Host a video conferencing party on your phone

I'm looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It's CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for PCs, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I must say, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh's large-screen smartphone.

The simplest way to think about iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You sign up for an account and can start adding any contact who has also registered with the service. Conferencing starts when you enter a room, after which you have an array of controls to launch multimedia sharing functions with a one-button click; that is, tap or click the interface to chat, start a video conference using the phone's camera as the lens, send a file, and see a buddy's GPS location on a map.

I like the glossy black interface, which packs in a lot of features without making the app feel overcrowded. The video quality wasn't too shabby either, and definitely an improvement over other video software I've seen, but a lot of that input will depend on the capabilities of the phone itself. On mobile phones, iVisit Teleport supports 120x160, 320x240 video. It will be interesting to see how iVisit Teleport plays out on an actual conference call when the app's beta release goes live in April on Windows Mobile phones, and if the pricing will appeal more to consumers or small businesses. In the meantime, anyone can pre-register for the iVisit Teleport private beta or iVisit desktop for Windows and Mac.