Anyone can play

Last year at VON Europe, I included a slide on the theme of how interesting applications can come from nowhere, and used TeamTalk, which I had only just stumbled across, as an example. Brainchild of a single computer science masters degree candidate in Denmark, it claims a lot of features which "conventional" VoIP users might dream of - unlimited conference call participants, narrowband compatability, 3D spatial positioning of conference participants. It's interesting to see what direction voice can take when the starting point is something other than reinventing telephony - in this case it was the expectations and demands of massively multi-player gaming, which are shaped by a different user experience. TeamTalk is now available as a developer kit for 3rd parties looking to integrate voice into other applications.