Be Skype Journal

There is so much going on with Skype that the independent Skype Journal needs help. Please Skype me if you'd like to change the world, cover Skype, its competition, products and technology, industry events, and business affairs. 2009 will be a dramatic year for the hundreds of millions of people using Skype around the world. Tell that story.

The network of networks is making distance disappear, and everything is becoming the Internet. We are building pixels into the ambience of our homes, into the plastic we carry, into the theaters of our work, onto our cityscapes and into everything with wheels.

Those pixels are coming with sound and sensors. So the web's metaphor moves from paints and surfaces to glass and open windows. We talk through these open windows into other people's lives. And we share our own.

Somewhere in between here and there is the plumbing that connects all of us together. Energy pulses through glass and sand and copper and air, throbbing with life, with attention, with the minds of humanity, with our beating hearts, with our music.

As we make it, we are changing ourselves. We barely understand what that means. We are becoming more connected, seizing control of our institutions, revising what it means to know and remember, to belong.

And the Internet is only five thousand days old.

In 2001 our global blogosphere shared the horror of the 9/11 attacks.

In 2008 our global mediasphere tweeted, blogged, Blackberried, tagged, digged, YouTubed, streamed, Skyped, IM'd the horror of the #Mumbai attacks.

What could it be like at day 10k? 20k?

Rolling Stone magazine told the story of a music and cultural revolution. I hope Skype Journal does it's part to report and interpret this revolution, shine a light where it does good, and invite people to the party.

Which brings me back to you.

Consider this an invitation. Write the change that happens. Write the change you want. Skype Journal needs your voice. Skype me and we'll set it up.

Phil Wolff
Publisher, Managing Editor.

Fring lays off 10, shows Skype's partnership with iSkoot pays

So Fring goes from 50 to 40 personnel. Big whoop. This is less a sign of trouble than of prudence. While the Fring layoff surprised Jan Geirnaert, Om Malik thinks it looks weak. It looks capital-conserving to me in light of the new economy.

Skype's clout matters in this space.

Fring and EQO and iSkoot all courted Skype executives for a partnership. Only iSkoot got the nod, which led to their becoming the software behind Skype's profitable 3 Skypephone and profitable relationships with carriers.

Skype and 3 solved iSkoot's need for distribution, capital for PSTN-Skype gateway operations, and traffic monetization. Fring must to leap those barriers on its own. Maybe you can help: Nominate Fring for the Crunchies 2008 award.

Fring's popular software lets you access many Skype features on your mobile phone, including Apple iPhones, Google Androids, and Nokia Symbian smartphones.

A Fring spokesperson wrote about Fring's 400% growth this last year, now at 400 thousand new accounts monthly:

The monthly increase is a result of a number of things - the continued viral growth in fringsters now active in over 220 territories globally, our phenomenally successful iPhone launch which took us to the Number 1 free AppStore download in markets worldwide within twelve hours of launch, a number of new product releases and handsets supported, and our overall business development effort which includes items such as the Mobilkom A1 deal.

tags: skype, fring, iskoot, layoffs, crunchies, iphone, android, google, apple, nokia, symbian

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Skype Public Chats: Redesign the Redirect

Recruiting people into a room from the web makes a Skype public chat useful. The pattern is:

Web badge (on a web page)
–> Skype.com redirect page 
--–> Skype client

As long as Skype is working on it, a few improvements come to mind.

Reform the blob namespace so blob-names are short, even with a dozen hosts. Very long blobs impair our ability to use those urls in email, chat, or over the phone.

Add permanence. Create public chat permalinks that don't change with time. Right now they change with time, as hosts change. We need more permanent links, even if it increases dependence on a referring server.

Preview before click-through. Rebuild the redirection service to show more information about a public chat before a person clicks through. I'd like to see for example,

• date created,
• number of people,
• title,
• description,
• tags,
• moderator name, and
• date (or days since) someone last joined via public click.

Group chat owners should also be able to end-of-life a listing by withdrawing it or by setting its status to retired-but-still-visible-for-historical-purposes. 

Directory. As long as you have the data, host a searchable directory of public chats, for chats that opt-in.

Bonus Points: The directory is an opportunity for community behavior, including comments and feedback on directory entries, integration with event sites for cross posting and updating, and embedding within group sites using protocols like OpenSocial, RSS/ping mesh. This might even become a successor to the Skypecasts service.

Platform. API for search, to extract data about public chat objects. The better to create topical directories elsewhere, and create smarter badges.

Grandfather older public chats to the new services.

tags: public chats, im, voim, skype, directory, find, prime

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Wednesday read

Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) Developer Evening, London. Wednesday, 26 November 2008. Yahoo! UK, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, England WC2H 8AD.

Phonebook Art. Cheap paper that takes a pencil well.

Kill Your Telephone. "A step-by-step guide to Skype, the cheapest and easiest way to make a phone call." Replace your landline.

Xobni brings the internet into Outlook… 4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. New release adds your Outlook contact's Skype calling info to your Xobni Outlook profile. Best feature: automatic discovery of the Skype name for the people that send you email.

Thoughtpile.org. Herman Miller's open brainstorming about design, creativity, innovation and work.

eBay Traffic Plummeting. October 2008: –10% uniques, –33% page views, –19% time per user year over year. Page views may be less of an issue with Web 2.0 designs keeping people on a page. But 10% fewer people? Spending 80% of the time they spent last October? eBay is just not that efficient.

Heaven's Call Center. Feist the Angel puts Stephen Colbert's prayers on hold. An opportunity for fonolo?

Getting Closer to the True Numbers on Skype via Mobile

Yesterday UK web publication TelecomTV put out a post "Skype claims mobiles are involved in a quarter of its calls". But a "correction" comment by the author, Tony Chan, disclaims his basic premise:

CORRECTION: As the original author of this story for CommsDay, I am corrected by Skype that the 4 billion minute figure is actually for Skype-to-Skype minutes with video, NOT mobile.

Turns out to be a confirmation of what we have heard in the past: 25% to 30% of all Skype-to-Skype calls invoke video calling.

So how can one generate Skype-to-Skype minutes from a mobile device? What % of Skype-to-Skype minutes are generated from a mobile device?

• iSkoot: sets up a Skype session on their server using information delivered from the iSkoot client on a supported mobile device, such as BlackBerry or Nokia N-Series. When you make a Skype call, it's Skype-to-Skype from the iSkoot server to your called Skype contact.
  
• Skypephone: uses iSkoot's algorithm with the one difference. 3 has set up their own "iSkoot" servers to support this service. As of October 1, 3 customers using iSkoot or a Skypephone can now make SkypeOut calls from any 3 Skype-enabled phone also.
  
• Skype for Windows Mobile: here the limitation is the small, and decreasing, market share for Windows Mobile devices. It requires either a WiFi connection or 3G but the former is favored but both call quality and robustness reasons. But you can make both Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls from this client. (And it's the only instance of a true Skype VoIP client on mobile device -- challenging both processor speeds and battery life.)
  
• Skype for Mobile - currently at a beta stage with limited outbound calling; this service fundamentally uses the same architecture as iSkoot. (I suspect iSkoot has any appropriate intellectual property protected under this. After all, Skype and iSkoot are working together on Skypephone, etc. But it is interesting to experience the difference in user interfaces between iSkoot and Skype for Mobile) Again this does not put the full VoIP client on the device but rather back at a server. Probably not too many minutes here yet.
• Update: Mobivox CEO Peter Diedrich emailed to remind me that their voice-enabled service also has the ability to launch Skype-to-Skype voice calls. From any landline or mobile handset worldwide the caller makes a "local" call to VoxGirl who, in turn, launches and connects to a Skype session on a Mobivox server. Effectively creating a landline- or mobile-to-Skype call, Mobivox requires no downloads or client software. VoxGirl will determine presence information to decide whether to proceed with a call; however, there is no IM/chat capability.
  
• I have described my experience with Fring for iPhone when it launched almost two months ago. My problem with any iPhone application of this nature is that there is currently no background processing such that you can allow an IM session to run in background while executing other applications.
  

And how successful has 3's Skypephone service been? We initially heard some qualitative information at eComm 2008 last spring. But, information supplied by Skype's PR this morning provides us the basis for an order-of-magnitude guestimate:

".... since Skype launched the 3 Skypephone in November last year, there have been over over 100 million minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls by users of the 3 Skypephone and other mobile handsets with Skype and there are currently more than a million minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls each day on 3 mobiles in the UK."

So out of 16 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes each quarter (as reported in the last eBay quarterly analyst call), it would appear that, at the current > 1 million minutes/day on 3, 75 to 100 million minutes per quarter are via mobile handsets. Hmmm, that makes about 0.5% to 0.8% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes.

Why can 3 offer this service at such low prices? As explained by iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein at eComm 2008 last March, there are no termination charges for Skype-to-Skype calls, even when one Skype session is on an iSkoot server.

P.S. - Want to keep up-to-date on these issues? Registration for eComm 2009 (Mar 3 to 5) opens a week Monday.

Full disclosure: the author uses iSkoot on a BlackBerry Bold when out of the office; he has also experienced successful use on a Nokia N95.

Tags: Skype, iSkoot, Skypephone, Skype Mobile, eComm2008, Mark Jacobstein, Tags: TelecommTV, Tony Chan

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IPEVO gives free Skype minutes, free US shipping

A message from IPEVO's Caroline Andreolle:

Happy Thanksgiving! To celebrate and thank our customers, we're offering free ground shipping until the end of year (to the Continental US).

