At ooVoo, we understand that providing life-like audio and video quality is key to achieving our mission to bring people together, face to face. From the get go, ooVoo has supported state-of- the-art digital video and wideband audio technology that gives our users a communication experience which is far better than a plain old telephone call. To that end, in ooVoo version 1.7, we turned on high resolution video to give ooVoo users crystal clear picture quality. And now, our latest 2.0 release makes another significant experience enhancement with greatly improved audio quality.
Without boring you with too many technical details, here are some highlights:
ooVoo conversations now sound more natural and ever closer to a face-to-face chat. With other VOIP solutions, users either get lousy audio or audio that may appear to be clean but somehow feels unnatural due to over-processing. Our engineers have worked hard to fine tune our audio system to give you the best and most consistent overall experience by balancing a variety of factors that could affect audio conversation quality, such as the type of microphone and sound card the user has, level of background noise presented, quality of user’s internet connection, and whether it is a one-to-one or multiparty call.
ooVoo users can now enjoy excellent quality conversations even over not so good Internet connections. Dropped words and garbled sound occur significantly less often with version 2.0, thanks to the sophisticated network error handling techniques we’ve included.
All this, and there’s no need to worry about how to properly set your audio devices. We understand not everyone is comfortable with navigating the sometimes complex windows settings menu so we have automated the process to give you an optimized ooVoo experience right out of box. And, if you are the DIY type (like many of our power users), simply turn off the automation feature and you can take things into your own hands.
In addition, we have invested in the best-in-class Echo Cancellation technology that has only been previously available on higher end professional video conferencing systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
If you have not upgraded to the latest 2.0 release yet, you can download it from http://www.oovoo.com/download.
Thanks for “listening”!
Chang Feng
VP, Technology & Innovation
I would like to share with you a recent experience of how politicians in Israel have been using ooVoo to assist in communication their messages. Due to the recent events in Gaza, Israel’s election period was suspended for 3 weeks. Following the Gaza operation, the politicians had a very short time to convey their messages to the public.
One of the most important voting sectors in Israel has become the Israeli Russians who today comprise about 15 – 20% of the voting rights. Many politicians are retaining special advisers to this sector and deploy numerous efforts to reach them, especially during election time. ooVoo has been partnering with leading Israeli Russian Internet portals in Israel during the elections, including Zahav.Ru, the leading portal. Zahav.Ru asked its users to use ooVoo video messages to send in questions to the politicians. Then, ooVoo was used by Zahav.Ru reporters to conduct interviews with the leaders (VIEW HERE).
The activity was very successful and as a result Tzipi Livni, head of Kadima and Israel current Foreign minister, as well as Avigdor Libeirman, head of "Israel Beiteinu" and the leading Russian Israeli politician who succeeded to gain 15 mandates and to become the 3rd largest party in Israel, each have had a 20-minute interview on ooVoo.. These interviews were posted on Zahav.Ru (http://otvet.zahav.ru/elections2009/) as well as in Google Video (Livni video, Libeirman video) where thousands of people have viewed them. We continue to work with Zahav.Ru and other portals and media outlets on ways to use ooVoo to bring people together, face-to-face, to discuss, debate, communicate and connect.
Danny Yelin
GM, Israel
ooVoo
A BIG day at ooVoo today as we just launched our new Version 2.0 which is a big leap forward for our product and the video chat/video conferencing category in general. The release continues our focus on high quality video and includes significant audio improvements. But what we’re all REALLY excited about at ooVoo is our “Call Me” link which lets ooVoo users make video calls with anyone they know, even if their friends/family/colleagues/social media friends haven’t downloaded ooVoo. All you have to do is send someone a link, they click on it, and in moments they can join your call in a web browser. How great is that? And it is the same outstanding ooVoo quality. ooVooer’s have a permanent “Call Me” link (like a phone number). Give it out, put it in your email signature (we’ll help you create a button for this), post it on your blog or personal web page and all anyone has to do is click on the link to ooVoo you.
What else is new? Users can now build their own Video Chat Rooms (very easily) and can embed these into their own social network pages or blog. Users want flexibility and the ability to be creative and we are doing our best to deliver what our users want. Lastly, we have published an API for developers to build their own applications with ooVoo. And as we learn more about what the development community wants in high quality video chats we will continue to rollout more API’s.
So, back to the title of my post and the forward-momentum of the video chat category. When esteemed technology writer for The New York Times, David Pogue, writes an article such as the one he wrote last week "Video Chats Overcome Clunkiness" it gives attention and validity to this “new” way of communicating. In the article Mr. Pogue gives a pretty thorough review of Skype’s new version 4.0 and it’s features and also mentions ooVoo! We don’t believe Mr. Pogue had a chance to take a thorough look at ooVoo but we’d certainly welcome this opportunity!! And we are located in New York City, how easy is that!! We hear from a lot of users that they find the overall quality of ooVoo superior. Find out for yourself. We’d love to hear from you. Visit us at www.oovoo.com.
Marty Walker
Chief Marketing Officer