Here's a few minutes with Vivox co-founder Monty Sharma at the Spring VON 2007 in San Jose.

Among other things, Vivox will make 2L's person-to-person voice services:

• Scale to hundreds of people in a space
• Sync with gestures (maybe even mouths) as people talk
• Spatialize from left to right. (What about distance before and behind you, and above and below for those in-flight conversations?) Diamondware may get this business if it can efficiently architect a highly scalable set of spatialization components for the server and client.
• Terminate to landline and mobile phones.

Heading into closed beta now, open beta in a few weeks and live around June 2007. The announcement is three weeks old but still good news.  

Rival 2L VoIM provider Centric's Second Talk drives calls through Skype, and will continue to offer their service because:

1. Linden Labs’ integrated voice won’t work everywhere. Second Life landowners determine whether or not voice is enabled on their property, so it’ll be entirely possible to cross from one region where voice works to another where it does not.
2. Linden Labs’ system isn’t free. Second Life landowners must upgrade to the current $295/month land tier in order to use Linden Labs’ system on their regions. Although this is a small investment, we understand that a lot of landowners won’t want to make it.
3. We’ve been asked to continue support. Even in light of Linden Labs’ announcement, many Second Talk users have asked us to continue support for Second Talk. Many people want a system that simply facilitates connection to an impartial third-party voice system, rather than routing through a captive system.

Technorati tags: skype, video, skypejournal, secondtalk, secondlife, 2l, centric, montysharma, vivox, von, 2007, spring, voip, philwolff, im, chat