And to celebrate that, we're offering 300 free Skype vouchers to all Skype lovers and to our friends at Skype Journal! Simply email iWantSkypeMinutes@gmail.com for your free minutes today!

All vouchers must be redeemed this month, before 31 November 2008, limit one per household, 300 vouchers total.

IPEVO makes Skype USB and desk phones, speakerphones, and webcams.

tags: blackfriday, ipevo, skype, discounts, pricing, free, minutes

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Skype Public Chats: Web redirect offline

I went to join the Blue Box public chat the other day.

I clicked on the chat's badge.

As it's supposed to, it took me to Skype.com redirect page.

Usually it gives you a link that, when you click it, sends your Skype desktop client directions to connect you with the desired public chat.

Only this time Skype showed an error message:

"Feature no longer available.
We're sorry but Public Chats are no longer available."

Darn. Nothing to click on.

So my public chats were working. 

But Skype is no longer letting people join them unless I add them directly in my Skype desktop client.

Skype staff say this is not permanent.

So.

1. How might I redesign the redirect service?
2. How might I improve public chats themselves? 
3. What would I like in a Skype public chat Badge 2.0?

Coming soon.

tags: public chats, im, voim, skype

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Alec Saunders Twitters: "Ditching all IM Systems except Skype"!

When I started using Skype more intensively about three years ago, I had been a heavy user of Microsoft's MSN Messenger for several years. But about 18 months ago, I stopped logging into MSN Messenger; none of my contacts were there - or, if they were, they were also on Skype. As for GTalk, well I added a couple of contacts two weeks ago to test out GMail's new voice and video chat feature, so now I'm up to ten contacts on GTalk - and they are also all on Skype. One person still persists in trying to reach me on GTalk these days ... and my BlackBerry catches that - in background.
But when long time acquaintance, well respected blogger and former Microsoft employee Alec Saunders puts up a tweet as shown above, it has to be the ultimate complement to Skype's pervasive worldwide presence.
When you have 370 million accounts (yes, I know there are only 30 to 50 million using Skype over the course of a month), one would suspect that market presence and user base size wins out over any technical disadvantage, such as the lack of XMPP compliance. Sort of places XMPP right up there with SIP - an excellent protocol for interop but it's sort of like the tree falling in the forest - who hears it -at the end user level? And, both SIP and XMPP require business agreements between the linking service providers covering every connection, whether there's revenue or not.
In the IM world, it's a matter of who's available for a conversation? Which service has the highest probability of being able to determine a contact's availability and start a chat, voice call, share a file, send an SMS message or even do a (High Quality) video call? Which service has eight ways of seamlessly carrying out a file transfer?
Alec's one problem in keeping current? He'll have to go back to his BlackBerry to receive Skype IM messages via iSkoot. BlackBerry's background processing capability becomes a very distinct advantage here in the smartphone market. When attending an event in downtown Toronto last night I received an important "good news" Skype chat message on my BlackBerry Bold, while looking up a website the speaker was referencing and following the Twitter feed of one of the organizers.
A more significant challenge for Skype is to generate the marketing that will attract all those of a younger generation (such as my daughter) whose "social networks" are immersed into MSN Messenger as their IM client.
In closing have a look at some of Alec's followup Tweets:
In closing I should also mention that I like to use BlackBerry Messenger for its ability to bypass the Internet for messages that "just have to get there now!" via BlackBerry's unique method for PIN messaging.
Update: An oversight on my part: of course Skype IM also has the hooks to allow Skype chat sessions to proxy for other services. For a classic example check out Twitter4Skype.
Full disclosure: Alec Saunders is author of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, which is proving itself out in today's dynamic mashup environment - especially when it comes to Communications Enhanced Business Processes. He is CEO of iotum, whose Calliflower Conference Call service is currently being launched. And, much earlier in his career, he was DOS product manger at Microsoft Canada at a time when DOS's memory management feature tried to compete with Quarterdeck's QEMM and the author managed Quarterdeck Canada.

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Laptop thief, caught by Skype users, sentenced

We reported Utah actor arrested in laptop theft; caught answering Skype video call in July. Michael Birkeland pleaded no-contest to Class A misdemeanor theft charges Wednesday. Full story on the Deseret News.

tags: skype, utah, security

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Source of Skype Growth

Borderless Communicator Hudson Barton has spent the last few years as the "keeper of the 'real users' statistic", a measure of Skype usage that attempts to understand the demographics of Skype's user base and put it into some sort of perspective so that it can be compared with other communication services.

There are only five public statistics provided by Skype in their reporting. First is the number of users online in the lower right corner of the Skype client. With each eBay quarterly report we get to see gross revenue generated by Skype, the cumulative number of Skype accounts opened as well as minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls and minutes of SkypeOut calls.

I have posted a couple of times about the fallacy of the cumulative number of Skype accounts as it gives no indication of "active" Skype usage over, say, the last quarter or, expressed more succinctly, how many accounts were really used for a Skype call of any type in the previous quarter? It's based on stale data; this particular number ranks right up there with "how many hamburgers sold".

However, by tracking the number of users online several times per day over the past few years, Hudson feels he has gained some perspective on Skype's growth.

Sources of Skype Growth
by Hudson Barton

A question was raised the other day, in a Skype public chat forum, that the raw "real user" statistic could not adequately answer. That question was "Is Skype growth coming from new users or from changes in the pattern of Skype use?" So here is a deeper analysis that answers what the raw "real users" statistic fails to fully capture.

In 2005 and 2006, the amplitude of the daily usage wave was growing. That is to say, the daily highs were growing relative to the lows (after discounting regional distortions)... 10% per annum faster in fact. Skype usage was increasing in the middle of the workday relative to off-peak hours. People were not using Skype as a general communication utility for inbound and outbound calling and presence. Rather, they appear to have been using Skype for special work-related purposes like outbound long distance calling to save money.



In 2007 and 2008, the trend reversed. The amplitude of the daily usage wave started shrinking. The lows have been growing relative to the highs ... 20% per annum faster. It appears that people began using Skype for normal, essential and basic communication, staying online for longer stretches of time or even around the clock in order to receive inbound calls and to mark their presence. Although we don't know the precise motivation for this change in behavior, it could be related to the expanding availability of unmetered broadband. Electricity is the only variable cost associated with keeping your Skype device running 24/7. So the trend is mostly due to a broadening of American and European usage.... folks in industrialized countries are staying in the Skype cloud around the clock with either computers, mobile devices or proxies such as iSkoot.

Today, the peak of the Skype usage wave is at about 14.5 million and the trough is about 7.2 million (out of 36 million total "real users"). The comparable graph for a "phone" company (or a VOIP operator like Vonage) would show a usage wave with an amplitude of zero; all users are by definition online all the time. If Skype's usage trends continue, it will begin to look more and more like an indispensable communications utility and less like a mere disruption to the communications status quo.

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Interview with Julien Decot of Skype

Christopher Smith of Relevantly Speaking interviewed Julien Decot, Director of Strategy for Skype, at the >play Conference last week. Rough transcript follows, emphasis mine.

Q. Hey, it's Christopher Smith here for Relevantly Speaking. We're in Berkeley at the Haas School of Business. We're at the play conference and we're talking with Julian from Skype.

You've got a really enviable position there at Skype. you're a director of strategy, which means you have the ability to see the future, move the company into particular directions. Where are you going right now?

JD. The beauty of working for Skype is the breadth of opportunities you look at is very very wide. I'll give you a few examples. Skype could get into SMBs or enterprise. Skype could move more aggressively into mobile. Skype could get into the web. So there's a flurry of opportunities. And my job is to navigate the ones we should go after first knowing we're only a 500 [person] company.

So a few things that says...

One is: mobility is a big deal for us. There's tremendous appetite from our users to use Skype on the mobile. We don't want just to take the experience on the desktop into mobile. We want to invent something that's very unique to mobile and complements the desktop really nicely.

And also we think, even if it doesn't sound super sexy, just improving the basics of the service making it into the next level is a big deal for us. The best example is video calling in high def for everyone. We think that's really exciting, for example, and we're working very hard at this.

Q. You just released a desktop device to assist in that.

JD. We work with ASUS as a partner. They built the first Skype specific video phone, for example, which allows you, for I think it's a $200 device in the US, to get very simple video calling capabilities from your home without having a computer or anything else. That's one example of things we think are pretty cool.

About Google Video

Q. Last week Google comes out with Gmail Chat and Video in there. Do you find yourself in a defensible position there? Do you think Skype already has a very significant head start?

JD. Every time Google enters a space you have to watch out. They're big and they're very good and they innovate really fast. First thing I'll say we're not very surprised, that's something we've been expecting for a while. We're surprised it took so long.

We think it's a good product, we think the quality is good, it's not great, it's good, a nice implementation.

We think it also validates our idea that video is a big deal. And it's so early that everyone who can come with us and sort of help evangelize the fact that video calling is free for everyone and that it works is good.

Of course it's going to force us to get better and better, but I wouldn't say it's going to change our course. we're going to watch them. That's a company we have a lot of respect for in general.

Search

Q. Discoverability seems to be a common theme in a lot of the conferences we've been attending, the problem of finding both people or audiences for content. How are you guys approaching that problem?

JD. That's a very big question. It totally depends on what you're looking for, if you're looking for content or people.

We spend a lot of time helping you find people. it's a big deal for us to find someone you can communicate with. And linking people is a big deal for us because we're in the communication business.

Finding content is not our business. We'll definitely leverage third parties to do it. We'll let third parties get into Skype, to allow this to happen. We have for example the ability to attach a video mood message to your profile. So we worked with partners; you can attach a video to your message and if I'm connected to you I can click on that video and watch a video clip. That's the kind of thing we're going to do but it's mostly about driving and triggering conversation.

