Phil Wolff’s 117 Rambunctious 2011 Predictions

May You And Your Skype Contacts Have a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!

For 2011:

Platform

1. Televisions from Philips, Sanyo Electric, TCL, Toshiba, and Vizio come with Skype apps preinstalled.
2. Only two of Samsung, Panasonic and LG will continue to offer SkypeKit-based TVs.
3. In Store Solutions, Skype consumer electronics partner and retail middleman, launches new FreeTalk HD webcams with microphones for the desk and improved HD webcams for televisions.
4. A Skype app ships on 3D televisions, without 3D.
5. SkypeKit goes from announced-but-closed Beta into public Beta.
6. Long time Skype partner IPEVO finishes selling its inventory of Skype-certified phones, webcams, and speakerphones and abandons the Skype market, burned from years of neglect. 
7. SkypeKit comes out of beta.
8. Pie is the new cupcake.
9. Skype hires a guy named Soups.
10. Skype hosts four devcons in Europe, America and Asia. Seven thousand developers attend.
11. Skype cloud services go into announced-but-closed Beta.
12. Facebook buys TokBox.
13. You can get Rails, Scala and Clojure wrappers for SkypeKit.
14. Skype’s directory of people and businesses gets a web service API for server-to-server people search.
15. Skype launches an app store. Again.
16. Skype for Linux is almost open sourced. Nearly. So close.
17. Another Skype robot.
18. Skype over Near Field Communications.
19. Yahoo! Messenger APIs find fast uptake, accounting for 25% of all of Y!M message traffic by year end as mobile clients find it easy to and reliable to build in.
20. Skype extends its presence web services to include social updates and mood messages.
21. Voxeo buys Twilio.
22. Skype for HTML5.
23. Skype buys Voxeo.
24. Skype shows up in a TV product not made by a television manufacturer. Roku, Boxee, Clicker, Apple TV, Slingbox, Google TV come to mind.
25. Google offers a Voice cloud platform.
26. Augmented Reality UI for Skype.
27. The functional programming re-architecture of Asterisk produces working prototypes by Q4 2011 Astricon.
28. A third-party attempts to rebuild Skypecasts, only to suffer the Tragedy of the Chatroulette.

Consumer

1. Group Video comes out of Beta. Starts charging. Free to consumers with global subscriptions. Cheap to businesses.
2. Black Beauty, The Green Hornet’s car, comes with a SkypeKit option.
3. A language file for Klingon localizes Skype.
4. Windows Live Messenger adds free 5-way group video calling.
5. Dolby Labs releases a push-to-talk teamspeak service for MMORPG players.
6. Skype’s Apple-like lifestyle branding outshines Skype’s enterprise brand.
7. Indianapolis Colts win the Superbowl.
8. Skype starts showing you a list of other places where you are logged in. Starts as a security measure. Actually helps people find lost phones.
9. Skype for Kindle.
10. Skype supports OAuth and OpenID.
11. Skype continues complicated identity models, fractured between “corporate” and “consumer” IDs.
12. You’ll be able to pay for Skype calls with Facebook Credits.
13. Skype for Vampires is used by Lucy in the Vampire Summer Camp movie, shooting in New York.
14. Wal-Mart’s sells Skype credits, accessories again, this time outside the US.
15. Two large metropolitan hospitals set up Skype for patient visits.
16. Skype’s revenue from Marchex browser toolbar advertising will pay for someone’s bonus.
17. Skype will be preinstalled on 50% of all tablets.
18. Someone is arrested for using Skype in a country where Skype is forbidden.
19. US Skype growth slows as high unemployment and weak labor markets make US metered broadband unaffordable.
20. Greyson Chance is the new Justin Bieber.
21. Skype store sells T-Shirts featuring cute Skype characters created for the Asian markets.
22. Skype rocks Rio’s Carnaval Samba Parade.
23. Rising Skype T-Shirt and rub-on tattoo sales beat falling non-HD webcam sales.
24. After representatives can’t agree on how to sit around a table, a new session of Middle East peace negotiations are called The Skype Talks.

