Another Voxygen Product Ships
I’m pleased to say that as of today Blabbelon.com launched its BETA service, based upon the work of the team here at Voxygen.
For those who are just learning about Blabbelon, it is a push-to-talk communications product that we helped conceive, develop, create and build, using a combination of proprietary (patents filed) technology and cutting edge open source software.
The most interesting thing for me about this one, and the reason I jumped on the project in the first place, is:-
1. Blabbelon is not about cheap minutes
2. It’s VoIP, but it’s not telephony
3. What better a use-case do you want for demonstrating that VoIP has value of and in itself other than a bunch of online users that have a genuine need to talk to each other?
After an initial few weeks of discussion, deciding that yes we can do this and agreeing to take on the project, we worked with Blabbelon to crystallize the vision for the product:-
1. Provide great sound quality that would be unduplicated in the gaming industry
2. Delivery one click simplicity for the user where possible
3. Offer a feature set that solves the problems gamers face when using existing VoIP products targeted at them
This presented a number of problems that we had to find technical solutions for.
First, a one-click experience generally means web-based applications (no downloads) and a URL based infrastructure. So we knew Blabbelon had to be web-based, but browsers are not really designed to service high quality voice applications.
Secondly, being web-based meant we had to find a codec that we could embed in either Flash or JAVA.
The codec we wanted from the get-go was Skype’s SILK codec, which has both superb audio quality and a small network bandwidth footprint. A few conversations with Skype and we had an early BETA version of the SILK binaries which we then set about making work in a browser. For this I hired Westhawk Limited, a leading expert on JAVA and VoIP services to execute (probably the best in this field in the world). Together we got this to work, through some clever code trickery that makes the underlying OS run a binary that is native to the OS, and isn’t running under JAVA, yet is still controlled by the browser. Problems solved.
Our process in order to achieve the best possible user-experience for gamers was to employ gamers. A group of early adopter and big Ventrillo users from a Guild in World of Warcraft became our testing companions for the next few months as we developed a feature set and more detailed set of requirements based on our early prototyping. This revealed to us a number of interesting findings and set us off into quite new directions – concepts such as audio being the primary user-interface (most gamers inevitably have a game in front of them, not the Blabbelon UI).
The whole process has taken about 10 months, end-to-end, to achieve a launchable BETA product. It’s not perfect and we still have some work to do, as well as some kinks to iron out. But as with every new software launch, especially one where boundaries are being pushed further and further, requires a period to effect a full test, complete with real users and users with a fresh set of eyes.
Our commitment to our client now becomes one of remaining agile and adapting to user reactions and feedback as quickly as possible. We anticipate another 6-8 weeks of fairly intensive development work on the back of Blabbelons now rapidly growing user base.
The work never stops, and we’re already starting to roadmap out to version 3 for the client with planning out budgeting requirements and strategies for 2010.
Thankfully, my client is only one click away.