I was in Milan when a guy told me Italian men carried three mobiles. One for work, one for the wife and kids, and one for his lover. Keeping worlds apart by giving them different phones to call.

GrandCentral says with enough control, you could keep them separate, and treat them differently, by using one number not tied to any device or service provider. And with their very slick software.

I shot this demo at GrandCentral's Fremont, California, headquarters earlier this month. It stars Craig Walker (CEO in the dark blue shirt) and Vincent Paquet (COO in the pale blue shirt). 2.5 minutes.

In the video:

1. Craig calls Vincent's GrandCentral phone number.
2. Several of Vincent's phones ring.
3. Vincent picks the desk phone and puts the call on speaker.
4. Vincent listens to Craig leaving a voice mail. (You'll hear some echo and latency because you're hearing Craig speak in the room and his voice through the speakerphone at the same time.)
5. Vincent decides to take the call.
6. Vincent presses a key code and joins Craig in the important call. If Vincent didn't take the call, Craig would have continued leaving his voice mail message.
7. Craig explains whey sometimes he wants to take calls from Mrs. Walker and sometimes he doesn't.

From a user view:

• GrandCentral restores call screening, a feature we haven't had since answering machines.
• It shows a call to one GrandCentral number rings on all of your phones.
• Call screening controls incoming calls, the better to manage your time, your privacy and your relationships.

Other notes:

• GC numbers are free.
• GC works from any phone, nothing to download.
• The magic engine behind this lets you do things like transfer a call from one phone (like my Cingular mobile running out of battery power) to another (like my charged Verizon mobile) in mid-call.
• Like Iotum, you can define rules for how to handle incoming calls in a web control panel. You tailor caller experiences and routing. You can tailor for a specific person, or have GC apply rules based on groups the caller belongs to (like family), time of day, or even challenge and response.
• GC's web interface to voicemail rocks. Everyone should take note and steal the ideas liberally.
• The magic is courtesy of their proprietary soft switch. Everything else in their business extracts value from having such a scalable, smart switch.

It's a small Skype promotion for a good cause. The Food Network, a US cable channel, and Skype are auctioning video calls with chefs Emeril Lagasse (a charming New Orleans favorite, known for saying "let's turn things up a notch" and "Bamm!!!!") and Bobby Flay (telegenic with a tough New York attitude). Proceeds benefit a charity to fight hunger and poverty. Bid on eBay until 3 December for a 7 December call, and get some kitchen tutoring and troubleshooting before you dive into Christmas cooking.

Video is the difference, and a clue to Skype's positioning in 2007. Don Albert told me Skype is emphasizing qualitative features over price in the United States. This contrasts Skype with cable and Vonage VoIP: Skype does video, those don't. 

Darn. Now I'm hungry.

Skype moved marketing functions from countries back to London in a reorganization announced yesterday. About 40 of the 516 people working at Skype worldwide are affected, 26 of those shifting roles or locations and 14 who are leaving or who have yet to find another job at Skype or another eBay company.

Skype doubled its headcount this year, hiring 298 people since 1 January. Henry Gomez, Skype's global marketing officer, told Skype Journal the recentralization of marketing will improve message clarity, help Skype marketing move more quickly, and engage more marketing personnel in product decisions.

The 40 people affected by the reorganization were from across the company, touching all regions and departments. Skype's job site lists 17 vacancies: 8 in Tallinn, Estonia (coolest job ad word of the month: "anechoic"); 7 in London, 1 in the United States; and two elsewhere in Europe.

In separate moves, Saul Klein, former marketing executive, left Skype but continues to consult on eCommerce and advanced projects and can still be seen in the Skype London corridors. James Bilefield, former business development director and general manager for Europe, also left the company.

by Ike Roelfsema,  Varras Consultantcy, Skype Lifestyle blogger and Skype Forum moderator.

Only a few minutes ago, Jan van der Zwaag, Managing Director at Tracer Systems Heerenveen (Holland), finished the integration of Skype.

Tracer Systems has developed a single, fully integrated flexible cross platform CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and HRM (Human Resource Management) solution to assist customers in keeping their competitive advantage. The possibilities are endless.

Jan van der Zwaag used a plugin developed by the Swedish company Premium. [download the Filemaker Skype plugin.]

With Tracer you can now call your contacts in Skype for free.

For external calls, the user of your database needs a SkypeOut account.

You can answer a call from Tracer and automatically search for the caller in your database.

To receive external calls, the user needs a SkypeIn account.

Features in this plugin:

• Call a contact
• Answer a call
• Send voicemails
• List available voicemails
• List missed, received or made calls
• Chat inside of Tracer using Skype
• Start a conference call

Jan used me as a test-bunny and it worked just perfect. The chats and calls are saved in Tracer under the client and business relation tabs. Even recording voicemails is possible.

Great job and another proof that Skype is a useful business tool!!

Don't get me wrong, I love Skype. It's saved me a fortune, and is way more convenient than the alternatives.

But sometimes it lets me down. Yesterday, I was expecting an important SkypeIn call at 4pm. Never came. I was online, for sure. Finished work after 5pm.

This morning when I log on at 3am (hello jetlag), I get the voicemail from that person -- timed at 4.15pm yesterday. So it never rang, and I didn't get notification of the voicemail. Annoying.

I've also had problems with conference call quality at times. SkypeOut isn't as good as BT's VoIP voice quality. SkypeIn is generally pretty good though.

What this is telling me is that the field is wide open for competition in the small-medium business space. And a telco brand could be just as good as an Internet one. I don't mind paying for business-class quality -- I just need something that works at a reasonable price. There are additional feature like web conferencing (synchronised Powerpoint, desktop sharing) that need to be in there too.

PS - Downloaded Sightspeed this morning. Looks like a nice product, but they make the users jump through far too many hoops to get going.

You can miss Martin just as often at the Telepocalypse.

This is the third of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In the first post I outlined the problem; in the second post I proposed a proven solution; in this third post I want to review the recent Skype beta releases (3.0 for WIndows, 2.5 for Mac) and Skype's 3 Group partnering activity with respect to the proposed solution.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness? .... Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, 1964

One primary objective of public relations is to leverage media reporters, including bloggers, to provide an outside perspective on the subject matter of press releases, product announcements and corporate presentations at, say, industry events and to propagate corporate awareness through corporate interviews.  In turn, media reporters want to feel both sufficiently informed and experienced to have the background for providing objective, accurate and complete coverage while making assessments of the impact of a story.

Personally I prefer to report based on exposure to a product, not just a press release. I have also found interviews with senior executives (usually the CEO, one of whose roles is to be the Chief Company Salesperson) an opportunity to flesh out details that can make a more viable and credible story. I have also had a couple of executives point out that I have brought to their attention issues that they subsequently realized should be addressed in their public announcement.

Over the past two weeks we have seen four major press releases involving Skype: Skype 3.0 for Windows Beta Launch, Skype for  Windows - Business version, Skype for Mac 2.5 beta launch and Skype's participation in 3Groups' new X-Series program. The result has left behind a very mixed image of what Skype is offering and the direction it is taking. The first post in this series exposes some of this confusion; the second post proposes a cost effective solution that can help narrow, or even avoid, the confusion..

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Technology and Products

1. MobiGater GSM-to-Skype gateway, plugs into your PC, passes Skype calls to your mobile phone. Also lets you speed dial your Skype buddies from your mobile, ringing them on Skype. From Bulgaria to 20 countries

2. Accessing Skype APIs with Ruby. Pretty easy, if you know the Ruby programming language.

3. Moodgeist pinger for Linux. The better to let the universe know how you're feeling. Even if you're using Linux.

4. 10 Things to Know About Skype Ap2Ap Programming. Read this before you code. Adrian Cockroft.

5. Skype on Solaris. More Sun bloggers spread the word.

6. US Robotics' webcam. Is the 9640 cheaper (at $40) and smaller than the Logitech Fusion?

Advanced topics

1. Project San Dimas, an experimental eBay desktop, built on the Adobe Apollo platform using web services. Congrats to eBay's Alan Lewis.

2. Nokia: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones. "Nokia researchers are working on a system that allows physical objects to be identified and connected to the Internet through mobile-phone screens."

3. MashupU. Anyone from the Skype developer community available to teach at MIT, 15-16 January 2007?

4. Everything is Miscellaneous lecture. David Weinberger's speech mp3 (46:53, 22.5 MB) at the Scottish Learning Festival.

5. Cooperation Commons. Research project by the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold to study cooperation and collective action.

6. A Voluntarily Loosely Organized Organization. How does Skype support emergent management practices?

Business

1. Boom when UAE's Etisalat opens up to Skype? Skype Wi-Fi phone vendor Belkin is hoping UAE lifts Skype ban sooner than later.

2. Death of the phone company: "There will be a custom communications experience generated dynamically for every context, and it may be personalised for the individual communicators."

3. Death of Skype: Australian ISP: "Skype packets, in the world that we are heading to, will be able to be seen by all telcos and all telcos will have the capacity to prioritise or de-prioritise those packets."

4. ISP Xtra: No Skype shaping. Computerworld: Despite terms of service which allow it,

   Telecom's retail ISP Xtra says there is no rate-limiting for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, contrary to reports in the media and complaints in web and Usenet forums. "Applications such as Skype can be used," Xtra spokeswoman Lenska Papich says. No traffic management is applied to Skype, she adds.

5. The future is bright .. The future is 3 .. How 3's switch to flat rates for mobile data unleashes explosive growth. Great essay, by Ajit Jaokar, about taking down the "walled garden" (controlling everything in the ecosystem) in favor of an Open Garden. via John Furrier.

6. WordPress follows SixApart and SocialText into Corporate IT. SixApart needs this: one enterprise vendor is a novelty, four is a market. See also Traction and Blogtronix. Skype may benefit from enterprise adoption of other social media like blogs and wikis if they jump on the knowledge management and collaboration memes, and further integrate Skype into blogs.

7. Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever. Skype is number 9. Others: Hotmail, MySimon, BlueMountain, Lycos, Netscape, GeoCities, Excite, AOL, and Broadcast.com. A hard meme to kill.

8. The Peanut Butter Manifesto. Yahoo!'s Brad Garlinghouse rocks. Messenger's executive sponsor bets his career on focusing Yahoo!

This is the second of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In the first post I outlined the problem; in this second post I am proposing a proven solution; in the third post I want to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution.

