Phil Wolff’s 67 Reckless Predictions for 2010

In 2010…

1. A hot stranger will IM something inappropriate to you.
2. Skype‘s SilverLakeification will be complete, with a very short leash on strategy and operations at first.
3. Skype will serve 125 billion minutes of calls.
4. Second Life will serve 20 billion minutes of calls.
5. Oprah’s television show will end as scheduled in 2011; lots of Skype calls in 2010 leading to the finale as former guests make cameo appearances, holding out for a spot on Oprah’s last (highest-rated-ever) episode.
6. "The Tyra Banks Show" will end as scheduled in 2010. Nobody will Skype in.
7. UK police will allege terrorists use Skype (like everyone else). Parliament will demand the PM bring Skype under control.
8. Skype 5.x will offer multiparty video.
9. Skype 5.x will offer team features.
10. Someone will attend a family funeral via Skype video. And forget they are on camera.
11. Skype will release a "naked Skype" public beta. This Skype engine, no user interface, will be free/cheap. Hardware developers will like it; web developers won’t.
12. Skypecasts will still be offline.
13. Facebook will add voice to chat.
14. Skype for Business will account for ten percent of Skype sales.
15. Nortel changes its name to Avaya. Or avice aversa.
16. The world economy will continue to suck. An American commercial real estate crisis will reinvigorate the Great Recession. Good news for Skype as more people work from home.
17. 24‘s eighth season will feature Cisco’s new midrange video conferencing.
18. Skype won’t offer a "Login with Skype" service.
19. Vampires still won’t Skype.
20. Tencent will buy ICQ for its non-China userbase. Skype won’t.
21. Google Talk will add multiparty video with On2 inside, and become a standard part of the Google office suite.
22. Skypers post thousands of videos of Skype calls on YouTube, thanks to recording software. Jeremy Hague’s Vodburner outpaces Pamela as the bestselling Skype add in.
23. The US student loan crisis ($700 billion outstanding) strains consumer lending.
24. Skype starts a post-SIP standards discussion about communications protocols for the 21st century.
25. Avaya will make Skype for SIP the default setting for new switches they sell.
26. Skype manages to get a television commercial on the air.
27. China’s troubled economy will boost Skype usage when families can’t afford to travel home for the Lunar New Year.
28. A team will talk for 200 hours in an uninterrupted Skype-to-Skype call.
29. Wi-Fi phones will ship with Skype SILK inside.
30. Six former Skype employees will become CxOs.
31. Someone dies, unable to Skype for emergency help.
32. You’ll be able to make iSkype voice calls on Verizon 3G before AT&T 3G.
33. 100 handsets will run on Google’s Android.
34. Skype will release their homemade COTTON video codec, so they don’t have to use the ones from Google‘s On2. Higher quality. Easy, free license. Independence.
35. Skype.com still won’t let you log in with OpenID.
36. Windows Live Messenger gets a huge boost in new user signups from Bing, Office2010, Office Live, and Windows 7. Microsoft will rock in 2010.
37. LG ships a television with Skype inside.
38. Mobiletelco 3 ships its third generation Skypephone.
39. An angry entertainer tweets to a million followers her PC crashed and lost all her Skype history. So she’s switching to…
40. Skype opens a mobile research lab in India.
41. Gizmo5 features migrate to Google’s plumbing and Google Voice.
42. A Harvard Business Review case will feature a Skype-related issue.
43. A Fortune 500 company (not eBay) will provide Skype for Windows for their employees.
44. Volunteers phonebank using Skype on behalf of a national EU political candidate’s campaign’s.
45. A lobbyist slips a Skype-hostile measure into a US law on behalf of incumbent telcos before Skype can muster opposition.
46. The Skype store will sell a netbook with Skype preinstalled.
47. The BigTelco industry pressures Nokia, so it never preinstalls Skype on its Series 60 line for the US market.
48. Skype relaunches its software platform developer program mid-year.
49. Skype’s unreasonable Broadcast Terms of Service keeps it off new dramatic television programs and out of movies all year.
50. A court will find Skype guilty in a class action suit related to collecting small sums of money from customers but not offering service or prompt refunds.
51. Skype will offer to buy Tokbox for its browser-based video.
52. Skype revenue per minute called will continue rising from $0.06 as Skype trunking starts to contribute.
53. Skype will top $900 million in revenue.
54. Skype will sell small businesses pricing plans making it easy to budget and buy.
55. An IETF working group publishes avatar portability protocols.
56. 23 million people will log in to Skype at the same time.
57. 180 million new Skype accounts, about 500k daily.
58. Someone Skypes from a Virgin Galactic space flight.
59. Skype loses juicy US government contracts over the TOM-Skype security compromises. You don’t know when someone you’re talking with is using a TOM-Skype client with monitoring software from Chinese security agencies. An audit will show Skype on 500K federal employee computers anyway.
60. Skype relaunches Skype for Android. Android Skypers have more dialtone per user than the iPhone or Skype Lite.
61. Zombies become the new Vampires.
62. Tom Green Show‘s corps of Skyping fans will continue to Skype into the show while he is on the road with his new Standup Comedy Tour.
63. Skype-like features become generic, included in every communications and collaboration product shown at Demo, TechCrunch50, Telephony Startup Camp and similar product launchpads.
64. BT/Ribbit adds video support to its platform for programmers.
65. Voicemail to email transcription becomes a standard feature in most markets for mobile and home phone service.
66. United Nations rescue and recovery teams standardize on Skype.
67. Skype sponsors a Festivus site for the public "airing of grievances" and videos of your "Feats of Strength."

Hudson Barton predicts a 2010 peak of 27,695,335 Skype users online, Total "real users" will be 67,596,505.

What are your predictions? Can you do better? Prior years’ predictions: Phil Wolff’s 26 incriminating 2009 Skype Predictions, Phil Wolff’s 37 Sketchy 2008 Skype Predictions, Predictions? Wish List? What’s In Store for 2008 (Jim Courtney).