Global IP Solutions

» see gipscorp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Google offered 13 kroner a share for Global IP Solutions in May 2010, valuing the company at about 421 million Norwegian kroner, and made the bid conditional on 90 percent acceptance. Kistefos, the Norwegian investment house that had been the largest owner since 1999, accepted and booked a gain of 42 million kroner on a 37 percent stake. The offer was set to expire on or about 4 June, with a backstop of 31 August if conditions were not met.

The last document the company ever published is dated 6 July 2010, and it is a notice of an extraordinary general meeting to be held at eleven on Friday 23 July at a law firm on Birger Jarlsgatan in Stockholm. It records the total number of shares and votes as 32,380,693. It names the shareholder calling the meeting as Google Acquisition Holdings Inc., "which after the completion of its public takeover offer for the Company controls more than 90 percent of the shares". Item ten on the agenda is approval of the board's own application to delist every share from the Oslo stock exchange. Item nine explains, in passing, that the company "is expected to be delisted from the Oslo stock exchange shortly."

No delisting notice has surfaced, so July 2010 is where this grave sits: the month the owner of a company convened its shareholders to vote it off the market, and the month after which it said nothing again. English Wikipedia dates the acquisition to May 2010 in its text and the company's end to 2011 in its infobox, and does not reconcile the two.

~ the case file ~

~ the codec in the call ~

Four signal-processing people started it in Stockholm in July 1999 as Global IP Sound: Roar Hagen, the chief technology officer, Bastiaan Kleijn, the chief scientist, Espen Fjogstad and Ivar T. Hognestad. Their observation was that nearly all the voice technology then available had been designed for circuit-switched networks, where a channel either exists or does not, and that none of it was built for a medium in which a packet might arrive late or not arrive at all.

What they sold solved that. The narrowband codec iLBC degraded gracefully when packets went missing instead of producing the underwater noise everyone associates with early internet calls, and the wideband iSAC adapted its bitrate to whatever the connection could take. Both shipped inside products called engines rather than as bare codecs, VoiceEngine and VideoEngine along with conferencing variants of each. The 2008 annual report lists the customers as Citrix, IBM, Google, Nortel Networks, Radvision, Yahoo, WebEx, AOL and Samsung. By then the company had 14 patents granted and 12 pending, and 69 employees.

Skype was the customer that mattered and the one that left. In June 2007 Skype's own blog said its audio engine was by then fully built in-house, as Disruptive Telephony reported at the time, and the 2008 annual report names the loss of Skype among the reasons revenue fell 29 percent to $10.2 million from $14.4 million. Revenue had peaked at $17.1 million in 2006. The company listed on Oslo Børs on 22 July 2008 anyway, under the ticker GIPS, having traded on a Norwegian over-the-counter list since December 1999.

~ the turkish line ~

On 9 March 2010, about ten weeks before Google bid, GIPS put out a release I did not know existed until I went looking. Argela Technologies, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom, had integrated GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile into TT WiRO, a service that let a Türk Telekom customer abroad make calls over Wi-Fi from a phone or laptop and be billed as though the call came from their home line. Argela's product director is quoted on why they picked it, and GIPS' chief marketing officer is quoted being pleased.

I was twenty-six and living in Turkey when that release went out and had never heard of this company, which is the whole point of it. A codec vendor is invisible by design. It ships inside somebody else's product under somebody else's brand, and the better the thing works, the less reason anybody has to learn whose it is. The firm whose software made that Turkish service sound acceptable was bought and taken off the stock market within five months of announcing the deployment.

~ given away ~

iLBC had been published as RFC 3951 in December 2004, an Experimental memo written by S. Andersen of Aalborg University, A. Duric of Telio, and four people at Global IP Sound, two of whom were Hagen and Kleijn. Publishing it made the codec an open specification. The license attached to it was not quite open: GIPS granted a royalty-free right to use iLBC but required anyone deploying it commercially to register that license with the company first, and drew limits around what counted as permitted commercialization. For a firm whose only asset was signal-processing code that is a defensible arrangement, and it still amounted to a gate with a keeper.

Google removed the gate. In June 2011 it released WebRTC as a developer preview under a royalty-free BSD license, built on the engines it had bought, and the webrtc.org page for iLBC said plainly that Google was not charging royalties for it. WebRTC is what browser-to-browser calling has run on ever since. Google's own tombstone for the company is still up at gipscorp.com today, a single page carrying the Google wordmark and listing the product names, explaining that none of them is available for sale to new customers any more. There is no date anywhere on it, which is in keeping with everything else about the ending.

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