Google open sources $68.2m realtime comm platform Google has open sourced a framework for realtime video and audio inside the browser. Known as WebRTC, the framework is based on technology the company acquired with its $68.2 million purchase of Global IP Solutions (GIPS) last year. "We’d like to make the browser the home for innovation in real time communications," Google …
Bet you it's a little north of $2/b
Tell you what it's really worth now...
Just goes to show how well one business is run to how poorly another is run if both can purchase pretty much the same thing for vastly different sums.
(speaking technically, I know MS are trying to buy a userbase two which counts for a lot more but there's a totally other argument to why that's going to fail)
What uniqueness? There's plenty of A/V conferencing software already out on the net, using SIP for example - or even older stuff like vic/vat for MBONE.
The only thing this has is the actual code, oh and Google's name label if that floats your boat. It's only uniqueness is Google slapping the "Web" word in front of it, which is just marketing bullshit since it doesn't work over HTTP.
Nothing else, G.711 and G.722 audio codec patents have both expired already. There's VP8, but that's free now as well.
This is not even even being used anywhere yet, who knows if it works at all.
$100,000 would be more like it and being generous. $68 million is just a ridiculous figure to catch the headlines.
If you bothered looking you would see that they haven't opened up G.722. They actually use *my* G.722 code. What they have opened up and given patent grants on is iSAC and a bunch of well proven audio enhancement and echo cancellation stuff they got from GIPS. G.722 and G.711 are just part of the total bundle.
This is great news. Nobody has really produced open source versions of these functions that are world class. The speex library has some of the elements, but they are far from polished, and have specific problems. This could save a lot of work.
Yes did notice how much of the code is taken from other projects, never was it mentioned that they had opened G.722.
What's the advantage of iSAC vs G.722 or indeed G.729.1, both of which already had decent open source implementations? Is there any big improvement? Doesn't seem so.
Plenty of code out there for audio enhancement and echo cancellation, for example the Oslec package.
Maybe Google's implementation slightly better and I'm not saying it's not good news, but not $68 million good news that's for sure. That valuation is beyond ridiculous.
Also this code isn't actually that well polished either.
If it's built into Chrome then if you need the chat features you'll install Chrome and if you've got Chrome, you're likely to use it for web browsing.
So this could increase the market share of Chrome at the expense of Internet Explorer so what do you do if you're Microsoft?
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