Drawing from my management experience over the past couple of decades involving business public relations activities, from both a marketing and investor communications perspective, I think Skype can enhance both its market awareness and usage leveraging the enthusiasm, interests and various perspectives bloggers have the power to introduce into the market.  I have had employers who tried to ignore the need for PR (and dealt with the fallout) and others who were viewed as overly aggressive in their PR activities. But the one constant, both prior to and following the Internet's evolution as a business communications medium is that PR is about building relationships -- not only with your customers and users but also with those who have the potential to propagate the message, whether through traditional media or web-based media, such as blogging.

First three general comments:

• In the pre-Internet days, for every major software product launch at one of my previous employers, we sent out a team of product managers, executives and PR personnel to conduct individual press interviews. This took significant resources out of the office for up to two weeks. And then we had the overhead of delivering and supporting pre-release software prior to the launch such that reporters could write up their impressions based on actual experience. With VoIP and Internet-based real time communications, software distribution and feedback tools all such costs and overhead effectively go away.

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This is the first of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In this post I want to outline the problem; in the second to propose a proven solution:in the third post I want to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution. .

If you follow the VoIP blogosphere at all, you may notice that certain products and services, when introduced, get a lot of coverage such that readers can quickly assess if there could be followup interest.  SightSpeed and TalkPlus, whose beta program launches today, are two examples; this did not happen by accident. In both cases, while bloggers are open to make their own observations there is an underlying consistency of message as to what the service provides and what are the key features. SightSpeed focuses on high quality realtime and asynchronous video communications while TalkPlus focuses on delivering a means to manage your phone number infrastructure in a manner that protects individual privacy while providing helpful business and social networking tools.

On the other hand I have done a review of various blogger posts on the Skype 3.0 Beta launch; here is the original press release and a sampling of the initial "first impressions" posts (Ed: with my bolds):

Gizomodo:

The big new feature is browser extensions for IE and Firefox that let you embed SkypeOut links into web pages. ... The re-designed toolbar, contacts and call tabs look much easier to use. And Skype also added moderated public chat features, which makes me all wistful for IRC.

Skype Numerology

Nov. 9: Skype 3.0 beta released. And indeed, the differences between the previous version 2.6.0.105 and the 3.0.0.106 are (from my point of view) quite small, see the change log.

Nov. 11: Mea Culpa: My mistake (see my post below), Skype 3.0 has indeed quite some new features, as explained on the Skype website and in Skype Journal.

Tech Crunch UK

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After living in process-server exile for years, it must feel good to be free to travel stateside again.

• Elinor Mills (closest to a transcript): 'Skypecasts' coming to your blog soon
• Dan Farber: More from the Web 2.0 Summit.
• Alec Saunders: Skype 3.0: Transfer or no?
• Reuters: Skype tests new features in bid to diversify sales
• Doug Dockery: Skypecasts (Or Who Needs A Phone?)
• 21talks: Soon, more Skype to come
• Bobbie Johnson: Web 2.0: Niklas Zennstrom, Skype
• Eric Savitz: Niklas Zenstrom Gets A Big Laugh.

"An audience member asks, with an ironic tone, why Zenstrom, who has a tendency to spurn convention and do what he wants to do with out regard for conventional business practices - thus his creation of both Skype and Kazaa - decided to sell his company to eBay (EBAY) last year.

Zenstrom: "It was a great fit."

Audience of hundreds of Web investors and entrepreneurs: Peels of hearty laughter.

by Hudson Barton

Skype's concurrent users online just hit 8 million. We can therefore expect to see breathless reports about the number of days it took to get another million and how long it is going to take to get another. But these are not useful measurements of Skype's success. Skype doesn't give us much information, but there are better ways of interpreting the data we have than looking at the peak of the graph.

Skype usage at the peak time (around 16 GMT) is a combination mainly of European users and users in the eastern half of America. These are two of Skype's largest populations and they are online concurrently. Measuring at this peak has become the standard measurement of Skype growth, but it is not very useful. I prefer to measure at other times.

Skype usage in Europe (and Africa) is best reflected with data sampled at 11-12 GMT, before America's work day starts. American (North and South) usage is seen most accurately at 19-20 GMT. Asian (and Pacific) data should be sampled at 2-3 GMT. At each of these three points in time, the influence of one continent is maximized while the influence of the other two continents is minimized. Of course, Skype usage on the three continents is not perfectly segregated by this method (because some users stay online for extended periods), but it is segregated enough to use for comparison purposes.

This method of measurement permits one to analyze Skype growth in ways that are not possible when one looks only at the peak number. One can see for example a difference in growth rates between the continents. Or by comparing the rates of growth on specific weekdays and weekend days one can discern whether growth on each continent is being driven by business usage or non-business usage.

I have been measuring Skype usage in this way for about a month (my historical data is supplied by Jean Mercier, "The Skype Numerologist."). In a few more months of detailed daily measurement, we will be able to conclude much more than we can presently.

So what can we conclude from the data so far? On this day of surpassing the meaningless waypoint of 8 million concurrent users online, let's just say this: Historically, Skype usage in Europe has slightly underpaced that of America and Asia. In more recent months, this trend has continued and perhaps accelerated.

Note: Two factors are at play in the data; the actual number of active users and the user's average time online. It is difficult to distinguish which factor is driving "concurrent users online".

eBay North America expands Skype buttons in seven more categories, for a total of 24 catgories.

"AuctionBytes has not seen signs of wide adoption of Skype click-to-call buttons in eBay listings."

Money talks. And eBay sellers listen.

Most I've met love being able to squeeze all their customer encounters into email and eBay forms; they really hate interruptions or wasted time. I wouldn't go so far as to call them antisocial... Most, especially those who sell part time, need to fit eBay into the rest of a busy life.

The eBay forums for Skype switched from overwhelming doubt last summer (should we or shouldn't we?) to demands for access and questions about using Skype buttons to drive sales.

As more powersellers stand up and testify that Skype buttons means cash, Skype will continue to spread at a natural, unhurried pace. It feels really slow to me, but unforced and comfortable. This may improve retention as those that adopt Skype buy-in and stick with it.

Skype's CEO is speaking at Europe's largest blogger conference, 11-12 December. I'm sure he'll demo Skype 3.0's one blogging feature. It's nice, but neither jaw dropping or disruptive, especially given this crowd's sophistication.

Blogpulse tracks how much the blogosphere mentions a topic or brand. The unit of measure is percent of blogs that mention the keywords or an url. Nielsen BuzzMetric's blogpulse is slightly biased toward English language blogs although many blogs in other languages are represented.

In October 2004, Skype was mentioned in .015 to .020 percent of blogs.

In March 2005, Skype buzz was in the .045 range, doubling in six months.

Now Skype is in the .07 to .08 range, doubled in 18 months, with frequent spikes over .09 percent.

The chart above shows Skype's modest growth over the last six months. The bottom curve is "VoIP". When I first started looking at both of them, they overlapped. They used VoIP to explain Skype. Now they are mostly separate; Skype has its own identity independent of VoIP.

Just for comparison: Paris Hilton (.075), Harry Potter (.2), iPod (.5), election (.65), Iraq (.7) and sex (1.4%). From a marketing perspective, the new blogging service Vox is stable at .1 after launching its preview in August; Coke (.225, including all uses of the term) and Pepsi (.1).

GigaOM today reported on Vonage's latest results: new subscribers down, churn is up, ARPU is down, subscriber acquisition costs up.  All indicators going in the wrong direction; in fact, one could say that Vonage continues to dig its own hole (as predicted here and here).

Maybe Vonage's board could use Vonage's latest service announced yesterday: calling 811 for assistance in digging holes. Hat tip to Garrett Smith at VoIP Supply for digging up this story.

Questions this raises:

• Should not the FCC be developing e811 regulations? From the press release:
  • Note that 811 access depends on its availability within your area. States set their own timelines and procedures on when to call. In some states it is the law to call before you dig. Subscribers should check with their state and local governments for further information.
• Is there a Vonage VP who became totally confused when he heard about Digg.com as a "user driven social content website"?

But we'll all know when Skype is getting desperate - when they start stating: "Skype is not a telephony replacement service and cannot be used to dial 811 or other hole digging assistance phone numbers".

Powered by Qumana

The first new idea I've seen in a long time on the stale network neutrality debate came from following a comment to this post (whose conclusion doesn't match the quotation -- if big enterprises want to waste shareholder capital on me, please bring it on!). Anyhow, here's the deal:

The false dichotomy of net neutrality, and the Tariff Rebate Passthrough solution

...and the nutshell version from the previous comment:

The idea is Tariff Rebate Passthrough -- i.e., the ISP can charge by byte for QOS (but only by byte) and the information service provider (Google) can rebate the costs directly to the consumer (but only to the consumer). This works because it meets the need to pay for differentiated QOS, without letting the telecom companies' control over that payment become actual control over content. I.e., all the good parts of net neutrality are preserved, but there's no need to give something costly away for free.

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VoIP Now wrote yesterday that "Skype's closed protocol seems to be ruffling feathers everywhere" as he mentioned Jordan's brief Skype ban.

It's a question of whose feathers are ruffled, I think.

First, you have those protecting economic interests, like phone companies and those who tax long distance calls. They'll get over it when they bring their own rival solutions to market or when consumer demand is overwhelming.

Second, you have those opposed to encryption (and secret speech) in the public's hands, like law enforcement, intelligence and internal security agencies. If they can't kill Skype when it's small, they'll wait for a monsterous event they can blame on Skype's security.

Third, there are people paid to be control freaks who run private networks. It's their job to be skeptical about new things, to protect and nurture their information and communications infrastructure. They get over their anxieties as the true nature of useful tools becomes clear and they learn to bring deployment of new tools under daily and lifecycle management.

For all of these "hostile" parties, Skype's biggest enemies are the apathetic, the millions of people who're saturated to the point they don't want to try new channels of communication.

This is Skype's breakaway marketing challenge in every market. Yes, Skype will compete against other VoIM products, but that's straightforward and more of the same. The real challenge will be getting those who live offline to come online, joining the 21st Century's social fabric, using Skype as they come online. And to convince mobile lifestylers to blend Skype into their communication habits. Both are very hard marketing challenges, like getting tea drinkers to switch to coffee, or futbol fans to embrace chess. Skype is doing its bit with free trials, but it's a long game, just beginning.

Naked Conversations co-author (with Robert Scoble) Shel Israel and American-converted-to-Canadian VC and blogger Rick Segal (and our former Microsoft evangelist when I was at Quarterdeck) are currently traveling through Europe. With an objective of learning about Europeans who have been bitten by the technology development bug, as well as about the integration of technology into European societies,. Shel is planning to write another book, Global Neighborhoods, while Rick may be seeking out new ventures that would complement current ones funded by  J.L.Albright Venture Partners.

