Voice Com Update
While esecurities apparently is lost in some other world, let's get back to reality, with what is actually happening.
First of all, regarding intergration into products, Battlecom at www.shadowfactor.com, already has offered an SDK for exactly that purpose for a while now. Regarding the "uniqueness" of the platform, the only thing particularly different about Talk N' Play, besides having less features and supporting less people is the "PeopleLink" instant messenger. Well ICQ offers all that and more and is far more popular. More on that later. BattleCom offers linkage with it now.
Second, as expected, game developer groups continue to spit out games with their own functionality - Novalogic announced Delta Force II will include it's own proprietary Voice Com technology as well.
Once again proving the comparative slothful speed that Thrustmaster moves, Baldur's Gate expansion, with the built in Roger Wilco client,
has arrived in stores, *despite* a delay due to remastering the Gold.
Less than two weeks even so... And watch it sail to the top of the charts within six weeks. Hausmann's reality doesn't seem to match this kind of speed (and Interplay is in bad financial straight right now)
Probably the most interesting news is the move by Roger Wilco - they have released their latest "Gold" version FOR FREE! That's right, not only do you get the additional features, but when you register, you do not need to send any money - just info - for a free working copy.
Released May 3, 1999. The best part about this for us stock watchers is that you can see the number of downloads updated on a daily basis.
download.com
/0,332,069226-,1000.html?tag=st.cn.sr1.dir. That's right - over 17,000 downloads as of this writing, compared to the zero conferences on www.wecantalk.com (and what's with the messed up conference page? Trying to upgrade their product?)
In less than a week. Roger Wilco also offers integration with ICQ.
Roger Wilco also runs on Linux, NT, and soon on FreeBDS for all those techheads out there.
Roger Wilco also offers an easy 20-minute integration scheme (and offers a more complex one) posted right on their WWW site. The 20 minutes is obviously an exaggeration, but it looks pretty easy (I am
a software engineer, BTW) to do. An SDK is on the way.
www.rogerwilco.com
On to the obvious iConference competitor - MSNetmeeting - does everything that iConference does minus multi-conference telephony
(only does two people) and the PeopleLink community link. However it does Video Conference and remote control instead. And it not only works alongside ICQ, ICQ has a special version is made just for it. Has dozens of free enhancements available as well. But the biggest advantage, which pretty much everybody has over wecantalk products, is that PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE IT and it's FREE! Unlike Roger Wilco, cnet is not the exclusive download site for NetMeeting, but again, you can track the download as a comparison to Thrustmaster's failure at:
download.com
/0,332,068321s,1000.html?st.dl.search.results.tdtl
Again over 430,000 downloads for their latest version in less than one month. Just on download.com
Now what's this ICQ you say? It seems to be available to work with all the above products! You haven't heard of it? You live in the Hausmann world where products are unique simply because they come packaged differently? Well take a gander at ICQ, and compare it to the comparitively lame PeopleLink messenger. Same genre, but more popular (PeopleLink isn't even in the top five - AOL has one too).
And features up the yahoo! And community? Who would choose Hausmann's non-existant community of ZERO and pray that you find someone else that uses PeopleLink *and* Talk N' Play, when you can access the community of ICQ - check out the downloads on this baby:
download.com
0,332,069262-,1000.html?st.dl.search.results.tdtl
Keep in mind that is says May 3 - but these downloads are total for version 2 I believe (May 3 is when they released a new beta).
That's right - you read it correctly - over 50,000,000 downloads just from their site. Over 1.3 million each and every week lately, according to CNET. And it is FREE FREE FREE! Works with dozens of products and has many versions (like for CE and groupware) and is the de facto standard now.
Now on the the big boys - Talk N' Play as a stand alone product is obviously a failure, but maybe they can go outside of gaming? Well here comes the juggernauts (keep in mind that the technology underlying Talk N' Play, while upgradable to past the 4 person limit for instance, is a based on a non proprietary protocol stack that NetMeeting itself is based on.). Esecurities again is in fantasy land with an IPO dream (apparently the same place MS would pay $150 million for a Thrustmaster division). But amazingly, once again, dreams for Thrustmaster match what someone else is already doing:
redherring.com
biz.yahoo.com
biz.yahoo.com
news.com
news.com
That's just a sample of the real "snowball" that is happening, and just like with the telephone and cable, only the big boys win. Hmmm, Lucent or Thrustmaster, Lucent or Thrustmaster? ALL of these have the technology that Thrustmaster borrowed. Every single one mentioned in these articles. How is that possible? Perhaps you could see how multi-point audio is created....
Anyway, enough for now. You can get the picture - the entire wecantalk line isn't going to sell any better than Talk N' Play for the same reason - everything wecantalk.com offers the individual user can already be gotten for free with more features right now, everything Thrustmaster promises in six months is already being done by both large and small competitors right now.
The only question remains is why esecurities continues to desperately promote this company and disregard reality. I do agree that you should listen to the CC and do real DD though. See you in six months...Maybe
And the answer to the question is:
>So, who buys these products, and why?
No one but OEMs, because you can get better ones for free.
(URLs split up above when too long - paste them back together to go there) |
