By Torben Nyhuus, Aalborg, Denmark

The contest to acquire market shares on the growing VoIP market is at full pace. The market is;

• the VoIP calls,
• the internet access,
• the devices.

Is the mobile/cellular market also afflicted?

VoIP calls:

Skype is reaching out to new customer segments. With Jubii and Skype in new cooperation!

(Jubii was the first and is the most successful web portal in Denmark, visited by 2.5 mill users monthly. DK has 5 million inhabitants.)

The Danish internet portal Jubii has commenced a cooperation with the world's most popular provider of IP-telephony, Skype. The new cooperation is a cobranding strategy, which shall broaden the knowledge of Skype in Denmark, and in return be a new source of income to Jubii.

The idea is to get Skype out to Ms. and Mr. Smith, using Jubii to reach them and fight the somewhat nerdish stamp on Skype. Skype can now be downloaded from on Jubii and Skype is expecting a Danish success making telephony free. In return for this exposure Jubii gets a part of the SkypeOut revenue generated.

Microsoft building our VoIP backbone!

Microsoft bought Teleo and is now co-operating with MCI to let users, as a start, make calls from PC to fixed line and the mobile/cellular net.

Google, Yahoo, and AOL have been on VoIP for a while.

Access:

Old and now privatised Telco’s: Broadband access is still being sold at too high prices; you still must pay for a phone line to be 'allowed' to pay for ADSL/DSL, that’s even with a three-party ISP, double charging. The privatised Telco’s and governments are still happily milking the cow together! Did they make a secret agreement? For how long? Was this international, European/EU wide? The necessary legislation is postponed (Government/MP’s claim further examination needed) to the fourth quarter 2006 in Denmark, this on an already five year old issue. No wonder that TDC can keep a 70% market share on broadband.

Mobile prices:
Are mobile prices being squished from 3G (UMTS) and the lowered fixed line prices?

In the mobile area, discount sales of cards are now starting in the Aldi shops in Germany. Aldi is a low price supermarket chain spread out over Europe with 4000+ shops alone in Germany. This is a big stick in TDC’s discount EasyMobile (purely internet based), launched 4 months ago, gaining 15,000 customers. EasyMobile has already lowered their price from 16 -14 € cent as a response to Aldi's 15 € cent.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telephony company, responded with a full page ad to counter Aldi, which began its service on Thursday. … T-Mobile will have to provide something to keep customers. Aldi has been one of the driving forces behind retail change in Europe's largest economy.

by TMCnet

Aldi is also selling IT hardware, recently a Wi-Fi SIP phone (200+ €) for Hotspots and your other access points.

Devices:

Kirk and RTX companies are joining up to get global market shares together on both Wi-Fi and DECT.

Kirk Telecom, who already has an 8% market share in North America on 2.4/5 GHz DECT products and a 100+ years of telephony history behind it is being sold to US SpectraLink, known for its Wi-Fi Netlink products.

RTX and Kirk Telecom are long term co-operators, both Danish companies. All three are VoIP ‘players’, more on this Monday.

And when are we going to see new Skype devices? The long promised Wi-Fi phone is not yet seen. Accton and Skype and their WIFI phone -Skype Journal.

The WiFi phone prototype. Share Skype, the Skype blog, lists 34 preferred partners but Accton is not among them!?

RTX is soon launching a VoIP standalone SIP phone before a Skype one. Is the eBay takeover delaying Skype getting the certification process going on new (kind of) products and making better room for non-Skype ones? Is Skype on public Wi-Fi hotspots not significant?

Which new players will join in, will they be late? Will even new IP markets be opening during the next year?

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.