On 12/22/2012 04:49 AM, Brian Conley wrote:

That said, thus far, neither redphone nor those over listed rivals skype or Google hangouts quality of transmission.

Depends. RedPhone's audio quality is (in general) substantially better on Android than Skype's has been. Skype's desktop audio quality is probably better than RedPhone's, however. I see this more as a desktop vs. android thing rather than a skype vs. redphone thing. Low-latency audio on Android is just hard, particularly over mobile data networks. It is true, however, that Skype has a much larger engineering team than we do. I like to think that RedPhone is getting better all the time, but if this is something that you or anyone on this list is interested in, we'd obviously welcome help improving things in any way that you can contribute. Please don't be shy about filing issues in the GitHub issue tracker for the project, even if they are user experience type things rather than strictly bugs. We need the feedback.

This is not meant to detract from them, its more a question, is a revenue based model the only option to ensure high enough quality to attract users and grow?

I agree that it's a problem. I've pointed out before that user expectations for these types of apps are set by things like WhatsApp, which is an entire company focused *just* on a single chat app, with an engineering team that is larger than the number of developers in the whole "privacy enhancing technology" community put together. I think there are at least a couple of trends working in our favor though: 1) Mobile apps are a huge opportunity for us. It's difficult to do much in the security/privacy area strictly within the browser, and the barrier to installing native desktop apps is high enough that you need something like the network effect of skype to make it happen. The barrier to having users install mobile apps is much lower, and what we can do within that framework is much greater. 2) Infrastructure continues to get easier to deploy, manage, and scale. As depressing as it is that there are companies developing insecure communication tools with engineering teams larger than our entire community, there are also examples of very small teams that have done some really highly scalable stuff. The engineering team at Instagram, for instance, was quite small. They were able to leverage AWS to scale up without many problems, while focusing most of their effort on user experience and core features. Right now RedPhone has a global set of POPs deployed that offer less than 100ms RTT to a relay from almost anywhere in the world, and we don't have a dedicated infrastructure team. That would have been really hard to do in the past. - moxie -- http://www.thoughtcrime.org -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE