Tuesday, April 11, 2006

El Camino real?

Still on the Carphone Warehouse webcast, I have just received a voicemail from a Palladium Club charter member, saying that eBay has acquired Camino Networks, which unfortunately doesn't have a public website to point to. This company has some eminent figures from the VoIP world at its head, including Jonathan Christensen, as well as, I am told, some top-class speech codec experts formerly with GIPS. The description of Camino found here is "a voice over IP start-up building unique solutions for high quality speech processing, coding, and transmission for the next generation of mobile IP based networks." Note the operative word - "mobile" - I assume the focus is going to be on low-CPU utilization, wideband codecs. I don't know yet what the implications are for GIPS (though it looks to me like it is about to get un-licensed), which late last year sued Camino and its parent Sonorit (which shares a common investor with Telio - also started by former GIPS folks!) for violation of trade secrets (yet more work for the eBay legal team, I guess). I find this an interesting development, given that I witnessed Jonathan Christensen giving the P2P SIP panel at VON a hard time for "invoking the 'S' word" so often...

UPDATE: I never got anything from Skype PR (thanks guys, nice to see you remaining loyal to your roots!), but here it is from Businesswire. It's 7:22 AM in New York - why is this info not on the eBay site?

UPDATE 2: Jaanus' short post on this is interesting in its understatement: "Sometimes an acquisition makes the most sense."

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