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.

Yesterday's Second Life client update improved in-world instant messaging and presence. From the change log:  

• Added: a new Profile tab shows a web page of the profile owner's choice without launching a browser. (more than Skype)
• URLs in chat and IM are now clickable links. Supports http://, https://, secondlife:// (hmmm, wish skype: links were clickable in 2L)
• Log IMs and/or chat (hmmm. Are my Skype moods and presence logged?)
• Permit friends to see you online/on the map (Presence, availability and location. I'd like that, maybe let GPS or cellular tower codes update Skype via SMS/texting?)
• Conference IM multiple friends by multi-selecting in the Friends list (multichat! only one step to conference calls.)
• See who granted you permission to modify their objects in the Friends list. (this personalized presence is almost relationship brokering: who can see and do what with me when, where and in what ways.)
• Set whether you show as online in Search (Spreads your presence data, making people-search more actionable.)

2L's on a great trajectory: 

• it's matching features with the popular IM clients,
• expanding presence depth and accessibility, and 
• making it slightly easier to blend the outside world into the 2L experience.    

Are you a mobile phone software developer? I've been going to MobileMonday events for a long time, mostly in the Bay Area, always great demos, active vendor participation, tasty schmooze. Stuart John, Skype's mobile product manager, is hosting the London MoMo 11 December at Skype's offices. 2 Stephen Street, W1T 1AN (map). The theme this month is mobile community, specifically mobile social networks. Should be hot, especially with the announcement of YouTube for mobile.

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!

Just off the phone (21 November 2006) with Jeff Black, ceo of TalkPlus and star of the demo I posted 13 November 2006: calling from a mobile to echo123 without a Skype client anywhere in the loop.

He confirmed:

1. TalkPlus does not use SkypeIn.
2. TalkPlus does not use SkypeOut.
3. TalkPlus does not use the Skype-operated SIP gateways now.
4. TalkPlus conversations going from a mobile to a Skype user are only encrypted in the usual Skype way from TalkPlus's servers to the Skype client.

Black said he's been to Skype's London's headquarters several times, most recently about 30 days ago. He said they fully shared what TalkPlus does and how it does it to Skype's management and technical people, right down to engineering diagrams. They continue friendly discussions. He said TalkPlus filed multiple patents which predate Skype on mobiles.

Black declined comment when asked if TalkPlus was building something for Skype.

If you'd like to chat about this, join the Skype 3.0 discussion. You can view the video of the demonstration on Revver, Vox, and Google Video.

CaptainAmerica Maverick gave me a bracelet tonight. A Skype presence bracelet. It shows my Skype availability when I wear it in Second Life. And if you're in 2L with me, you can use it to Skype me (I'm "Phil Arrow").

Stephen "CaptainAmerica" Klosky is using Skype's "SkypeWeb", a web service that takes a Skype username and returns that user's public status.

Web services are the life blood of Web 2.0, published protocols that open a company's software engines to programmers. SkypeWeb is Skype's only public protocol.

Skype must do more to empower developers who want to blend Skype into the rest of cyberspace. On Skype Journal's short list:

1. Turn the Skype client messaging APIs into web services. All of them.
2. Skype user authentication as a web service.
3. Directory service for public chats, public conference calls, and open contact groups.

Offering a "Naked Skype," (Skype devzone wiki, Skype issue database) a bundle of protocols to the cloud, would let developers blend Skype with any service, including email (like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!).

Skype is in an earnest race. (Skype management has not acknowledged this.) The company wins who publishes the most complete, friendly web services for live communication. The measure of success: developers everywhere mashing up your communications with their social networks, mashing up your social network with their services. Skype's performance so far: not in the game.

Today, for example, I must use the unscalable Skype client on projects to: 

• Write a web page that shows a Google map of the locations of a logged-in visitor's contacts, colored by contact group, indications of when they are likely to be online.
• Build a web based feed aggregator that crawls urls mentioned in buddy profiles, showing updated web pages and blog posts.
• Run gateways between the Skype network and SIP services.

In the Skype 3.0 public chat, Julian Bond said Skype's new Skype4com ActiveX wrapper gets us partway there. I suppose it does, if all you care about is embedding a Skype widget in web pages or rich clients. So much more is needed.

Web services will unleash the power of Skype's

• communication infrastructures,
• identity infrastructures,
• social infrastructures and collective social capital, and
• commercial infrastructures.

Web services open new markets, attract new customers, reinforce your value propositions.

In Second Life, web services literally open up new worlds. Skype's rivals get it and are acting now. Where is Skype's leadership in this race?

Over the past several years I have owned Nokia phones, the last one being the (tri-band) Nokia 6310i. However, I was always finding blind spots in my coverage.  Would be half a kilometer along the drive out of my subdivision and having to apologize for phone calls cutting out over the next kilometer or so.. I was also aware of some coverage gaps along the 401 freeway connecting Toronto to Montreal and Ottawa. This continued to be my experience with the Nokia N70 and N91 which were so-called quad band phones but supporting GSM/GPRS only at 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz while having UMTS at 2100 MHz as its "fourth" band.. While obtaining some parameters last summer to allow web browser operation on the N70 and N91, I was advised by a Rogers network engineer that all new towers installed in Canada in the previous two years were 850 MHz for both capacity and coverage range reasons

On the other hand my Blackberry 8700 supports true quad band, including 850MHz, along with the EDGE enhancement on GPRS. Recently I received for evaluation the new N73 and N93 --- a quint (five) band phone (no WiFi) and a quad band phone (plus WiFi) respectively. I moved my  primary SIM chip to the Blackberry about six weeks ago and instantly found I have better coverage not only as I drive out of my subdivision but also within the Scotiabank Centre, home of the recent Voice 2.0 conference. A couple of trips along the 401 have also demonstrated significantly improved coverage as well as a tourist area where I have previously received marginal coverage. When I received the Nokia N73 last week I moved a second SIM chip into it and immediately found that gap near my home had disappeared. Phone Boy reports similar experiences trying out the N93 on Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S.

Bottom line is that, if you want to have full coverage in North America you need a quint band "world" phone covering 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz for GSM/GPRS/EDGE plus 2100 UMTS for any forthcoming UMTS deployment. As an indication of the presence of the 850MHz channel, on the N73 I see an "E" above the traditional Nokia data service symbol, as well as a much stronger signal level indicator; also the downloads are significantly faster. On the Blackberry 8700, as shown above, you see the word "edge" associated with the signal strength indicator. This recommendation applies to both all purchases of wireless GSM phones for residents of North America and those residents of Europe and Asia who may be traveling to North America and want full wireless (GSM) phone coverage.

Something to think about as we await the Skype Client for Symbian, apparently to be released next month (I assume, initially as a beta). As indicated in a previous post, fast networks are required for adequate IM and VoIP operation over wireless networks. Alec Saunders talks about some of the battery limitation potential for these phones when running a VoIP client while he attempts to configure the N93's WiFi connection. 

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I shot this demonstration on Halloween, 31 October 2006, in the offices of TalkPlus in San Mateo, California. The video is uncut, no editing at all, including about five seconds in the beginning of Jeff Black, TalkPlus CEO and founder, warming up. The call is from an unaltered mobile phone. You will see the Jeff send a text message and automatically download a Java program. That app shows his Skype address book, and he clicks on Skype's echo123 acount. For those who don't know it, echo123 is one of Skype's first test accounts. It doesn't have a SkypeIn number, so you couldn't fake access by dialing a PSTN number that forwards to echo123. TalkPlus doesn't have any access to Skype's private SIP gateways. So this demo shows that TalkPlus customers can dial any Skype user by their Skype name.

It also shows that TalkPlus has engineered a server without Skype components that talks to the Skype network as if it were a Skype client using Skype's own language. It will scale to thousands of simultaneous sessions. TalkPlus has no plans to license this technology or turn it into a product. They built it to solve their customers' need to talk with millions of Skype users.

Jeff demonstrates that Skype's protocols have been reverse engineered, and shows unmet demand for a high performance, highly scalable, "headless" or "naked" Skype server.

Last month I came across my mother's stash of "we're having a be-in party" stationary, left over from the early 1970s. Those cards were a carry over from the 1940s and 1950s when my mother grew up. The formal etiquette of mailing and invite and RSVPing became kitsch before it became corny then classic then retro. 

danah boyd: what i mean when i say "email is dead" in reference to teens.

"I'm part of the generation caught between email and IM where IM feels more natural but most of the folks just a little older than me refuse to use IM so i'm stuck dealing with email. Today's teens are stuck between IM, MySpace/Facebook, and SMS. There's another transition going on which is why there's no clean one place. IM replaced email for quite a few years but now things are in flux again. Still, no matter what, email is not regaining beloved ground."

Young people are more flexible in learning, and older people more easily adopt the tools and norms that feel familiar from their youth. There's more than one reason why computers have QWERTY keyboards; they made transferring skills from typewriters to computers feel familiar.

People also follow their cohort's lead when it comes to building social capital. Aren't most of your friends around your age? That's just the way social networks usually expand. So you're going to use the conversation and social coordination tools that dominate your social network, and your cohort.

Skype is riding this wave, of course. So it's interesting to watch Skype's founders stick a toe into another wave, social video, with The Venice Project. Are you too old to ride it?

