use the Lypp service. From viewing the logs I can see that you have not had a chance to use Lypp at all, likely because you live in Germany and Lypp is currently a North American service. Since you seem to be speculating what the Lypp experience really is and since I am familiar with the service you are referring to I think I can help you better understand.
As we can see from the architectural diagram below (available on the GTalk2Voip website) the media and signaling all route through the Internet.
Gtalk2Voip network
The Lypp network functions much differently. We do not send media (calls) from/to the IP endpoint (IM client) from/to the PSTN gateway. We in fact send a signal to the network that in turn creates outbound legs from the switch to any typical land line phone or mobile phone. You obviously know my background in SIP and softphones so it would have been simple to do what is shown above.
At Lypp we knew that the users would suffer from QoS and basic service issues if we were to rely on their broadband connection to act as a backbone for the last and/or first mile of telephony. We also did not want to impose a download onto any mobile device so we leveraged existing software for the first pass of the Lypp beta. I hope this helps you understand better how the initial service is being offered. Fyi, we hope to bring Lypp to European markets within the coming months so you should not have to wait too much longer to try the service.
Moshe Maeir writes..
"Tried it. Worked. What more can you ask? I did in my blog :-)"
Moshe, great blog post! I have a few comments that may help you. As you know, since you are a member of the Lypp group on Facebook, you were given a sneak preview to Lypp service.
I am glad to see you had a chance to use the service. Your points regarding "business class" conferencing services are great! The one thing that you may or may not know about the company's history is the concerted effort we made on building enterprise class conference features. A great deal of the code base that makes up Lypp comes from our Gaboogie offering. If you are not familiar with Gaboogie there are a few, albeit dated, screencasts of the various modules we made available within the Gaboogie offering;
Creating a Scheduled Conference
How to Record and Syndicate a Conference Call
This glimpse into what we are capable of, and already have a code base for, should provide you with some clues in regards to parts of our revenue model.
Thanks to all for the early feedback, keep it coming!
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