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Weekly Update #2

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Major changes are on the horizon for imVOX along with big news.We are shifting even more of our efforts into expanding our development and engineering capabilities! We want your ideas, dreams and feedback for how we can make the best gaming communication platform possible.

Here’s just a few of the things coming with our next release, which is initially slated for the end of the month.

Major Mac Client Update- The old one barely worked. This one will be leaps and bounds ahead of it. We have a developer dedicated to getting this working.
High Definition Voice- Audio quality will go up dramatically with only minor hit to bandwidth and CPU. A new mixing engine will enable expanded future capabilities such individual level control of other users without effecting the overall chat.
Expanded Text Chat- Clickable URLs, one-to-one chat, and notification of text messages will make text chat more useful than ever
Bug Fixes- The new imVOX will be faster and more stable. A new testing procedure has been put in place to catch issues before they hit you in the middle of a raid
And More!- A new MOTD screen, user aliases, user profiles, away channels, and better banning options are all just around the corner

If all of this seems exciting, just wait for what we’ve got in our back pocket. We aren’t just making another voice chat program, we are going to change the way you communicate and interact with your games. Please leave your ideas and feedback in the comments.

Tags: bugs, chat, HD voice, mac, MOTD, text
Posted in Company, Development | Comments

Seeking Mono/C# Developer for Contract Gig

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

We’re looking for someone to help make the Mac version of our imVOX product (http://imvox.com) more stable and mac-like. I believe it will be between 40-80 hours of contract work.

The developer needs to have experience in using Mono (C#) for Mac development. Additional experience in C++ and Objective-C might be handy. We use Git for version control and Redmine for project/task management. We wrote our client initially in .NET for Windows and we’ve got it working mostly in Mono so far, however there’s a handful of loose ends that we need to tie up.

The rate is negotiable, and we’d like to get this going ASAP. Reply to me directly if you’re interested and feel free to pass this on beyond this list.

We’re looking for someone to help make the Mac version of imVOX more stable and Mac-like. It will probably be 40-80 hours of contract work up front, and if you’re good I’m sure we can find more hours in the future.

The developer needs to have experience in using Mono (C#) for Mac development. Additional experience in C++ and Objective-C might be handy. We use Git for version control and Redmine for project/task management. We developed our main code branch initially in just .NET/C#, but we are using Mono for cross platform compatibility and maintaining one code base. Needless to say, we’ve got some lose ends to tie up.

The rate is negotiable, and we’d like to get this going ASAP. Location isn’t really important, but communication skills and being able to get the job done are. Send us an email to support@imvox.com if you’re interested or can refer someone.

Tags: apple, c#, contract, Development, gig, job, mono, objective-c
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Visualizing Load Testing imVOX.com’s Servers

Monday, December 7th, 2009

When we moved our infrastructure over to Amazon’s EC2 a few weeks ago we also switched all of our web servers over to EC2, including the one you’re reading this on now. The switch was fairly painless once I got past some RSA key issues and the server has been holding up well. How well? If we got front page on IGN.com would we be able to survive? Once when I was at gamerDNA we got hit by Kotaku and were “Kotaku-Killed” for a few hours while our databases recovered. That day we learned that writing our own queries instead of relying on ActiveRecord (the ORM in Rails) was a good thing.

Thankfully our website is much simpler than the hundreds of thousands of lines that encompass gamerDNA. The main page is just XHTML/CSS with PHP gluing together a few things and doing some templating for us. Everything is running on Apache. The blog runs WordPress and the forums run vBulletin on a mySQL database. Nothing too fancy yet with advanced php caching or layering up Apache with ngnix.

Today I thought we should do some minor load testing just to make sure it held up ok. In the end I did testing using a handful of websites, Apache’s AB tool and looking at the logs by hand. But something really cool for you to see is the visualization that was rendered using gltail, a ruby program which visualizes various types of logs (apache, postgresql, rails, etc).

I basically launched the program, threw a ‘stress test’ site at the server and let it run while screen grabbing it. Turned out pretty cool. The web server held up perfectly and I was able to easy access it on another computer at the same time. Yet my Macbook Pro didn’t hold up as well to the visualization side of things and it got choppy when things got really nuts. I tried to do the same video when testing it with AB, but it was too much for the visualizer and nearly crashed my poor laptop. Anyway, here’s the video. Be sure to check it out in HD.