Skype 3.0 Dev Notes including one element I advocated and requested many times over. Call Transfer is finally here in the Skype 3.0 API. That's a big deal and will grow Skype's appeal with developers who now have all sorts of call routing options. At a meeting in Estonia just over a year ago (that happened as the eBay sale was going through) a group long term adovacates put the case for it. I'm very pleased to see it has finally happened. I'll have some other comments on Skype 3.0 although I want to share them in a broader competitive context. My buddies at Skype Journal are writing plenty on the new public chat feature. See Phil and Jim.

See Alec's comment. Skype Dev Zone (lots re extras), Antoine's Dev blog:

Skype 3.0 introduces the long-awaited interface to enable call transfer. Call transfer is being phased in over two releases, and won't be exposed to users until the 3.5 release. The reason for this phased release is to ensure substantial penetration of Skype 3.0 among users, because call transfer requires that all parties are running Skype 3.0 or higher. Our goal is to enable you to start building and testing great new apps now which will be ready to blow peoples' minds away when we release 3.5 next year. No more playing catch up with the client!

Don't miss this TechCrunch post. Important to understanding the changing competitive landscape. TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Skype 3.0 (beta) starts the communication platform wars [with the release of Skype4Java,  Skype4COM, and XPCOM wrappers].

As mentioned elsewhere I have had significant exposure to a variety of phones that have been designed to work with Skype, either as the primary purpose of the device (Skype WiFi phones, Skype Cordless phones) or as an application within a more versatile mobile "personal assistant" platform (Windows Mobile platforms and, by year end, Symbian platforms such as the Nokia N-series). In addition I have now had the opportunity to work with a few wireless phones made by Nokia and Research in Motion (Blackberry). A few comments that could help Skype ecosystem product managers going forward:

Battery life: many of these phones have a battery life of four to six hours idle time. Probably best to license RIM's Blackberry power management -- I can get four to five days of idle time on my 8700. Any device that will have a hope of broad market acceptance should have at least two days idle time.

DTMF tones: This is a fairly basic and widely deployed feature of the Voice 1.0 phone infrastructure; yet I am constantly amazed at the cavalier approach taken to making sure "TouchTones" work with any Skype client, whether a softphone or a hardware device. Here are some of my experiences:

• Skype itself would not work reliably with DTMF tones prior to version 2.0; that issue has been resolved at this point (within the Skype client's "Dial" tab).
• The Skype WiFi phones do not support DTMF; therefore they limit the usefulness of SkypeOut when calling businesses that use IVR systems or other services, such as voice mail systems, that require a DTMF response. I have also experienced USB phones with the same issue.
• At the other extreme the RTX Dualphone and VoIPvoice Cyberphones do provide the appropriate support; the Sony Mylo aslo supports DTMF but you have to remember to put their unique keyboard in NUM mode to enter the tones.

Chat: I view Skype as having two primary features: Instant Messaging (presence and chat) and Voice. For USB phones, the IM activity remains on the host PC; however, for PC-independent devices there are issues:

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Tim Berners-Lee's Web Science Initiative is important. Tim's starting academic research to create a scientific discipline that studies human behavior and the systems that support it. Like people talking to each other over the Internet. There are already two academic conferences

Let's start a contract research team. Call me if you're interested. I have a domain and am putting together a discussion forum. We should put together a list of proposals and potential sponsors and see if we can get this off the ground.

Topics that come to mind in the last five minutes:

• How do effective people switch from talk to action?
• What are the cues for mode switching (e.g. switching from IM to voice) or blending within a conversation? Within a relationship? When and how do they work?
• How do people think about the privacy of their calls? How does this vary from culture to culture? What are the effects of those perceptions on choice of communication channels?
• Where are the tipping points for social network migration, where you and your buddies flee one network for another? Are there leading indicators? What strategies might preserve a network's critical mass?
• Can occasional random calls among workplace strangers (in a large organization) improve knowledge work and organizational effectiveness? Might this compensate for not bumping into colleagues at the corridor?
• How does IM change the relationship between supervisors and knowledge workers?
• Which behaviors improve social capital? What metrics and other cues best drive those behaviors?
• How is the psychology of persuasion altered by the social proximity of strangers?
• How long do people talk about different topics? Do those talks have common templates, narrative structures?

If you're a behavioral scientist or market researcher, please ping me. Do you sense the time is right for this area?

p.s. For fun, try this University of South Florida Skype User Satisfaction Survey.

TalkPlus today announced plans to revolutionize the way people use mobile phones by offering new and innovative Voice 2.0 calling services that work with existing mobile phones globally. Under development for more than two years, TalkPlus' patent-pending technology will provide customers a wide array of new and advanced calling services previously unavailable from mobile phone carriers.

First Offering: A Second Number That Works on Your Mobile Phone

With an additional phone number from TalkPlus, mobile users can now take advantage of having two numbers on their mobile phone. This additional mobile number is fully functional and unique; it works just like a mobile number issued by a carrier. By having a separate number to both place and receive calls on the same phone, subscribers get greater convenience and flexibility, as well as the benefit of an additional layer of privacy. With a second number, TalkPlus subscribers will be able to easily manage personal and work lives, while carrying only one mobile phone.

Subscribers will also benefit from an online management center, where they can easily control the TalkPlus Number's advanced call screening, voicemail, and contact management features.

Incorporated into the "Second Number" feature set will be an independent voice mailbox, a rules based engine for call management, bidirectional calling (in and out) such that a user can, say, separate her personal and business life, while using one phone handset with one carrier account. If you want to apply these management features to your original (well publicized) mobile number, you can port that number to the TalkPlus service and have a new (probably unpublicized) number applied to your basic carrier service.

But the calling support services go beyond capturing voice mail. Here are a couple of  examples:

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Initiated when Andy invited me to participate in the Nokia blogger program back in June, I have now had the opportunity to work with several mobile platforms and, over time, made several attempts to work with programs that access Skype from the mobile phone. I've also been following the Skype perspective on mobile here, here and here where expectations are set for processor power (minimum 400 MHz on Skype for Mobile), wireless access requirements (WiFi and/or 3G) and other operational limitations on a mobile platform.

As a guideline for user simplicity, I look for an experience where I can (i) easily "ping" a contact and enter text for a chat session and (ii) simply access a (Skype) Contact or dial a number to make a voice call - an experience that has a minimal installation and learning curve for the user public; an experience that will readily gain broad market acceptance. For the record the platforms I have worked with include:

* also accepts SMS messages

At the moment the best platform on which to experience Skype on a mobile device is the Sony Mylo with its embedded Skype client. It has both the standard Skype IM and Voice functionality (as well as supporting file transfer). It does not require any special setup other than to use the embedded Opera browser to log onto fee-based WiFi Hotspot services. Of course its other limitation is the availability of WiFi connectivity although Jon Arnold is already proclaiming 2007 as the Year of WiFi. The Mylo does present the most authentic and most complete Skype user experience. Skype-to-Skype calls are straight forward. Calling any PSTN number worldwide, provided you have SkypeOut access to the dialed number, is a simple matter of going to the Skype Dial menu, entering the PSTN number (with +Country Code) and clicking. Finally, as noted by both myself and others, the Mylo has superior voice quality due to its embedded VeriCall voice engine. One minor shortcoming is the lack of Outlook Contact synchronization; but this is not necessary given the overall intended Mylo experience as a personal communicator and not primarily a wireless phone.

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Walking across the river this afternoon in central London. Thinking of home, missing the wife and kids. Have been on the road too much in the last month or two, and too much travel in prospect too.

So I want to call Dr Mrs G to pass on my heart's desires etc. Problem is, the younger daughter tends to sleep at various slightly random times. Too often I've called just as the little madam was falling asleep on mama's shoulder, and ruined the whole afternoon for my wife who then has a grumpy, sleepy baby who will whine all afternoon.

So what I want to be able to do is make the phone flash gently, or solicit an outbound call. No ringing!

You can't do this on the PSTN. Sure, you could have handsets that have custom rings per caller based on the caller ID. But I want control per call over the ring at the other end, and it doesn't support that feature.

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Today Skype released Skype for Pocket PC 2.1, a release whose accompanying documentation reflects the reality of the limited resources of handheld mobile devices. A full list of new features is available here; however, key items include:

• A new multi-chat interface which supports chats with several participants.
• Skype Launcher, a small 'launcher" application that checks available memory and verifies that Skype is installed correctly. (Hopefully this will avoid the situation I previously encountered where sometimes I had to reboot a Windows Mobile device before Skype for Pocket PC would start if other programs, such as SliingBox Mobile, were running.)
• Built-in call management that detects incoming mobile calls (via your normal mobile service) during a Skype call and offers the user the choice to hang up or ignore the call. You can switch to Skype calls when in a mobile call.
• Detailed contact search including specification of country, city and language as options.

However, buried in the details are the following that reflect a more realistic approach to Mobile Skype:

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In the file sharing world of Kazaa and bittorrents, members of a network share two things: the files, and offers/bids for those files. More specifically, they ask for or offer little chunks of files ignoring the chunks' order in the file. You pass along what chunks you have and grab the chunks you need and, eventually, getting little bits from many sources, you have all the parts you need to assemble a copy of the whole file.

But what do you do with a live event, like a news broadcast or a university lecture? How do you get the benefits of scale-free p2p distribution while keeping all the viewers in sync? How do you accommodate people tuning in and tuning out during the event?

Skype conference calling goes part way. It distributes little bits to/from the conferenced people in streamed order. To keep a conversation rolling it will tolerate dropped chunks and accommodate resource challenges like poor CPU power.

