Peerio's roadmap - another signpost

The Popular Telephony announcements are accelerating at a nice clip, and later today, the company is to unveil a partnership with Global IP Sound (www.globalipsound.com), to make GIPS' "VoiceEngine" the voice processing technology of choice for Peerio444 (the free consumer client) and PeerioBiz (the enterprise desktop edition). It will also be the recommended voice processor for the middleware to be embedded on hardware bearing the "C'est Peerio" designation (again, think "Intel inside"), though it is my understanding that embedded product manufacturing partners will have discretion if they prefer/are already using another voice processing solution.

This announcement marks pretty rapid momentum by GIPS as well, as a follow-through of the announcement they made only late last month regarding Embedded VoiceEngine(http://www.globalipsound.com/newsroom/newsroom.php?newsID=79). Beyond their expertise in the field, it is noteworthy that GIPS has client relationships with Nortel and WebEx, as well as being a member of the Intel, Motorola and Texas Instrument design/developer networks. This is further evidence of the traction that Peerio is gaining in getting buy-in from credible, established partners who themselves have good client/partner relationships to build on.

GIPS claims that its products can withstand up to 30% packet loss and still maintain telco-grade quality, and indeed the company wrote the codec which makes Skype the robust client it is. Those who use Skype are undoubtedly aware of the voice quality, and may have used it under extreme conditions with no noticeable degradation. I have used it (inadvertently, because of a 3G network connection failure) over GPRS, and was unaware at the time what was happening. The resiliency of the GIPS codecs, coupled with the connections to Intel, Motorola and TI, raises some interesting questions about the timescale for seeing Peerio on wireless devices.