Future?

Q. So looking around the corner what should I anticipate from Skype?

JD. Great mobile applications, across platforms. I don't want to announce anything but look around all the key platforms are coming up. We'll be on there very soon with something pretty radical I think.

Expect the video and voice quality to improve significantly. So expect very very awesome video quality very very soon. And expect a few surprises. If you're a Mac user you'll have a few surprises pretty soon.

Q. Any announcements about the Apple platform?

JD. Come to MacWorld and you'll know more.

See also:

• ASUS PC-free Skype desk videophone, coming October, Skype Journal, September 2008.
• Hands On: ASUS's AiGuru SV1 Grandma-Friendly Skype Videophone, Gizmodo, September 2008.
• GMail Voice and Video Chat: Threading Voice and Video Into Email Dialogues, Skype Journal, November 2008
• Blogger interviews Julien Decot, Skype's director of strategy, Skype Journal, August 2008

tags: skype, trends, strategy, juliendecot, bizdev

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Did Google's iPhone app learn from Goog411?

Google's new iPhone Google Mobile App uses speech recognition. So does their directory assistance service, 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411). Is it a big leap to imagine that one learned from the other? Especially since Mobile App has a US English bias. Google's seemingly eclectic talk family is coming together.

21 November 1938 – Testing Telephone Meter

On this day, seventy years' ago...

We build on those who came before. 

Photo courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

tags: skype, history, au, australia, nsw, telephony, telecom, telephone, meter, test, testing, Postage Reduction League, Scottish House, Bridge Street, photo, statelibraryofnsw

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Skype Becomes Platinum Sponsor for eComm 2009

Perhaps the most informative event I have attended during my two-and-a-half years of writing for Skype Journal was last spring's eComm 2008. Our of a sense of frustration organizer Lee Dryburgh took it upon himself to risk organizing this event when the former eTel Conference announced it would be no more. The 300 attendees were treated to a buffet of information about various initiatives being undertaken to deploy IP-based communications in innovative ways. From communications enhanced business processes to a garage-based operation to monitor security of abandoned farm houses, we all learned a lot. And the networking opportunity was excellent.

eComm 2009 has been announced; in fact, a call for speakers flooded Lee's email over the past few weeks. He has put together a tentative schedule and been recruiting sponsors. Last year's sponsors included many vendors we have written about since the event including iSkoot (Skypephone), Voxbone (iNum), VAPPS (HiDef Conferencing) and Brough Turner's NMS Communications. Sponsors recruited to date for eComm 2009 include, once again Voxbone, and newcomers Global IP Solutions and Voxeo.

Today we learned that Skype has added its name to the list of sponsors. This is a new initiative for Skype in that they have previously tended to maybe provide speakers but not sponsorship at this type of event. In a statement to Lee Dryburgh this evening, Skype's GM Audio and Video (and a keynote speaker last year) Jonathan Christensen said:

... thinking about why we did it.. We believe that communications is going through a major shift from hardware devices on dedicated networks to software applications. A new paradigm is emerging. As a clear leader in this new age of communications, it makes sense for Skype to sponsor the eComm event as it is all about celebrating this innovation and sharing our vision for the future of communications with those individuals and companies who are most interested in changing the way people around the world communicate.

It's been pretty quiet recently on the Skype scene. But then President Josh Silverman did tell us in our September interview that Skype was undergoing a major restructuring. And we have not heard of any layoffs. So it would only be natural to assume that development efforts (beyond the Skype for Windows 4.0 beta program) are under way and we can assume we'll see new product and service announcements in 2009.

Would any be made at eComm 2009? Speakers from Skype include Jonathan Christensen and Director of Strategy Julien Decot.

Registration for attendees opens December 2, 2008.

Note: Skype Journal editor Phil Wolff, Skype's Jonathan Christensen, Voxeo's Dan York, Brough Turner and Jon Arnold are on the eComm 2009 Advisory Board.

Tags: eComm2009, Skype, Jonathan Christensen, Lee Dryburgh, Julien Decot, Voxbone, GIPS, Voxeo

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Skype Seeking Skype Developer Community Manager

If we go back to our early September interview with Josh Silverman where we discussed "The Way Ahead - Platforms and Partners", Josh stated in response to our question about addressing ongoing partner communications issues:

What I don't want to do is over promise. Step one is, when you get somebody good in, lay out a plan and then when we're ready to announce some more forward looking things we'll do that.

I take the partner program really seriously and we're aware that we've not invested adequately behind it and want to do more. The first thing we are going to do is hire an experienced, capable leader of that organization who will pull together for me a plan for what resources do we need to invest in -- engineering, partner support, evangelism, technical documentation -- to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly.

Skype is about to take "Step one" and has put up a job posting for a "Manager, Skype Developer Community".

Interested in an extraordinary opportunity to win the hearts and minds of developers all over the world? Are you passionate about the promise of rich Internet communications? If so, Skype needs you to come help change the industry. We are seeking an individual who can help provide knowledge, expertise, and charisma for partners building applications on the Skype Platform.

A comment about the Skype platform:

The Skype Platform provides developers with an open communications development environment with unparalleled richness and reach. With the Skype platform developers can build and deploy differentiated and revenue-generating communications applications, devices, and services for businesses and consumers alike. Since its launch 5 years ago, Skype has grown to over 330 [370] Million registered users across the globe. Skype provides a breadth of rich and integrated communications experiences. Now we are looking for developers to take those capabilities and experiences to another level by integrating Skype into applications, devices, and services on the web. If you are interested in voice over IP, mobile devices, audio coding, video services, rich collaboration, gaming, next generation internet / interactive TV, Location based services and experience as a leader within a community of developers... this is the role for you.

And the challenge:

Your challenge is to drive the Skype Community program that moves the new platform forward, compliments our platform product investments and ultimately delights our partner community and users. Your success will be measured by your ability to work closely with the product teams to develop a comprehensive developer marketing plan, and work with our marketing, product, and business development teams to evangelize Skype's tools, development environment, and unique value proposition to the development community.

You will be part of the newly formed Skype Platform team whose mission is to lead the adoption of Skype's Platform with developers and ISVs. The team is resourced and chartered to secure the future of the Skype Platform with developer audiences that span corporate and commercial developers, device developers, next generation developers in startups, students and social developers that writes plug-ins, widgets and mash-up applications today.

It's a senior management position with responsibilities for leading a renewed Skype Developer program - articulating the vision, analyzing the market space and established best practices, executing on building sustainable developer partnerships, driving the interface between internal Skype resource teams such as developers, business development, marketing and the external developer partners through various outreach activities.

After describing the skills and experience sought, the posting concludes with:

You will be responsible for managing a team of professionals that will support your programs and plans to create a significant and long lasting impact on the community of Skype Software developers. We are looking for a thought leader that can also motivate and raise the enthusiasm of all Skype developers. This is a position with lots of visibility outside of Skype and experience managing media and driving public events is critical.

Location: London, UK or San Jose, CA. (With lots of air miles guaranteed.)

As for Dan York's question about "the team is resourced and chartered", recall that earlier in the same early September interview, Josh mentioned:

Right now we have created the job of GM of Platform; I hope to very soon name a GM of Platform. That person is going to have to really work on what does the architecture need to look like to support this, what are the API's going to be - reference UI's, technical documentation - as well as evangelizing to the broader community forming some of our partnerships, so we have some work to do.

So, I have to ask, in the context of what we heard during the interview: Has Skype appointed the GM of Platform but not announced it yet?

Dan also comments:

For those of us watching the emerging communication/telephony space, we've seen Skype make several different attempts over the years to create a successful developer program. Given their incredible user base and platform, it's been curious to see that they haven't yet found the right formula.

The Developer Program has more or less stalled since my Primer series post last fall discussing the developer partner achievements to that point in time. Yet there remain some basic resources such as API's, a base of about 50 partner applications, and what continues to be world leading technology that gives Skype a head start in architecting and building a complete platform from which developer partners can build successful businesses.

In the meantime we have seen the evolution of the Apple Developer Program for the iPhone where, even with my bias towards the BlackBerry, I have to admit that we have seen some very interesting, innovative and impressive third party applications and mashups. They link voice, presence, location-based services, social networking, search. The results include obtaining real time information for traffic and transit, contributing to a successful US presidential political campaign and finding the nearest Tim Hortons or Starbucks. The most interesting has to be this week's launch of voice activated Google Search, often invoking location based information for assistance.

The overriding challenge for Skype's Developer Community Manager will be to create a winning environment that can foster a similar level of creativity and innovation while generating business wins for both Skype and the developer partners. Or to requote Josh's statement: "to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly."

From my viewpoint, it's the position that will ultimately make or break the restructured Skype. Partner innovation and successful business development are key to the sustainable and increasing revenues required to justify eBay's investment in Skype.

Hat tip to Dan York who first pointed this out in a Twitter tweet.

Tags: Skype, Developer, Skype Extras, Josh Silverman, iPhone, Dan York, Skype Partner Program

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Tencent's QQ: 45 Million Simultaneous Online

Tencent Holdings (SEHK 700), one of Skype's biggest competitors, had a great quarter. From their 2008Q3 financial release (pdf):

• 856.2 million: Total registered Instant Messaging (“IM”) user accounts, 4.1% growth QoQ [quarter over quarter]
• 355.1 million: Active IM user accounts, +3.9% QoQ
• 45.3 million: Peak simultaneous online user accounts for IM services recorded, +7.9% QoQ
  
• 4.4 million: Peak simultaneous online user accounts of QQ Game portal (for mini casual games only), +11.2% QoQ
• 30.3 million: Internet paying subscriptions, +16.1% QoQ
• 14.8 million: Mobile paying subscriptions, +10.4% QoQ

More people actively use QQ instant messaging than live in the United States and Canada [Tencent defines "active" as logging in to an account in the last 30 days of the quarter].