The Company That Will Soon Be Formerly Known As The Venice Project promises to extend this to sharing your bits with strangers. Like bittorrent, you're giving the network a little control over distribution of the bits. You shouldn't mind sharing a little upstream bandwidth with the community since you're sipping from the same stream. Part of their art will be a balance of:

1. Centrally managing the publishing and initiation of streams (think YouTube),
2. Peer to peer distribution of those streams (like bittorrent, but first-bits-first), and
3. Playing on a rich client (like Skype).

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Last week's Voice 2.0 Conference in Ottawa exposed examples across the entire range of infrastructure and services that lead to voice-related applications. Martin Geddes led off with a keynote asking What's telephone for? What's the unmet user need? Where's the money and What's next? Sam Aparicio of  Angel.com provides an excellent commentary on Martin's presentation ending with Martin's economic model for Voice 2.0 telephony:

• Martin talks about an inversion of the model. While most of the money was being made once the call was connected, now most of the money is to be made pre- and post-talk.
• Before talking you have devices, connectivity, privacy, presence, availability, directory and integration
• After the call, social networking.
• Google managed to create $400B of market value by exploiting digital social gestures around hyperlinks, but Telcos still fail to see how CDRs are a goldmine.
• Some of the growth areas: B2C (I'm soo glad he mentioned this...), C2B -- whenever you cross the trust of a social boundary. An example: In Finland, some people organized a grassroots, non-official Voice Idol type system, creating tons of value for the carriers without much of their involvement.
• Some examples of new thinking: considering a cell phone as a retail outlet you get to carry with you wherever you go.
• In the end, whoever controls the context in which conversations happen. (Following the Starbucks model, where they get to capture the bulk of the value generated by the chain starting at the bush of Juan Valdes). He mentioned how, in the future, when in a hotel, options for room service will be in a buddy list.

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Some more random thoughts on how our minds have been poisoned by 100+ years of Bell (or was it Meuccian?) telephony.

The signalling system in the analogue era was very simple. I want to talk, your phone rings, you pick up. We then enter a manual signalling exchange. "Hello, this is Mary." Confirms I got through to the right number and callee. "Hi Mary, this is Kevin calling. Is this a good time for a chat about next week's meeting?". Identity, availability.

Now imagine a system where we could press the green "call" button on our mobiles either once or twice. Pressing once would just request a call with the person. They would then have a queue of "people who want to talk to you", and those present/online would appear in that queue in time order. I could even, if calling from a PC or other rich UI, suggest times to call back. My phone would have a special ring for returned calls.

Alternatively, press the green button twice and make a normal interruptive "ring now!" call.

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How does Skype fit into the mix of other social media? If you recall, Lilia Efimova started using the ULRTMT - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator this summer. Lilia and her online friend Andrea Ben Lassoued wrote "Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative" and it's being included as a chapter in a new textbook.

Their essay documents their professional relationship's evolution. The chart, at left, has three columns: Lilia's blog on the left, Andrea's blog on the right, and mutual territory in middle. The top of the chart is 2003 and the bottom is April 2006. They discovered each other in the blogosphere, reading each others' posts. After a while, they commented on each others' blogs, bookmarked each others' posts on del.icio.us, and swapped the occasional email. After a few months of more intense intercourse, they escalated to Skype conversations.

It is a solid ethnographic case study by professional social scientists. It spans a long time and covers multiple media channels (how we really interact with each other online). In this case, discovery and low level interaction earned (banked) a small amount of trust.

I'd love to see this analysis of online relationship-building extended to other groups and situations. How do entrepreneurs find each other? How do job seekers discover potential employers and choose media during job search? How do new project teams negotiate the fit of modes to communication tasks? How long do some patterns persist, and do people repeat them across different relationships? How effective is shifting into work/task mode before fully establishing lower levels of trust?

I'd also like to see the end of a relationship. Can you salvage a fading relationship by experimenting with other communication channels? What are the textual or other early warnings indicators that a person is fading from "friend" to "former friend" or "contact"? How much asymetric communication can most people tollerate?

Which behaviors affecting user adoption and migration: What factors affect the success rate in dragging your (family, friends, work colleagues) into new channels? Are social network hubs more able to migrate their networks? Or do hubs who switch lose their power and start from scratch?

The ability to create great experiences comes from deep understanding of human nature. If you'd like to fund a more exhaustive study, let me know. I'm organizing research proposals.

I could do a long critique of every softphone out there, and there's plenty to pick apart. I thought I'd just select one little detail to show why the portal IM clients and Skype remain top dog: they just deliver what the user wants, no hassles.

Every time I log in to Windows I get this:

Go away! Shoo! Don't irritate me with unnecessary login screens. Fade into the background. I don't want to think about you until you're needed. (If the wireless Internet connection comes up too slowly, it also tends to crash.)

I suppose I should also point out some of the other usability issues. As Amazon long-ago discovered, the way you present the login/new user screen makes a big difference. If it's confusing (high cognitive load) people bail out, probably (rightfully) assuming the rest of the experience inside will be equally bad.

Gizmo fluffs this with a strange radio button layout. In the user's mind, registering is a different process from logging in, even if the information requested is identical. The drop-down text entry box is the wrong cue for creating an account name, because it implies a selection of existing data. (Yahoo is superb at managing this process in a crowded namespace.) Gizmo operates from the perspective of the programmer, not the user. Contrast with Skype:

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"WAP is Crap!"

Well, in fact it was quite good given the technology constraints it had to work within. As an implementation of the wired Web on mobile devices, it was well thought through, surprisingly effectively implemented, and funded to the gunnels.

The difficulty was that it was in general a solution to a problem the users didn't have. The power of the wired Web is the hyperlink and browsing of information. Users spend a lot of time "transaction hunting", where you decide where to put your money and attention. The wired Web is about bubbling up of important, interesting and useful information. This doesn't match the use case of the wireless Web, which is about quick hits with sites where you already have a relationship.

All this is well documented. So it's rather sad that the industry is about to go through the same harrowing learning process all over again with mobile instant messaging.

Once more, there's a well-established and successful model from the wired Internet. "Presence" as it is usually constituted grew up from the always-off world of dial-up Internet. Online rendezvous was hard, presence solved that problem. For the first time, you could have multiple conversations on the go at once. Distance didn't matter, a novelty for those separated by countries and continents. Parents and partners were excluded from this private chat world.

Mobile IM is also the solution to a crisis the user doesn't have. The buddy list reflects a closed world that doesn't match the openness of the actual tools the users prefer, namely SMS and voice. We already have a universal identifier system, the phone number. Users already manage multi-threaded conversations using SMS. The idea of the "chat window" doesn't make sense on mobile. The interruption model doesn't match, either. A new IM whilst you're browsing the web means a flashing taskbar icon and minor context change from one app to another. Mobile interruptions mean suspending real life. That's why you ask the sender to stump up a few cents to demonstrate the value of the interruption.

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On Wednesday I was asked to moderate a second panel at the Voice 2.0 conference in Ottawa on Alternative Networks. Having spoken with a couple of the speakers this session is going to provide an update on what amounts to further unbundling and disintermediation in the voice communications infrastructure space. These developments, which include demonstrated profitable business models, are resulting in the separation of network access, service provisioning and content delivery required to achieve not only net neutrality but lower costs of Internet participation.

The conference is filling up; however, there's still time to register here. See you Monday.

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Marcelo Rodriguez rounded up five products that connect Skype and SIP products in his post, Is a Skype-SIP Peace At Hand? 

• VoSky Exchange
• Skype2PBX
• Uplink
• ChanSkype 
• Pika Connect for Skype

We all want interop, and these products are gaining loyal followings. They build audio pipes between SIP and Skype voice callers. We've been calling these Level Three Skype integration in our Skype Journal Connectivity Maturity Model. 

Skype Journal Connectivity Maturity Model

Level 0. No connection.
What's VoIP? What's Skype?

Level 1. Skype indifferent.
Devices doing nothing but input or output like the most basic of USB phones. On the software side, the only software is Skype.

Level 2. Skype aware.
Configurations are Skype-aware or Skype-smart devices, like the Kensington Vo300, the YapperNut YapperBox.

Level 3. Skype conversant.
Level 2, plus audio pipes between apps, especially across the SIP barrier. You call with your SIP phone, something happens in between, and my Skype phone answers.

The move from Skype to SIP at Level 3 costs you all the benefits of rich conversation. You lose:

• Availability and geopresence
• Mood messages
• Caller authentication
• Access to caller profiles
• Launching text chat or video in the same call
• File transfer and folder sharing
• Voice messaging
• Access to Skype voicemail
• Skype multichat and conferencing
• Broadband audio quality 
• End-to-end encryption
• Chat/call permalinks 
  (e.g. skype:?chat&id=%23leedryburgh%2F%24evanwolf%3Bd5b446f89da627a3)

Level 4. Skype equivalent.
Level 3, plus restoring most of the missing elements. 

Does this model work for you? What's Level 5? What do you call it when the other system has capabilities beyond or different from Skype and you can't translate them?  

The new Skype API command "SET SILENT_MODE {ON |OFF}" is only a baby step toward the idea of a "headless" or "naked" client. Silent mode tells Skype to turn off its user display and alerts. They are still there, just not seen, a programmatic parlor trick. A high tech version of Peek-a-boo! I see you! with the same old software.

