We met many manufacturers offering products for Skype, usually as components for someone else to import, add software, wrap, and bring to market. Skype certifies finished consumer products. It's time for a third program: Skype Registered Components. Test the technical merit of usb phones, headsets, microphones, usb flash drives, and the rest. Anyone applying for Skype Certification that uses a registered product need only pass the rest of the testing. This saves you time and money and improves your chances of passing cert. It has the side benefit of extending Skype's reach into the hardware community where they can influence features.

Software certification is warming up. I just noticed the software funcitonal test requirements (pdf), software checklist (pdf), and the user documentation requirements are on the Share Skype Certification Specifications page. Just for Windows right now. Skype has certified software before, but always with hardware.

Skype's requirements aren't rocket science, but few software products pay such close and extensive attention to usability basics. The cert program program will raise the bar for many developers. That's a very good thing. Users will come to trust the "Skype Certified" brand stands for polished software that works out of the box with Skype.

By driving partners to improve customer experience, even on generic items like installation and documentation, Skype software certification:

• Bolsters the parent Skype and eBay brands, by raising the quality of the Skype ecology
• Telegraphs specific goals and values to the development community. This lowers development costs as horizontal capabilities are made generic and standard.
• Brings in knowledge from outside developers about best practices and use cases. The developers represents many different software engineering cultures, user communities, and regional differences. This exposure provides valuable off-campus views for Skype's internal product management and engineering teams.

Call Skype Journal if you'd like help getting your own products ready for certification.

For a sense of the topics covered by the certification...

4.1 HIGH-LEVEL FUNCTIONALITY

4.2 CONNECTION MANAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS

4.3 CALL MANAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS

4.4 VOICE MAIL REQUIREMENTS

4.5 CHAT INITIALIZATION REQUIREMENTS

4.6 CHAT CONFERENCE REQUIREMENTS

4.7 PROFILE MANAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS

4.8 CONTACT MANAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS

4.9 CLEARING

4.10 DEVICE PRESENCE, CONTROL, RINGING, AND CALL-STATUS REQUIREMENTS

4.11 FILE TRANSFER REQUIREMENTS

4.12 VOICE CONFERENCE REQUIREMENTS

4.13 CALL FORWARDING REQUIREMENTS

Ebay

First off, Ebay finished buying Skype last week. Skype Technologies, S.A., is still a stand alone company, but Ebay owns all the stock. Just over a month from the announcement; speedy, neh?

Steve Dzemidzenka tips us to an ISP-Planet interview with a company that offers pay-per-call advertising on Ebay (vs. pay-per-click); a great read and with one or two insights into models Skype may enable. A related AP story: Online ads urge surfers to pick up the telephone.

Some folks don't like Skype

Skype is still banned on university campuses in France. (Thanks, Alain.) Verso is still selling a filter to block Skype traffic. (Thanks, Mr. Harvey.) Qatar is still blocking Skype software downloads and Skype purchases. (Thanks, Jeff) Can you suggest a reliable way to tell if my Skype traffic is blocked?

From the Skype Ecology

Ipevo launched a family of Skype Certified phones last week, shortly after Linksys and Skype announced a co-branded Skype-only mobile handset and base station. While Skype says the Linksys is certified (via SparkPR), you wouldn't know it by reading the Linksys product literature, the Skype news release, or the product page on Amazon. Everyone else pays dearly for the Skype Certification and brags about it mercilessly; why not Linksys?

Look2Skype, the Outlook plug-in, is upgraded.

Maintaining the key benefit of Look2Skype which is the minimal inteference with Outlook, whereby it doesn't cause it to crash, or slow it down. Some of the new features are:

1. Instant access to all skype contacts from Outlook.
2. Extract callto:// signatures from e-mail.
3. Auto-recognise of skype contacts from e-mails.
4. Free text entry of phone numbers or skype names for contacting. Stewart Bissett

Recovery 2.0

This disaster is in a war zone.

• Families in Kashmir prevailed upon Indian authorities' better natures to open up cross-border phone service, normally carefully scheduled and monitored for security reasons.
• Volunteers are setting up a QuakeHelp Relief Hotline using SMS. Skype was unable to help with a voice line this time (they helped in Katrina relief) because they don't have SkypeIn services in India. Good sources: QuakeHelp and the QuakeHelp blog.
• Pakistan banned public access to satellite imagery of the disaster zone. Security. In a fight-or-flight, clench or relax, response, one or the other response is better. Restricting geo information breaks the decentralized operation of the Internet. You want to open up resources and remove obstacles for the many thousands of online volunteers who can put that data to work. Fortunately, relief workers voices persuaded the UN to re-publish much of the imagery and data. A win for emergent organization.
• The term "Recovery 2.0" is a flexible set of online tools and behaviors that can help invidividuals and groups organize themselves around any crisis. I've proposed a few possible projects on the wiki (feel free to register and add your own):
  • Phone Bank Network; the telephone remains the dominant way people communicate. We need tools to deploy volunteer phone banks that scale rapidly and cheaply.
  • Emergent Relay Service; provide a framework for live interpretation for cross-language and cross-mode communications.
  • Wish I could take credit: Mesh-Networking Cellphones; Why aren't there ad-hoc battery-powered "cell towers in a barrel" that could be "bombed" or floated into disaster zones to turn the thousands of useless cell phones in people's pockets into a crisis mesh network?

Skype at Work

Enterprise Skype isn't even vaporware, but the need is real. For example:

I was wondering if there exists a Skype Proxy server for enterprise use? Essentially, all Skype traffic would flow through this edge device, but would also allow for Skype-to-Skype traffic to stay internal to an organization without having to contact SuperNodes. HTTPS Proxies don't really provide any control of Skype traffic since they blindly pass all traffic since it's so volitile.

Also, is there a product that will allow multiple Skype clients to connect to a PBX simultaneously? Thus, be able to make calls from a Skype client to any phone on the PBX. I've seen some hardware solutions, but they seem primitive and only allow 1:1 communication. I'm looking for large scale many:many.

Thanks, Joe Schwendt

Another case:

Hi guys, I run a 450 person company's IT department. Yesterday Verizon had a man-hole fire and cut our lines completely, so we were phone-less for the whole day. We're a financial services company so you can imagine how freaked out everyone was.

What I was thinking last night is, what if Skype had a great enterprise version, that we could purchase 50 accounts for, and get them set up, distribute mics to our top 50 offices and have a back-up plan immediately in effect

Help Wanted:

We're always glad to post job listings of interest to the Skype Journal community.

Hi. We are currently looking for an Asterisk developer who has experience in integrating Skype to an Asterisk-powered IVR.

Skype me and I'll pass along your interest.