Yesterday they met with Sten Tamkivi, Skype's 28-year-old COO learning about Skype's strategy, vision and operations.

The core of that strategy, according to Sten, is Skype 's intention to increasingly derive revenue from non-telephony services such as text, SMS and video.

"Very few VOIP services do not compare themselves to Skype." That means they are positioned to follow not lead. "Skype is more focused on staying ahead by focusing on its own opportunities," he told us..

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One of the "joys" of being a US-controlled public company is that SEC requires the breakout of International from domestic sales. So today's 3rd quarter report from eBay provides some information that allows us to look at Skype registrations coming from the U.S.

With over double the registrations from two quarters ago, it certainly demonstrates that the free SkypeOut within North America is probably helping to build some traction but Skype remains essentially a non-US business with over 84% of registrants outside the US. This is corroborated when you compare the % revenue increase with the % user increase; certainly some of the difference can be attributed to absence of revenue for SkypeOut calls within US/Canada.

The results are even more impressive when you consider there has been very limited marketing of Skype within North America - Phil has noticed some media ads in the Bay Area; there are some Skype ads on the eBay website.

These results also reveal some other interesting information:

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I'm on holiday, but I'll post more from last week's Internet Telephony Conference and Expo. The photo in the masthead is of a mad rush into the exhibit hall's opening night.

It was bizarre for me, all VoIP but almost no Skype in the hall, and none in the official program. This conference brings VoIP resellers and enterprise buyers (seen above) to the exhibitors, corporate VoIP toolmakers. Skype, as far as these folks are concerned, is in another industry, consumer VoIP, and not their business. Mostly, the exhibitors and speakers don't even mention Skype because their clients haven't bought or sold millions of dollars of Skype products.

The funny part: a number of vendors are pitching Skype-like functionality. Centralized and well domesticated, of course, but some blend of presence, IM, voice, video, and other collaboration. But few in the room (or with checkbooks) seem to buy value-added-VoIP. Most see VoIP as long distance bypass and little more.

And most don't know that VoIM is being smuggled into their workplaces by team leaders and expatriots and the adventurous. By parents with kids and lovers who want privacy. Skype is spreading in typical disruptor style like faxes and personal computers. If this conference is any indication, this wave of new behavior is well below the radar of nearly all IT and telephony vendors.

Web 1.0: Lots of websites which offer personalised portals with domain names like "my.foo-inc.com".

Web 2.0: Shouldn't we see lots more sites with domains like "our.corporate-inc.com"? Their absence speaks volumes.

Exercise for the reader: is it possible to transition an institution from control to co-creation of value, or can you only build such edifices on greenfield sites? Or to be more blunt and specific, does the journey from Telco 1.0 to Telco 2.0 on average require the capital and goodwill to be split apart and re-cycled via the bankruptcy courts or distressed asset sales?

Martin thinks aloud at Telepocalypse.

I have just been asked to moderate a Round Table at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa next Monday; Topic: the Future Visions for Telecom. Recently there have appeared three posts that provide a foundation for discussion of the subject:

First, James Enck, a highly respected telecom analyst and blogger, based in London, posted details of his keynote presentation last week, Ten Things I Hate About You, at Telco 2.0 in London  James has developed a strategic framework around which he sees the future of telecom:

• Telcos have lost control of their core product
• Voice is becoming a feature, not a service
• Telcos can't grasp that consumers may not want what they're being sold
• Telcos thrive on scarcity - future value will be built around abundance
• Command and control culture is dead, open API's rule
• Telco DNA is fundamentally unsuited to the current dynamics of content
• Telcos expand their footprints physically, not virtually
• Telcos can't innovate
• Telcos shouldn't try to innovate
• Maybe the entire foundation is wrong

Definitely a landmark post. So what should the foundation of telecom become? Alec Saunders presents a first anniversary update on his Voice 2.0 Manifesto:

The customer experience predicted by the Voice 2.0 Manifesto is not of a single carrier, but rather of three classes of entities - access, directory, and applications.  As a customer, you'll pay to be part of the network, you may pay for an identity (and this is an idea who's time will come, although it's hard to see today), and you'll pay for applications that that help you communicate in a diverse number of ways.  This is a very different model from the traditional, vertically integrated, communications network.

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I have just been asked to moderate a Round Table at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa next Monday; Topic: the Future Visions for Telecom. Recently there have appeared three posts that provide a foundation for discussion of the subject:

First, James Enck, a highly respected telecom analyst and blogger, based in London, posted details of his keynote presentation last week, Ten Things I Hate About You, at Telco 2.0 in London  James has developed a strategic framework around which he sees the future of telecom:

• Telcos have lost control of their core product
• Voice is becoming a feature, not a service
• Telcos can't grasp that consumers may not want what they're being sold
• Telcos thrive on scarcity - future value will be built around abundance
• Command and control culture is dead, open API's rule
• Telco DNA is fundamentally unsuited to the current dynamics of content
• Telcos expand their footprints physically, not virtually
• Telcos can't innovate
• Telcos shouldn't try to innovate
• Maybe the entire foundation is wrong

Definitely a landmark post. So what should the foundation of telecom become? Alec Saunders presents a first anniversary update on his Voice 2.0 Manifesto:

The customer experience predicted by the Voice 2.0 Manifesto is not of a single carrier, but rather of three classes of entities - access, directory, and applications.  As a customer, you'll pay to be part of the network, you may pay for an identity (and this is an idea who's time will come, although it's hard to see today), and you'll pay for applications that that help you communicate in a diverse number of ways.  This is a very different model from the traditional, vertically integrated, communications network.

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Those handsome guys at the big CES booth in the Skype Journal banner are from a startup called YapperNut. I coulda sworn I wrote them up last January but a quick search didn't pull it up. Fresh out of Stanford engineering (some of them not even out of school), they started YapperNut to create products for Skype.

First came Amy, one of the first answering machines for Skype, and still a very nice and free program. It was the first add-in to screen incoming calls based on the caller's social proximity, leading Iotum by more than a year. Amy offered voice messaging before Skype's. Skype still doesn't have scheduled voice transmissions or office hours that direct calls to voice mail when you're sleeping, a feature Skype still doesn't have.

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One of the toughest challenges I encountered in managing the Canadian operations of a PC hardware and, later, PC software vendor was to ensure that customer support flows seamlessly between the resellers and the vendor. It is the responsibility of the vendor to set up training and support programs that provide appropriate tools for the reseller but it is also the responsibility of the reseller to ensure that all its support employees get the proper training and support policies in place such that problems can be either resolved or elevated appropriately in a timely manner. Now I know the reseller support people take pride in their ability to solve a problem; however, when the going gets tough they need to understand when to elevate a problem beyond their experience and resources. And to a large degree it is the responsibility of the reseller's management to define that line within their support policies and then to communicate it effectively to their support reps.

The same applies when it comes to mobile devices sold through the wireless carriers. Andy Abramson (VoIP Watch) seems to have encountered a situation where a T-Mobile carrier rep just did not know when to escalate and persisted in tying up Andy's time when in fact the problem was beyond her/his skills and resources. So he spends almost three hours on a Saturday morning talking with a T-Mobile support rep trying to restore his Blackberry into service when after fifteen to twenty minutes it would have been obvious, in this case, to escalate the problem back to a RIM support person.

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Not much to do with Skype but I have just watched (via my Slingbox) the press conference where it was announced officially that Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion, has signed an agreement to purchase the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. Jim's comments were interrupted at one point as his Blackberry phone rang (even in Silent mode mics will pick up the rf signal coming in and "buzz" nearby speakers). At the end photographers were taking pics of him holding his Blackberry with a Penguins logo on the display. (He spent most of the press conference saying he was committed to the previous owners' commitments to a new arena in Pittsburgh.)

I have been lucky enough to have had some behind the scenes exposure to hockey as a business (my neighbor's son plays for the Boston Bruins); as a RIM shareholder for the past eight years I have been watching Jim (along with Mike Lazaradis, Co-CEO) demonstrate how to build and operate a very successful high tech business.  (Who else can take a patent settlement and get more marketing buzz than any traditional marketing campaign costing the same amount?) It will be interesting to observe how Jim adapts to the professional sports culture and what contribution he can bring to professional sports in terms of business expertise and acumen. Jim has always been approachable and has integrity beyond reproach. (Maybe HP should recruit him to restore their image?) At this year's annual meeting he took time to give me a personal demonstration of the new Blackberry Maps GPS-based navigation feature that will be available this fall (yes, it will retrofit to more recent older models). His enthusiasm is infectious.

While most of the local press will speculate on whether he will move the Penguins to Hamilton, Ontario (it won't happen -- remember I said Jim has good business acumen), I wonder how long it will be before Penguins games become available on your Blackberry. Now there would be a revenue generator for the service providers and RIM gets some fraction of all that service provider revenue. And if they got to the Stanley Cup finals, the traffic demand could bring down the (at least Canadian) wireless networks! (I did watch one period of last spring's finals via my Slingbox during an intermission at a theatrical performance.)

And, let's face it, Jim is living the Canadian dream. How often will we find high tech entrepreneurs who can build their business virtually from scratch  to a level where they can own their own NHL franchise?

Now if we could just get a Skype client onto the Blackberry!

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Last weekend Netralia launched Version 2 of Skylook - a tool that links Skype to that ubiquitous contact management and email tool, Outlook 2000/XP/2003, and extends facets of the Skype experience to your mobile phone. In an interview with Jeremy Hague, Skylook's CEO, I learned that Skylook is rapidly becoming a key business tool for that 30% of users who use Skype in business. Key points include:

• over 60% (and rising) of Skylook licenses are known to be for business use;
• its major appeal is to hard core Skype users
• its business users have as many as 15,000 contacts in Outlook
• its US$99.95 per year per user price tag includes a 12 months 24 hour response time support warranty as well as all updates during this period

While working with Outlook, Skylook 2 also introduces audio technology for several key features, incorporates enhanced SMS messaging into Skype's Instant Messaging features and uses Skype's API's to forward voice and email messages to your mobile phone. In the image above I have "wrapped' the toolbar to show all its features. Skylook 2 offers six key functions:

• Communicate with Outlook Contacts: for instance, you can even send an SMS message to any Outlook contact, including those who do not have a Skype account, provided they have a mobile phone
• Record Skype calls (with several new features in Skylook 2.0 - the subject of a separate post - ideal for creating podcasts using Skype)
• Alerts and Forwarding: a totally new feature that will be the subject of a separate post.
• Answering Machine provides full voice mail functionality
• Archiving and organizing all your communications: emails, IM sessions, SMS activity and voice mails.
• Synchronize your Outlook and Skype Contacts.

