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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First three general comments:

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

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

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

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

Gizomodo:

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

Skype Numerology

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

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

Tech Crunch UK

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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.

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

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

Questions this raises:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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During Canada's Centennial Year (1967) I was host for a student exchange with Finnish students; we have kept up contact over the past 39 years. Last week I asked one of them if s/he could translate the actual Helsingin Sanomat article reporting on their interview with Niklas Zennström (registration required) or at least give me the gist of it. Below (with minimal editorial correction of spelling and grammar)  is what my friend calls her/his "amateur translation".

The interview certainly goes well beyond the content of the Reuters summary report. (On the other hand there is nothing there that is going to impact eBay's stock price!) Note that, while my friend has been using English in both personal and business activities all these years, Skype Journal is not responsible for any mistranslation.

Of note in Niklas' comments:

• Niklas sees the future for wireless as being in WiFi (and WiMax) networks once they become more ubiquitous and more easily accessible. (reinforcing Ted Wallingford's recent comments on WiFi as the primary VoIP wireless medium)
• The issues with developing Skype for GSM or other wireless mobile phones relate to both processing power and memory issues (which translate into latency issues discussed in a post last weekend).
• He sees current rates for calls to wired lines as being the lowest we will see as someone has to pay for at least the connection.
• He only sees an explosion of mobile VoIP only once there are unlimited use fixed rate data plans available.
• The path to Skype as a ubiquitous mobile platform may be through "rebel" or "challenger" mobile operators who want to challenge the larger legacy service providers. But this is along the lines of what Andy was concluding in his recent "Being on the Inside" post.

A summary translation paragraph by paragraph goes as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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During VON Fall 2006 I did two podcasts with Jon Arnold on some aspects of the show:

• Tuesday: Discussing the morning's two keynotes (Jeff Pulver and Ted Leonsis) as well as the IM session the previous afternoon.
• Wednesday: A discussion of Canadian companies participating at VON Fall.

Also Jon and I were both individually interviewed by TechNewsWorld about the implications of Skype's announcement of the Skype 2.0 beta with video.

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to net neutrality.

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

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

I agree. In a perfect world.

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

So we must act.

We must effect change.

We must out-innovate and out-market.

We must organize as consumers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Watching blogpulse's chart of Skype's blogshare, I can't help noticing how closely the line of the term "VoIP" follows the incidence of Skype-related terms. It's almost as if VoIP is mostly getting mentioned as an explanation or echo of Skype. Has VoIP become redundant as a consumer marketing term? If you're a rival, are you better off saying your product is "like Skype" than "a VoIP tool"? If you're Skype, why would you even mention the term to consumers?

So if Skype is driving the public perception of VoIP, how much is Vonage affecting the "VoIP meme" with their massive US ad campaigns?

Skype is more than VoIP, of course, and the company has a real chance to define its brand on its own terms, and not just on this last-millenium bit of jargon. Careful framing may put all the traditional VoIP people at a disadvantage. For example, Skype adds value with secure phone calls; does your VoIP do that? Since "free" isn't enough to justify North American mass adoption, Skype marcom will explore all the other offers it can make. Its choice of offers may not only redefine VoIP, but set expectations (privacy, presence, collaboration, picture sharing, voice quality, ease of use, video, it just works) competitors may find challenging to match.

Over the past few days, Katie at GigaOm has been trekking down to Mountain View on hot days to try out the new Google-Fi network. Most recently she went with a Mac and Nokia 770 and tried out Skype and GizmoProject respectively to determine the feasibility and quality of the call.. She concludes:

• If your call is critical and you're in a big hurry, and not willing to tinker with new technology, stick to your cellular handset. and
• if you're willing to give up the ease-of-use of your mobile handset, then, Google's Mountain View network is not bad

Alec Saunders has referenced Katie's post, commented on his experience and concludes:

The biggest problem, identified in the comments area, is the ubiquitous authentication screens that nearly all public WiFi access points have now.  For all intents and purposes, these make the use of non-PC based VoIP (such as dual-mode handsets) impossible.

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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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Last week Microsoft cranked up the hype machine and had lots of people wondering if their announcement today would be something approaching earth shaking.  In the end it turned out to be about the consolidation of several communications related servers, such as Exchange and Live Communications Server, onto on Office Communications Server, available in Q2 2007. It was announced today so that IT and communications managers can start to plan architectures, hardware requirements and budgets for its implementation shortly after availability. Fundamentally it is a server product with clients that could potentially replace PBX's. But at what cost in revamping resources, redefining business processes and defocusing an enterprise's primary business strategy.

