I warned folks at this week's Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference not to ignore Skype or its kin. To continue...

Second, Skypers are having their "communications of the future" moments now. If you're thinking about selling video conversation someday at a premium, it's too late. The market's already commoditized and more useful. And it's happened without fast lanes, using the dumb IP network.  

With:

• free calls
• free conferencing
• free video calls
• free video conferencing
• integrated with instant messaging
• file and folder sharing

All at the same time, in the same call.

Please don't think your rivals in this market are your first mile competitors. Your customers are downloading free software from foreign cities like Shenzhen and Luxembourg and Redmond. And from global brands like Yahoo!, AOL and Google.

And your customers are talking to each other, now more than ever. By one measurement, seven percent of all long distance traffic is on Skype. Seven percent. This isn't at the expense of long distance carriers. It's making the pie bigger, making intercontinental conversation carefree and impulse friendly. Changing caller behavior.

From the portal player point of view, this is a continuation of their moves to win and keep attention. It's all of a piece with event sharing (like Yahoo!'s upcoming) and social calendaring (Google Calendar), social networking (MySpace, facebook, Google's Orkut), social bookmarking (Digg, Yahoo!'s del.icio.us), photo sharing (Yahoo!'s flickr) and blogging (MSN Spaces, Google Blogger, SixApart). You know the funny thing? These systems all talk to each other! Open protocols let you see your flickr photos on your MySpace page and Skypecast schedule on your TypePad blog. When was the last time any two of you, let alone your whole industry, agreed on something as technically simple as exchanging voice mail, a twenty year old technology?

All today, used today, engaging your customers today.

But wait, there's more.

All of this is coming to a mobile near you. Location aware applications are exploding as GPS geocoding becomes cheap and transparent.

But that's just the easy stuff.

Third, eBay will build on that enrichment this year. It will come in at least three parts.

Send money. If you didn't know it, eBay the auction house, car dealer, and flea market owns a bank. PayPal will be built into Skype this year. (screenshots as shown at eBay's 2006 Analyst Day via flickr) Forget Western Union for remittances, you'll just call up your friend, ask for $50 and she sends it. No email, no browser, just money. p2p money transfers via this "phone." As lucrative as this will no doubt be, this is just a baseline service.

Send me money for something. eBay is using Skype to enter the consumer-to-consumer intangibles markets:

• Information,
• Entertainment,
• Knowledge, and
• Service.

They're not just helping people buy and sell figurines, they're selling 3D structural simulation of architectural wind forces, and independent medical opinions, and Arabic and Mandarin language tutoring. Information, education, entertainment, and service. No atoms to ship via UPS. Intangibles.

This plays to eBay's strengths. They master services that free people to buy online with confidence. Fraud detection, private police, strong identity, reputation management, and escrow services. Trust, in short. Which brings us to the third leg...

Find someone to send me money for something. eBay are masters of category management, communities that share a common passion and redefine their markets hourly. They bring millions of people together from around the world. Their directories of people and businesses evolve quickly and richly.

This year Skype will build searc of those directories, and new ones specific to intangibles, into Skype's search forms. So users that let their mice do the walking through Skype's white pages will also use eBay's classified yellow pages and new interest searches straight from the Skype client.

Again, no browser involved. Portable to a mobile client. Just look up a Motown expert, ask for the best Marvin Gaye song a tone deaf groom can sing at a wedding, and pay your $2.  Three minutes, $2, and PayPal and Skype get their few pennies of the transaction.

If Skype's rates of adoption and defection stay flat, they'll have 150 million participants in this new economy by year end. This before eBay spends one dime on advertising. And before they wave the flag and get eBay's own customers to embrace this new medium.

So this ain't your ma bell's plain ole phone call.

And those competencies are so hard to buy or build they are formidable barriers to entry.

Where does that leave you?