Life and Death of the Ojo Video Phone

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Ah, the Ojo Video Phone. Engadget posted the rumor that the phone and service have now gone kaput. And I can confirm it. After two plus years, the Ojo in my living room has finally reached the end of its run.

Because I work for Motorola, I became the proud owner of two Ojos back in late 2005. This was right before Motorola gave up on the product and turned it back over to WorldGate, its original manufacturer. I was the coveted demographic for the video phone, a new parent and daughter of new grandparents, all with broadband connections. And despite a few hiccups here and there, we would have made a fantastic case study. Until last week, we used the Ojos regularly. My two-year-old has literally grown up seeing her grandparents on the phone every few days. Now it looks like we’ll have to default to webcams, a sorry substitute.

So why didn’t the Ojo survive? There are many, many reasons.

  1. No interoperability. You could only talk to an Ojo from another Ojo.
  2. An original retail price of $1,600 for a pair of Ojos, plus a monthly fee. (Price came way down later on)
  3. Timing. As widespread as broadband is, there are still quite a few grandparents without it or without the tech savvy to do more with a broadband connection than check email. Maybe in five more years.
  4. Routers. It was virtually impossible to make the Ojo compatible with every router on the market, which means a lot of customers could not get their Ojos to work at all without another new piece of hardware.
  5. Wired connection. The Ojo only worked with an Ethernet line, and while being tethered wasn’t a big deal (you could still move the Ojo around for different perspectives), finding a place to put the Ojo within Ethernet reach was. We ran an Ethernet cord up from our basement, through a vent to our living room.

Some time soon I believe video will become an expected, add-on feature for all of our phones. And then we’ll probably hook them into our TVs for big-screen display. And then we’ll be able to interact with the video, marking up our screens like any WebEx presentation. And more, and more, and more. It’s all coming.

Just not for the Ojo.

14 thoughts on “Life and Death of the Ojo Video Phone”

  1. FEEL SCREWED LIKE I DO?

    Wordgate is run by Hal Krisbergh.
    Hal had no response when a reporter got a hold of him for an article that just came out.

    This is an insult to our families who have paid a lot of money for ojo’s.

    This is his home address:
    ————-
    ————-

    If you use google maps you can see a picture of his mini-mansion using “street view”.

    Public records state he and his wife Audrey purchased the home in 1992 and it is worth about $750k.

    CALL HAL AND AUDREY TODAY AND ASK THEM WHY THEY ARE PLAYING POLITICS AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR FAMILIES:
    (###) ###-####

  3. NOT GOING WITHOUT A FIGHT!

    I too have kids who are missing seeing their grandparents now. For all those who are interested, I have set up a website to try and galvanize the Ojo community and hopefully find a way to be able to use the phone again:

    http://www.theojocollective.com

    It may not work out in the end, but we can try! It does sound like there are some Ojos out there with the ability to make calls without the Ojo service. See ” The Big Hack” forum on http://www.theojocollective.com

  4. you have no idea how frustrating this is when you are trying to use it to contact your deaf family across the states. It NEVER works right. We have spent hours and hours unplugging the modem, changing the URl, changing the phone numbers, working with SNAP . Who is SNAP??? They are middle men apparently to make this even more difficult and impossible who communicate with the deaf. I am ready to throw the whole device out the window , but still want to communicate with my deaf family.

  5. I was a Worldgate stock holder.. It upsets me to know that my contributions to a company that showed so much promise didn’t quite fail because of poor technology, but by greed!
    Now, this person living high on the hog should sell his home and pay back the stockholders.. Don’t you agree?

  6. My understanding is that the owners/founders of ACN are now the primary stock holders or wgate. What does this mean for the Ojo? What does this mean for owners of the Iris3000? Will there eventually be a standards agreement that will allow various video phone products to communicate video with one another?

  8. Does anyone have any information on service providers that can be used with the Ojo phone in place of Worldgate? I still would like to use my Ojo phone if this is possible.

  10. I plan on hacking this device. Or at least coming up with a decent workaround. Progress will be slow as I am going through a lot, but I really want to bring this thing into the open again. They are pretty cheap now (I paid 50).

    I bookmarked this page and I will check back now and then to see how much interest there is in reviving the ojo. If it seems like a decent amount of people want it, I will find a way to hack the ovo and hopefully use it either free or via another SIP provider (skype would be nice).

  13. The only way to full hack it is reprogram it via JTAG. But to just change SIP server you can do it without reprogram. First versions had very strong protection. WGate has unique RSA 1024 key for each provider but never share the key with providers. Latest firmware (rev02.01.15) has big security issue – reverse connection for support. It still use RSA to authenticate on remote support server but … private key on a phone side and you can easily regenerate public part of key for your fake support PPP server. Then you can reroute sra.dev.ojodc.com to your fake server, initiate support connection from phone and then you have web access to phone. You still can’t reprogram firmware but you can change internal variables (like sip server and etc) or you can find password to change parameters via hidden phone menu.

  14. Dimitry, Please comment more fully using phraseology sensible to neophyte hackerz.
    Thanx mucho

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