Two good posts I have come across:

Alec Saunders has an indepth perspective as both a former Microsoft product manager and a potential competitor to iotum's Relevance Engine. But, as Alec says:

When the announcement came, it was a damp squib. Microsoft will rename Exchange as Communications Server, and add telephony features to Communicator, and other products. It's an integration announcement, as opposed to a dramatic new direction -- a reprise of the 1993 announcement that created Microsoft Office out of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Interestingly, this tactic may backfire for them this time around. Today there's much more focus on open standards. The idea that you must buy all of your infrastructure from a single vendor just isn't palatable for many companies today. Certainly, that is the view expressed by TMC's Tom Keating in his coverage of today's announcements.

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Using Bubbleshare (well, you're all tired of Flickr, right? and it's a local product coming out of the Toronto area), I have finally organized my pics from the eBay/PayPal/Skype Developer's Conference two weeks ago.

Double click on any picture for a larger version and the slide show in a separate window. Enjoy!

This album is powered by BubbleShare

Aplogies for not taking full advantage of BubbleShare and putting words in people's mouths...;-)

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Last week, Skype changed the NorthAm VoIP landscape with free SkypeOut until year end. Skype downloads picked up right away.

This week Vonage speculators caught on about 24 hours too late. Vonage, its bankers and investors took in half a billion dollars. That'll buy them a mix of time, talent, features, and paying customers. We'll see how well they use it. 

StreamCast Networks' little litigation engine ups their lawsuit's ante by going for deep pockets, including eBay's, and naming Skype's founders in the expanded suit. Reading their complaint, they think they're facing the Sopranos. ♥ The ammended complaint (4.6MB, PDF) is full of juicy language like "fraud", "exclusive rights", "secretly siphoned-off", "conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act", "steal", "hatched a scheme", "theft", "secret disabling feature", "sweetheart deals", "hijack the 28 million Morpheus user base", "scheme", "scheme", "conspiracy to restrain trade", "pattern of racketeering", "mail and wire fraud", "are currently being aided and abetted in their efforts to fraudulently tranfer funds and properties by their families, accountants and attorneys". ♥ They say Skype's p2p technology is owned by StreamCast, and that Skype's founders cheated them out of the technology. They also say Skype lied to eBay about owning its technology free and clear, or that eBay (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). To make their case, they must pierce several corporate veils, show they had rights to the technology in the first place, prove the people and companies named messed with their rights. The parties span the globe, from Estonia to Vanuatu, but they may have enough to assert California jurisdiction. ♥ The kicker: StreamCast asked the court to shut down Skype. Right now. Protect your Skype SuperPowers! Should you tell StreamCast's management how you feel about it? Using your free or cheap SkypeOut minutes? Just by clicking on the phone numbers below? Maybe you'd say something like "Hands off my Skype, Mr. StreamCast!"? ♥ Do Skype's users have any legal standing in this?

• Michael Weiss, ceo, (818) 887-8610 x110
• Matt Neco, counsel, (818) 887-8610 x105
• Elizabeth Cowley, vp bizdev, (818) 887-8610 x108

The eBay/Yahoo deal seems healthy. Partner with a symbiote, not a parasite. Don't fuel Google's rising threat with ad dollars. ♥ It's an opportunity. Generalizing for a moment, eBay is great at making markets for goods. Yahoo! is better at making markets for intangibles, like jobs, movies, travel. Both create rich communities, but very different mechanics and cultures. As eBay uses Skype to embrace an intangibles strategy, Yahoo! could be a great partner. ♥ What happens should the Skype and Yahoo! Messenger teams swap spit? The best bits of both products could show up in the other. Might they resolve digital ID spaces and data models for users and conversations? Agree to strong interoperability for chat, voice and video? Standards for distributing in-client adverts? API co-development, blending the Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal and Skype developer communities? Together, they'd be an unbeatable team.

Skype updated Windows and Mac clients, bug fixes and repaired security problems, including a bug that exposed millions of SkypeOut call records to the NSA and other Internet snoops.

Dan Houghton, Skype's answer to Shelley Vision, started blogging about new Skypecasts.

