Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Vivox to power Facebook voice calling app Bobsled

By Rodney H. Brown

Internet-based voice chat technology company Vivox Inc. is going to be providing the back end for a new application in partnership with T-Mobile USA Inc. that will allow person-to-person calls through Facebook – first on a PC or Mac and soon on a mobile device.

Natick-based Vivox will use its VoiceEverywhere Service to power the application called Bobsled, a Facebook application that allows free calling from one Facebook friend to another. While the Bobsled by T-Mobile branded app is launching today on just the PC and Mac platforms, the app is intended to be platform and device agnostic, according to Vivox officials.

Vivox CEO and co-founder Rob Seaver said that while the company has been working on Facebook voice applications since 2009, Bobsled is brand new and has been under beta test for just “five or six weeks.”

Seaver said that he wasn’t worried about handling the user base of the world’s largest social media company as its first win in that space.

“The great thing is that we created all this on top of the platform that we have been operating for years,” he said. “We have 55 million registered users and we are doing 3 billion voice minutes a month – that’s our launching pad and part of the uniqueness of the platform is how efficient it is.”

The move is the first big announcement in a plan Vivox announced years ago to move beyond the videogame space that has been its bread and butter to date. Among the big name customers using the Vivox voice service are Sony Online Entertainment LLC, the California-based maker of EverQuest and DC Universe Online, and Electronic Arts Inc. Other game space companies Vivox has as customers include Linden Labs Inc., the maker of virtual world Second Life, and Atari Inc. subsidiary Cryptic Studios, the makers of City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online: Free for All and Star Trek Online.

In February of 2010, Vivox CEO and co-founder Rob Seaver said he saw huge potential for future growth in social media opportunities like Bobsled for Facebook last year, now in beta. At the time, the company took in $6.8 million in new venture capital to expand further into the mobile and social media spaces.

Vivox has grown to about 40 employees at this point, Seaver said, and he is looking to add more employees as the company grows further into the social media space.

“Leveraging the fact that Facebook is this fantastic, innovative ecosystem is a great first step, but there’s a lot of other huge communities out there,” he said.