Skylook has a more detailed outline of its functions on its web site along with links to examples of how several features work.

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By now you've read the BusinessWeek interview with Janus Friis and Om Malik's interview with Friis. The Venice Project is Friis and Zenstrom's video play. We still can't believe eBay let them build this outside of Skype. As I wrote in July, The Venice Project steals an opportunity from SkypeBay by not building video distribution into Skype's network. The whole point of Skypenomics was to bring eBay (c2c cash-for-atoms) into the intangibles economy.

21talks sees the problem when asking: "Does it mean that sharing TV content could be already available through Skype and its video functionality? At an average quality and requiring a small to medium size bandwidth. Is their next move to combine the Skype's, Kazaa's and Venice Project's networks to enhance the general quality of service of the service?" Sorry, but the few indications say no.

They are designing this new network to follow the money, fitting its rules and architecture to the special needs of the content producers and advertisers. I'm sure they won't have any problem lining up anchor tenants like television channels and movie archives for their DRM'd TV streaming network. If you want a taste of the TVP experience, sign up for a very limited Beta Test of the client.

I can only hope eBay owns a little of Baaima N.V., the Netherlands Antilles limited company doing business as The Venice Project.

While well-known as Canada's capital and, for hockey fans, as home of the NHL's Ottawa Senators, the Ottawa region has transformed itself over the past quarter century into Canada's high tech capital (dare I say Silicon Valley North?). Ottawa is headquarters for Mitel, Corel, and Versatel Networks (amongst others), hosts significant facilities for Nortel, JDS Uniphase (the JDS part), Alcatel (formerly Newbridge Networks) and a major Dell support center, and is a breeding ground for many high tech startups, especially in the telecommunications sector. Under the sponsorship of OCRI,  Ottawa is the site of a new conference - Voice 2.0: beyond telecom - a week from Monday (October 16).

"There is a great need for a venue where practitioners at the forefront of building next-generation communications networks and applications can get a broad perspective on the changes in telecom," said Ross MacLeod, Voice 2.0's conference host. "Voice 2.0 will provide an environment where attendees can share experiences that will speed the adoption of leading technologies and practices in the sector."

As one primer check out Alec Saunders post: Voice 2.0 A Year Later.

Skype Journal will be there and reporting on the activities. Check out the agenda. If you are interested in attending you can register via their website. (Hint: check out Terry Matthews' Brookstreet Hotel. They serve a great Sunday brunch if you arrive a day early and want to work in some pre-conference golf.)

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[Yes, I know it's Sunday! But I started to write this up Friday.]

The past couple of weeks has seen much higher visibility for attempts to duplicate the landline long distance calling revolution generated by VoIP technology in the wireless space.

First Jajah launched Jajah Mobile at DEMO Fall 2006, where a Jajah client on your mobile phone redirects any calls starting with, say, "+" or "00" via a VoIP-enabled  backend. Your cell phone sends dialing instructions via either a SMS message or a GPRS over-the-air data service to trigger calls which bridge your phone and the called party. The beauty of this plan is that it does allow you to continue using the standard dialing algorithm; however, there can be a 20 to 30 second pause while the bridge is established. Almost simple but not all the way there. Alec Saunders provides a more detailed discussion; Russell Shaw has nine reasons why it is not a threat to neither mobile carriers nor VoIP service providers; Luca agrees; Alec rebuts.

In a trial using my Jajah-supported Nokia N70, I found that the GPRS/EDGE/3G connection worked whereas via the SMS service it did not perform satisfactorily. It does have a problem recognizing that long distance calls to within North America ("+1") should be handled via Jajah.  They have assumed a U.S.-centric model where it is probably just as cost effective to use the various fixed monthly rate all-you-can-use plans available through U.S. mobile carriers; the Canadian mobile space is one where we still pay 10 to 25 cents per minute for long distance calls outside a local calling area. With their primary focus on the U.S. market Jajah Mobile sends all North American calls via the underlying wireless service, not the Jajah Mobile backend. To correct this they need to differentiate between US and Canadian phone numbers.  (This is easily done; Skype users may note that flags associated with "+1" phone numbers differentiate between Canadian and US area codes.) Calls using the SMS connection need some more work by the Jajah people to get the software right; Alec tells me they are aware of the issue and working on it.

Another service introduced at DEMO Fall 2006, Grand Central, offers "One Number for Life" designed to aggregate all your phone activities, including voice mail, ring tones, call blocking, call redirection and call recording. Unfortunately since it's only available in certain area codes in the U.S. the economic argument only works in the U.S. However, to get two sides of the picture read the comments by Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson who thinks "it rocks"; Ken Camp and Ted Wallingford who basically remind us not to forget the basics of consumer telephony and the potential of Voice 2.0 for the sustainability of its value-add. Ted sums it up with:

We need to focus on increasing ACTUAL functionality and lose the obsession with placing band-aids on the infrastructure of yesterday in order to save a half-cent a minute, which is the basis of these firms' business models. When clients ask me about VoIP, they always bring up carrier cost savings. That may've been the case in 2001, but it's getting tougher and tougher to make that case. So I switch them off of cost savings and turn them on to new ways of thinking about communications.

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Guest post by Hans Blaauw

Many many months ago I wrote a Skype plugin called Mood-o-Matic. It could retreive information from external databases and publish it in your mood. It was limited because Skype did not support clickable mood messages. Now they do!

There seems to be nothing in the EULA about what you are allowed to put in the Mood message (I just checked with some Skypers).

So in theory I could recruit 10000 popular people that are willing to display ads in their Moodmessage when they are away or busy. Imagine, each of these 10000 highly popular people have 25 other people in their list. That would make a interesting audience for advertising.

What if you would have the possibility to get free credits if you would put these ads in your Mood message, interesting?

It seems to me the Mood message can be used for many more things. What if it would support widgets from Widgetbox?

Niklas Zennström chalks up two year delay to "technical hurdles and a lack of suitable handsets" in a Reuters summary of a Helsingin Sanomat interview (registration required). Duh.

Absent any immediate threats, and after Monday's conference call with eBay's government affairs people, San Jose State University's University Computing and Telecommunications department (SJSU UCAT) said they will not ban Skype. [correction: it was Skype's government affairs person, not eBay's, on the conference call.]

I wasn't there, but if I were briefing them, I'd be telling them about:

• Skype's value to the University's academic mission. Bringing distant guest lecturers into the classroom, helping students collaborate on projects, improving language study, helping faculty to perform research and develop curriculum, curriculum delivery, sustaining family and social ties that support students far from home.
• Skype's popularity. It's great to make people happy. Skype is a small but growing hit with both SJSU faculty and students. The UCAT office had many calls after the student newspaper's first article. And there's overwhelming popularity and demand for Skype worldwide.
• Little budget effect. Nice that it's free to get and use. Support costs are unknown. No known revenue impact (selling SkypeOut credit at the campus bookstore?)
• Configuring Skype to run through your proxy service to get through the firewall. So Skype clients deal with the firewall in a known and managed way. And so Skype's activity and effect on the network may be monitored. Or shut down, if needed. Linux FAQ. Network administrator's guide (PDF).
• Intel's pilot of an IT-friendly release of Skype. It lets the IT department create a locked-down version of the Skype client. So they could turn off the ability to use Skype's file transfer feature, for example. Or configure all Skype clients to use a campus proxy server. A promise of things to come, and a gesture that Skype is listening to enterprise network managers.

This all happened in public, with lots of nasty name calling and bother. But UCAT's initial choice may not have been reconsidered without all the attention drawn to the decision.

More people Skype in Chinese than in English. One of eBay's justifications for buying Skype was help entering China's consumer-to-consumer ecommerce. Now rumors: eBay will sell its Chinese operations to Skype partner Tom.com. Or to Skype rival Tencent, maker of QQ. Or eBay buying Tencent. eBay doesn't comment on rumors.

QQ broke 20 million simultaneous users in June 2006, compared to Skype's 7 million. They have 549 million accounts (vs. Skype's 130), 224 million active IM accounts. And nearly all of QQ's users read Chinese and speak at least one Chinese language. Compared to Skype's language diversity this means QQ is comparatively ubiquitous in China.

A Tencent-Skype merger could work, at least on paper. This would blend Skype's technology, QQ's userbase, and Tencent's enterprise RTX and Tencent Messenger workplace messaging. Aside from the vital soft stuff like cultural-fit, the businesses and products might match up.  Who else might rapidly build Skype's markets and capabilities? More M&A consolidation to come? What does Skype need? How would you define critical mass and market dominance in 2008?

Mercora, presenting at Demo Fall, is showing off its IMRadio service. You download the client, build playlists and public folders, name your radio station, and start streaming. Share music among friends, "legally."  

Would you like to have these features be part of Skype? Or the network with your biggest list of buddies? Skype's brand as the leading voice-talking client could be part of a bigger meme: conversation with a shared experience. Like listening to music together, watching TV, barnraising in Second Life, reviewing an internal audit, or playing checkers. Together.

Most of the technology is in Skype now. So it's a marketing focus question. Does this build on Skype's core brand notes? Could it help US consumers try Skyping?

What other businesses are adjacent to Skype's? I keep coming back to labor markets, so more on that next week.

Yesterday Andy posted a reference to an article in today's San Jose Mercury News about various new "mobile lifestyle" companies that want to change the way we are using phones. But Michael Arrington has made an excellent point in stating that:

A bunch of VOIP services have launched to help people make cheaper calls from normal phones. None of them are compelling for the mass market.

The question any VC's need to ask when considering funding of any of these startups is "How do you intend to readily migrate these services into the mass market?".  This is a market that fundamentally picks up a handset, "dials" a number (or looks it up in an embedded directory to dial) and makes contact with the called party. Unless it can perform this basic simple algorithm for establishing a voice connection, additional services and features become technology showcases without hope for any mass adoption (and all the associated revenue opportunities).

Over the past three months I have had the opportunity to use the VoIPVoice UConnect when in my office and their CyberSpeaker W Skype phone when on the road. (Both use the same driver software and start with a standard telephone keypad user interface.) Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to preview what is coming out this fall in cordless phones. As mentioned previously I am evaluating some relatively new wireless devices. Over the past year I have not had to pay more than 3 cents a minute for any landline long distance calls whether at home or on the road beyond any basic service fees (and since mid-May that has gone to zero for SkypeOut calls within North America).

The combined experiences have helped me establish a base line for the level of simplicity I would expect as we see the emergence of both cordless phones and wireless mobile devices that use or access Skype (and/or other VoIP-based services) while serving as a standard telephone handset:

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You invite some friends to a party at your home. While at the party, they sublet your home to strangers. You learn this after the strangers are throwing their own parties in your home and moving in, eating your food, dating your wife.