This is progress, of course. All the app's user messaging is now under the control of fewer pieces of logic, a simplified design you need before allowing alternate user experiences.

Since the UI is only hidden instead of omitted, the operating system must have all the parts to run a full windowing interface. Linux servers, for example, often dispense with a display or presentation system to save computer resources and avoid bugs. Asterisk experts, for example, write that display overhead is contraindicated for Asterisk installations on Linux. So "silence" doesn't help service-oriented developers much.

Also missing: Skype hasn't brought all the client's UI functionality into the API. So there are still things you can only do in the UI. Nor does the client support multiple user accounts simultaneously. So servers need to make and run a separate copy of Skype for each user. And a web interface to admin the Skype service. All things you need for a server-friendly, scalable, extensible developer platform.

Skype has a long way to go if they want to offer a GUI-free server client or create an ultra-light client like Adobe or publish a naked API library like LibJingle. Those would open up new levels of integration and interoperability, new markets, new industries. Peek-a-boo is a game for babies or adults. I voted for the full featured adult version.

Earlier this week Skype announced a new Skype 2.6 beta release for Windows.  Two new features:

• Skypecasts controls are now directly available within the Skype client
• A bandwidth indicator is enabled via the Advanced Options (Tools|Optiions|Advanced)

However, the most interesting for partners is this line in the announcement:

For developers, there's a feature here that has been requested a lot: you can turn off the visible Skype UI through the API now. For more info on this, please stay tuned for updates on our developer zone and the developer blog.

As Alec Saunders points out, this is Silent Skype where developers can turn off the visible Skype UI.. Is this on the path to the long requested Naked Skype where developers can build around a core Skype engine?

Skype's Developer Program has launched a developer newsletter. But it begs the question as to why it is simply a traditional web page as opposed to being published with RSS feeds for those who want automatic updates and all the other benefits of RSS use.

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Just got home from the opening day of Yahoo!'s first open Hack Day. I thought it might be useful to contrast it with eBay's DevCon.

tags: skype, skypejournal, yahoo, hackday06, hackday, hack or die, yahoohackday06, ebaydevcon, ebay inc

I just reinstalled SightSpeed on my "rebuilt" laptop and am always impressed with the video quality. It is reminiscent of the days about 25 years ago when the first color monitors became available for the mini-computer-based instrumentation I was selling at the time. My budget-limited customers (mostly university based researchers) thought they could get away with budgeting for a black and white monitor until they actually saw the color monitor ... it took all of two minutes to change their mind once they realized the features color added. Somehow the additional funds for color magically appeared quite quickly. (I won't mention the price they paid for simple monitors at that time!) When you see a SightSpeed video its quality just hits you instantly as being the benchmark for video communications.  And this week PC Magazine thought so also.

While it is a challenge to market in a space containing the GYMAS-five, SightSpeed CEO Peter Csathy and hist team seem to be ringing up the wins by working with partners who can take advantage of SightSpeed's video messaging functionality.  Two of note: a deal with MTV who is using SightSpeed on their Total Request Live offering to bring viewers into the show; SightSpeed is also making its debut in politics as a campaigning tool. Would be interesting to see if my university colleagues Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae start to use SightSpeed in their tight run for the leadership of Canada's Liberal party this fall where they need to approach 4500 delegates spread across 4,000 miles.

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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.

Since its inception the secret sauce that results in the excellent voice quality of Skype-to-Skype calls and facilitates quality in Skype-to/from_SkypeIn/Out calls has been the Voice Engine for PC and Voice Engine for (Windows) Mobile licensed by Skype from Global  IP Sound (often referred to as "GIPS"). Monday came the announcement that Skype has licensed a second player for voice engine software in embedded, PC-free consumer devices, namely, Trinity Convergence. Trinity's VeriCall Edge^TM software  brings their many years of silicon-device independent software development into the Skype stand-alone PC-free device space.

The agreement benefits hardware manufacturers by providing a software bundle that allows them to efficiently and cost-effectively design Internet calling and the Skype user experience into devices such as wired phones, WiFi phones and multi-function personal communication devices. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) will leverage the software bundle to shorten product development cycles and accelerate their time-to-market.

The first device to employ Trinity Convergence's software will be the forthcoming Sony Mylo which should be available later this month. Additional devices under development include a Skype phone from Universal Scientific Industrial, a Taipei-based ODM (prototype in the photo) and a currently anonymous dual mode WiFi-GSM phone.

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This is the second post in a series reviewing wireless devices in the emerging Personal Handheld Assistant space; the ultimate aim is to identify roles that Skype can play in this market of converged functionality devices. This is a special post in the series that was triggered by a VON Fall 2006 session. Links to other posts in this series are available at the end of this post.

Monday afternoon I attended the first Fall VON 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. 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.

One major direction for IM is the extension of IM's access and reach by its incorporation into wireless devices. We heard about many of the issues that challenge the ability to provide seamless wireless IM clients, including login barriers, coverage and the relatively high cost of data services.

But the session confirmed a belief I had started to hold about a month ago during my evaluation of several wireless platforms. In particular, my evaluation of one Skype WiFi phone demonstrated to me the futility of providing such a device:

• The battery life was about eight to twelve hours in standby mode
• It could not handle DTMF tones
• The basic clock would arbitrarily drop a couple of hours
• It provides the presence functionality of Skype's IM client but no text chat capability
• Skype was the only application that runs on the device
• While the Skype client provides Skype names and the Contacts' other phone numbers (if available via the Contact's registration), there is no address, email or other information such as provided by synchronization with Outlook.
• They would only work in open access WiFi zones; they would not work in WiFi hotspots requiring a browser-based logon.
• They were purely engineering toys that demonstrated one could make the concept work but they badly needed an experienced wireless phone product manager to get the feature set right.
• In a market of multi-function devices in a similar price range, a Skype-dedicated device could not be price justified.

I came away with the feeling that, while they perform more or less as advertised, Skype WiFi phones are nothing more than a prototype engineering demonstration of Skype on a wireless platform.  Certainly they would have a very limited market -- maybe in enterprises that wanted to provide "walled garden" communications amongst geographically disbursed nomadic employees. But they certainly are not a wireless phone that will gain broad consumer acceptance and market share of any significance.

Combining this experience with my experience with Nokia N-series phones, the Blackberry and Skype for Mobile on the Dell Axim 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. (It is for this reason that I did not bother to mention which brand of Skype WiFi phone I evaluated; it's the entire product concept that is a problem.)

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This is the first post in a series reviewing wireless devices in the emerging Personal Handheld Assistant space; the ultimate aim is to identify roles that Skype can play in this market of converged functionality devices. Links to other posts in this series are available at the end of this post.

Over the past couple of months I have received several wireless handheld phones/devices from Nokia (manufacturer of the last three cell phones I have owned), Research in Motion and SMC for evaluation. In addition I have been using a WiFi-enabled Dell Axim X50v as a PDA over the past two years and a Canon PowerShot A610 for photography; the Axim, of course, can run Skype Mobile, . Recently Sony announced its WiFi-enabled mylo; meanwhile last week saw the arrival of the Blackberry Pearl 8100.With such a variety of feature sets and user experiences, one needs to take a pause to review what is fundamentally important in a wireless handheld device to provide a basis for reviewing these devices, particularly in view of the convergence emerging in the various Nokia, Windows Mobile and (RIM) Blackberry devices.

This avalanche of handheld devices has made me ask the questions:

• How much convergence of functionality do I want or need on a handheld device?
• Where should Skype play a role in wireless-enabled handheld devices?
• Can my previous three devices (phone, PDA, camera) be combined into one unit or do I continue to need three device holsters on my belt?

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I'd like to send my wife an SMS. In Skype I've got a group called "Family", which includes her entry. However, she hasn't filled in her mobile number in her profile, because that means exposing it to anyone she adds to her buddy list.

I can instead create a new entry for her mobile, or enter it directly, so this isn't a massive deal. I could even hand some bonus money to a telco and SMS her from my mobile. It does serve to illustrate a bigger point, though, on how different communications systems can create value by managing privacy differently.

There are several ways of technically resolving the situation. A simple one is that I have a local copy of her profile that I can extend and annotate -- a proper object inheritance mechanism. Another is that I can request her number off her.

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Last winter, while visiting a friend in Silicon Valley, I had a demonstration of a comprehensive personal video management system that he had set up combining SlingBox, a TiVo PVR and his WiFi-networked home office personal computer configuration that included a 300GB storage drive . This is a person who is a hard core road warrior and wants to be able to access his video recordings from anywhere on the Internet; he had configured this system to achieve this goal. Via his SlingBox Player he could perform all the TiVo functionality, call up any recorded program or PC file, whether stored on the TiVo or his 300 GB hard drive from any broadband connection to the Internet in hotels, airports, etc. But it required some work on his part to pull this all together and to maintain the integrity of the system through software and firmware upgrades, etc. After his initial demonstration I enquired about pricing and then asked, "Is this not 90% of the functionality of a Windows Media Center system at 20% to 30% of the cost?" He replied in the affirmative.