QQ IM has 3 simultaneous users online for every Skype user online.

Skype has 370 million user accounts, does not report active users but estimates vary from 36 to 85 million people, and peak simultaneous is around 14.5 million.

Skype report minutes, when Tencent does not. Live voice and video calls. Ten billion minutes served in June 2005 (before eBay bought them). 100 billion minutes served as of February 2008. 18 billion minutes a quarter as of 2008-Q3.

Mini-SWOT

QQ has a few strengths.

• No QQ-In or QQ-Out. Regulations forbid connecting to the public telephone network. So Tencent focused their resources to create online communities, content, and games that both trigger talk and make money. QQ commerce is so hot QQ has one of the world's largest virtual currencies.
• Multiple OS clients. Windows. Windows Mobile. Mac beta. Browser. Linux. 
• Age and Incumbency. QQ celebrates their 10th year of service. Skype is only five years' old. Brand awareness and loyalty build with time and experience. QQ has effectively built IM dial-tone (confidence that people will be available through the network) and network lock-in for its customers.
• Monolingual, Monolithic. QQ only needs to support Chinese. So it's easier for people to find other people with similar interests. Spoken Chinese languages pose a linguistic barrier, but not too much since Mandarin is a common second language. 

Weaknesses.

• Sub-Global reach. Skype has to build markets in each country, in every language community. This makes it harder to localize software and web sites, provide customer service and tech support, and talk with a community; the time and costs pose a barrier to entry. Once localized, Skype has an advantage over entrants. QQ isn't even trying to serve non-Chinese cultures.
• No PSTN or mobile voice integration. No income. No new points for the company to learn.
• Platform 1.0. Like most IM providers, QQ offers a simple messaging API. A handful of third-party clients offer alternatives to QQ's own clients. However Tencent lacks a platform strategy, building foundations for third-party partnerships beyond IM clients.

Opportunities.

• Markets: India. Chinese Diaspora.
• Features: Voice/Video/Conferencing.
• Business: Alliances with Indian and western portal/IM companies

Threats.

• TOM-Skype joint venture. Working inside China to spread Skype's brand.
• Premium quality audio and video, a qualitatively different experience.
• The four national Chinese telcos who may enter the market and who restrict PSTN access.

tags: skype, im, voim, tencent, qq, china

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Another Skype Partner Acquired: VAPPS Goes to Citrix

We have often reported on HiDef Conferencing as a leader in high quality voice conferencing. It's a service built around servers that specialize in connecting up to 500 conferencing participants from either the PSTN or Skype, and managing the call participants' level of participation. Should a participant be connected by Skype, they will hear all other Skype participants across their HD Audio service with all its benefits for providing better voice clarity (thus, the name HiDef Conferencing).

But HiDef Conferencing's owner, VAPPS Inc. has not let their success depend solely on Skype activity; they have been wholesaling their conferencing service to other conferencing and collaboration service providers. As one example, I often participate in (but do not host) conference call and desktop sharing sessions involving Citrix's GoToMeeting service and recently noticed that these calls were using the VAPPS service for provisioning the audio component of the calls.

Friday evening New York Times blogger Claire Miller reported that VAPPS venture capital partner, Azure Capital Partners, had concluded a deal to sell VAPPS to Citrix for $26.6 million plus $4.4 million in bonuses, provided founders Ben Lilienthal and Jerry Norton and their team meet certain goals. For Azure Capital Partners this provides a 3.6 times return on an 18-month investment. From Claire's post:

Azure first looked at Vapps in 2006, but did not invest until the spring of 2007. First, they asked the company to change their business model. It used to focus on selling equipment. Instead, Azure wanted it to charge by the number of minutes people used the equipment to talk because they knew that number would grow exponentially, Mr. Weinstein said. At the time, people talked using Vapps’ technology only a few million minutes a year and now pay for half a billion minutes a year.

Acquisition is becoming the primary exit route for today's start-ups. Build a business and service that can readily complement another service that has capital for acquisitions and you may find yourself being acquired. At least this is one service that is not going to Google or Microsoft. On the other hand Citrix has been a leader in developing virtualization and collaboration technologies along with related services for over 15 years.

Congratulations to Ben, Jerry and the entire VAPPS team on this achievement. It has been a pleasure to watch, and to report on, the evolution of their service over the past couple of years.

For Andy Abramson's Comunicano Internet marketing agency this represents a third client acquisition over the past fifteen months; previous ones being IBM Lotus Software Group's acquisition of Unyte and Logitech's recent acquisition of SightSpeed.

Related posts:

• Fierce VoIP's Doug Mohney also comments.
• HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

Full disclosure; in 2004 the author provided business development and general management services for Citrix partner Runaware, whose Test Drive service, built on a Citrix virtualization platform, powers many online software evaluation programs, including Microsoft Office.

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Updates: iNum, Calliflower and Entering "Last Name" onto a BlackBerry

With both VoiceCon and Under The Radar events in the Bay Area last week, there were lots of announcements in the Voice 2.0 communications space; I wrote up some GigaOm and Web Worker Daily Posts to cover a few of them:

On Tuesday Voxbone announced the launch of their iNum Service. Basically it provides a means to have a universal worldwide "local" number that can be accessed through the recently accredited (by the ITU) +883 country code. Last Tuesday I hosted a SquawkBox conference call with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens; a post on GigaOm with more details talks about Geography Is Dead - Thank VoIP. Two other excellent "Voxeo Talks" posts from Dan York on this topic (Voxeo is a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner):

• How to get an iNum - a "global phone number"
• iNum and "global phone numbers: a video interview with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens.

A heads up on using iNum; access from Skype to a +883 number is considered a SkypeOut call requiring SkypeOut credits. It's not a "country" covered under Skype's Universal Calling Plans; check out the various alternative means to access iNum numbers here.

The following day iotum announced the official launch of their Calliflower conference call service incorporating premium options for businesses that see its benefits for more interactive voice conferencing through the Calliflower call portal. Document sharing and a much wider range of access points, including iNum access were amongst the new features. And they announced an iPhone application for accessing Calliflower calls. More details can be found in my Web Worker Daily Post: Calliflower: A Complete Conference Calling Service.

Finally, in doing some checking out of a new service, I encountered an Automated Attendant that wanted me to enter a person's last name in order to locate that person in the host business's extension directory. But that presents a bit of a problem when you have a BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard and you want to generate the tones where 2--> "A, B or C", etc. But the RIM people think of everything; there is a relatively simple solution. Find out the answer over at Web Worker Daily in "Entering 'Last Name' From a BlackBerry".

Tags: Voxbone, iNum, iotum, Calliflower, Research in Motion, BlackBerry, Dan York, Voxeo

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Dial-o, the new typo

Congrats to Shai Berger, the first to coin "dial-o" and winner by popular acclaim of a Sony PSP3, courtesy of Skype. Shai is CEO of Fonolo, which helps you deep dial customer service, sales, and tech support hotlines, bypassing phone trees.

Other suggestions for what to call an accidental call:

• Skypo
• callerr...pronounced differently from caller. More like Call Err!
• Bad Call
• DTMF'd (no other meaning there :-) as in oops I dtmf'ed the wrong number
• MisD'd as in Sorry I misd'd the number.
• Burp
• ryle (wrong + dial)
• voops (VoIP + whoops) 

P.S. So, do you pronounce it "di-low" or "di-uhl-oh"?

P.P.S. dialo.com resolves to dialo.de, a yellow page directory for Germany.

tags: dialo, words, jargon

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Twitter4Skype. Following Your Twitter Life within Skype

Borderless Communicator's Hudson Barton and I both follow our Twitter friends using a nifty third party Skype utility called Twitter4Skype. Basically you set up Twitter4Skype as a Skype Contact and enter your account information. Going forward, whenever you are logged onto Skype and a Tweet arrives from one of those whom you are "Following", it will pop up in a Twitter4Skype chat window. And, of course, your messages placed into a Twitter4Skype chat window become "Tweets" seen by all your Twitter Followers.

We both have had many requests for instruction on how to set up Twitter4Skkype. Hudson has authored for Skype Journal a review of Twitter4Skype with all the details:

Twitter4Skype: A Review
by Hudson Barton

One of my favorite online tools is "Twitter4Skype". Not very many people know about "T4S", but if you are a fan of both Skype and Twitter, your life will be made much happier and more productive if you use this little robot. It does not require you to download any software. There are no additional processes to clog up your computer. There are no additional windows for you to deal with. Everything runs within Skype as a normal Skype chat session. It could not be simpler.

• First, the robot posts your tweets directly into your twitter account from Skype. When you IM into your Twitter4Skype chat session, the message appears automatically in your Twitter feed.
• Second, the robot gathers tweets of everyone whom you are following and posts them to you in the same Skype chat session.

