If anybody wants to let me know where the Gizmo download links disappeared to, I’d sure appreciate it. After fighting with Gizmo for many months about a year ago, trying to keep it from becoming corrupt on my Mac (which required me to reinstall it repeatedly), I eventually gave up on it, switched to Skype, and then eventually stopped using IM altogether.
Now I can’t blame that on Gizmo. Much of it has to do with the SwitchVox system and iPhone I adopted for business use–those two have been transformational to the way I communicate daily. But now that Google has lapped up the Project, I’m interested in seeing if the Mac version has lost its self-destructive tendencies. But presto the download links are gone. Boo.
It’s been well over a year since I last ran Skype on my MacBook Pro. This screen-sharing feature has got me fired up. I’ve got the beta downloading now, and since I’m fed up with Gizmo Project (which would be the far superior solution if it just stayed running on the Macs and myself my employees), I might be making the switch back to Skype.
Issue with Gizmo Project for Mac still not resolved. But, hey, type in “mac gizmo damaged” and I’m the top hit. Come on SIPPhone, get this one fixed.
Logitech bought Sightspeed for 30 million bucks yesterday. Congrats to Peter Csathy and the crew in Berkeley. After giving birth to the infamous “Sightspeed Guy” and forming a number of worthwhile licensing agreements for raising Sightspeed’s visibility in the industry, the makers of the best videoconferencing tool on the planet have cashed in on a seven-year journey.
Sightspeed is a community-centric desktop app that offers PSTN dial-out and runs on both Macintosh and Windows. It’s been hailed by many as offering the best video quality among desktop video chat programs, and it competes against Skype, Gizmo, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and iChat.
Not sure what this means for Vlip, the video discussion service also run by the Sightspeed folks, but I can only imagine that Logitech was interested in it as well.
FREMONT, Calif., Oct. 28, 2008 and ROMANEL-SUR-MORGES, Switzerland, Oct. 29, 2008— Logitech International (SIX: LOGN) (Nasdaq: LOGI) today announced that the company has agreed to acquire privately held SightSpeed Inc. of Berkeley, Calif. for approximately $30 million in cash. SightSpeed is an award-winning provider of high-quality Internet video communications services. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in early November.
The acquisition of SightSpeed will provide Logitech with video calling technology and a software and services development team that can be focused on future video calling initiatives that can enable cross-platform video communications with an intuitive, lifelike experience, for people sitting in front of a personal computer or with their family in a living room.
“With this acquisition, we are significantly augmenting our current video R&D resources to help us move more quickly toward our goals for video services that complement the way people socialize, communicate and enjoy entertainment,” said Junien Labrousse, executive vice president of Logitech’s Products group.
“According to our research, there is a large untapped market of people who want to communicate with friends and family using video. But they want it to be integrated into their family lifestyle, which means going beyond the PC. We believe with SightSpeed we can help create the next wave of video communications enthusiasts.”
Founded in 2001, SightSpeed has approximately 25 employees. The company’s management team includes technology leaders with backgrounds in Internet services and software technology development. The SightSpeed services are based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), a standard that enables the services to be interoperable with other Internet communication services.
Using the Bitty Browser widget and a widget-enabled theme, like the one I’m using, Wordpress users can now embed Gizmo5, the chat application, into their publications, allowing cross-network messaging functionality from any Wordpress publication. Cool stuff. Also recently introduced are widgets that do the same for Google, Windows Live, and other widget-friendly web tools.
UPDATE: Tried it; don’t think it’s that exciting. Might be better for heavy users of Google start page? You tell me…
The last few Gizmo5 builds I’ve installed on my Mac 10.5 notebook all seem to implode right after I drag them to the Applications folder. Especially after recovering from sleep mode, the program unexpectedly quits and then can’t be launched again, as the Finder claims it may be “damaged”. Simply copying the virgin Gizmo executable from the DMG file restores it to a running state, but it’s getting to be a pain. I suppose I’ll post on the Gizmo support forum about it.
Hats off to Gizmo Project. Gizmo5 lets me IM on four different networks from my mobile, with a unified buddy list and a consistent conversation view across all networks. Awesome. But the big to-do about MySpace support last week is really not that big a deal, now that I’ve actually tried it.
The way it works, the Gizmo backend server uses IM to collect your Myspace account information and then logs into your account, parses information out of your profile, and sends you text-based alerts when that information changes. Yeah, really–that’s about ALL there is to it. Oh, and it will forward MySpace IM messages to and from your phone. But you can’t browse your MySpace buddy list unless you want to send texts back and forth to the IM-based “agent” they’ve built.
Not exactly the kind of interactivity I was hoping for. Let’s hope version 2 is more fruitful.
