Looking for next Skype Part 1: Gizmo

The trend quite reminiscent of the dotcom era, is witnessing a huge traction for the PC to PC VoIP players who all of sudden are becoming a hot property and an essential part of any Internet company’s communication strategy

Yahoo VoIP IM,  Gizmo Project, Damaka, Jaxtr, to name a few are some of the PC to PC VoIP players that are getting traction in the market and pose a serious threat to Skype in  the near future.

In the first part of the series, we take a look at Gizmo Project.

Gizmo Project is a peer-to-peer Internet telephony (VoIP) network and has till date 2 million downloads.  Gizmo Project works on open standards based SIP protocol and has been conceived by its makers to meet the need of developing a SIP standard client.

Gizmo Project's soft phone comes with one-button call record, call mapping, voice mail chat and integrated weather info.

The company also has a free conferencing calling to at least 99 people for conference call with high quality conference call with ten to twenty people. 

Gizmo Project is available today for the Macintosh, Windows and Linux based and also has jabber based instant messaging system. Gizmo does call in and call out to the PSTN much in the same way that Skype in and Skype out does. 75% of calls emanating from Gizmo Network are PC to PC based while the rest 25% are PC to PSTN based.

The company is licensed with the GIPS technology and boasts of very high voice quality.

Michael Robertson, CEO, Gizmo Project, says  this feature is makes it a big bet against Skype.

"We have high-end quality voice is possible as GIPS code has a sophisticated ability to handle network conjunction, jitter call control", says Micheal.

GIPS codec adds Micheal "actually tunes up and down to the bit rate of the call. On noticing the slow network, GIPS codec actually slows down the words of the caller and let the network catch up".

“Since both SIP and jabber are both open standards, consumers are able to use any directory and any software to be able to call each other. Being SIP based, Gizmo Project works today with Wi-Fi SIP routers, SIP adaptors”, explains Michael.

Other than the features offered by Skype, the company offers call record which is very popular with the people for it allows people to create broadcasts The company offers free voice mail. Incidentally Skype charges for voicemail.

On the security front, Gizmo continuously monitors the behavior of networks and if it sees any suspicious behavior on its networks or network abusing, they block the person from its network.

In the second part of the series we will focus on damaka.