Installing twitter4skype:

1. Using "Add a Contact", search for and add "twitter4skype" as a Skype contact.
2. Open a chat session with "twitter4skype"
3. Type the following into the chat window (to tell the robot about your your Twitter account and give the robot permission to access it):
   
   1. /account (shift+return)
      
   2. twitteraccountname (shift+return)
      
   3. twitteraccountpassword (return)
      
4. The robot should return: "twitter4skype Registration complete!"

Running Twitter4Skype:

1. The next time you write a chat message to "twitter4skype", the entry will appear on your Twitter account and a confirmation of your posting will appear in the chat. Note that only the first 140 characters of your posting will be received by Twitter, so keep it short and sweet.
2. You will begin to receive your friends’ twitters in the one-to-one Skype chat session with T4S.
3. Try adding another Skype contact to the chat you are having with T4S. You have now established a one-way group Twitter feed. What you (and only you) post into that chat will be distributed to Twitter and to the other members of the chat. Incoming tweets will be distributed to all chat participants.
4. Try adding the T4S contact to another group chat: You have just established a special relationship between Twitter and yourself that distributes your posts (and only your posts) from that chat into your Twitter stream. Incoming tweets are not posted into this extra chat, but go to your main T4S chat only.

Tricks for keeping twitter4skype healthy and happy:

Twitter4skype is running on a server in Tokyo Japan. Its reliability and the stability of the server have been improving, but like everything in our technological world (especially free services), it sometimes disappoints. Although you might glean the following tips from the Twitter4Skype help screen (accessed by typing "#help" in the chat), here is how to avoid some common problems:

• Situation: T4S appears to be offline. Occasionally T4S will appear to be offline when it is actually online. You will not be able to receive your Twitter feed in this state and you will not be able to post your own twitter either. You can "wake up" T4S" by calling it. When you do, your queued incoming tweets will be posted to you immediately, and afterwards you will be able to post your own tweets. If this does not work, then T4S is actually offline rather than only appearing so.
  
• Situation: T4S appears to be online but is unresponsive. Occasionally T4S will "forget" its relationship with you. Although it is online, you are not receiving incoming tweets and it will not post your outgoing tweets. You can force T4S to reset your relationship by typing "#on" into the T4S chat window. T4S will respond with a "welcome back" message.

What the Robot can't do:

Twitter4Skype is a simple robot. It knows only the tricks outlined above. Here are some tricks I wish it could do additionally:

• My Twitter use is evolving toward two separate accounts; one for personal and one for business to reflect my multiple personalities. But I really want to run only one Skype account and have both twitter accounts feed into it. So, with my second twitter account I would like to create a second T4S account and run it inside the same Skype name with separate T4S chats. Unfortunately, that is impossible. One T4S account per Skype name is the limit.
  
• Twitter4Skype is all about following and being followed by Twitter users. Now imagine you could follow and be followed by Skype users in the same way (without sharing contact information). Skype users are already connected to a universe of some 36 million other active Skype users worldwide. So why can't Skype establish a network of followers within its own system. A percentage of those contacts will lead to shared Skype contact information, and those relationships will lead to increased Skype calling. A pseudo Skype chat established for this purpose would be one way to implement the concept.

Thanks, Hudson.

One additional point: If you have set up your Twitter feed to send tweets into your Facebook status message, then entering a message into a Twitter4Skype session will also pass it along to become your "current" Facebook status message. Same applies if you have linked Friend feed to your Twitter messages. (Unfortunately nobody has offered a means to pass your tweets along to your Skype Mood Message.)

And, when I am away from my office, I am able to follow my Twitter activity as a "twitter4skype" chat session in iSkoot on my BlackBerry.

Tags: Hudson Barton, Borderless Communicator, twitter4skype, Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry, iSkoot

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Weekend reading

What Can Skype Do For Graduate Students? on the The Graduate Student Survival Blog. Save money is the first concern. I chipped in ten more things grad students can do with Skype: #10: Robots.

The Skype survival guide by David Tang of VoSKY Technologies makes the case for Skype trunking, adding Skype gateways to PBXs. 987 Hotels (Prague, Barcelona) uses VoSKY's 9040 Exchange gateway. 

Is Our Internet Future in Danger? InfoWorld's Gruman and Kaneshige say it is, that demand for video is quickly outstripping the world supply of bandwidth. Doc Searls urges America to go Forward with Fiber: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration. Doc makes a strong case that we can expand capacity far beyond

Korea's Cyworld virtual community gives up on North America. Culture barriers.

Google Reader Implements Feed Translation. Brilliant. Can't believe Skype still has not built in IM translation like Don Kennedy's Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator. Moka is jumping into this space with its own Moka Chat Skype Plug-in.

Super Mario Galaxy is absolutely brilliant writes Jaanus Kase.

Wish for Skype on Please Fix the iPhone.

Mail-order brides on Skype. hmm.

tags: skype, education, vosky, fiber, bandwidth, cyworld, korea, google, iphone, apple

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GMail Voice and Video Chat: Threading Voice and Video Into Email Dialogues

Earlier this week the GMail weblog announced GMail voice and video chat; basically they are designed to add voice and video modes to an email thread; from the GMail blog post:

... today we're launching voice and video chat -- right inside Gmail. We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video -- all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

This afternoon I had an opportunity to try it out with Hudson Barton; publisher of the Borderless Communicator weblog and tracker of "Real Skype Users". We had a 20 minute conversation using my Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks on a Wiindows laptop and the webcam on Hudson's MacBook. There are two viewing sizes available: a 225 x 140 window inside the GMail tab of a Firefox (or other browser) session and an optional pop-up window that goes to 430 x 270. We were only able to determine that it provides a "letterbox" 1.6 width-to-height ratio (as opposed to the 1.33 ratio of "standard" video), but not the frame size or frame rate actually being transmitted over the Internet. As for CPU usage, the "googletalkplugi.exe" was using between 10% and 17% of my CPU. With no accessible statistics along the line of Skype's option to display call statistics, it was not possible to drill down further. Both audio and video quality were clear and crisp - quite acceptable for a basic one-to-one conversation. Echo cancellation was apparent; Hudson was using the native speakers and mic of his MacBook with no perceivable echo..

It's definitely not up to the feature set of Skype but here's where it fits in:

• GMail certainly has a large user base, same order of magnitude as Skype.
• It's easy to forward your standard POP/IMAP email account to GMail; I use this feature both for the resulting search capability and the available access to GMail on multiple devices, including smartphones.
• It provides real time conversation mode options for GMail threads being read on a PC. While reading an email and running the cursor over the sender's name, an option pops up to respond to the email message by email, Chat or Voice/Video based on the sender information as shown in the graphic above.

I would classify GMail Voice and Video Chat as a very mild competitor to Skype, suitable for basic "free" voice and video as a conversation enhancer. There's no way to establish or check audio and video settings; there's no access to the PSTN; we are not aware of the security level of the conversations. While the video is quite good, it certainly does not meet Skype's High Quality Video standards. It's a perfect example of embedding voice and video into an application as a feature but it's not a standalone real time conversation software application. When I consider the rejuvenation of Global IP Solutions and look at its customer base, I can foresee many other forthcoming instances of embedded voice and video as a feature within an application.

Note: as for the installation issues that Aliza encountered, I simply went to the URL suggested in the GMail weblog post and installed the plug-in (with the browser open). But then you have to restart your browser (in my case Firefox); initially the "video availability indicators" (as represented in the graphic above) were not present but I had to head out from my office at that point. When I came back to my PC four hours later, they had appeared. Chat pixel dust from the (Google) cloud in the interim is my only explanation. At the time of writing this post, its availability should have spread to many GMail accounts by the usual Google osmosis process.

Full disclosure; the author has had previous first hand experience with what was thought to be an application but turned out to be a feature. Quarterdeck's mid-90's effort at building a web browser as an application was thwarted when Microsoft decided to make its web browser (aka MS Internet Explorer) a feature within the Windows operating system.

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Contest: What's the word for a calling misadventure?

As 'typo' is for writing, ??? is for a call made in error.

I often launch a conference call or dial a contact accidentally, or get called by someone who clicked the wrong button. We furtively apologize but lack a simple word to describe our error. Nothing as simple as "typo."

What should we call it?

Leave your ideas as a comment or email it to tips@skypejournal.com.

Most useful contribution? Win a Sony PSP, courtesy of Skype.

tags: skype, sony, psp, contest, typo, error

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The cable connecting Gore to Kerry to Obama

I'd like to make two points.

First, the Democratic party learned grassroots organizing on W's watch. There's an exponential curve moving:

• from nothing in the 2000 Gore/Bush election,
• through substantial roots activity in the 2004 Bush/Kerry campaign,
• to overwhelming in the 2008 Obama/McCain victory.

Second, the elements that made campaigning so lively, engaging, social and meaningful may show up in Obama's governance.

You may not know this about me but my gig before Skype Journal was volunteering on the John Kerry presidential campaign.

Ten of us met in Berkeley a few months after the first Howard Dean meetups in San Francisco's East Bay. We became five thousand full time volunteers over 18 months until election day 2004. Our two-county grassroots operation made more than one million phone calls to swing states. 1,000,000.

We had no control over the candidate and his campaign staff, so we focused on what we could do ourselves. Using an American football analogy, we thought of East Bay Kerry as the ground game and the national campaign as the air game. 

We modeled many of the practices used today in the Obama campaign.

• Communications and coordination
• Local blogs. Feed aggregation. CMS. All with free/cheap technology.
• National event directory. Developed locally, adopted by the campaign, used to drive activity.
• Yahoo mailing lists.
• Focus on organizing, not policy/issues.
• Managing
• Grassroots organizational structures that scaled and split.
• Professional guilds (writers, coders, designers, speakers, lawyers) ran service bureaus for grassroots orgs in swing areas.
• Netroots fundraising.
• Meetups for recruiting volunteers.
• Operations
• Mobile phones for instant phone banks.
• Ambassador roles connecting local groups.
• Involving electeds in roots activities.
• 50 state strategy.
• 58 California county strategy (the fast growing eastern part of the state votes for conservatives).

