Vivox Interview With Monty Sharma--www.mmosite.com

Vivox Interview With Monty Sharma

KeyWord: Vivox	Date: 2006-11-08
Summary: An interview with Monty Sharma, the VP of Product Management and Marketing at Vivox.

Vivox Precision Studio delivers high quality, massively scalable, real-time voice communications to MMOGs.Following is an interview with Monty Sharma, the VP of Product Management and Marketing at Vivox.

MMOsite.com: Before getting into the centre of the questions, would you care to introduce yourself and talk something about your company first?

Monty Sharma: Sure, I would love to. My name is Monty Sharma and I am the VP of Product Management and Marketing at Vivox. I am also the resident gamer. I have gotten several people in trouble, I mean, involved with EVE Online, WoW, and DDO in the office.

MMOsite.com: To the people who are not familiar with Vivox, can you give a brief view of Vivox in your own words?

Monty Sharma: Vivox provides in-game voice services that allow players to talk to each other while they are playing ¨C one-to-one and in groups, character-to-character, avatar-to-avatar, within their guild, gang, or corporation. The services are integrated into the game and tailored for the game experience. We provide lots of controls to ensure both the game and the player can control the experience -- things like kick, ban, mute, and who is talking indicators.

We launched Vivox in August of 2005 and our office is just outside of Boston in Framingham, Massachusetts. We come out of a group of companies headed by VoIP-pioneer Jeff Pulver (co-founder of Vonage among others). As we were building the company and the technology, we saw a need in the MMO market as most of us are hardcore gamers. So, we took that deep background in large-scale VoIP services and are now applying it to creating a better experience in online games and virtual worlds. We knew we could create a service that would be a huge leap forward for the MMOG market and that the industry was ready for this wave of innovation.

MMOsite.com: How do you look upon the online communication market nowadays? In your opinion, what makes Vivox stand out?

Monty Sharma: The online communications market is reaching its stride as consumers understand the benefits and use has become simpler for VoIP. Services like Vonage, Skype, and GoogleTalk have really opened the doors to mass acceptance and use. What makes Vivox different is our ability to integrate into the online game and community that is utilizing it. Our focus has always been to make the communications an integrated and integral part of the web experience, no one else has done that. In addition, we are a managed service that offers massive scalability, exceptional quality, and professional customer service. Game developers and publishers see this and like it. So do the players. Players want to communicate and talk in their own way -- we make that possible and we do it well.

MMOsite.com: How many people can talk in a channel at one time? How do you guarantee the transmission rate and quality?

Monty Sharma: The game developers and publishers set the parameters around the maximum number of people on a channel. But behavior dictates limiting it because, let

s face it, 50 people all trying to talk together can get unruly. But it is really not limited by us or our technology.

MMOsite.com: Recently, Business 2.0 elected 25 innovation companies representing the next generation Internet trend and Vivox was on the list. From these companies, people see a totally different Internet. What is your view about "next generation Internet trend" ?

Monty Sharma: The next generation of the Internet will have people accessing the internet from a multitude of personal devices including personal mobile devices. These devices will be much more enhanced than you have today so that full interactions can take place as opposed to just viewing game scores or stock prices on a cell phone screen. Because of this integration, simplicity, personalization, and customization will be very important to the site developers and end users. We see ourselves playing a very large part in this wave of next gen Internet communications.

MMOsite.com: Recently, Vivox announced to provide free communication for Second Life players and 835,000 Second Life players will become the initial beneficiaries of the deal. They will be able to make outgoing calls to the real world. How does this idea come out? Do you think it is a good promotion idea? Does it indicate a communication reform in virtual online world?

Monty Sharma: I absolutely think this represents a reform in virtual online worlds. It is a strong indicator of the need for quality communication tools as people congregate more and more online. The Internet has done an amazing job in making the world a smaller place. Now Vivox wants to enrich that world with quality communications and bring down even more borders.

The phone booth in Second Life was developed earlier this year as a cool demo of our capabilities. Second Life caught our attention because everything is open and we could develop the tech and implement it. We thought it would be a fun hook for a promotion to get attention in Second Life. It has also been a great success and a tremendous learning experience for us as Second Life residents have been very honest and helpful with the feedback on their experience.

MMOsite.com: What is your plan about Vivox in the future?

Monty Sharma: Vivox is presently developing a Mac version of the client and will be releasing recording capabilities, as well as voice fonts/morphing. In addition we have additional management and UI features on the roadmap that will make the user experience more enjoyable, secure, and immersive.

And of course, our future plans include being the default choice for in-game voice communications across the industry.

MMOsite.com: Anything else you d want to share with our readers?

Monty Sharma: Just that we would love to know how they would like to use voice communications in their favorite games. Let us know! Don

t forget to visit our web site at www.vivox.com for more information. Thanks for letting us talk with MMOSite readers.

[Editor:Shine]