Young blood for Skype
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Skype just got an injection of steroids. It was his mother company eBay who paid for the “beef-my-smart-guy” operation. The bill: around $27,000,000. Not in cash, in stocks only, 700,000 of them right from the eBay’s purse.
What we called the steroids are Sonorit and Camino, the latter being the San Francisco based subsidiary of the former, whose offices are situated in Norway. Both are specializing in speech processing and coding, as well as IP-based transmissions. Camino’s products are clearly targeted toward mobile IP networks.
And that is exactly what Skype has in mind. The softphone is doing great currently, but still lacks some audio quality to truly rival the level of sounds set by mobile phone operators and manufacturers.
Preston Gralla reported on his Networking Pipeline’s blog that the domain name Skypemobile.com has been already registered by the software company.
A new VoIP czar on board
Skype spotted the bright guy. Before founding Sonorit/Camino, Christensen was CTO and vice president of products at FaceTime Communications, the same company that recently introduces a Skype-buster filter in its security platform (see Skype-buster, à la FaceTime).
TelecomWeb mentioned that Christensen also was a Microsoft executive, “which is significant because he claims credit for engineering Microsoft’s entry into SIP. He was also briefly at Time Warner Cable, where he takes credit for helping the company enter the broadband market.”
Another lawsuit in perspective?
Sonorit was formed in 2005 by ex-employees of Global IP Sound (GIPS), responsible for the audio quality of the Skype voice client. Yahoo did contract the same supplier for its VoIP-enable Messenger (see Yahoo Messenger equals Skype on audio quality), so did Microsoft and AOL.
GIPS broke up a lawsuit in December 2005 against Sonorit/Camino, charging them with “violation of trade secrets, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair competition.”
Remember, StreamCast has sued Skype for racketeering (see Skype racketeering or racketeering Skype?). Is GIPS going after Skype with this buy-out?
Answered by Skype spokesperson Lisa Hempel to RedHerring: “At this point, Skype is still a customer of Global IP Sound, and Sonorit will continue to work on this technology.”
Skype insisted that it is buying the companies for their VoIP engineering expertise. Developers from the companies will work on future versions of Skype. Whether or not it’s its primary intention, Skype is doing very great.
Apr 12, 2006 | By Nuno
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