Lots of peopleware with just a touch of technology to

• speed things up,
• keep costs down,
• push activity out to the edge, and
• help more people make smarter decisions.

We also revealed many problems.

• How grassroots fund themselves without violating campaign finance law (or not).
• Web applications absurdly hard to learn and use.
• National message management vs. local enthusiasm.
• Strangers instead of locals in GOTV efforts.
• The speed and efficiency of offline missing the disconnected and offline.
• Difficulty pairing union efforts with grassroots efforts.
• Inability to activate and motivate stale and tired Democratic Party organizations at the state and local levels.
• Costly voter and geographic data sets that grassroots couldn't afford. Weak geomapping software for precinct walking.

Most of these problems were tackled by the Democratic National Committee in the 2006 races.

The Obama crew really built on those basics, applying four years of advances in

• social media,
• GIS,
• cogsci,
• smarter/mobile phones,
• VoIM (like Skype),
• streaming video,
• agile methods,
• creative commons and open source licensing,
• emergent organization design,
• more reliable and scalable server hosting,
• SMS/texting (thank you American Idol),
• internet sousveillance and surveillance,
• flat rate long distance,
• cheap conference bridges,
• real estate 2.0,
• and all the rest.

Near the end of the 2004 campaign we hoped to bring the Democratic netroots into the new administration.

• Would there be a Chief Blogging Officer (CBO) as part of the white house communications office?
• Would local groups be able to meet and have a say on national policy with a channel not just to their safe congressman but to the cabinet and to the white house policy advisors?
• Would the conversation started in San Francisco's East Bay with 10 people sitting in a coffee shop, ending with 5000 full time volunteers in liberal Berkeley and Oakland and conservative Walnut Creek and Danville, continue into the new year?

We lost then. But what about now, after the Obama-Biden win?

Today, the hundreds of thousands of people who gave up work, family time, and school to volunteer want to continue the experience of being connected civicly with each other and of influencing their nation.

Chris Hughes posted Moving Forward on My.BarackObama on Friday.

Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama.  The scale and size of this community and its work is unprecedented.  Individuals in all 50 states have created more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign.  There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations played a critical role in Tuesday's victory.

What has made My.BarackObama unique hasn't been the technology itself, but the people who used the online tools to coordinate offline action.  My.BarackObama has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world connections between people who are hungry to change our politics in this country.

And the site isn't going anywhere.  The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on.  Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact.  Our victory on Tuesday night has opened the door to change, but it's up to all of us to seize this opportunity to bring it about.

In the coming days and weeks, there will be a great deal more information about where this community will head.  For the moment, let's celebrate this victory and know that the community we've built together is just the beginning.

More than 1400 comments on that thread.

We'll see what the election laws permit. The Obama Administration is already creating tools for change that may become a vital part of the national discourse, a force for good in our little-d democracy.

Competition fuels innovation. The pursuit of power, the struggle to help millions of people climb ladders of engagement and participation in your cause. These are a crucible with real consequences, measurable results, and strict fitness tests. How many lessons can we draw for the private sector, for education and for governance from what politics invents? Let's pay attention and dive in.

tags: skype, politics, campaigning, organizing, roots, grassroots, netroots, barackobama.com, barackobama, change.gov, eastbaykerry, eb4kerry

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Obama transition team publishes technology goals

The Obama-Biden transition team launched Change.gov Friday. You can apply for a job or see how the new administration blogs its progress. RSS feeds for news and blog.

A national technology agenda is one of the first items brought to the site from the campaign site, with few changes. 

The problem statement:

The Problem

We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.

America risks being left behind in the global economy: Revolutionary advances in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other fields are reshaping the global economy. Without renewed efforts, the United States risks losing leadership in science, technology and innovation. As a share of the Gross Domestic Product, American federal investment in the physical sciences and engineering research has dropped by half since 1970.

Too many Americans are not prepared to participate in a 21st century economy: A recent international study found that U.S. students perform lower on scientific assessments than students in 16 other economically developed nations, and lower than 20 economically developed nations in math performance. Only one-third of middle class physical science teachers are qualified to teach in that subject, and only one-half of middle school math sciences have educational background in that subject area.

The outline:

1. Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Ideas through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets
   • Protect the Openness of the Internet
   • Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership
   • Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment
   • Safeguard our Right to Privacy
2. Create a Transparent and Connected Democracy
   • Open Up Government to its Citizens
   • Bring Government into the 21st Century
3. Deploy a Modern Communications Infrastructure
   • Deploy Next-Generation Broadband
4. Improve America's Competitiveness
   • Promote American Businesses Abroad
   • Invest in the Sciences
   • Invest in University-Based Research
   • Make the R&D Tax Credit Permanent 
   • Ensure Competitive Markets
   • Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad
   • Protect American Intellectual Property at Home 
   • Reform the Patent System
   • Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House
5. Prepare All our Children for the 21st century economy
   • Make Math and Science Education a National Priority
   • Improve and Prioritize Science Assessments
   • Address the Dropout Crisis
   • Pinpoint College Aid for Math and Science Students
   • Increase Science and Math Graduates
6. Prepare Adults for a Changing Economy
   • Lifelong Retraining
   • Build a Reliable Safety Net
7. Employ Science, Technology and Innovation to Solve Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems
   • Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems
   • Invest in Climate-Friendly Energy Development and Deployment: 
   • Modernize Public Safety Networks
   • Advance the Biomedical Research Field
   • Advance Stem Cell Research

I have little to add to the obvious:

• The team has their communications act together.
• They are more transparent about the Presidential transition than any team in history.
• They are inviting public participation.
• The vortex of lobbying that began on the campaign trail is more intense.
• The devil is in the details.

tags: education, technology, policy, us, usa, change.gov, patent, intellectual property, science

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iSkoot Scores a New $19MM Financing Round

This evening iSkoot, the service that provides Skype access from smartphones, announced they had received a new $19 million venture financing round to build out and bring to market a new suite of mobile communications services. Recently iSkoot acquired Social IM, who is in the beta stage of producing a desktop Instant Messaging client linking real time communications and notifications to social networks. No further details have been released but obviously both their existing financing partners and one new partner feel there is a significant potential.

Update: VentureBeat reports that the financing relates to a forthcoming AT&T service offering "an array of Web services to users of its low-end phones — the majority of its phones, which don’t have the iPhone’s powerful features. The services will include things like social networking, email, RSS feeds and eventually services like Twitter."

In addition to their smartphone service, iSkoot also provides the firmware behind the Skypephone, available through the Hutcheson Whampoa 3 carrier in the U.K., six other European countries, Hong Kong and Australia. According to Tech Crunch over 300,000 Skypephones are now in service. However, their recently launched iSkoot for Android appears to have encountered a rougher road; Andy speculates they may have launched prematurely to meet the G-1 launch date. I'm sure we'll see upgrades to address the outstanding issues.

Personally I have iSkoot running on my BlackBerry Bold, largely to keep current on my Skype chat sessions when away from my office, and have experienced it on the 8820 as well as a Nokia N95. Look forward to learning more about the services whose launch is being supported by this new funding round in today's somewhat rough economy. At least there's still support for innovation in the real time conversation space.

• iSkoot Presentation at eComm 2008
• iSkoot Gets Third Party Recognition
• iSkoot Extends Partnership with Skype

Tags: iSkoot, Skypephone, BlackBerry Bold, Android

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BlackBerry Bold: A Laptop for the Hip or Purse...

With about two months' experience using a BlackBerry Bold, I was able to pull my experiences together for Web Worker Daily yesterday when this smartphone became available on AT&T: BlackBerry Bold: Upgrading Your Mobile Experience.

Last night at a small local dinner on the topic of social networking in public relations, a few attendees had Bold as it has been available for a couple of months in Canada. Our consensus was that in a world where one wants to keep current in real time with Twitter, email, document viewing and editing (a new feature of Bold) and browsing weblogs or many websites, the BlackBerry Bold can be considered as the first generation "laptop for the hip or purse".

As for Skype via the Bold, whenever I'm away from home, I open iSkoot and am able to follow Skype chat messages (including Twitter4Skype) while riding the commuter services or in a restaurant. With Ontario's forthcoming law banning cell phone use (except for Bluetooth headsets) and text messaging while driving. it means safer roads but I may not respond immediately. Of course iSkoot also gives me calls to Skype contacts with only charges for local wireless minutes.

And, if you don't want to be "Always On", BlackBerry Bold (as well as the forthcoming Storm and Pearl 8220 Flip) includes a bedside mode feature with options to turn off both phone call and email notifications (but logs them) yet still allows the alarm to work.

BlackBerry will continue to be a major player in the smartphone market; but these new smartphones are devices you have to see and experience to realize their full potential as not only a business productivity resource but also a personal associate for both your business and personal social networks and activities.

Tags: BlackBerry Bold, iSkoot, mobile, smartphone

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FCC puts off rural funding and freemium decision

The Federal Communication Commission scheduled it for election day, but they will not vote to reform intercarrier compensation and rural telephone subsidies as part of the Universal Service Fund (USF). While it may be brought up again, it probably won't be until the new presidential administration appoints new commissioners. Supporters had hoped for a delay to hold hearings in December. 