Enterprise

1. Skype launches lightweight conferencing service cheaper than Citrix GoToMeeting.
2. Skype reports its Connect trunking contributed $50 million in revenue in 2010.
3. Skype commercializes a ruggedized client for places where low power and dial-up connectivity is the norm.
4. Skype announces tiered SkypeOut subscription plans for businesses. This makes Skype budgets manageable for companies, revenue predictable for Skype.
5. Skype becomes a darling of the hospitality industry as hotels install Skype-ready TVs and rake in affiliate revenue.
6. The King’s Speech gets best picture Oscar.
7. Skype’s Global 2000 direct sales team rides a wave of IT social software buy-in, gets 25 million new workplace users by July 2011.
8. Skype buys DropBox.
9. Skype video worries enterprise network managers as usage soars.
10. Washington Capitals win the Stanley Cup.
11. Salesforce builds SkypeKit into Chatter.
12. Skype expands its partnership with Nuance to include transcription of conference calls.
13. The first Skype apps will ship on Avaya phone stations.
14. Skype publishes anonymized data sets about its network and customers for use by academic researchers.
15. One million people work full time using Skype.
16. 200 thousand customer service operators will use Skype at work.
17. Real-time social media profiling (rich caller ID) will be the hot thing in call center software. 
18. Skype Connect will include the IETF ViPR protocols developed by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg and Cisco’s Cullen Jennings. The protocols teach the PBX which SkypeOut destinations can bypass PSTN on future calls. Customers will save tens of millions in the first year.
19. Skype televisions become hot in conference rooms as new ones support Skype HD video for just a little more than a dumb TV.
20. Google Voice in Europe.
21. Google Voice in Google Apps issues more than 5 million US workplace phone numbers.

Mobile

1. Apple launches FaceTime for Windows.
2. Apple ships FaceTime for Mac and Windows with iTunes.
3. Apple ships FaceTime for Android and Blackberry.
4. The number of active FaceTime users approaches half of Skype’s by YE2011.
5. Skype for iPad launches with iPad 2. So good it sells iPads.
6. Skype for iPad touch interface flows over into Skype 6 desktop client.
7. Skype mobile video calling on iOS, Android, Blackberry.
8. Skype mobile apps show users live data consumption rates vs. monthly/daily bandwidth quotas.
9. Skype Me! Returns with the launch of Skype-by-Barcode and Skype-by-QRcode for mobile phones.
10. Skype for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. 
11. The first car dashboard with Skype for Drivers.
12. Mobile operators worldwide adopt a two-tier pricing structure, only allowing Skype on a higher quota, higher cost data plan. #deathofnetneutrality
13. Verizon Wireless and Skype renew their US relationship, but no longer exclusive.
14. AT&T and Skype announce Skype preloads for iOS, Blackberry and Android mobiles and netbooks. Deal not extended to set top boxes.
15. 28 billion mobile app downloads. (Not just Skype apps, obviously).
16. Mobile operators stall on instant messaging for another year, afraid to cannibalize their SMS cash cow.
17. Skype adds speech-to-text conversion for mobile instant messaging.
18. Skype preinstalled on thirty Chinese 3G Android smartphones from ZTE, Huawei, Zoom Technologies, G’Five International, TCL/Alcatel, and Beijing Tianyu for domestic use.

Corporate

1. TOM-Skype partners with two of the top four Chinese telcos.
2. Skype IPOs in 2011Q2.
3. Skype IPO market cap beats US$3 billion.
4. Skype raises $100 million from its customers for emergency relief efforts. Disaster to be named later.
5. Facebook tries to buy Skype for stock options.
6. Cisco buys Skype for cash.
7. Naspers buys Skype for cash and stock.
8. Skype cited in #WikiLeaks’ Cablegate.
9. Skype has more than 1300 employees by year end 2011.
10. Two patent suits against Skype fail on their merits. One settles out of court before Skype’s next liquidity event.
11. Seven electricity utilities will offer telephony products and fail.
12. Mobile operators subsidize their own video calling with free data if you use their app instead of Skype’s.
13. Skype reaches 30 million concurrent users, up from a 2010 peak of 25. They credit growth in the workplace and mobile devices with video-chat-ready cameras.
14. Skype accounts for 16% of all international minutes spoken.
15. The telecom ministry of a country in the Pacific will approve Skype for economic development zones.
16. The US Army preinstalls Skype apps when they distribute smartphones to all soldiers.
17. Belize still blocks Skype. VPN companies promise Skype access.
18. A third-party publishes a live map of Skype supernodes.
19. North Korea still blocks Skype.
20. Despite the block, 10,000 people show North Korea as their country in their Skype profile.
21. Antarctica: highest percent of Skype accounts per actual resident.
22. Green resistance uses Skype in the aftermath of the death of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
23. Skype publishes a Data Portability Policy.
24. A US court rules Skype must offer e911 emergency dialing.
25. Skype reports surviving a cyberwar-style attack.
26. No new EU and USA net neutrality laws or regulatory powers as laissez-faire takes hold.

Our prior art: Phil Wolff’s 67 Reckless Predictions for 2010 and how I did. 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).

Check out what William Ogburn predicted in 1931 about 2011. So spot on.

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