Although the plot is straight out of Madhouse (1990), I'm really talking about San José State University's network managers facing the reality of Skype adoption. In this metaphor:

• the student Skypers are the friends,

• the sublease is the Skype EULA,

• the strangers are the members of the Skype network,

• and side effects are:

  • a new thing to support without any planned budget,

  • unanticipated use of your networks,

  • unknown exposure to various risks on your master list.

This gets trickier when Skype's architecture (a blend of p2p and centralized services) isn't well understood beforehand.

Don Baker and Bob Neal are resisting proven defensive instincts. Before tossing out the scoundrels and locking the doors, they're inviting comment from campus stakeholders and building expertise by bringing an eBay/Skype person to a closed briefing on Tuesday. All the public attention doesn't make it easier to take a measured approach, so these SJSU University Computing and Telecom (UCAT) execs are showing great discipline.

If you want to learn more, and share your thoughts, Steve Sloan is hosting a discussion, open to the public, on Skype in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC). We'll be Skypecasting it too. I'll see you there.

How do you voice enable the whole web? With Adobe Flash. My host walks me into his tiny war room at Adobe North. The tables strewn with copies of VON magazine, and Sinnreich's Internet Communications Using SIP. The white board has an architectural map on the left, laying out the technologies he'll need to build, buy or partner, and revenue models for each. On the right he's listing interconnect standards for call termination.

The goal is audacious. Outside of Microsoft, however, Adobe may be the only place on the planet with a hope of making VoIP ubiquitous. My host, an Adobe entrepreneur in residence, is building a startup to "just add voice." And video. And conferencing. You know, voice 2.0.

He assumes Adobe makes platforms for developers, not end products. So he's looking at companies like Skype and Yahoo! as potential customers, not rivals. He wants to help them build applications without worrying about the telecom plumbing.

• The MySpaces of the world should be able to call their own directory services from Flash but let Flash make the connection.

• The Salesforce.coms should be able to design a video customer service widget without worrying about the cameras or the codecs.

• Amazons could create live chat rooms for clusters of related books without invading customer privacy or setting up data centers.

These businesses add value with their social networks, their workflows, and rapport with their communities. They don't want to be in the "Skype" business, just their own. Among other things, this means Adobe doesn't need to convince every user on Earth to get an Adobe ID; people will use existing namespaces.

Adobe builds on others' value by creating baseline, ubiquitous infrastructure. Making commodity features from expensive, risky, perishable, complex systems. It's a platforming strategy. If Adobe's growing voice team (open Senior Product Manager and Computer Scientist - VoIP) can make coding for calls simple and elegant, a million flash designers and developers will add it to their toolkits. Contrast that with the hundreds actively developing for the Skype API.

Adobe is already active in the telecom industry. They license flash to mobile phone manufacturers, promoting the Flash developer channel's flash apps to carriers. Some of the most compelling mobile experiences are courtesy of Flash designers. About 70 million devices have Flash embedded.

Flash is also important to the advertising industry. 77% of banner ads are in Flash, says Adobe. If you think click-to-call advertising has a future, wait until you have click-to-talk-with-a-satisfied-customer or click-to-join-the-concert-in-progress.

If the Masked Entrepreneur can make it work and sell it to his internal stakeholders, it will be part of the next major release of Flash in 18 months or so. Adobe says the "Flash player is installed on nearly 98% of Internet-connected desktops."

That's a short window for Skype and Microsoft to respond. Skype product management has pretty much deprioritized developer requests since Summer 2005 to plug into the Skype cloud via a "Naked Skype", "headless Skype" or "Skypenet." Skype could be offering web services and server software that cleanly plugs other systems into the Skype cloud. They aren't working on it according to several sources within Skype's development team. Will Adobe's signaling wake up Skype to the industry power of being not just a social network but the leading infrastructure provider? Skype management didn't return calls by post time.

My take:

1. Everyone is doing the right thing. Students sharing how they are using Skype now. IT managers learning everything they can about the technology, its risks, and opportunities. Faculty and staff researching best practices and comparing notes.
2. Ubiquity matters. The size of the Skype network should earn it a hearing. Telling people to use other "VoIP" products like Wengo or Gizmo, as UCSB did, is like trying to convince everyone to speak in Esperanto to protect the network. As Skype rolls into 200 million users next year, you have a good shot at finding people on the network.
3. Skype builds campus Social Capital and Capacity. A university education, if you do it right, builds social skills you need as a student and depend on in the workplace. Skype is the live, real-time counterpart to blogs, wikis, email, and other social media. Skype is becoming the way to "get things done" with others, the tool of choice for communication, collaboration, and coordination. And with Skype's cumulative history of your contacts and conversations, the more you use Skype, the more effective you are at team building and putting your social networks to use. The choice isn't whether or not to use VoIM on campus; it's mastering how to make the most of it.
4. The rationale against doesn't hold water. You might make effective cases against Skype, but the three points in the proposed policy misapply the University's regulations and policies and misinterpret Skype's license and the way the technology really works.

Five updates to our Monday story by Steve Sloan:

SJSU to grill Skype Security on Tuesday. Bob Neal (the Sr. Director in charge of the networks at SJSU) wrote to a San Jose State University (SJSU) student (who promptly blogged it, of course):

Andrew, we will be having discussions with EBAY (Skype) next week. Network security is not a debatable issue. If EBAY can not resolve our issues, Skype will be banned. Several other universities, including UCSB have already banned Skype. There are several alternative VOIP systems that comply with the Universities security policies ........bob neal

SJSU ban modeled on the UC Santa Barbara Skype ban. Here's the "Skype Prohibited at UCSB" policy (modified 1/30/2006) via the UCSB Office of Information Technology Network Policy and Procedures page. The language from SJSU's proposed policy ("UCAT Operating Practices document describing the reasons and details for blocking Skype," pdf) is lifted directly from UCSB's policy.

Student calls for student action. Andrew Venegas blogs for students to call Bob Neal, passing out his campus email and direct phone number.

"Here is where I am stumped... if network security is not a debatable issue, why are any P2P applications allowed on the networks at all? It would be rather easy to transfer viruses from computer to computer across such open networks. So why ban Skype without debate on the topic? Secondly, why would the University not want student input? After all, aren't they technically student networks?"

Making the case for Skype as Instructional Technology. "Save Skype at SJSU : This is a letter to my colleagues at SJSU." Steve Sloan's points:

1. Skype and podcasting are both useful and popular.
2. Bringing guest speakers and faculty into the classroom.
3. International research and study.
4. Language learning.
5. Keeping foreign students connected with their families.

Sloan frames this choice in terms of the University's educational mission. "In my opinion this will result in our being at a competitive (not to mention technological) disadvantage compared to other institutions of higher learning when it comes to emerging technology, research and collaboration. This act has potential high visibility, given our campus's geography, with potential negative publicity, exposure and fallout. It can affect our relations with our neighbors and potential business partners in a very negative way."

Mainstream Media Catching the Story. Reporter Elise Ackerman of the Mercury News newspaper would like to speak with international students using Skype. Call her via Skype, via email, or by phone at (408) 271-3774.

tags: skype, skypejournal, sjsu, calstate, california, sanjose, sanjosestateuniversity, banning, enterprise, csu, security, web2.0, voip, voim, policy, stevesloan, soapboxprophet, andrewvenegas, blocking, education, distancelearning

Jean Mercier is our Skype Numerologist.

Skype was - in the past - proud of its viral growth. But business is business, and they try to attract people by gifts and promotions, hoping to generate more revenue through SkypeOut, SkypeIn and Skype certified products. The last two promotions in September were:

1. Free SkypeOut for France in France
2. September Giveaway for USA and Canada

For the time being this has been unsuccessful IMHO! See the graph below:

Even if MuppetMaster pretends downloads isn't a measure of the growth of Skype (and I partially agree with this), the number of downloads should have shown some acceleration if these Skype Marketing campaigns mentioned above had been successful. Indeed, a bunch of new users downloading Skype should show a change in pattern in the download curve, as it was some months ago when they launched the free SkypeOut in Canada and the USA. It doesn't: almost straight line growth since several months.

September Giveaway was targeting mainly students, and this (probably) proves again that the Skype Users are mainly adult professional users.

Skype Users seem to be also quite often small businesses. But French small business mainly have their customers in France (France is a big country), and phone calls inside France are not free but quite cheap. Belgian small business (as an example), because of the tiny size of the country, do more business abroad (in France for instance), therefore they are more interested in reducing their phone call bills.

So? Why trying to force Viral Growth? Let it grow the usual way, by improving mainly quality, reliability and services.

One of my new "Skype Customers" told me: Skype to Skype has a fantastic quality, but SkypeOut isn't that good, but it is much cheaper indeed! She phones to her family in Algeria, and lives in Belgium! Improving quality will attract more Small Businesses!

Actiontec announces a Reseller Program for the VoSky Exchange This looks like a good opportunity to make money in Skypeland. The timing is good too. We will probably see some exciting new initiatives from Skype for the Small, Medium Business segment in the next six months.

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Skype DevZone's Triona Carey wrote about the Tallinn Beta Tester Days just completed (we're eager for Bill Campbell's comprehensive report). She lists the topics ("roadmaps, the forthcoming plug-in framework, Skype for Business, components, and the Skype4Java API.") without actually transferring that knowledge.

And then she does something smart and nice (which is not unusal for Triona). She writes:

International gatherings cost time and money - for attendants and for Skype. None of us can afford to have as many of them as we'd like. We are working on other ways to enrich communication in our community - newsletter coming soon, Skypecasts, conference calls, wiki.

If you can suggest useful ways to enrich networking in our community, please let us know.

Hi, Triona. I wish I'd been there.

You're on the right track. I'd urge the Skype team to look to the needs of the people outside the room. For every attendee, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, who would be there if they could. Four stages for addressing this:

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Guest blog by Steve Sloan, Information Technology Consultant, San Jose State University.

UPDATE: At the moment, Skype's status remains undetermined and unblocked on the SJSU campus. A UCAT Operating Practices document describing the reasons and details for blocking Skype. (pdf)

Skype is a peer-to-peer (p2p) voice communications, instant message and file sharing program. The recent decision to pull the plug on Skype at SJSU (has it been implemented?) may be a classic example of command and control (Web 1.0 thinking) versus collaborate and communicate (Web 2.0) technologies and principles. According to one person I spoke with in the networking department of the university's computer center, "the issue that caused the decision to kill Skype is that Skype communications are encrypted." But, other protocols like SSL, SFTP and SSH are allowed and are encrypted. These protocols could be also used to do evil things. There is no discussion I know of to block these communications and they are used a lot on our university's network. Also IPSec and Kerberos are protocols used used on the SJSU network. These protocols are also encrypted and supported by SJSU. Should we also kill them? Do we want to have to make credit card transactions in clear text?