MediaREADY Inc. (formerly known as Video Without Bounderies, Inc.) is a Florida-based provider of interactive, media-ready home entertainment devices that effectively combine the functionality of the TV and networked home PC's media management features into one dedicated Linux-based device. These devices, combined with the SlingBox, can provide the equivalent functionality of my friend's configuration at a much lower cost than a TiVo combined with a home-networked Windows PC and dedicated storage hard drive . Working with a MediaREADY dedicated function device, the user can focus on managing his/her TV viewing, recording and recall without the inherent problems of a Windows system, such as sharing the processor to handle other non-media-related programs or handling Windows security issues. From an home entertainment system point of view it is simply one more box in a home entertainment cabinet as opposed to requiring full PC hardware configuration including the monitor any other attachments and the associated footprint requirements. Not to mention placing a full PC in the family or other TV viewing room may not be appreciated aesthetically (or socially) by other members of the household.

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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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Last week Skype issued two press releases (Philips and NetGear here and Panasonic here) relating to partnerships that involve cordless Skype phones. No PC required! Just Plug-and-Call -- from anywhere in your home. Basically they comprise a base station that connects directly to your home router as a well as a cradle for the base station handset and the portable handset itself. They provide a degree of freedom that allows you to make Skype calls from anywhere within the cordless phone's radio range with minimum installation hassles. Another vendor, Ascalade, has also announced they are showing Skype Certified cordless phones at Fall VON.

Why the sudden interest in cordless phones? Well, Russell Shaw references two more cordless Skype phone announcements (US Robotics and Linksys); then he goes on to explain all this activity may result from the fact that our homes are getting larger (about 50% on average relative to 1975) and we want the flexibility, range and portability inherent to cordless phones. He goes on to point out other factors: more rooms, more air conditioning and a higher percentage of two story homes.

Garrett Smith goes on to reinforce Russell's arguments, stating that his sales data  and sales floor experience interacting with customers demonstrate that customers will pay a premium (of over $100 per handset) for the convenience:

In general, most consumers found the entire process surrounding the use of a telephone adaptor difficult to fully wrap their head around. What if I have five phones in my home (a typical telephone adaptor only allows for two phone lines)? Does this mean only two of them can use VoIP? What if I want all five phones to utilize VoIP (you need to use multiple adaptors)?

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Last week my Windows configuration finally collapsed under the weight of too many installs/uninstalls. When four different program upgrades won't install properly (including the new Skype 2.6 beta) and come up during the installation attempts with dialogue boxes that only the most dedicated and focused developer would understand, it's time to re-install Windows XP from a fresh start.

How did I know my configuration (and/or Windows Installer) was corrupt? When I went to reinstall the previous version of Skype (2.5) I got the same error dialogue box and there was not a trace of Skype left in Add/Remove Programs. And I had recently experienced two other programs that balked at upgrade attempts.

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I once considered AOL a relic, a doddering giant foundering without direction and burdened with legacy ideas and technology.

Not any more. 

Start with the AOL People Connection, where naturally evolving blogging, dating, and image sharing communities become formalized and juiced with extra resources. Or the Calcanis project reshaping Netscape.com into a peer news filter.  

The AOL of ten years' ago, even of five years' ago, wouldn't have been up for this kind of rapid evolution and leadership.

AOL's messaging family shows this managerial focus and maturity too. Read Andy Abramson's Requiem For The Future of VoIP. He explains AOL's closing of the AOL TotalTalk service as strategic abandonment of a commodity market in favor of AIM PhoneLine, "a true Phone 2.0 child and the future of voice." A walk through the reasoning with Andy shows strong situational awareness and readiness to act.

I'm also excited for their AIM platform evangelism. It opens their AIM technical architecture as web services. It's still only months old, but the words are right and they're hustling for geek attention. Now if they'd just do it across all their properties. It's prerequisite when competing for developers with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.

I'm glad to know aging fools, like myself, can get their act together.

The secret sauce used by Skype that results in the excellent voice quality of Skype-to-Skype calls and facilitates quality in Skype-to-SkypeIn/Out calls is the Voice Engine for PC and Voice Engine for (Windows) Mobile licensed by Skype from Global IP Sound ("GIPS"). Combining codecs, echo cancellation technology and other voice and packet management features the various GIPS Voice Engines eliminate or minimize the impact of inherent (wired or WiFi) network problems and deficiencies introduced by factors such as delay, jitter, packet loss, clock-drift, acoustic and network echo.

In a press release last Monday, Global IP Sound announced the extension of this relationship to include Skype's licensing of Voice Engine for Embedded such that the GIPS features and technology can be deployed in voice-enabled hardware devices. In an interview with Wendy Toth, VP Marketing, and Dr. Jan Linden, VP Engineering at GIPS, we learned:

• This agreement will permit the incorporation of GIPS Voice Engine technology into future WiFi phone offerings. (It is not included in the recently released WiFi phones announce last month.)
• It would facilitate the offering of a Skype for Symbian phones (such as Nokia's N-Series) although no such client has yet been announced by Skype.
• In July Skype/eBay and GIPS resolved the patent dispute that Skype effectively assumed upon Skype's acquisition of Sonorit and Camano Networks.

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In a post this morning, Alec Saunders has introduced Hullo, a new calling service that allows you to control not only to which phone your calls will both originate and be received but even seamlessly hand off calls to another phone as you go from, say, your home to your car. While Alec's post provides much more detail, two key points:

hullo bills itself as a personal call manager.  The promise is that it will help you stay in touch better than ever before.  It incorporates a buddy-list style softphone with some very slick advanced telephony features. 

The company is focusing their launch on the college and high school crowd.  The features have been designed recognizing that young people are increasingly the most sophisticated users of mobile phones.  hullo's feature set makes it easy to use those phones to socialize, arrange events, or stay in touch with friends and family who might live in different cities.  It's not hard to imagine how appealing this will be for students away from home for the first time.

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One new cool new feature in the Skype Preview version (2.6.0.44) of August 9th. is live (clickable) URLs inside a mood message.

Here is how my fellow Skype beta tester Don enhanced his mood message:

This is a great way to share web content (think video on UTube) with your buddies or to just simply direct them to your web site.

Thanks Don. Just think how many new readers we would have if everyone was as kind as you. A "love-in" for Skype Journal. (grin)

It is also a great time to learn about TinyUrls. TinyURLs work like a trash-compacter. They take a hugely long URL and make them shorter.

This URL:
http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/2006/08/stealth_re
lease_of_skype_26.php

equals this:

http://tinyurl.com/r29o5

when compacted.

Go get in the mood!

Tomi Henning, CV Romania

Sticker shock or not I bought a Nokia N80! I want to be ready for Skype Symbian.

I had the opportunity to buy one, and the first thing that astonished me was the price of the phone, which is very high even for a multimedia phone. The prices vary from 550€ to 620€ (without VAT!). Of course if you bought it with a subscription the price dropped to about 350€-400€ which is a good thing.

The first thing that surprised me was the thickness of the phone, it is a bit thick, but the big screen and the 3MP camera compensates for it without a doubt. Also the metallic touch of it is very well finished giving it a fashionable look, and also a style which shows that it is indeed a Nokia phone, without even having to know the exact type. The slider of the phones works really smooth and if you open it when it is ringing and if closed during a call it puts the call down. The buttons are relatively small so quiet un comfortable if you have large fingers but respond on the first press easily.

Starting up the phone takes a rather long time as to what I was used to with my former Nokia 6230, but all Smartphone's or Symbian phones need to boot up properly so it is understandable it took a long time.

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Both Alec Saunders and Jon Arnold have commented on a KTVU news item video where Andy is interviewed about dual mode WiFi/GSM phones. Andy points out that he could not demonstrate on his Nokia E61 in the hotel where he was interviewed because of the requirement for a login page. A week ago I commented on the need for a simple login page that was "mobile" optimized until an automated authorization-authentication protocol is worked out for mobile WiFi access.

Turns out that Montreal-based provider of hotel-based WiFi services, Intello (formerly iHotel), has taken one step in the right direction by "mobile optimizing" their initial user page. I have often used my evaluation Nokia N91 Personal Entertainment Assistant to simply and discretely detect the presence of a WiFi signal in a hotel lobby or coffee shop. When you start up the N91's web browser at a location serviced by iHotel, you get the mobile-optimized page shown on the right; simply enter the access code given by the front desk attendant and "Voilà"! Not a totally seamless switchover but the entire form fits within one screen. Were this my Dell Axim I could start using Skype Mobile. (Is Skype developing a Skype for Symbian?)

According to the AT&T spokesperson in the video, we can expect to see a seamless dual mode carrier operation at some time in 2007.

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Skype did a stealth release of a "Preview" version of Skype 2.6 today.

Read about the details from Jaanus at Skype.

If you do Skypecasting you will really want to test drive this new release. If you have never tried Skypecasting start today!

The new client features this tab, "Live"

This new "Preview" version tells a silent story about the future of Skype. It is a story worth reading.

Go play with 2.6.0.44.

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Skype did a great job packaging Skype into the new Mylo. And I'm desparate for a device like this that lets me carry Skype around. But Sony's Mylo doesn't deserve this moment of love. Like the T-Mobile Sidekick, Mylo:

• is a closed device and platform when we need open platforms;
• only has Wi-Fi when we need the ubiquity of wireless edge networks; and
• lacks authoring tools when everyone creates, mashes up, and publishes photos, sound, and video.

Definitely not for the MySpace generation, despite the great job at embedding Skype, Yahoo! and Google IM clients.

Save Mylo, Sony.

