I sent a Lypp alpha invite over to a friend of mine thinking he would have some fun testing our system before we released Lypp to private beta. What happened next was pretty damn cool.

On his iPhone he logged into his Gmail account and clicked on the invite link he got in his email. He was redirected to the Lypp alpha signup page and associated his Gtalk account via Meebo on his iPhone with Lypp. He then added the Lypp buddy to his buddy list and immediately upon doing so received a confirmation code. He pasted this confirmation code into the Lypp confirmation page and clicked the Finish button.

The Lypp signup was complete, all via iPhone and all within 3 minutes of getting the invite email.

He then called me and his business partner by simply sending the call command "call 6046297990, 650xxxxxxx" to his newly added Lypp buddy. His phone rang, "Lypp is completing your call". "Ring Ring", my phone started ringing. I was giddy, he and his partner were impressed.

So there ya have it, the first Lypp group call via iPhone, and it was free 🙂

Lypp is a new calling service that uses IM and command line commands to create one-to-one calls and group calls. By sending a simple command from AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Gtalk, or ICQ like "call 6045551212, 7035551212", users can create a quick group call. It will be launching in September. It will be Free.

Fellow Vancouver Voip veteran and buddy Ian Bell has reclaimed PubSub and will soon be launching a new FaceBook app. Ian is a very capable fellow and he is in good company with Lance Tracey joining as CEO.

I think Ian is doing the right thing in going after the Facebook crowd, the intelligent search capabilities of PubSub will be put to good use there. Ian is also getting some love from Michael Arrington and Om Malik.

Great stuff Ian, good to see PubSub alive again!

When we talk about conference calling pretty much everyone in the business world can relate. Picture a speaker phone (probably Polycom) in a board room with people speaking into it and voices coming out of it, fairly straightforward.

So why are we now calling it Group Calling? According to Wikipedia Group-calling is..

..similar to conference calling, is a means of communication where the calling party wishes to involve multiple parties. In comparison to conference calling, all parties involved in a call always have the opportunity to participate actively. Alternatively, group calling also functions as a means of leaving voice message to defined groups. The calling initiator calls a number that identifies the caller and inquires the caller as to which of the caller’s defined groups the voice message should be sent to.

Hmm, we may need to revisit that definition as it seems to have evolved a bit since it was written.

Today it seems that conference calling and group calling are terms that are almost interchangeable. I think group calling would apply to smaller conference calls that are more adhoc in nature and are not unnecessarily business oriented. The term group calling also seems to be used more in reference to mobile group calls and infers a less formal experience as opposed to traditional conference calls that have more participants and are generally business oriented. 

Now you know, err or at least you know my opinion.