Yes, there have been past concerns about Skype. But, these concerns may be over blown. Oxford University, which had banned Skype, in fact recently lifted its ban on Skype.

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Organized crime organizations suppress competition in a market. This keeps margins high on vice goods and services. Higher prices means overall crime rates fall, some people just can't afford vices at higher rates. Organized crime trys to avoid "wars" with rivals because they are expensive and bad for business. Big Crime also stifles small time rivals who expand the market by bidding down monopolist pricing.

In theory, police would cooperate with mafiya to keep the streets clean of petty crimes that interfere with the mafiya's business. Total crime falls because monopolists will maximize profits in a smaller market at higher prices. General law and order benefits those holding monopolies on drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other steady businesses.

But there's a greater problem. Monopolies concentrate wealth and power. This leads to corrupt government.

So we write special laws that hurt organized crime. We add penalties for large quantities of drugs. We legalize big gambling to bring it out of the underground economy, producing tax income instead of fueling crime lords. We mandate property forfeiture and allow mobster surveillance. In short, we make it more expensive to do big crime and we level the playing field. You never do away with crime altogether, but you cut the concentrated cash flow that corrupts.

Which brings me to net neutrality.

Our Martin Geddes thinks little of laws and regulations supporting net neutrality.

I've said it many times before, but Network Neutrality is a treatment for the symptoms, not the causes - and it's an ineffective anti-consumer folk remedy at that. Good intentions aren't enough. ... Picking at one tiny part of the anti-competitive edifice isn't the way forward. Better to have power over suppliers through your wallet than via politicians.

I agree. In a perfect world.

But the markets are imperfect, power is already concentrated. We see the corrupting power of the largest lobbyists in Washington D.C. and other centers of political power. We see their astroturfing and other bad acts.

So we must act.

We must effect change.

We must out-innovate and out-market.

We must organize as consumers.

We must organize as citizens. We need to educate this generation's Judge Greens, the judge who broke up Ma Bell and made the mobile revolution possible.

We must lead our society to define unmediated access to the Internet as a human right, a civil right. And to react with anger and purpose to anyone who tries to tamper with that access.    

We must find allies, if not friends, in other industries. Companies that need their bits to go untrammeled. That need an Internet without gatekeepers. Companies that know how to lobby.

Like the mafia, yakuza, or bratva, the concentrated power of the telcos will fight back.

They won't fall to any one measure. So we need a theme that All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
 -- Edmund Burkedrives many measures, new ones over time, each driving the monsters toward acceptable societal norms. Perhaps the theme is liberty and freedom?

I agree with Martin that fighting the telcos with laws is hard. Maybe impossible. And not without risk.

But doing nothing is not an option. The societal consequences of giving absolute control over public assembly, public speech, over our new libraries, encyclopedias and news sources, over our civic participation and education - this is tantamount to creating a new branch of government, one without oversight, without checks, balances or accountability.

Martin, we don't have dozens or hundreds of viable suppliers in the United States. We don't have efficient markets for Internet access. And we have damning evidence of the foul intentions of these monopolists to subvert civic freedoms and rights.

So, instead of waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to restore rights seized by phone and cable companies, what do you think should we do? 

P.S. Dr. Magaddino, my old economics professor, challenged me to consider crime, applying supply and demand theory to social evils instead of goods.

I often forget when writing for Skype Journal that terminology in the English language may have different meanings in different parts of the English speaking world. For instance, there is no boot on my Canadian car and I'm sure there is no trunk in Martin's car in Edinburgh.  I guess wireless and cordless can have different interpretations in different parts of the world.

Also sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading my blog posts (although I am learning lots of VON Fall 2006 attendees do). But I was glad to see my post where I recommended that Skype drop their WiFi phones drew at least one response questioning my recommendation.  Furthermore I recommended that Skype work with Nokia, RIM and the Windows Mobile wireless platforms to include Skype as an option for wireless phones.  But a wireless phone is not a cordless phone -- in North America at least.

Rest assured, Howard, today I have seen a solution that can meet your requirements for an easy to use phone that your parents can use with no PC and no learning curve, namely, the entire range of cordless phones being shown at VON Fall 2006, especially in the Ascalade booth. Here they are demonstrating the cordless Phillips and NetGear Skype phones announced last week plus models that will be introduced soon by US Robotics, Linksys and Creative Labs. (In the photo, L-R, are the USR, Phillips and Creative cordless phones.) The cradles hold the power adapter to charge these phones; the modules in the background are cordlessly connected to the handsets using DECT technology and include a processor with an embedded Skype client as well as an Ethernet connector for connection to a cable/DSL router and an RJ-11 connector to the PSTN line. While each vendor will be pricing these units, it appears that these base unit devices will sell for about $150 with additional handsets in the $50 to $80 range.  So not only is the base solution lower cost than the Skype WiFi phones, you can have additional phone handsets around the house or apartment as appropriate at a much lower cost than buying additional Skype WiFi phones.

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by Howard Chang, Amperor Direct

Dear Jim Courtney,

My name is Howard Chang, and I have always enjoyed reading your posts on the Skype Journal, especially the product reviews. Your articles have inspired me to start my own Skype accessory review blog.

For full disclosure, I work for AmperorDirect.com - an online retailer of Skype related products and accessories. Further, we are in the process of determining our level of commitment to Skype WiFi products.

This letter is a reply to your conclusions made in yesterday's "Fall VON 2006 Special - Time to Move Beyond Skype WiFi Phones" article. Specifically, I would disagree with the statement, "I have to recommend that Skype drop the concept of a dedicated Skype WiFi phone and focus their efforts on getting Skype incorporated into those other wireless platforms."

As an engineer and long-time Skype user, I can understand how you would come to such a conclusion. I, myself, would hope to have a non-PC, WiFi device that allows me to make Skype calls almost anywhere -- such as at home, work, or on the road. Based on our testing, I was a little disappointed to see that this generation of Skype WiFi phones has limited WiFi hotspot use because of their lack of support for web-based authentication. In addition, increasing the battery life and a ring tone volume would be two of my preferences as well.

However, even with my engineering concerns, as an end user I cannot wait to own this Skype WiFi phone! Why? My parents live overseas. We have talked over Skype many times before and have enjoyed the high voice quality Skype offers us. Once upon a time my parents had a hungry and demanding kid (me!) running around. In order for them to provide for me and my education, my parents learned to save whatever they could. Even after I left their house they still look for ways to keep expenses down and they consider an always-on computer as being a big waste of electricity and money. Therefore, I'm lucky if I can catch them on-line so I can call them through Skype.

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I was being interviewed for a podcast last night. As always, the purpose of the "stupid network" is to enable crazy new things, not connectivity arbitrage. The setup was that I'm in my hotel room using the woefully over-contended in-room Internet access. The caller could only record calls made using his landline phone, so he called me on my SkypeIn number.

The audio experience was OK, but about that of a typical cellular call. Not ideal for a podcast.

This does, however, provide great fodder for a "Voice 2.0"-ish story. Normally, VoIP uses the UDP protocol for media transmission. If the packet doesn't get there within 300ms, or whatever, forget it. No point in asking for reliability and re-transmission of lost data. The TCP protocol is used for signalling and other purposes where a reliable, in-sequence connection is required.

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Monday afternoon's first Fall VON 2006 plenary session, IM: The State of Presence, featuring a panel of executives and managers from the GYMAS-five representing over 90% of the IM usage worldwide:

• Dan Casey, Director, Windows Live VoIP and Messenger Product Management, Microsoft
• Jeff Bonforte, Director of Voice Product Management, Yahoo!
• Nitzan Shaer, Director, Mobile Devices, Skype
• Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager, Real Time Communications & Google Talk, Google
• Ragui Kamel, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, AOL Voice Services, America Online.

As mentioned previously Carl Ford ran his usual vibrant Q&A format, offering each member of the panel an opportunity to provide commentary on several topics surrounding IM and where it is going. It was a very informative and stimulating discussion overall. Carl's questioning covered why IM, video usage, the role of presence, mobile reach, business models and projections in for the future.

Why do users want Voice with Instant Messaging? From the students avoiding contention when sharing one phone line in a five-student apartment to business productivity enhancement, we heard stories about new scenarios enabled where IM and voice facilitate social networking to newly announced collaborative applications that share spreadsheets. Oh, and for the younger generation, IM allows students to avoid being seen holding discussions in the classroom; did I say to allow private discussion sessions in the boardroom? The new challenge arises when a group of youth want to do a conference call but Stephanie is is not on IM but at the mall shopping for new shoes.

Nitzan talked about how IM with Skype allows users to create one centralized ID that can be used across weblogs, sharing pictures, and enhancing a discussion using video.

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Having a total time management meltdown this week: Edinburgh, Newcastle, Berlin, London, New York, Cape Cod, and Boston. So here's a tiny thought or two.

Airline magazine.

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Our friend U. Yogu, a Ph.D. chemistry student at National Taipei University of Technology, attended a concert there today. Skype partner PCHome sponsored the event, had a booth and gave out prizes, like a Skype ball with a headset inside. More photos from the event.

I've been looking through the VON Boston program and don't see Skypenomics on the agenda. Nobody is talking about how Skype and its cousins continue to change the rules.

1. Skype is building Click-to-Call advertising. Online advertising is the only ad sector that continues to grow. Skype, eBay and Google are diving in to get their share. Click-to-Call isn't new, but the marketing might of Google and eBay, and their far reaching ecosystems, suggest they can deploy to millions on the web, and eventually on mobiles.
2. Skype hardware partnerships are extending Skype's brand and customer reach. Hardware is part of Skype's strategy for earning brand acceptance. Hardware is also crucial to putting Skype into homes and home offices.
3. China. Skype's biggest userbase is in China, the fastest growing broadband market, a place where more people speak English than in the United States. How many telcos and cablecos are as active globally as Skype? How many have become household brands outside their native markets?
4. Yellow Pages. PC-based search is a direct competitor to directory assistance services. This year Skype added business search to their browser toolbars and promised to add it to the Skype user directory. Their business development team continues to build alliances, country by country, with yellow page database providers. Watch browser-centric phone apps like Skype erode directory assistance revenue as Skype migrates to mobiles.
5. Payments. Skype will add person-to-person PayPal payment to its client, as shown in our banner this week and the graphic above. Skype is going to get its share of the remittance market. Again, Skype wraps conversation in commerce.