1. Add a good still and video camera. We're sharing our work and our lives. I want this to replace my mobile camera phone, but you are betting it won't, at least for now. Please try! 
2. Add audio, video and photo recording software. Surely Adobe is ready to come out with pocket versions of ImageReady, Audition and Premiere.
3. Add authoring (or at least uploading) tools for blogs, vlogs and podcasts. A browser can only do so much, even with Web 2.0 goodies.
4. Publish developer tools and seed an open ecosystem. I want to code rich clients (feedreader, please) to run on Mylo, especially apps that work offline.
5. Open the device to third-party apps, without prior Sony approval. So I can buy Mylo editions of Quicken, Flight Simulator, QQ, and embedded Firefox (with extensions). It's much easier to be closed, but a Sony bizdev tax is a barrier to user adoption.
6. Add AIM. Still being used by millions, even adults.
7. Let me use Skype without a plug-in earbud (built in noise-cancelling microphone). Just one thing to carry, please.
8. Support the U3 flashdrive standard for better desktop integration.
9. Bundle more memory. 1 GB is too small to do the job needed, and an insult at this price point.
10. Support IMAP and POP3 email servers. How can Sony segment work from life when work and life are blended for most people?
11. Talk through GSM and EDGE data networks. Wi-Fi-only is premature in most places for most people.
12. Add bluetooth. The better to play with desktops, cameras, and mobile phone.
13. Lose the big orange and blue lights (or at least make them optional). Nobody around me needs to know when I'm using Mylo or I'm online.
14. Add batteries. So you can do all that and sustain the long battery life you offer now.

Mylo represents a great stab in the right direction. Product managers trade off time, features, cost, quality, risk and prices. Here's hoping Mylo continues to evolve and expand into a development platform to rival the Playstation, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS, and Symbian.

P.S. Good luck to the musician Mylo, who's had no Google juice competition until now.

eBay recently launched a service providing users with SMS and IM alerts for when monitored auctions change status or they are outbid. When I first clicked the link to sign up for an alert, I expected Skype to be the first thing I saw. Maybe this was to be the first real use that eBay's had for Skype. However I was disappointed with what I saw.

Skype was missing. Does eBay not trust their own product enough to use it themselves? What are their limitations? What do other IM networks have that Skype doesn't? I have an answer. Reliabilty.

Skype's P2P architecture makes having a reliable server-side client next to impossible. Messages aren't always delievered, voicemails pile up, and supernode traffic bogs down servers. What the developer community needs is a stripped-down cross-platform client for connecting to the Skype network. This client could get rid of Skype's colorful GUI bloat and perform core tasks such as handling chat messages and calls. Combined with a Call Forwarding API, Skype would have the business market hands-down if they just took this one little step.

Hey Skype, if you need a developer for it, you know my number.

More on Skype and alerting:

• Some public Skype events and why Skype should embed calendaring. Phil Wolff, Skype Journal.
• Skype Heartbeat is a good second step, but we need more. Phil Wolff, Skype Journal.
• Skype RemindMe. Uri Levanon, Skype Journal.

The 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference was the best gathering of VoIP revolutionaries ever. Next year's ETel starts February 28, 2007, and I hope to see you there. If you have a topic or product to present, submit your proposals by September 26. Topic requests, email etelchair at oreilly dot com.

From Skype Journal's coverage of ETel06:

• FON - Your Community Wi-Fi Provider
• Day One Reflections - Emerging Telephony
• ETel: Disappearing telephony
• Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo!
• Sean Egan, Google ETel
• Phil Wolff, Skype Journal at ETel
• David Isenberg - Fat Pipes
• Brad Templeton - EFF
• PayPal at ETel
• Phillip Zimmermann at ETEL

True or false? You decide.

There will be three desktop clients through which you conduct your life. Browser wars ("Episode 1" ... or was that 4?) was only the beginning.

• The browser. "Their stuff" -- your lens on the outside world -- discover, read, and transact.
• The messenger. "Our stuff" -- your lens into your social world -- connect and converse.
• The manager. "My stuff" -- your lens onto your own digital artifacts -- search, edit and view.

Skype is/was the "new Netscape". Perhaps a few billion dollars was cheap...

Having played with Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 for a while, I think this is kind of a transformative moment for how we interact with the last category. It's still at the Mosaic-like stage of development (go read your browser wars history), but it's useable. I look forward to the Windows Explorer paradigm going the way of MS-DOS.

No time to blog further on this one. Time to let the idea stew and simmer.

Stew and simmer through the telepocalypse.

"The Skype API is the envy of Yahoo" (yes that's an inside quote, and no I will not disclose the source). Programmers get to do sexy things; users get imagination explosion.

A few weeks back Don, TheUberOverLord (Skype ID), did his magic using the Skype API and the CPU between his ears and came up with a real-time language translator for Chat Messages. Don is now trying to out distance his last run.

Here is Don's Skype Application for getting Skype's Chat Messages to talk to you.

It is fun to play with.

"Now you can watch TV, go to the bathroom, cook dinner and still not miss out what your Skype buddies are saying",

Go download it and install. You can even hear yourself talk. That is what I like best!

Many of graphics and images that you see in Skype Journal  (including the ones in this post) have been captured using TechSmith's Snag-It. Snag-It has been a core utility for my Windows computing over the past five or six years.  Need to capture an object on your Windows desktop (or your entire desktop)? Snag-It does it and allows you to output it in many ways, including several graphics formats such as jpg, gif and png.

Today I received their monthly newsletter announcing the availability of three Skype profiles:

If you share images during Skype conversations, you know the process involves taking and saving the screen capture, then browsing for, opening, attaching and sending the image file over Skype.

Now, SnagIt has a set of profiles for Skype that allow you to take screen captures and send them immediately to the person you're talking to over Skype - or to any of your other Skype contacts.

More information and the free Skype Profiles download; there is also a video demonstration showing the entire process, including the ability to edit the captured image prior to sending it via Skype's File Transfer.

One more partner in the Skype ecosystem...

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Expanding Skype's user base beyond "geeks who use softphone clients" is key to Skype's ongoing growth that would justify eBay's $2.6B purchase price.  But the non-geek world is much more familiar with another user interface for its voice communications, namely, the 12-button TouchTone telephone keypad. This interface is associated with that large installed based of traditional telephone handsets incorporating the keypad. So when a device comes along that can effectively connect those phone sets into Skype such that users can dial in a familiar manner but take advantage of SkypeOut in appropriate situations, such as long distance calling,  they deserve an in-depth look. Once they are using Skype for familiar applications, they can learn and experience other applications -- even something as straightforward as "chat".

A plethora of devices is coming onto the scene for using my 12-year old Nortel M9417 dual line phone as the primary telephone handset on my office desktop (wood version). They continue to provide access to my PSTN services in the normal manner yet accessing Skype is as simple as picking up the handset and dialing 00. One such device that makes this possible is the newly released Skype Certified Multi-Link TeleVoIP Stick.

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Recently a couple of posts discussing VoIP Quality:

Om Malik reports on a Brix Networks study, based on data collected on Acceptable Call Quality via their TestYourVoIP.com site.  Note that Brix also announces the availability of this service as a Google Gadget (for Google Desktop) providing ongoing measurement of the quality of your connection for voice and video activities. The study reports an ongoing decline in VoIP Acceptable Call Quality from 84% to about 80% over the period December 2004 to May 2006.

Andy at VoIP Watch found  MyVoIPSpeed Internet Connection Test and was using it as a tool to measure the connection speeds and QoS at the hotel he was staying at. I checked out my own home office connection and got this report:

Om talks in his post about degrading quality of calls received from callers using Vonage. I have been a Packet8 subscriber for almost three years and have found the quality to consistently improve over time to the point where I have minimal problems. I also find I am getting a high quality level with my Skype and SkypeOut calling with one exception: SkypeOut calls to some wireless phone services.  Too much compression/decomprssion going on? first via VoIP, then at the wireless end?

I also ran the Brix TestYourVoIP and got a MOS score of 4.2, close to the MyVoIPSpeed result shown above of 4.0. The tests appear to have some level of consistency across the tests and do appear to reflect the quality of calls that I am experiencing.

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Skype for Outlook Toolbar has become one of my key tools in day-to-day communications. In fact, I am at the point where I seldom actually "dial" a phone number; just look it up in Outlook Contacts, click on the Toolbar and click on the relevant "phone" number to launch a Skype or SkypeOut call..In his post on GizmoProject's All Calls Free offering, Alec Saunders says: "At iotum, Steve Lecomte and Julien Raynal, who spend lots of time on the phone, are using Skype for business calls.  Integrated with the Outlook Toolbar, it's a natural, since most of our calls are North American."

Peter Kalmström, Skype's Toolbar Program Manager, has written an informative post on how to launch conference calls across both Skype and SkypeOut using the Skype for Outlook Toolbar in any of three scenarios:

1. Select any meeting - you will see a conference button on it

2. From an email - starting an ad-hoc conference call with all the cc:s etc of an email

3. By selecting more than one Outlook contact in your contacts folder

Also works with the Toolbars for Outlook Express and Thunderbird.

The best part about using Skype for conference calling is not receiving a $200 bill from a legacy telco for a five person one hour conference call as recently as four or five years ago! The biggest challenge for Skype is getting a significant base of their users to realize they can easily do multi-party conference calling at little or no cost.

Note that there are Hotfix releases of each Toolbar put out this past week to fix some minor issues.

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If you have ever used Google Language tools to help understand or communicate in another language then with this Skype Add-on is for you.

Sadly, the product's name, (makes me sound like a robot or someone speaking with a mouth full of marbles ULRTMT v2.6 (Beta) - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator), does a great disservice to this very useful utility. It is simply marvelous.

