Disruptive Telephony

Those who know me well are aware that one of my hot buttons is my belief that one of the greatest disruptive potentials of VoIP is to fundamentally change the sound of telephony. With VoIP, we are no longer constrained to the 3.5kHz frequency range of the PSTN... I'll save my wideband rant for another day, but tonight I'll just point you over to Rich Tehrani's post "DiamondWare in HD", which talks about the power of DiamondWare's "3-D" stereo technology.  As Rich describes in his blog entry:

Once on the call I was able to easily position the three callers all around me. One could be directly ahead of me and one on either side. The computer can automatically position participants as well if you so choose.

When everyone was in place, Keith had one coworker start counting from 1 and another reciting the alphabet from letter “A.” While these two participants spoke, Keith proceeded to speak with me and the strangest thing happened. I could focus on anyone I wanted and was able to absorb what all three participants were uttering.

It was an amazing experience and the sound quality was beyond compare. I could hear everything in a conversation and more. A sniffle. Lips moving, etc. I swear I could almost hear eyes blinking.

I've not yet personally tried DiamondWare's stuff (although I've met CEO Keith Weiner several times at various shows and he's offered to take me through it) but I am aware that it's also being used in the SecondLife voice beta trial (also another topic for another day).  To me I just think this kind of thing (and publicity by folks like Rich) is great to see... with VoIP (or IP Telephony or whatever we want to call it today) we have the very real capability to have far better audio communication than we've ever had with "traditional" telephony.  It's here now already (just ask a Skype user, but that's yet another topic)... but companies like DiamondWare are showing us just how much farther the boundaries can be pushed.  Cool stuff!