Posted in Company, video | Comments

imVOX Brings Cloud Hosted Free Voice Chat to Gamers

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

We just dropped a new press release to the wires. Here’s the text. Feel free to reblog and post it.

imVOX service connects up to 30 gamers for free; paid service allows users to connect to up to 250 gamers

AKRON, OHIO & BOSTON — November 24, 2009 — Ayalogic announced today the public beta availability of imVOX (http://imvox.com), a new voice communication service designed to broaden the use of voice in games. The free imVOX service allows up to 30 gamers to join a voice chat for free. imVOX runs in the background while a user plays a multiplayer game like Modern Warfare 2 or World of Warcraft to provide users with better communication with teammates. Premium services are available for $24.99 USD per year, and provide users with the ability to connect up to 250 users to a single server and expanded in-client features such as text-to-voice and a skinnable client.

The imVOX software is currently available on Microsoft’s Windows XP, Vista and 7 and runs directly on your computer. Support for OS X is in the works. Additionally, social networking features and integration are currently in development, with login via Facebook Connect and Twitter integration available soon.

Ayalogic’s CEO Mike Rojas says, “We want to make it easier to enable gamers to connect with voice. There will be no more begging a friend to leverage their voice server to have a little extra fun in whatever game you want to play.”

The imVOX network of servers is set up on Amazon’s Web Services platform, utilizing EC2 for the main servers and S3 for backup and persistent storage– a first in the consumer game voice market. This solution allows for a low cost, redundant, scalable and cost effective infrastructure that passes its benefits for reliability and price directly to the gamer.

By providing not only the servers and technology for imVOX, but also the user client, Ayalogic is able to provide a smoother experience than existing solutions at a significantly reduced price – Free.

“Our architecture and technology will allow us to bring rapid innovation around communication services to the gaming market. The time has come to bring together to merge the benefits of embedded voice and dedicated gaming voice clients into a single solution”, said Mike Rojas.

Tags: press release
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Quit Ventrilo, Get Awesome Stuff Instead!

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Instead of spending your hard earned cash on costly Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers, you can spend far less (or even nothing!) with imVOX. With our new plans starting at a rather affordable ZERO dollars and topping out at just more than two movie tickets for $24.99 a year, you can take care of your voice hosting and save money.

But come on, who saves money? You’re going to spend it on cool stuff instead!

Looking over at our good friends Typefrag, you’ll see that a 30-user Ventrilo server will run you $86.40/year if you pay upfront. If you pay by the month you’ll spend $144 of your hard earned dollars to get yourself and 29 others talking.

That is infinitely more than our offering of 30-users for free! And it doesn’t matter how you pay that sum of free. You can do it over 12 months, yearly, or even every minute if you so please.

For $144 you can buy some pretty sweet stuff. Throw down $50 more and you’ve got a shiny new iPhone, or upgrade your cable modem to the fastest package, or buy your girlfriend a present to attempt to make up for all of those hours spent playing WoW instead of paying attention to her.

But there’s more!

What if you went with imVOX instead of Ventrilo for a whopping 250 user server? That sounds pretty serious. And it is a serious amount of dough if you’re buying a Ventrilo server. The best price you can get on Typefrag is $1080, and if you buy monthly you’ll spend a princely $1,200.

I bought a motorcycle the other month for $400! My first car was $1,200! If you’re working for $10/hr that’s 120 hours you’re not spending playing games, but instead working a dull and boring job- and that’s before tax!

imVOX can host 250 people on your server for only $24.99/year.

So save yourself over a thousand dollars, buy a new computer or something fun- and go with imVOX. Oh yea, and we do a lot of other cool stuff that you can’t do on Vent- like searching for servers

Tags: cheaper, free, headset, host, hosting, imvox, server, ventrilo, WoW
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imVOX Price Drop!

Monday, November 16th, 2009

This news is so hot that it isn’t even reflected on the full site yet. You’re hearing it first here!

imVOX’s pricing is coming down. This isn’t a minor cut, its to the bone to bring you the voice goodness you’ve been wanting for a price that’s simply too good to pass up. If you’re a Ventrilo host, you might want to close your eyes because this is going to hurt.