I certainly could have used this last week while I was in Buenos Aires. I had only one Spanish word in my vocabulary, which turned out to be more than most Argentineans had in English. Did I ever feel lost!
If you get that same lost feeling in some Skype Chats you will want to have this tool as a short cut on your desktop.

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Skype announced four WiFi phones today. Mobility for Skype user got a real boost with this news. And just maybe this will be the spark that will wake up the Skype Market in the US.

We saw these at CeBit show, but now they are real. All four come preloaded with Skype.

Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype (F1PP000GN-SK)

Edge-Core WiFi Phone for Skype (WM4201)

NETGEAR WiFi Phone for Skype (SPH101)

SMC Wi-Fi Phone for Skype (WSKP100)

Check out the Skype store for more info. Maybe even buy one. I will.

I had a quick conversation earlier today with a vendor who was sitting in the departure lounge at SFO airport waiting for a flight. He is based in the UK, and this is roaming on a US network.

Here's how the sequence of interactions went.

1. He calls my SkypeIn number.
2. I get an incoming call from a UK cellular number. Assume a UK-based caller.
3. I don't have my headset plugged in, or Skype set up to use my USB headset instead of default Windows settings. Scabble around to retrieve headset, plug in, configure.
4. I call his number back, it goes to voicemail. He hasn't answered me.
5. A minute later, I've got a new voicemail in Skype from him. He gives his context and contact details.
6. I call him back, he answers.

There are lots of places here where the telephony user experience broke.

Firstly, Skype's device management is a total mess. I need to be able to tell Skype my #1 preference is for my USB headset, second choice is the USB handset I'm trying out. I want to set the PC built-in microphone to "never", as I don't have any such device; and my laptop doesn't have a built-in microphone.

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Over the past week there were a couple of news items about video communications services:

• Out of Japan, Novac has released a product, Skype TV, that lets you stream your TV across Skype video. More commentary from Gizmodo.
• Last Monday came news about the forthcoming SightSpeedTV, a new feature to be included in SightSpeed's next release at the end of the month.

But moving beyond the place-shifting domain, last week I had a demonstration of Tele3DWorld from Mellanium, a 3D design and modeling studio. Using 3D texture rendering CAD software with output via a video capture card, they have Skype or SightSpeed recognize it as a webcam for video.

One of the people behind this has already used it on a sales call for the remote dynamic 3D presentation of a new anode metal refining furnace where different types of refractory brick are used within the furnace depending on the high temperature profiles.. Using this tool, Joe was able to walk his customer through the interior of the proposed furnace, zeroing in on critical heat sensitive areas and showing how they have addressed issues related to the different types of brick. In another demonstration, he walked me through a tour of a proposed palliative care unit; a third demonstration is a walk around tour of a WWII Spitfire bomber, initially drawn up in AutoCAD.

In the course of my experience with desktop sharing or web conferencing services, one frustration has been the inability of web conferencing products to do 3D CAD viewing in real time within the desktop sharing tool sets due to the intense real time graphics demands. With video configurations such as demonstrated by Mellanium perhaps we can see this methodology become the standard for this business requirement.

Bottom line: Personal video services, such as Skype's video and SightSpeed will eventually deliver more than basic video calling. They will require either special hardware (Novac) or TV-tuner-equipped PC's, such as Windows Media PC's (Mellanium and SightSpeed) as the video source. Obviously the creative juices are flowing in developing webcam emulations that can flow video through Skype and SightSpeed.

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by: Julian Bond.

Julian is CTO of Ecademy, an online network "connecting business people." He Skype-enabled the Ecademy website to facilitate communications amongst members. The following is a post he made on the Ecademy Skype Directory Club forum in a discussion of the "code cracking" news.

Here's some ways to think about this. The first point is to understand what interop means. There are 3 ways of linking IM/Audio/Video networks.

1. At the network level. Transparently route chat, voice and video by linking the networks. Skype can't do that because there is no central network. MSN, YM! and AIM have a big centrally controlled part of the system even though a lot of the communication is P2P so they can link, at the cost of running that big central system.
2. At the server level. This is what some Jabber servers do. Because all communications go partly through a server they can be switched. It's the same as 1) except that anyone can run a Jabber server.
3. At the client. GAIM, Trillian and others let you have one client that speaks multiple protocols. You need an official account with any system you want to talk to but it blurs the differences between them.

So if there's a library that can be built into client code that duplicates the Skype protocols, 3) can be built. And 2) can be built where it's appropriate (eg Asterisk PBX).

Then look at two conversations that are happening on the Skype forums already: (i) Building audio/video stream access into the Skype API and (ii) release of a Naked Skype which is a library that provides the API without having to have the Client.

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It's been a busy week:

• The previously announced (eight months ago) MSN/Yahoo IM federation became real. Yawn.
• Phil Wolff and Alec Saunders have commented on the Skype code cracking by a Chinese engineering team.
• Ken Camp has linked both the U3 Skype/SanDisk announcement and any potential Skype code cracking to corporate security policy implications.

I tend to be more pragmatic in terms of looking at how can I use Skype more effectively as a business and personal communications tool as opposed to worrying about all the implications of any Skype protocol publication.  For instance, I have been evaluating a couple of the new Nokia N-series personal communications accessories; they are much more than just a wireless phone! And certainly represent an excellent platform for personal accessory convergence; I have found a wealth of uses for them.

However, since they are based on the Symbian S60 Series operating system, there is currently no opportunity to use Skype for Mobile. The one aspect I miss much more than the voice communications is the absence of any Instant Messaging with my Skype contacts. I mention this only as background to how important Instant Messaging has become to those who have incorporated any version of Instant Messaging into their daily activities.

Today Alec has published one of his insightful benchmark posts, Detente in IM's Cold War, on the opportunities that could arise from the (currently theoretical) public availability of certain Skype protocols (whether directly from Skype or via "cracked code"). He sees where, with the right approach to publication of the appropriate Skype protocols, Skype could set the leadership standard for the federation of Instant Messaging. In particular :he views Skype from its potential as a platform and from its business model that is significantly differentiated from that of the MSN/Yahoo/AOL portal models:

Today, unlike Google Talk, Skype has brand, momentum, a large customer base, and an active ecosystem of partners.  These are the ingredients for a successful platform play.  Unlike the dominant players, Skype makes their money from traffic across network bridges, from applications partnerships (like TellMe), and from downloadable add-on's to the application.  They are much less dependent on monetizing eyeballs than AOL, MSN, or Yahoo.  There wouldn't be the tension between their existing business model and a platform model which AOL, MSN, and Yahoo have to contend with.  As the incumbents, AOL, MSN and Yahoo would be victims of the Innovators Dilemma.  Skype would be the disruptor.

And challenges Skype management to take the leadership role in IM federation. Punt to Niklas (and Alex).

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The VoIPWiki Blog reports a Chinese firm reverse engineered Skype's communications protocol. It allows Skype-to-compatible softphone calls.This is credible; I've talked with a member of the team that built a Skype-compatible softphone. They hope to go public by month end. We're eager to discover if they will publish the protocols, offer Skype-compatible consumer software, offer Skype-compatible engineering products to other developers, sell their firm to a bigger company, or simply offer consulting services.

I've also used a demo version of software that crawls the Skype cloud, downloading profile data. From another group. This is not "the Skype database" but the natural white-page listing that all users put in their public profile. Skype's servers, and the financial data kept there, are not touched by this system. Screenshots:

Both systems build on detailed knowledge of Skype network parts not on Skype's servers.To build a Skype-compatible client, they had to figure out:

• how to see and navigate through the Skype cloud, to find a Skype client.
• publish their own client's profile into the Skype cloud, so a Skype client could find them
• negotiate starting the call session, including encryption and

Publishing the Skype calling protocol would create new opportunities for products and developers:

1. Third parties can build Skype connectivity into their own software, no longer requiring an official Skype client.
2. It may open up creation of Skype-compatible server software. So your salesforce system could IM you.
3. It could open up Skype to PBX integration. So you might preserve Skype identity, authentication, encryption, and presence while routed through an Asterisk server.

The profile probe is a slightly different issue. In this case, software that mines the Skype cloud for profile data is working with "dirty data." The collection is unverified, often clearly faked (an unbelievable number of people live in Antarctica), old, and incomplete. It does have some gems. Correction: The cloud has email addresses, hidden in the Skype user interface but used to locate friends. The cloud has email addresses, but they are hashed and not human readable. 

I'm not sitting at the management table, but Skype has several choices.

Open. They're already on the path to opening up more of their apps at the API level. Skype could embrace this at the protocol level too. This is the hardest thing to do, but may pay off in the long run. Exposing these protocols is the only way for the Skype network to become an industry standard. And it would put Skype in a position of leadership the way Microsoft is for dot net, Sun is for Java, and Adobe is for Flash.

Switch. Skype could change the protocols, breaking the new software. This is a costly and temporary solution; tricky but doable. Replacing Skype clients for updates is hard enough; getting everyone to migrate could kill the brand love. It won't be long until the Chinese engineers figure out how to get in again.

Quash. Skype might try to blow out the startup's fire. eBay has a powerful combination of PR, lobbyists, litigators, and business allies. Even in China. Skype could try to accuse the startup of piracy. My guess is Skype will tread litely. These tactics rarely work in China and often tarnish the reputation of the outsider applying the pressure.

