noirExtreme

I found out about Damaka yesterday thanks to Eurovoip and despite tomtom's doubts I couldn't help thinking "aha! finally a competitor to Skype based on open standard!s", something I consider critical for a healthy the voip market.

Based on the information available on their web site I concluded that they were addressing the problem from the right angle: that of simplification of user experience. Setting up a SIP client is excrutiatingly difficult —even for experts— compared to the 2 click setup of Skype. Bringing that kind of simplicity to SIP is the single biggest element that will contribute to making the playing field more level and encourage standards based offerings to flourish. And we do want a wild diversity of SIP product and services to be available because that is the mechanism by which standards based solutions beat proprietary ones.

Then I installed and briefly tested this VoIP software yesterday night.
One think I didn't realise before was that Damaka is a actually a walled garden and does not offer interop with other SIP-based VoIP providers. In this perspective, I am a lot less enthusiastic about it and I rejoin tomtom's opinion that this one is unlikely to catch up as end-users don't care what underlying technology is used. With Damaka they get less features than with Skype and about 50 million less people to connect with.

So my recommendation to the Damaka people is to:

1. push further the open standards logic that you claim to follow and open up your peer-to-peer network to as may SIP providers as possible (FWD, SIPtel, etc. Check voip-info.org for complete list. Yes, I added you to the list...). This will provide you a critical mass of reachable users to build the necessary momentum to start growing;
2. adopt XMPP standard protocol (RFC3920-RFC3921) for messaging. XMPP is converging with SIP and is likely to be your strongest ally to build cool presence features. Besides doing this will enable you to open up and connect with the XMPP users base and gain critical mass more quickly.
3. Provide very quickly an API to enable enthusiast to develop add-ons to your basic architecture and integration with other applications and devices.

Damaka done right could become the strongest contestant to Skype. It has the potential to federate the fragmented SIP world around a paradigm established by Skype (dead easy p2p telephony client) and to challenge them thanks to the combined efforts of a community of developers behind a standard as opposed to a handful of (very talented) guys with a proprietary product.