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Recipe for a Sustainable Skype Partner Business

June 10, 2006 03:42 PM

Topics: Business | Developer Zone | Developers | Skype Partner Watch | Skype杂志 | Strategy | ebay | forums | observations | skype | skypejournal | voip

At a session on business opportunities for the Skype API's this afternoon. Charles Carleton, CEO of Jyve.com, gave a presentation on the recently launched Jyve Pro service. In the ensuing Q&A he commented on how his business relationship with Skyp. Key elements of Jyve Pro:

  • Jyve Pro allows "experts" to charge for services delivered via Skype, such as music instruction or provision of personalized technical support.
  • Jyve Pro is linked into payment systems such that revenue can be obtained via, say, PayPal regardless of whether it is a metered or fixed rate service.
  • Jyve Pro manages sessions, tracks usage; it can be embedded into a website or weblog.
  • Jyve Pro also includes a Directory listing available services by categories.
  • Also available are evaluation/feedback forms and reporting features to provide analytics on usage.

Jyve has been known for developing presence and chat tools whose functionality have since been incorporated into Skype.  But they developed these tools as a precursor to developing the Jyve Pro service only because they were not available in Skype at the time; they did not see them as building a sustainable business. Charles made two key points in response to a Q&A question that came up:

  1. Jyve Pro's ultimate value is provided through their aggregation of service providers (under their current beta program they already have 600); this is where they provide a unique, difficult to replicate service.
  2. While they currently depend on Skype as the delivery vehicle, there is no reason they cannot migrate the service to MSN, Yahoo and/or Google should either the Skype relationship sour or one or more of these players become as relevant a player as Skype in the Voice 2.0 space.

Important points to keep in mind if you are looking to partner with Skype:

  1. It's the customer partners and uniqueness of the service that builds value
  2. Look for services that be can be readily migrated to other delivery vehicles.

This is no different from the experience 15 to 20 years ago where a variety of DOS utility products came and went because the utility publisher focussed on the technology (which often was often eventually incorporated into a Microsoft offering) rather than building a sustainable business servicing its customer base.

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Posted by: jan geirnaert | tropicaljantie at June 10, 2006 7:14 PM

Hi, I like the directory-system of Jyve. Fair enough. What I find less interesting on the other hand are the wild skype*.com domain-name registrations by jyve.com. Being a community-builder they should not do this. This is confusing for the users. Search for Skype domain names on google to see what I mean.

On the matter of this billing-system overlayed on top of Skype. Well, it might work if the customer of course does not have to call the payable account from the first time. Secondly : in order to pay somebody for rendered services per minute, the services must be good and accurate. There might be some problems here... People need time to explain what they want, will you charge them per minute for that... Maybe for very basic micro-income (low quality) simple services it might work. On the other hand, since Skype will integrate paypal into the Skype interface, this might be just one of those plugins developed as a precursor to for something else because they were not available in Skype at the time; meaning not for sustainable business...

To bill and invoice my services I need an eggtimer and an invoice. To collect micro-income I might need this toy, but why would I integrate it in my business now, if I know that Skype is building (see earlier posting on skype-journal) payment / paypal integration into their system. I can also ask somebody to pay me on my account on paypal, fix a meeting to render a service and render that service when they have pay payment in advance please or after consumption of the services).

Who needs voice-recorders, presence-icons, external sms systems as external plugins if this is going to be build into the skype.exe itself.

I don't. Thanks for the effort anyways. There could be an interesting business-model in this, but not for me.

Posted by: Charles Carleton at June 12, 2006 2:13 PM

Jim,
Thank you for this great article. It is very insightful on your part. This is exactly what we are trying to accomplish. It was great talking with you and Devcon.

Jan,
Jyve Pro is not about the payment system, it is about building the network of Experts on Skype. As Skype releases their paypal-Skype solution "SkypeWallet", we will simply integrate it into our system. This is the point that Jim was making with his article; that developers have to stop thinking simply of building add-on apps, but building offerings and models that are sustainable such as user acquisition and web based services.

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