Ignore. Skype has enough to do. Wait and see.

Invest. Buy the team, put them to work. 

Jim Courtney says technology does not a brand make. It takes quality control, aesthetics, user experience, customer services, an ecosystem of ancillary products, and integration with other systems. Skype's and eBay's marketing are a higher barrier to entry than technology.

Skype personnel were not available for comment. Hat tips to 9Skype, Jan Geirnaert in Malaysia and Lee Dryburgh in Austria.

Technorati Tags: skype, ebay, skypejournal, security, privacy, compatibility, ecosystem

Providing an outline and overview of the full Skype Certification program in action, including both the technology and business aspects, was the goal of Tiit Paananen's presentation at the eBay/Skype Developer Conference last month. The full slide presentation is here but I will add some comments that came out of the session.

From the Skype perspective, the certification process can become a "chicken-and-egg" problem in that both parties (Skype and the partner) must have a common visualization of what the end user product is and how it can bring value-add to the Skype ecosystem. As a result Skype has established a multi-phase process that facilitates preparation and communication while minimizing the number of steps to achieve Skype certification. Establishing this process involved:

• gathering requirements for the program
• establishing Skype's criteria for acceptance
• determining the pre-certification activity required to prepare for testing
• facilitating iterative listing of products as they change once certified.

The business objectives of Skype certification are:

• help sales of partners' products
• ensure a positive user experience
• establish quality control criteria and processes
• avoid technical issues once a product comes to market

To date Skype has the most experience with hardware certification (33 categories and counting) while they are still learning the processes and criteria required for software certification where they are still defining categories. A complete set of certification documentation (by category) is available on the website. As general guidance for software they look for:

• Solutions that make Skype better (Pamela)
• Solutions that Skype makes better (Salesforce.com)

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One of the enhancements of Skype 2.5 was to simplify the upgrade process. Instead of the tedious download/save/install process that involved saving a file somewhere and then finding it to do the install, one simply need click on "Help | Check for Update" and the entire process is automated. No need to close and/or uninstall the previous version. At one point you will receive a screen asking to confirm acceptance of the Skype End User License Agreement and the Skype Privacy Statement:

Click on the acceptance check box and the Install button.  From this point the new version is downloaded and installed; you are then logged back into Skype and ready to continue Skyping.

Feature additions in Skype 2.5.0.122 released at the end of June (change log):

• Adds a "Send SMS" button to the main Toolbar
• Updated translations, including install translations

and 17 minor bug fixes that result in smoother and more intuitive operation. (Note: no security issues in this hotfix.)

So, click on "Help | Check for Update" to ensure you have the latest bug fixes.

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Skypers should be very interested in event syndication, the technology behind sharing event information over the Internet.Yahoo! Upcoming and Google Calendar are Skype rivals' strong tools. I use the venture-funded Eventful every week (great API). I'd be using iCal If I was on a Mac. How might this fit into Skypeland?

• Event discovery. How can I find Skypecasts I want to join, meetings to attend/avoid, conferences to cover, parties to plan? How do I help others find them? All these services make it fast and easy to post an event to yourself, your  friends or the public. Some of them, like Google, make it simple to publish the data on your blog or another web site, or to subscribe to an event feed in your browser or feedreader.
• Calendaring. These data formats let me add found events to my personal calendars. They also make it simple to invite others (part of what makes event data sharing such a social medium).
• Alerting. Skype is mostly about real-time talk. I love it when an alarm rings telling me it's three minutes until my next call. Alerts and reminders help me change my own behavior, help me manage my time and keep my commitments.

What might eBay and Skype do in the next 90 days?

1. Publish open Skypecasts.
2. Publish eBay Auctions in iCalendar and related formats.
3. Publish eBay investor events (analyst days, conference calls, etc.)
4. Publish Skype business events. You have lots to share, like gift days, conferences where Skype participates, job fairs, focus groups, etc.
5. Support consuming calendar feeds in a Skype account. For instance, let me subscribe to the list of Spanish language casts using the word "futbol". And let me get my Outlook and Yahoo! events (including scheduled phone calls) too. Subscribing to the public calendars of my family, friends, customers, and work colleagues reinforces Skype as an instrument for managing my relationships.
6. Show my updated event feeds in a Skype tab. Right in the client.
7. Alert me to upcoming events. Trigger phone calls, conference calls, tuning in to auctions, joining multichats. Prod me to wind up my active call so I can be on time for the next one.
8. Publish my call/chat history as a calendar feed. So I can see whom I talked with, when and for how long right in the same Google/Yahoo!/Outlook calendar I use to manage my time. With access controls, of course.

Just playing around with here's a calendar of public Skype events, as I know them. You can click on the big button to add it to your own Google calendar. So far I've added the published SkypeOut Gift Days for July and the three U.S. Skype research days. Google makes available three links for subscribing or viewing a public calendar: , , and . I'll show a calendar below.

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In case you've ever wondered if there's any scope for innovation in telephony (geddit?), here's some points to ponder.

First, check out this post by Douglas Galbi, in particular:

Good sensory design of communication services requires understanding behavioral goals. Consider, for example, voice quality. High voice quality might mean transmitting the full audible range of a person's voice, and nothing else (no "noise"). Research indicates, however, that persons are able to identify locations based on their acoustic qualities. If the goal of a voice conversation is to transmit specific information in speech, then ambient sound is "noise". But if the goal of a voice conversation is to make sense of the other's circumstances, then ambient sound might enhance communication, particularly for a mobile device.

So, what about the pre-call context exchange?

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Jaanus has put up a post on the Skype Blog announcing the much anticipated Skype for Mac with Video; however, it is not a release announcement -- not even any dates for release. He has put this announcement up because there is a so-called unreleased beta version out on the web but attempting to use this version can cause significant damage to your Skype installation.

What you need to know about this version is that it is an internal unstable development version, and thus it is extremely buggy. It may and will destroy your contacts and other data. It is completely unsupported and if you experience problems due to using this version, you're on your own.

Looking forward to being able to communicate with our Mac Skype Contacts using an "official" version.

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Last Wednesday Skype released five new toolbars - two are entirely new while three are significant upgrades of previous versions. They incorporate several features reported in my interview with Peter Kalmstrom at the Skype Developers Conference. This brings to six the number of Toolbars released in June; when you you look at the feature list you can see the impact of Peter's having a much larger developer team as a result of the eBay acquisition.

At this time I will point you to them; as I am on vacation, reviews will be forthcoming during July:

• Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer , version 2.1.0.10
• Skype Toolbar for Firebox, version 2.1.0.11
• Change Log for Web Toolbars
• New: Skype Office Toolbar, version 1.0.0.22; this toolbar was released just prior to the Skype Developer Conference.
• Skype Email Toolbars
  • for Outlook, version 1.0.0.43
  • New: for Outlook Express, version 1.0.0.43
  • New: for Thunderbird, version 1.0.0.38
  • Change Log for Email Toolbars

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Time for a brief break from our voice communications obsession. As with any blogger, when writing for Skype Journal, I continually seek out tools that facilitate the blogging experience.  Ideally the entry of content, with graphics, should be transparent to the writer. However, while blogging tools make the experience somewhat more transparent, they still have some user interface issues to address. But I diverge.

Our blogging is done via a Moveable Type platform which is well suited to managing and publishing blogs with multiple authors. However, the inherent editor is minimal and requires recalling somewhat more than the basic HTML code experience, especially for inserting graphics. (MT has TypePad for those who want to author at a more transparent level of blog entry) Introduced to Qumana at the Toronto mesh 2006 conference in mid-May, I have found it a very useful aid in providing both a WYSIWYG window as well as a more complete for graphics placement capability. It even does spell checking as you type (à la MS Word). It allows you to build a post offline and save drafts; its Qumana Manager window provides an offline record of all your posts.  Works with all the major blogging tools. Certainly a productivity enhancer; now if they would add a dictionary to the spell checker, I could add "Skype"!

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When my daughter started up her new MacBook Pro a couple of months ago, the most impressive feature was the embedded iSight webcam. When you first create user profiles, capturing a picture of the user is one of the first questions that pops up. I have said previously that Skype is not fully supportive of the Mac line until they come out with a version 2.x of Skype for Mac OS X with full video support; they are currently at version 1.4.0.49.

Well, it should be no surprise that a second Wintel PC vendor has finally come out with a webcam-embedded laptop.  However, in order to ensure full communications functionality combined with hardware simplicity, the newly announced Packard Bell EasyNote Skype Edition incorporates a one-touch Skype calling button located next to the integrated webcam..  From the press release:

The Skype calling button is located next to the integrated webcam on the upper bevel of the 14-inch widescreen display. By pressing the button the user can answer incoming calls or open the Skype application to make a call. The notebook was also designed to be optimized with Intel dual-core processors. The EasyNote Skype Edition features built-in broadband and wireless connectivity, and an original Packard Bell design. Pre-loaded Skype software and the Skype button are just a couple of the many features available on this innovative notebook.

Availability in European retailers will commence in August and vary on a country-by-country basis.

An interesting development. Can a similar Dell laptop be in the future, given the recent announcement of a Dell-Skype partnership to load Skype software onto two new Dell laptop models with an integrated webcam? Will your laptop become your (portable) desktop phone of the future?

In the meantime, it's "Lights, Packard Bell EasyNote, Skype, Action"!

Update June 22: Added Skype button picture above. Janus has provided more pictures here.

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