Competition boiling up between Fring and Skype

Video calling technology has been available for a while already. For example, 3G video calls have been available in the Philippines for several years. But the recent introduction of Apple’s iPhone 4 mobile phone that sports a front-facing camera has made video calls more popular in the US where video calls via mobile phone has just began to enter the mobile mainstream. Fring’s recent release of its iPhone 4 app that enables video calls on the iPhone 4. This has catched fire so much so that Fring is now head to head with Skype.

Fring started out with a post on their site on July 12 entitled “Skype cowardly blocks fring“:

Moments later, Skype issued an answer entitled “Fring’s mis-use of Skype software was damaging to our brand and reputation“:

Basically Fring has accused Skype of cutting the fring app’s access to Skype services and that Skype has started the path of being non-open. But Skype quickly answered and has accused Fring of mis-using Skype software in a way that is damaging to the Skype brand.

At lot is at stake here between the two companies, Voice/Video communication over the Internet is starting to be the main method of communication between people. As we starts to evolve into the world of a connected phone, we will find ourselves slowly using less and less of the traditional phone calls.

With Google buying Gizmo5, another VoIP company, Skype and Fring knows too well that they will soon be facing Google in the arena soon. And the company with the most users may well turn out to be the victor once the war cloud starts settling down.

However this turns out, the consumers are bound to suffer unless everyone in this competitive voice/video calling space learn to inter-operate in an amicable fashion. I only hope this gets resolved soon so that everyone can all go back to enjoying the benefits of face-to-face video calls the world over.