In the lead-up to the forthcoming eComm Europe Conference organizer Lee Dryburgh interviews some of the speakers. This past weekend he posted an interview with GIPS CTO Jan Linden (picture below) and CMO Joyce Kim where they talked about (i) the role of codecs in delivering overall high quality HD voice and (ii) the emergence of H.264 SVC as a video codec standard.

Lee started off the questioning by asking about where the audio codec plays its role in delivering wideband audio and HD voice; Jan responded by talking about “the total HD voice experience”:

A codec is obviously an important part, but it’s not everything that makes the HD Voice experience. If you look at the analogy of a car, you have a lot of different things like tires, body, steering wheel, etc. and – the codec – let’s say that’s the tires. It’s one very important part that makes the whole thing run smoothly, but without all the other pieces, you don’t get the full experience.

That said, we’re very much focused on HD Voice, and the things we do, in addition to codecs, is things like jitter buffer and packet loss concealment. Those are things to address what happens on the network. We also address things that handles on the device, like sound card. For video, it’s cameras, microphone adjustments, speaker adjustments; all those things are necessary for the great experience.

They go on to talk about how GIPS is emerging as a full R&D facility, innovating incrementally and building voice quality expertise in a way such that third party attempts at replication run up against time-to-market issues due to GIPS’ long term experience with codecs. (Ed. – Perhaps Skype, with its SILK codec and experience with network bandwidth management is the only other company developing superwideband HD voice at this level.) When asked about where SILK could play a role Jan responded:

We do so much more than a codec, and in fact, SILK is a very attractive codec for our customers to use, in conjunction with the rest of what we do. Again, we look at SILK as the wheels or the tires of the car and we provide the rest of it to put the whole car together. That means that SILK, standard codecs like G72.1 AMR [G.721] wideband, you name it; they all fit into our solution.

Lee then opens up a discussion about GIPS’ widely implement iSAC wideband codec and the recent development of a superwideband mode for this codec. Lee effectively summarized GIPS role in the market, for companies that want to incorporate voice and video calling into their offerings, stating:

Okay, so what you’re doing is knocking down time to market for companies and you’re also knocking down the cost of providing voice – audio, I should say, to be more general, and video solutions for devices, software, and so forth. It’s about time to market, it’s about saving money.

Lee, Jan and Joyce then went on to talk about the emerging H.264 SVC video codec and its layering architecture that optimizes performance in a video conference that bridges a range of end point devices and the various devices’ respective network speeds. Click here for the complete interview. But since that will be the subject of Jan’s talk at eComm Europe 2009, I’ll end this post by suggesting that you consider attending for the conference to learn more details.

Click here to register with a 10% discount.

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During my three plus years of blogging, the most educational and informative conference for keeping up with innovation in the “Emerging Communications” space has been eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference (and now Awards). And now eComm is coming to Europe in two weeks.

Conference organizer Lee Dryburgh and his team of advisors have assembled many of the top thinkers and activists in the IP-based communications space with the goal to “promote and accelerate communications innovation”. On the website’s home page is an outline of the forthcoming changes foreseen:

Telecom is becoming software

Today’s model of the telephony and SMS cash-cows will significantly dry up long-term

“Phones” are becoming general purpose always-on computers

A march is underway to change how spectrum is allocated and utilised

Applications innovation is being democratised

The media industry is converging with personal communications

Internet-style ecosystems are starting to pressurise the traditional value chain

Search engines and computer manufactures are encroaching into the space

App downloads; media content and even communication streams are increasingly routing-around operator’s billing systems

The telecom kingdom is fragmenting daily.

It’s only at eComm that you will find respected experts such as Martin Geddes, Thomas Howe, Alan Duric, Brough Turner, Dean Bubley, James Enck, Jonathan Christensen, Jan Linden and Gerd Leonhard all under one roof at the same time. But amongst the others, there’s always at least one or two who will surprise us and challenge our thinking about how the telecommunications industry will evolve. While we all talk about “networking” from a technology perspective, the personal networking at eComm is just as valuable as the presentations.

Also this week it was announced that Skype has taken on the role of Headline Sponsor of the show while innovative companies such as Voxbone, Voxeo, GIPS and Voice Sage are Platinum Sponsors. Without their support Lee would have to triple the registration fees and probably put the conference out of reach for many of the attendees.

Alec Saunders has bought his tickets to go; have you? Click here for a 10% discount when registering.

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