In short, Skype is

• Amplifying network effects. It's not just more is more. You can do more things with your Skype buddy list, create more social capital, than in other networks.
• Surrounding calls with value-added services. Revenue, for starters. Loyalty builders, too.

In a time of large dinosaurs everyone else is either quick or dead. Right now, Skype looks quick.

I'm one of the people putting together the Voice 2.0 conference, Ottawa, trivial pursuit capital of Canada on 16th October 2006. (Americans should turn up on October 16 instead.) So join me heading south to the icy wastes lurking where the plains fall off the edge of the world, and get a dose of the latest and greatest thinking in telephony. (My only previous visit there was in January, so my views may not be fully representative of Ottawa's climate!)

A couple of features:

• It's great value-for-money. Non-profit, no fancy schmancy stuff, just what you need. Affordable to everyone.
• Both conference and un-conference: time to meet people and shape the agenda around what you care about.
• Workshops. I'll be running one, and you can come and see how I look into the future of telephony and explore your own insights (and without having to pay the usual consulting fee!)

Now, just again, this is completely separate from the Telco 2.0 event in London, which is mercifully for-profit, and designed around network operators rather than grassroots community and smaller vendors with great ideas.

Martin gets all fancy schmancy at Telepocalypse.

I've been barraged with PR spam, like all the reporters registered for VON Boston. You know it's spam when:

• The products aren't related to your beat
• The request-for-interviews aren't related to your beat
• Your email is stuffed with multimegabyte attachments from complete strangers
• The phone calls come at 5am

I've had some excellent contacts from contract and in-house PR people. Sadly, PR clerks outnumber the great ambassadors eight-to-one. Jeff Pulver is trying to make it better, Andy Abramson and Jim Courtney chime in.

Things Pulvermedia can do next time:

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Google UK ads were discovered with little green phones. I walk you through the experience (it works). This is a grand way to get your feet wet in the click-to-call business. You'll learn things. Like what happens to an advertiser when the phone rings off the hook ("all operators are busy"). Customer privacy concerns. Keeping it simple. 

Offering Skype and GoogleTalk options should cut down operations costs, compared to ringback services; you don't pay for two long distance calls.

Click-to-call's live interaction may be one of the biggest business challenges for advertisers. The skills for running a call center are very different from mastering a shopping site. And converting customers in a conversation is different than pulling through your site's shopping cart.

For example, there's often a gap between customer and advertiser time zones and hours of operation. Scheduling a call back should improve response rates, not to mention avoid waking small business people at 2am. Letting callers choose "Please call me around 9am tomorrow" is another. Click-to-voicemail during off hours or when overloaded is another.  SalesBuilder's Call Me Now is a great example of the state of the market.

Other coverage:

• Search Engine Watch Forums thread
• Search Engine Roundtable: Google Launches Click to Call in UK
• Googlified: Google UK Lauched Click-to-Call
• TechCrunch UK: Google launches click-to-call in UK
• Unofficial SEO Blog: Google Click To Call Launched In UK
• Greg Sterling: Google PPCall in UK

The walkthrough...

1. Go to Google.co.uk

2. Search for jet2

You might see search results like this. See the ads on the right?

3. Click on the ad with the phone.

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Monday marks the start of Fall VON and really the first conference for which I, as a blogger, have been registered well in advance as "Press". Over the past few weeks I started receiving emails from public relations representatives (either internal or external to the sponsoring company) and, with a few exceptions -- they know who they are because we have lined up meetings --, have been underwhelmed by the quality of the approaches and messages.

In my past lives I have been on the "client" side of the podium, both as an executive of a publicly traded high technology company and as head of an industry trade organization. I have also had some basic PR training; in Canada I worked with one agency whom I have always considered my PR mentor. They continue to be very professional in their approach, their media relationships and their innovation in getting a story out. Although I have never had any journalism training, I have always had a better than average command of composing stories, writing documentation and general English grammar which I credit to some high school teachers who gave me an early appreciation of the English language. I also hold both technology and business degrees. My experience has also brought me into understanding the pressures CxO's are under with respect to achieving both business and financial goals whether it's a mature business meeting published shareholder expectations or a startup looking for new financing.

So when I found Andy Abramson's VoIP Watch post this evening, Jeff on PR and My View, I was relieved to find I was not the only one questioning how we, as "press", were being deluged with impersonal emails and poorly expressed interview invitations. Since Mark Evans has described Andy as one "who knows the P.R. and VoIP industries like the back of his hand" and Hugh McLeod provides insights through his graphics, I will not comment further; however, in my trip to Boston this week here is what I will be looking for in my interviews:

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I'm having a chat this evening with a client in Califormia. We'll be using Skype. His job is at a Big Company, but it works OK for him behind the corporate firewall. When we last talked the audio quality wasn't great, so I suspect he's tunnelling out via HTTP or HTTPS via some supernode somewhere. These protocols aren't designed to carry real-time audio, and it shows.

This brings into question whether his internal telco manager is adding or subtracting value. I've had terrible experiences inside big companies using their telephony systems, because nothing integrates with my life. As an IT consultant in times past, I'd have an office landline number I had to put on my business card. I could set up the voicemail system to call me whenever I got a voicemail. Inevitibly, I then ended up with voicemails on my mobile telling me I had voicemails on my desk phone. (No, I couldn't simply forward inbound calls -- not an enabled feature, I guess to avoid paying outbound landline-to-cellular rates.) Then you turn up at a client site, and you can't even connect to their LAN. They're paying a fortune to have you there wasting your time doing dial-up via the fax line to access the information you need. It's as if it it's 1950 and everyone sits at one desk for their whole career.

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Skype Journal Exclusive

The marriage of Skype and Asterisk technologies has been a long-time dream for many business owners who love Skype. The time for dreaming is over. You can now deploy.

Canadian Call Center Pioneer Pika Technologies, Inc announced today a seamless, scalable connection between Skype and Asterisk. "This is not a trick-based solution around Call Forwarding a Skype Client," David Clarke, the Pika's BusDev guy tells me.

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In a previous post I talked about the announcement of the Open AIM PhoneLine initiative and how, as one of their launch partnerships, they will be working with iotum to incorporate iotum's Relevance Engine call management service into AIM PhoneLine. But there is another story behind the scenes in terms of how iotum and the AOL PhoneLine API development team came together to bring about this service.

Driven initially by its military connections where Halifax, Nova Scotia is Canada's major east coast naval base as well as home to a major oceanography research center and four universities, Halifax has been a hotbed of Internet technology since the early days of ARPANet. In the late 1980's one of the navy's custom software vendors, Software Kinetics, got involved with ARPANet and ended up migrating the technology to open one of Canada's first Internet Service Providers called NSTN.  When the first national Canadian event on the commercial Internet was held in Toronto in early 1994, NSTN was the poster child for what could be accomplished over the Internet; they even had a bookstore making sales worldwide.  During the late 1990's I was consulting for Software Kinetics, visited Halifax many times and came to appreciate that Halifax was an "under-the-radar" mini-hotbed of Internet technology and innovation. So it was no surprise to me when I learned that AOL had setup their AOL PhoneLine development team in Halifax through an acquisition of InfoInteractive who had previously developed some infrastructure software for use with AOL's services.

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Ken Camp makes a call to Women in VoIP to gripe about the few females at internet telephony conferences like those run by Jeff Pulver and Rich Tehrani and Tim O'Reilly.

In the last episode, the Office 2.0 conference had 53 men and 1 woman speaking. Gender imbalance? The organizer invited friends and strangers and that's how his personal network fell out. Reactions include asking speakers to step down, boycotts, the F-word. And building lists of women.

At least in the United States, women start more small businesses than men and are graduating at higher rates from high schools and engineering schools. So there is a vast pool to draw from. So if that's not the problem...

It's not about finding women speakers. It's about

• making it easy
• to find smart people
• with experience as speakers
• on a given topic,
• in a time frame,
• for a budget,
• outside your social network's event horizon,
• and selecting or deselecting for personal and professional characteristics, like religion, gender, ethnicity, and culture. (BlogHer clearly wasn't shooting for gender balance.)

Essentially, discovering the right strangers to invite to a conversation.

The world of matchmaking.

Of dating.

Of job search and recruiting.

Of Skype's people search.

They are markets of individual conversations. People offering a service and wanting a service, sharing a market. (Remind me sometime to talk about micromarket asymetry, where power is unequally shared among those who have and those who want.)

Conventions collect conversations into packages. Even open space and unconference events, where speakers are selected last minute by the attendees, fit this definition.

Secondary markets come in several forms. Convention programmers make markets for their conversation bundles (called conferences). Others show up as media, like podcasts of interviews or talk radio.

Systems which make matches efficiently (like the Monster.coms of the world) are often ineffective, making good matches. That's why some sites at least try to wrap the match in magic (Dr. Phil's advice to the lovelorn) or science (Ph.D. verified psychometric tests).

Back to women...

Diversity of thought and experience keeps markets, and conferences, vigorous. Balance proven relevance with serendipity, assuring somebody challenges your worldviews and assumptions. My favorite events leave me unsettled; perturbed from my usual orbit.

For example, I went to Blogher, a blogging conference for women (mostly). I'm in the red shirt in Hollyster's The Men of Blogher flickr set. Among other things, I was an obvious minority among 500 women, at a gathering where women's subcultures so clearly ruled. Speakers made meaning differently. It was less about painting a vision, than about sharing stories. Not so much sharing facts and observations as it was about bringing facts into the context of life experience. Not necessarily the way I blog or speak.

I'm looking forward to the Office 2.0 discussions, not this metathread about gender. More on how Skype fits into the Office 2.0 context soon.

Bill Campbell's post about Wall Street is baloney, of course. Kent says it well.

You state "Wall Street frowns on the eBay/Skype side of the partnership according to the New York Times." I read the article you linked ... it makes absolutely NO mention of the market's (i.e. Wall Street's) view of the Google/eBay/Skype collaboration.

The share prices are "factually" listed at the end of the article (without comment) ... as is customary. As for "doing the math," Google shares rose 2.0% and eBay shares rose 1.9%. The difference is statistically insignificant.

There may be a story here, but this article, and yesterday's share movement for Google and eBay, isn't it.

Investors didn't even notice the Skype side of the deal. Why would they? Any benefits won't affect eBay Inc. cash flow for years. Meanwhile, they had lots of other news to consider. For example, the advertising part of the deal, extending Google Inc.'s ad distribution onto eBay sites mirroring the previous Yahoo!-eBay arrangement, and the Google Office Suite that positions Google more clearly in opposition to Microsoft. Both bits of news would clearly have more immediate effect on valuation of the business.