Some services, such as free conference calling, use loopholes in intercarrier tariffs to pay the bills. So some smaller states became a haven for services free-to-consumers but with costs born by the phone companies of out-of-state callers. These only becomes a problem for bigger carriers when their long distance services are sold at a flat rate while underlying costs vary. Some of the proposed rate reforms would have closed these loopholes. In anticipation of this ruling, companies like Skype partner VAPPS left their freemium model for a subscription model.

The country's largest carriers supported leveling the tariffs, which would have cut off payments to small phone companies supporting about one third of the United States. Opposition to these reforms came from telecom unions, state regulators, rural phone companies and rural ISPs.

Barack Obama expressed support for the USF, for funding rural telecom access, and for expanding the reach of broadband to rural America. The Chairman's decision clearly had nothing to do with today's election. 

tags: skype, policy, election, 2008, regulation, rural, suburban, access, fcc, obama, mccain, presidency, president, us, united states, voters, icc, usf, tariff, demographics, demography, broadband

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Windows Live Messenger to be Essential

ArsTechnica reports Microsoft's Windows Live Manager (WLM) will be part of the Windows Live Essentials family with Windows 7. More PCs will come bundled with WLM, setting WLM as Microsoft's new standard IM client. Microsoft's consumer MSN and workplace Office Communicator clients will find distribution harder.

This OEM distribution will raise the opportunity cost of messengers, like Skype, that require a download. Advantage: Microsoft.

Other Essential apps: Windows Live Family Safety, Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer and Microsoft Office Outlook Connector.

It seems WLM will continue to be subsidized by advertising.

tags: microsoft, wlm, windows, windows7, windows live messenger, messenger, oem, freemium

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115 hours in a Skype call

Guest post by Monty, a Palmdale, California, ham radio operator and computer geek. Monty blogs on LiveJournal, tweets, and is on Skype.

This continues Monty's 24 October 2008 post, Marathon Skype voice call: 66 hours 40 minutes.

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

OK here we go again, longest Skype call experiment part 2 is underway, will I make it past 66 hours 40 mins? Will guthro break 74 hours? 5:26 PM

My friend Jdawg has just gotten upgraded to 12mbps/2mbps on Comcast standard tier wow it's nice! 7:31 PM

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Just waking up now, attempt 2 at longest Skype call with Guthro and I now passed 12 hours, 55 minutes. 6:04 AM

6:04am. Longest Skype call duration experiment part 2 now underway

I said I'd soon make another attempt at what I've come to call the Skype 100-hour challenge. That's the experiment between my friend Adam Guthro, and myself, as well as my friend Joe Quinn, where the goal is to make it to a call duration of at least 100 hours, or at the very least break our previous records. Joe Quinn has the oldest computer in the mix, and so he only made it to about 50 and a half hours or so during the last experiment attempt last week.

I faired slightly better, making it to 66 hours, 40 minutes on a single call, and Guthro finally was the last survivor during the last experiment, as he lasted a total of just under 74 hours total duration. He died when Joe Quinn, the only remaining person connected to him following my sudden drop after 66 hours, 40 minutes, went away a second time.

Well we're at it again, and attempt 2 of the Skype 100 hour challenge is underway as I write this, with all 3 parties still connected. We however have a long way to go to break our records and shoot for that 100 hour goal. Our current call duration stands at 13 hours, 12 minutes.

As we pass significant milestones, I'll keep you updated. You can also follow me on Twitter and get near realtime live updates that way as well. Can we shatter any of our previous records and make it to 100 hours? If anyone can, I hope it'll be Guthro and I, as I doubt Joe Quinn can, lol!

Looks like Jdawg's call dropped already after 15 hours, 2 minutes, don't think his PC is up to this challenge1! 8:14 AM

My Skype 100-hour call duration challenge for me now passed 21 hours as attempt 2 of this challenge continues 2:12 PM

I want a pizza, and I want one now! 3:39 PM

Skype call duration in my experiment now coming up on 25 hours shortly, all is well so far 5:59 PM

almost 27-and-a-half hours of Skype call duration so far 8:31 PM

Stupid Skype! I took another Skype call and somehow ended up hanging up on the experiment call!, even though it was on hold! 10:50 PM

My call duration this time, an unimpressive 29 hours, 34 minutes, 25 seconds, boo! 10:52 PM

Will I ever successfully complete this experiment? 10:53 PM

 

10:56 PM. I hate the escape key!

OK, I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be able to complete my own experiment! My end of the long duration Skype call has yet again ended suddenly, but this time, it was because I pressed the escape key in Skype to hang up another call I thought didn't hang up, while the long duration call was on hold. I didn't think that would result in the long duration call hanging up, since it was on hold, and not active at the time. I hear the hang up sound, which I thought meant I'd hung up the other Skype call I was trying to hang up. However I guess it had already hung up and I missed it, because when I went to resume the long duration call, it was no longer there! I'd hung up that call instead, just by pressing the escape key, despite the fact that the call was on hold and not active at the time, gurrr piss!

So for me anyway, this experiment attempt ends in disaster after a pitiful 29 hours, 34 minutes, 25 seconds. That didn't even make it to the halfway point toward my all time Skype record which as of now remains at 66 hours, 40 minutes. Yes I hate the Escape key now! lol.
If my end of the experiment had to end without reaching the goal, I would've rather had my internet go away or something, instead of me ending the wrong damn call! Oh well, I'm going to make this work some time!

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Attempting Skype experiment again, I better do well this time! Almost 9.5 hours in now 12:39 PM

Skype call duration 10:36:40, will update when I pass 24 hours as my Skype 100 hour challenge continues. I plan to break records this time! 1:50 PM

Almost 15 hours and 15 minutes on this Skype experiment, while Guthro is around 51 or so hours and climbing. 6:27 PM

Damn I had good tacos tonight for dinner, and Skype call continues, I'm now at 18 hours, 44 minutes, and counting! 9:56 PM

10:15 pm. Happy Halloween to all

I'm again attempting the Skype 100-hour challenge, and this time I'm going to keep my finger well away from the dreaded escape key, lol. I'm currently a bit over 19 hours in, and by the time I wake up tomorrow, I will have passed the 24 hour mark. Updates via my twitter and on here, as we pass major milestones in this experiment. I do believe Guthro's total call duration currently is at 55 hours or close to it. Wish us all luck. Even Jdawg is holding in so far at around 33 hours this attempt. His record to beat is 50-and-a-half hours, my all time Skype record is 66 hours, 40 minutes,

And Guthro needs to break 74 hours to set new records. Can we actually do it? It's looking promising so far, we'll see how it goes.

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Considering waking up, and Skype call duration currently 25 hours, 27 minutes and counting! 4:40 AM

Guthro's portion of our Skype 100-hour challenge now passed 62 hours duration, wow! I'm at 26:02:30 5:15 AM

Looks like Jdawg will break his Skype call duration record of 50 hours, 30 minutes, yay for him! Time for me to break my record now 1:31 PM

I ate too much pizza, and Jdawg's Skype died at 51 hours, 58 minutes in, which is a new call duration record for him. 3:57 PM

I'm still going, currently 36 hours, 45 minutes into my Skype call with Guthro, almost halfway to my 66 hour 40 minute record. 3:58 PM

My Skype duration is at 38 hours 20 minutes, Guthro has set a new Skype record at 74 hours 19 minutes and we continue counting! 5:33 PM

My call duration on Skype as of now, 40 hours, 30 minutes, and still counting 7:43 PM

7:48 pm. My Skype 100 hour challenge continues

As the sounds of Halloween fill the house here, I just wanted to do a quick entry to say that my Skype 100-hour challenge continues at this hour, with my duration currently nearly at 40 hours, 40 minutes.

Jdawg set a new record for himself at a bit under 52 hours, and Guthro who I've called the master, has also broken his old record and currently stands at well over 76 hours of continuous Skype call time, and we're still going.

What will happen over the next 24-48 hours? Follow my twitter for major updates, and this journal will have the major highlights. Have a scary but fun rest of Halloween everyone, and a good weekend to come. 

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

The 100-hour-challenge is continuing, my call duration now: 47:44:00 and climbing, I'll get an updated duration from Guthro after he awakens. 2:57 AM

Guthro's call duration about to hit 84 hours, and ironically, I'm about to hit 48 hours for my call duration. 3:12 AM

My Skype call duration now 53 hours, 25 minutes, and climbing, and Adamguthro should've passed 88 hours by now, wow fun stuff! 8:39 AM

8:42 am. guthro should reach 100 hours of Skype call duration later today

Our Skype 100 hour challenge experiment, as I'm calling it, is continuing
right now, with my call duration currently standing at 53 hours, 32 minutes and climbing. Thanks to Jdawg staying connected to Adamguthro when I accidentally hit the escape key, disconnecting my portion of the call a few days back, Guthro's call duration currently stands at an impressive 88 hours plus, which continues to shatter his previous record of just under 74 hours from our last attempt at the 100 hour challenge.

There are two major milestones that will occur later today. In around 12 hours from now, Guthro should become the first person in our group to break the 100 hour barrier, and soon after, I am hoping to surpass my previous record of 66 hours, 40 minutes.

So assuming things remain as stable as they have been going so far, tonight will be a big night in our long Skype call duration experiment. and tomorrow morning is when we all fall back and daylight saving time ends here in North America. Not sure what that may do to the Skype call duration with 1 AM occurring twice when that happens, Guthro has temporarily disabled daylight saving time change adjustment.

So things are about to get interesting, and you can follow developments in near realtime by checking out my twitter page for updates. Wish us luck, as anything can happen at this point!

I've just passed 54 hours of Skype call duration, and Guthro's passed 90 hours now, wow! 9:13 AM

9:14 am. Correction: Guthro now passed 90 hours in our Skype call!

