Conversation with Peerio's CEO

Peerio's CEO Dmitry Goroshevsky spoke to me by phone this morning from Paris, following up on our conversation at Supercomm. I expressed my disappointment that his company has still not shipped a product, despite the plans and announcements in the past.

Regarding his free software download, Peerio444, Dmitry told me that sound quality has been a major problem which is why it has not been made generally available. He told me that an important licensing announcement would be made *soon* which would provide a solution, but would not commit to a schedule for delivering this technology to the marketplace.

Regarding the company's commercial offering -- OEM'd versions inside commercial handsets, Dmitry promised that real product from real partners would be demonstrated at the VoN tradeshow... So if you are going, swing by their booth for me and let me know what you see.

I raised my primary critique with him again -- that Skype has such an enormous lead, that upstarts like Peerio (Nimcat, Litfiber, etc) were unlikely to become very important in this market. His counter to this point was twofold --

First, he said, Skype does not have the professional feature set required by businesses to adopt P2P VoIP technology. Peerio does, and is delivering this in handsets with partners.

Second, Skype is not a "true" peer-to-peer platform. Peerio is serverless. This is, according to Dmitry, a fundamental and game changing difference -- and not just for VoIP but for many different kinds of networked applications that will ultimately run on the Peerio infrastructure.

I am certainly interested to see whether these claims will bear fruit -- but at this point I want to see something working before I get excited...