Loudtalks

Today, three months from the first public appearance at TechCrunch40 we reached an important milestone of 10,000 registered users.

I want to thank these brave people for helping us. It takes courage to try the new software, which challenges existing communication tools with multi-million user bases.

We try to work up to your expectations. Over that time we went through 13 releases, fixing bugs and gradually improving usability. I really hope we are heading in the right direction. If you think we are not — give us a punch, we are listening.

Here is what expected in the coming releases:

• Automatic updates support
• Support of TCP-only transport
• Support of operation through a proxy
• Incoming messages and statuses history (think twitter timeline)
• Improved GUI (slimmer main window, compact contacts mode)

We also keep on adding new UI languages. Right now Loudtalks is available is English, Russian, German, Spanish, Finnish and Chinese.

We decided that it would be cool to nominate Loudtalks for one of The Crunchies awards.

If you think we deserve it, please support us by clicking on that cheesy round button on the left and entering “loudtalks” into “Best Bootstrapped Start-up” category. You may nominate us into different categories as well :)

Thanks!

We often mention that Loudtalks is faster than alternatives. What exactly do we mean? One meaning is that it’s lightweight, uses very little system resources and will work fine on older PCs too.

More importantly, it allows to communicate faster by skipping through the clutter and giving the ability to speak the very same moment you decided to say something.

Consider you want to ask co-worker a quick question. Here is how the timeline would look if you use Loudtalks, phone call (i.e. Skype), and an instant messenger (i.e. ICQ):

Loudtalks wins this case because it offers “always on” voice channel, without overhead associated with a phone call ritual.

(update 11/6/2007: Based on feedback from users, we replaced “DeepWell” build with a normal echo, which repeats back whatever you say to it. DeepWell moves over to “voices” username)

Today we launched the first bot in Loudtalks network. It’s name is “echovoices” and it’s added to all new users’ contacts automatically. You can add or remove it manually too.

The first purpose of this bot is to help users testing Loudtalks themselves before inviting friends. It does that in somewhat unusual way. The best way to experience “DeepWell” project is to login to Loudtalks, add “voices” to your contacts and tell something to it.

If you just want a spoiler here is what it does.

Read the rest of this entry »

I created the Loudtalks group at Facebook. If you are using both Loudtalks and Facebook please join.

I’m not sure how useful this would be but it won’t harm so why not give it a try.

See TechCrunch coverage here.

Unfortunately the demo was screwed by a technical issue. Loudtalks software worked fine, however the audio on the stage didn’t work at all (A/V guy said that the audio cable was broken unplugged by people stepping on it).

Alexander Vinogradov and Jason Calacanis saving the demo (photo from TechCrunch) 

Thanks for your support and I hope you’ll enjoy the product. If you have suggestions or issues to report please drop us an email at support@loudtalks.com