\”We made a drug out of a virus by engineering its destructive abilities from a foe into a friend,\” said Matthias Gromeier, M. D., who led the team. \”The rhinovirus acts as the trigger that activates gene expression, but the genes being express…

Jp

Gail

Three problems they will face:

1. Most people like to watch, few people want to be on camera. AT&T discovered this at the New York Worlds Fair in 1964. Every few years the cost comes down and someone tries it again. Same result.

2. Unlike Skype, Flash is not P2P. Bandwidth and FMS license fees make for incremental cost for each user.

3. Two-way interactive video is WAY more demanding on network performance than streaming stored video. It works great on a great network, but deteriorates quickly when packet loss or latency goes up. With stored video you can buffer, but buffering means awkward delays in a two-way conversation.

At the end of the day, tho, the real question is not “can this be done by anyone”, it’s really “who can afford to do this”. To truly scale this to a profitable margin, they’ll need the big bucks — for bandwidth, cpu and marketing. It’ll be interesting to see where 4m gets them.

I expect we’ll see more web apps like this over the next 6 months.

Are you suggesting that Sequoia did not do their due diligence? The mouse trap is the ease of use not the advertising model.

hey techies - Can I use Adobe Flex and build the same thing? Well, maybe not me, but a qualified engineer!

But if they can offer a good level of service to corporate users, that might be an alternative to over-expensive video/web-conferencing services out there.

I’m taken—but I’m sure inquiring techcrunch minds would like to know!

oh ya, I forgot to second that. The lady on the home page is very cute. Maybe I’ll run into in the Marina area:)

It is user friendly, easy to install, easy to syndicate, and not much paper work of clicks to get what you want. You cannot ask for more than that.

I must confess though I was a bit taken back by the name, but it has a Asian connotation to it and a non English feel. That may help the brand outside of the States in areas like Japan and S. Korea if it can break into those markets.

I could be wrong and you could all very well be right on the name issue. But as I said by the time you install it there is no logo anywhere to be seen, just your call and chat windows and that is all we really want on a social network anyway.

——Well, I completely disagree. But, that is my opinion. And after learning that they wish to make this a viral marketing model I disagree with you even more.

@7 Michael said…..” It is not generic like iVideoCalls or whatever, such (internet) brands are generally weak. It needs to be distinct, like Google (not search.com).

—–It is not fair to the company to compare it to a “Google” type. A generic/type in domain name would be a homerun for this company. And to say that such brands are generally weak is very off the mark. Just look at what Business.com recently sold for ($440M). Not bad for a company with a “bunch” of links, eh.

I think the size of the window is perfect for social networks, if the user wanted a more personal feel and left the social site and wanted a window with just their friends to video chat ,how will the size of the window scale based on the number of users all on at the same time?

I could see two large windows for two users and the gradually scale to fit on a scrolling page. When will the user have the ability to scale the window size outside of a social network setup?

I have now had 200 emails to myself (I’m in my own address book) and at least 50 friends have emailed me saying they have been spammed also.

It is now 10.35 (90 minutes after It started and I am still getting 10 emails a minute from them.

Their code is NOT ready for prime time.

Also, it never asked my permission to send emails. it simply asked me to make my address book available within the app.

Keith Teare
ceo/co-founder/edgeio

However, that said, it’s very, very tough to scale up these types of offerings since the Flash streaming from end-users need to go through a centralized point based on the Flash Media Server. You really need a powerful hosting solution to pull it off. Also, it’s very expensive because you have to pay for up *and* downstreams (YouTube is just downstream) bandwidth.

Maybe at some poing Flash will allow peer-to-peer video streaming. That’d be the only real way to scale such products.