Here’s what you get

Free

Everyone/anyone can make a server with up to 30 users connected at once to chat for free. Hot stuff eh? Last I checked Typefrag charges up to $144/year for this if you pay monthly. How’s Free vs $144 for ya? Chat as much as you like, for as long as you like.

$24.99/year

So you’ve got 31 friends. Or maybe you have 250. Well, for just $24.99/year you can create a server that can squeeze in a whole 250 people at a time. Typefrag (and most other Ventrilo hosts) charges $1080 for similar if you pay by the year, or $1200 if you pay monthly. The big servers will also get some neat tricks eventually that the small servers might not have.

So let me rephrase this. $24.99 vs $1080. Pretty sure if you go on Craigslist you can buy a car for the difference- or at least upgrade your computer.

No Feature Left Behind

We are working hard to make sure that we have every feature that Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, ViVox and two tin-cans held together have- and more! Social network integration, friends, profiles, a sweet SDK and other goodies are just around the corner. If we don’t have something- let us know and we’ll get to work. Our programmers are getting coal for the holidays if they don’t make these happen, so feel free to load us up with To-Do’s.

Oh and we’ve got a Mac client just around the corner (I can’t wait! Bootcamp and Windows 7 is getting old).

If you purchased an imVOX license prior- we’ll be in contact shortly via email to refund the difference and make sure that you’re good to go.

Tags: client, cut, drop, imvox, ouch, price, teamspeak, ventrilo
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imVOX Mac Release Coming Soon!

Monday, November 16th, 2009

The community has spoken and we’ve heard you loud and clear. We need a Mac version.

So we’ve got our holiday elves hard at work to bring you something awesome- a Mac client! No coal for you this year.

It should be about two weeks from today until we have a working Mac client. It might have some bugs upfront, but we should have it soon!

Tags: apple, client, imvox, leopard, mac, release, snow leopard, soon
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Giveaway! Free 75-slot imVOX account!

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Simply retweet this twitter status (“MMO Gamers! Follow @imVOX or RT this message for a chance to win a free 75-slot account on @imVOX“) for a chance to win a free 75-slot imVOX account for one year! That’s a value of over $200!

We’ll close on this by Thursday afternoon, so start tweeting and following!

Tags: contest, free, twitter
Posted in Company | Comments

New imVOX Website!

Friday, August 28th, 2009

As you may have noticed, we have been hard at work to create a new website for imVOX.com. The site has been heavily tested using Firefox 3.5.2 and Safari 4. We’ll be working to make it more compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in the coming week. IE 6 users should upgrade if possible, but we can no longer support a browser from 2001.

Look around and let us know what you think. The page is currently XHTML 1.0 Strict validated on most pages with some CSS3 styles, and we’ll be considering HTML5 in the future. If you should notice any bugs, rendering errors, or oddities let us know via the support form! Please make sure to note your OS and Browser version.

Tags: website
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Meet the Team: David Fisher, Mastermind of Marketing/Strategy

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Hi! My name is David and I handle the marketing and strategy efforts at imVOX. I joined the team mid-2009 and prior to that I worked with GamerDNA in advertising sales.

I’ve been a gamer as long as I can remember, starting with my dad getting a Commodore 64 when I was two. For Christmas when I was five my uncle gave me a Nintendo NES and much of my childhood was spent daydreaming about landscapes of pixels and the adventures of Mario and Link. My first business card I printed when I was seven proclaimed myself as a “videogame expert” available for training and consulting. It wasn’t until much later in life that I seriously considered again this as a serious career path. After the first wave of MMOs I slowed my gaming considerably but in the past 18 months have gotten back into the swing of things.

Some of my favorite games recently have been World of Warcraft (Argent Dawn server), Braid, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Monkey Island Special Edition, Grand Theft Auto IV, Geometry Wars II and Gears of War 2.

When I’m not working for imVOX or gaming, I am likely to be found researching social networks with the Web Ecology Project, funding awesomeness with the Awesome Foundation, playing guitar or working on DIY projects.

I’m excited about where imVox is going because I think the current state of voice in gaming is stale and can be made a much more fun and social experience. Should you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at david@imVOX.com

Tags: marketing, team
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