Guthro just informed me that he's now passed 90 hours Skype call duration, so time's flying by even quicker than I thought, holy wow! I've passed the 54 hour mark on my segment of the call, things still holding up.

Our Skype 100 hour challenge continues with me beginning hour 58, and Guthro now passed 94 hours, we're getting there! 1:17 PM

6:57 pm. we're about to achieve 100 hours of Skype call duration!

We're less than 15 minutes away from Adam Guthro achieving the 100 hour mark in our longest Skype call ever! I didn't think when I first attempted this experiment that we'd even come close to achieving 100 hours, but it's about to happen! My portion of the call currently stands at 63 hours, 48 minutes. I have less than 3 hours to go to beat my all time Skype call duration record of 66 hours and 40 minutes. This is history making at least in the Skype department anyway I do believe!

7:16 pm. We did it, 100 hours and still Skyping!

Just minutes ago, Adam Guthro achieved the 100 hour Skype call duration mark, and Skype is still going! My call duration currently stands at 64 hours, 7 minutes, and the next major milestone will be mine when I pass 66 hours, 40 minutes for my portion of the Skype call. Now the only question that remains is can I make it to 100 hours? Let's hope so! By the way for those that don't believe that Guthro actually did it, here's a picture that proves it! Yeah we're nuts, and proud of it!

8:23 pm. Link to Guthro's story on achieving 100 hours on Skype

For those that wish to digg it, here's Guthro's dig story on hitting the 100 hour mark on a single Skype call.
http://digg.com/software/100_Hour_Skype_Conference_Call

 

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

9:52 am. my final call duration on Skype

OK well with Guthro having reached over 115 hours plus, and with my microphone hitting my escape key, I'd say I had a pretty successful longest Skype call ever. The Skype 100 hour challenge as I called it was met and exceeded, and I did set a new alltime record for myself for a single Skype to Skype call. The final duration was 79 hours, 15 minutes, 43 seconds. I gotta say I am impressed all around, as I did beat my previous record of 66 hours, 40 minutes, and exceeded that by almost 13 hours.

So I think now I'll have a bit more normal call durations, at least for now, lol.

tags: skype, marathon, endurance, hours, days, record, fun

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Skype adds a light installer

Skype is changing the way users download and install software.

Starting with your next full update to Skype 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows, you'll download a quick 2.5MB "light installer." It will then download the full  Skype client, around 24MB. From the Skype FAQs:

"It manages the download for you so if you have any hardware or network issues, the download can be resumed. It serves the purpose of a download manager for Skype, allowing pause/resume and recovery from failures. It also gives information about features as it is downloaded and installed."

This is a common strategy.

Users get more immediate gratification from downloading (about ten times faster) and a greater sense of control over installation.

Skype gets more and better information about the desktop to configure what gets downloaded and from where.

UPDATE: Pondering that last point… What will the experience be for TOM-Skype users? Will they be given a choice of clients (monitored/filtered vs. private/free) at first download? at update?

tags: skype, 4, 4b2, downloads, downloader, installer, windows

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November 2008 Events

I'm attending bold events.
Tips @ SkypeJournal.com with suggestions, photos, reportage. Spend your travel dollars while you have them.

2 November. Dreamforce 2008. Salesforce automation becomes an application platform for live talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

3. ARGS: Cross-Platform Entertainment 2.0. People in alternative reality games have strong reasons to talk live in groups. NESTA, London.

3. Defrag. Some of the hardest questions are tackled at this thought leadership event. Among others, Daniela Barbosa of DataPortability.org is speaking. Colorado Convention Center.

3. The Business of APIs - The Web's Industrial Revolution. Platforming as a strategy and survival trait. Brought to you by The Mashery. City Club of San Francisco.

3. Mobile 2.0. Grand Hyatt San Francisco.

3. Widget Summit. Putting some of your verbs into someone else's places. Hotel Nikko San Francisco.

3. ad:tech New York. The people who pay for lots of free. New York Hilton.

3. Future of Web Design. Roseland Ballroom, NYC.

3. VRM Hub London Conference 2008: Unlocking the see-saw. Vendor Relationship Management, putting people back in control of their identities and their relationships with companies. Sun Microsystems London.

4. US Election Day. If your election lasts for more than four hours, call your doctor.

4. Think Global, Drink Local: Think London/Sterling Communications Election Night Party. San Francisco.

4. Mobile Tech For Social Change. A barcamp. San Francisco.

5. Digital Garage New Context Conference. Joi Ito's clan convenes. Shibuya-ku, Tokyo.

5. Web 2.0 Summit. Still hankering for a press pass. Palace Hotel San Francisco.

5. WinHEC 2008. Windows hardware engineering. Los Angeles Convention Center.

5. Design Futures: Deconstructing Networks - Jonah Brucker-Cohen, of Trinity College Dublin, experiments in how we design and think about the social effect places and alert networks. U.C. Berkeley, California. 

6. Edge of the Web 2008. Perth has a growing Web 2.0+ community. Crawley, Western Australia. 

6. Tweets and Dreenks: November Social Drinkup. Mars Bar, San Francisco.

6. Mobile Forum Meeting: Opportunities in Broadband Wireless. San Jose, California.

6. Community Manager Meetup. San Francisco.

7. Unofficial iPhone TechTalk after-drinks. The Apple event at University of Middlesex is full. London.

8. Silicon Valley Code Camp. Hands-on with peer coaching. Los Altos Hills, California.

8. Freebase Hack Day. Build something with massive quantities of creative commons'd data. San Francisco.

10. Mobile Monday London.

10. Internet Identity Workshop. iiw2008b is a must-go event. This is where the digital ID architecture of the next 10 years is conceived, debated, and bought into. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

10. VoiceCon. Enterprise and unified communications. San Francisco.

11. e-Democracy '08. The first post-US election event to explore politics, public participation and digital technology. RIBA, Central London.

11. US Veteran's Day, Canada and UK Remembrance Day. National holiday.

12. Emerging Communications Dinner. Thought leaders who can't wait for eComm2009 March 03-05 will talk over supper. Ping me if you want an invite. (tips at skypejournal.com) San Francisco Airport Marriott.

12. Under the Radar: Mobility. 32 mobile startups less than one year old. Microsoft, Mountain View, California.

12. The Second London Futures Symposium. London.

13. NewTeeVee Live – Television Reinvented. Mission Bay Conference Center.

13. OpenSocial's 1st Birthday Celebration. Day long workshops. And cake. MySpace Offices, San Francisco.

13. IceWeb08. Kathy Sierra keynoting. Reykjavik. 

15. Convergence 08. Focus on long-term technologies, especially Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno. Co-sponsored by Foresight.org. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

15. >play – Berkeley Digital Media. This year's theme is Disruption: Changes in the Digital Media Landscape. Organized by MBA students at Haas, U.C. Berkeley, California.

16. Adobe MAX 2008. Designers and developers imagine the next generation of browser-based talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

16. Fall IETF Meeting. Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.

17. Future of Mobile. Jemima Kiss, James Brody, and folks from Google, Symbian, and Mozilla make this a must attend event. Kensington Town Hall, London.

17. Mashup Camp. Steve Repetti of DataPortability.org is speaking at this mostly un-conference. Mountain View, California.

18. Mobile Content Forum. The event for all those companies who made millions on ringtones and wallpaper. Register from your iPhone, baby. Hilton London Kensington.

19. Open Mobile Summit 08. Discount: Register by Oct 10 with priority code TRL and save $400. agenda. trailer:

Fantastic hallway with Skype's Jonathan Christensen, AT&T, Dean Bubley, Om Malik, Rebtel, BT Design's JP Rangaswami, Truphone's James Body, Orange, O2, The US FCC's Julius Knapp, David Isenberg, Amazon, T-Mobile, AOL, Nokia, Google, Symbian, Intel, TAT, LG, RIM, OpenMoko, Funambol, Qualcomm. San Francisco.

18. Robo Development 2008. Robotics small, large, smart, and social. Santa Clara, California.

19. SOA World and Cloud Computing. The 14th Service Oriented Architecture conference. Now the standard for platforming architectures. I want to hear the session on building real-time SOA systems. The program's big buzzwords: cloud and virtual. The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, California.

21. London Geek Nights: Game Programming. ThoughtWorks UK Office, High Holborn, London.

22. YouTube Live. Concert. Fort Mason, San Francisco.

22. Berkeley beats Stanford. Football. Go Bears.

26. The Media Festival. The session I want: "Case study: Lessons from the adult entertainment industry; learn the secrets of success in mobile entertainment." Always two to five years' ahead in technology and business practices due to intense competition. Manchester.

27. US Thanksgiving. A nation shuts down for a long weekend of American football, turkey, beer. And gratitude.

30. St. Andrew's Day. Scotland's national day.

Skype's Freemium Rate (free/fee) is flat

Local fluctuations are less interesting than the range.

I applied several curve fits to Skype's freemium ratio but nothing reliable came of it. I don't imagine it is predictive of anything, merely descriptive. 

The wobbliness[1] of Skype's freemium ratio is, obviously, a function of variations in the supporting data. Eyeballing it, free activity leads fee by a few months. This makes sense if free experiences are preparatory behavior to greater commitment.

At a larger chart scale, like 1-100, the world of percentages, the curve would look amazingly flat. Many freemium businesses would interpret a ratio in Skype's 7-8 range as golden.

tags: skype, metrics, stats, statistics, free, freemium

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[1] I did love Professor Magaddino's econometrics classes, but wobbly suggests so much more than the proper language of statistics.