As for the Click-to-Call service, there is both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is to create a form of paid advertising with greater merit than page views or even click throughs. Web advertisers find page views a less relevant metric than ever. But someone actually talking to a sales person, well, I have a pretty good chance of converting that lead into a customer. It's the difference between driving by a car dealership and walking in the door to speak to a hungry rep.

The risks are equally huge. Click-to-Call assumes:

1. Potential eBay and Google customers have compatible smartphone software or hardware. eBay is now rolling out Skype to its buyers and sellers, starting back in June at the eBay Live conference. But uptake by the U.S. and Canadian public is very slow. Meanwhile Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, AT&T, Earthlink, Comcast and others are promoting their own VoIP enabled messaging clients, fragmenting the market.
2. They are willing to use PCs to talk. This is a new behavior. You can't assume customers will change their behavior in ways you approve. What percent of Skype users try voice once and never use it again?
3. Sellers are able to buy the right leads. Talk isn't cheap and margins are thin. eBay started by sheltering sellers from buyers; transactions just happened. Now sellers compete for buyers, augmenting eBay's natural traffic with their own off-eBay advertising and promotional strategies. For c2c, sellers must segment online prospects by interest in specific products. They must also decide which prospects are worth talking to. This is an auction-by-auction calculation and so far there is too little information to make an informed choice, especially for high volume sellers.
4. Sellers are able to answer callers. Most sellers aren't ready to talk to dozens or hundreds of callers a week. Some will need to set up phone-oriented CRM software, hire people or a service, and develop new call center management skills. They will learn to be agreeable and available at their callers' convenience instead of their own. These are new competencies, not lightly adopted and prone to misstep.

These are not fast, sure, or cheap to fix. But they can be managed. eBay and Skype know the problems and have started to address them. Skype education programs for eBay buyers and sellers is a start.

eBay's click-to-call service is FUDware today, the variation of vaporware that spreads fear, uncertainty and doubt among potential rivals. Nothing new for those who follow eBay financial conference calls. To get a payoff on c2c, eBay and Google will need to execute on branding Skype in the US and making the unnatural act of using your PC as a phone an everyday affair.

Jon Arnold is a Toronto-based communications consultant and IP blogger who does a weekly podcast on the Pulvermedia Podcasting Network with IP industry players. Jon and I also share in interest in the Boston Bruins, largely because he originally came from Boston and because my neighbor's son was one of the high points of what was a "down" season for the Bruins last winter. However while Jon is a dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox fan, I still maintain my loyalty to the Toronto Blue Jays when it comes to baseball. So we have our interests both outside and inside the VoIP arena.

Last week Jon invited me to participate as the guest on this week's podcast. Recorded late yesterday it turned out to be timely as a large portion of the podcast covers the Google-eBay announcement which resulted in several posts, not only on Skype Journal (here, here and here) but also by many of the VoIP bloggers such as Andy Abramson and Alec Saunders.I agree with Mathew Ingram in that the Google-eBay deal may turn out to be more important for Google than the Google Office announcement.

You can follow up (with a link to the podcast) here. It's been twelve years since I did media interviews as President of the then newly formed Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft. So if it sounds a bit rusty, it's just my nervousness associated with my first experience with doing a podcast and yet my sensitivity to try to keep a freely flowing conversation.moving along.

Thanks again to Jon for the invitation to participate.Give a listen (iTunes Player recommended) and hope it can provide some additional insight into where Skype is going.

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The early results are in. Wall Street frowns on the eBay/Skype side of the partnership according to the New York Times.

"Google's shares rose $7.69 yesterday, to close at $380.95, while eBay's shares rose 49 cents, to $25.79."

I think they got it wrong. But you can do the math!

What do you think? Are Skype users into family-friend communication and social networking or are Skype users a bunch of capitialist commercial buyers and sellers? What did Niklas Zennström create? Where is his new team taking Skype?

We would like to hear your views!

Skype gets hooked on Google. What's all this mean?

As Jaanus Kase of Skype puts it, "What does all this mean in detail? We'll see next year, as testing of all these new joint initiatives is said to begin in early 2007. For now, one thing is sure -- great companies working together is always exciting news."

Yes, the Google-Skype story feels very upbeat. It is a tremendous opportunity to monetize their huge customer base. This is bigger than SkypeOut and very scalable.

So do we have to wait till 2007? Will there be no sex? I doubt it. The new Skype-enabled Google Tool Bar is available in the 2.6 Preview Release Jaanus blogged about here.

Big Disclaimer

The formal press release ended on what seemed to me to be an unusual disclaimer,

"At this time, eBay does not expect this agreement will have material impact on its financial statements in 2006 or 2007."

Really? No sex? Let's see later today how Wall Street votes. eBay shares should, in my opinion (just about worthless), get a big boost.

To find out I talked with Don Albert, the North America General Manager for Skype. Don told me:

'Click-to-call' is something we have not done before. It is brand new. We are really excited by it. It is a new revenue stream for eBay it is just too early to predict financial impacts.

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In a press release issued this morning, Google and eBay announced an agreement which comprises "two primary components involving text-based advertising and "click-to-call" advertising functionality";.In the course of the press release there are several implications for Skype; however, let me draw attention to where Skype already has incorporated Google searches, namely, as an option in the search icon of the Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Skype Toolbar for Firefox:

Other options in this Skype Toolbar's search element include Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, eBay and Shopping.com.

Lisa Leff at AP provides a good overview; combined with the press release we can see the following implications for Skype:

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Google and eBay are swapping spit over ex-US advertising inventory, toolbar buttons, and click-to-call ads. Maybe even bring GTalk and Skype. We'll have exclusive interviews and more later today. News releases follow, but first impressions...

• Search Engine Watch: Click to Call is U.S. only and mid-2007.
• Blogging Stocks: Google eBay deal is much ado about nothing. A promise to do something sometime ain't worth much.
• Media Buyer Planner: Google, eBay Ink Click-to-Call and Text Ad Pact
• Andy Abramson: "Google won on this deal."
• Russell Shaw: "Google Talk isn't interested in Internet telephony's full potential"

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This is the first in a series going deeper into the "softer" business case for using Skype in the workplace. The series' launching point is the Squidoo Lens 8 More Reasons For You To Pick Skype At Work.

People ask "Why did Skype take off?" One reason: fabulous user experience. The time from click-to-download to your first conversation is short. And Skype outperforms expectations for ease of use and sound quality. First timers smile, laugh - you should see their faces in a class.

I contrast this with the first time I used the 1998 version of SAP. You attended a two-day class to learn how to fill out a simple invoice. Then promptly adjourned to a local bar to drown the frustration and helplessness.

Back to feelings. Great experiences stimulate adoption, indifferent and bad ones trigger abandonment. As true for industry as for consumer goods. Any IT manager will tell you it's hard to redeploy a product once users have puked on it. So happy, confident user experience curtails this risk.

Comparing Skype to other solutions, how well do they deliver on first impressions? Which indicators of customer delight fit this context?

Let's look at some steps in a new user's experience.

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Jaanus Kase. Skype's Chief Blogging Officer who visited Phil in Oakland, is also the Chief Skype Forum Officer and has recently completed leading the transition of Skype's Forums to a new platform that provides both visible and backend improvements resulting in a much more resilient and secure forum ecosystem. Key issues included login protocol, security and anti-spam measures. So what's changed? From Jaanus' Announcement: Welcome to the new Skype Forums post:

Here are the most important changes.

• separate forum logins discontinued - you now use Skype Name
• new forum platform - means more security, less spam, new features
• layout and skin changes - you can now use the Skype Emoticons and Skype My Pictures
• admin team reorganization - see below, "Who's who"
• structure changes

The most important "first use" change is the "Identity Re-claim" process for transitioning to using your Skype login information as the login to the new forums. But it's effectively the usual Skype login web page process; you do need to think about what you want to use as your Forum Display Name (which is independent of your Skype Name and becomes your identity on Skype Forum posts). The details are on the Announcement page linked above.

Jaanus, on his personal blog, has written a much more detailed description of the more than year-long process his Skype team went through in identifying problems with the previous php-BB-s platform, determining the objectives of the "forum remake", deciding on a new platform (Invision Power Board) and then executing on the transition in as seamless a manner as possible. In addition to making the change in login protocol, the most important considerations was to not lose access to three years of user feedback and passion. Makes for an especially good read if you're involved in managing a similar user forum.

Our congratulations to Jaanus and his team for such a successful transition. And may the user passion continue to be expressed!

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You may have noticed the new banner. My photo is from Skype blogger in chief Jaanus Kase's side trip to Oakland, California, earlier this year. Jaanus and I had lunch at Everett & Jones near the water. I wasn't impressed by the barbeque that time but it was great to finally meet Jaanus and talk enterprise blogging, online community, and social software. In the photo, Jaanus is taking a picture of cargo railcars going to the Port of Oakland through the Jack London Square neighborhood. Oakland is a major cargo hub, the fourth busiest container port in the United States.

Railroad rights-of-way made it possible for the telegraph network to spread across North America in the 19th century (like Skype on top of the Internets). At some point Western Union lost its dependency on the railroads, entrenched its monopoly, and lobbied Washington to protect it (like the phone and cable companies which followed). Meanwhile, the railroads developed standards so cars from one railroad could run on all the tracks. They later worked with truck and sea shippers to standardize the cargo container (packets for atoms). Containers slashed shipping costs. Now globalization is the standard in a world economy. And a bottle of Stormhoek, South African blogging wine can be shipped to California for less than a euro.

The masthead change is part of a long list of small site improvements. One side effect: you can read SJ on many mobile phone browsers. 

Help me rotate the photo a few times every month. When you have a snapshot and a story, post it to flickr, tag it "skypejournal", and let me know via email or Skype.

Microsoft Live Contacts offers developers 400+ million active users with 12 billion contact records. That's more than Earth's population, so should we assume a bit of duplication among the 30 contacts per active user?

A peak of 20 million simultaneous online (8.7% of the Live Messenger population, or 1 in 12) is 2 to 3 times more than Skype's reported raw peak usage.

Microsoft says Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls. Skype's decentralized conversation prevents us from knowing Skype's messaging traffic.

Microsoft is building Live into a hot software development platform, including Live Messenger tools. Live's demographics should be strong bait for Microsoft's developer, co-marketing, and distribution ecosystems. A mashup city worthy of serious phreaking.

More details from Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb, one of my favorite blogs, about from the Auckland Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference where George Moore, GM of Wind