Vivox is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Vivox has made huge headway getting its Internet voice chat software into online games. It now handles 3 billion minutes of voice chat per month. Now the company is poised to expand even further with an announcement at the DEMO Spring 2010 conference today.
Vivox is announcing the Social Voice Partner Program, which makes it easy for developers to integrate voice into any social media application with a small amount of effort, said Vivox chief executive Rob Seaver, in an interview.
To date, Vivox has been integrated into lots of online games, such as as EverQuest, APB, Second Life, Combat Arms and a bunch of others. Last fall, the company integrated the voice app into its own app on Facebook. Now the company is making the platform available for integration into a wider array of social platforms, such as Google Wave and Ning social networks. It will also let others put voice into their own Facebook apps.
Vivox will release a kit that developers can use to integrate Vivox. It takes a matter of hours to integrate.
“We want to bring voice to social apps across all devices,” Seaver said. “We see just about every app becoming social.”
Vivox has 37 employees in Natick, Mass. It has raised $21 million in three rounds of funding. Since the company started in 2005, more than 23 million accounts have been created. Most recently, Vivox raised $6.8 million from IDG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital.
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