The Skype ecology has been active too. VoIP Voice launched a new Mac phone in the UK. ♥ Actiontec is hiring a director of bizdev for VoIP products. "Actiontec is expanding its presence in the Skype Certified VoIP business! As a leader in this marketplace, Actiontec plans to capitalize on it's first to market advantage in the commercial space, and leverage it's intellectual property and strategic relationships in the VoIP adapter business. This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated professional to drive a huge up and coming business segment for Actiontec." If you apply, let us know what you learn. ♥ PhoneGnome to Skype came out, using the Uplink SIP to Skype Adapter.

Sometimes people ask me how I find something to write about just focusing on Skype. It's weeks like this, my friend.

This week sees two events that demonstrate funding of the VoIP-enabled space is alive and well.

Andrew Hansen comments on Benchmark Capital's $15M financing of Bebo, a social network with 24 million members in a space dominated by MySpace and Facebook:

I am pretty confident saying that Skype support was a major (allbeit not the only one) factor in their success. Skype is wildly popular in the EU/UK/EMEA due to high telephony costs. This is great news for the Skype ecosystem, funding is available for innovative and leading edge web applications such as Bebo, and EQO. The lesson learned here is a clear shot across the bow of other major Social networking sites - Skype support = users = traffic.

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I warned you not to ignore Skype and its cousins in my first post. In my second, I explained that Skypers are experiencing today the "communications of the future" you promised generations ago. eBay's building on this to create a new intangibles market. As I pack for my trip to the Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference, let me tell you something else you may not know.

Skype and its cousins are social media. The calls they support may be transactional but are just as often threads in longer conversations, moments in a relationship timeline. So Skype builds in features that transcend the call and focus on the people and organizations in your life.

Users have buddy lists, the kind of speed dial that's alive and updated every minute, that keeps friends and colleagues and sales prospects close to each other and engaged. eBay says about a third of Skypers use it in the workplace. So project and process communication, small team coordination, collaboration even in the same office, are big applications. And it's not because Skype is free. It's because Skype builds social capital.

It helps people stay in touch through "presence." Before you call you want to know availability. And not just what someone's calendar says, you want to know what they're up to and where they are. Skype's simple moodies ("what I'm up to these days") and geopresence (My Skype should be saying I'm temporarily in Lansing but that my home time zone is Pacific) signal status.

Not all conversations are the same, obviously. So Skypers tune levels of intimacy for each call. They start with chat and if they need more can switch to voice or to video with one button. Like a good Leatherman multipurpose tool, people mix the blend of modes to the person, the topic, their sense of urgency, how well they know each other, how prepared they are at this moment for this level of intimacy (nothing like getting a video call when you are in your pajamas). 

After the calls, Skype keeps a history on my PC. All chats can be archived. All conversations are logged. I can see my own call patterns, who I talk with most. I can read what I promised in chat. With permission I can record calls and play them back when I'm less emotional, or for a coworker taking over an account. All of this makes me smarter about cultivating my relationships.

And all of this is so 2005. Watch for companies like iotum to run apps that help Skypers better manage my attention in the context of my many conversations and relationships. Watch for tools to analyze my social networks and map the social proximity of strangers, and friends of friends.

By the way, we haven't talked about lock-in. I know you're used to contractual terms that meet your every need. But real lock-in is in friends. What does it mean to Skype to have a human hub bring her rolodex into the network? To really exploit all these features to manage these precious connections? To leave the network, you have to take your friends, and they have to bring their friends, and so on. Switching costs become a matter of losing your buddy list, losing your conversational history, being less capable of sustaining those relationships. Social capital lock-in is one of the strongest barriers to switching you may ever experience.

So Skype puts all of these relationship tools in your customers' hands. And makes it simple. And fun.

What do you do as a Michigan phone company?

You have my phone bills, but when was the last time your robot called and suggested adding a frequent caller to my speed dial? Or letting me know that I haven't talked to someone this week that I usually talk with every Monday? You have the data. Do you expose it in anything but a billing context? 

You don't.

You force people to write down their contacts on paper. At a time when we have more contacts to administer, and information overload threatens our competence, let alone our sanity. In perilous economic times, who you know can be the difference between employment and bankruptcy. And as our population ages, those with friends live better, live longer, stay healthier. Yet POTS makes us keep precioius relationship data in our heads.

It's no wonder that people are bringing their friends into Skype's social network. Skype makes those relationships easier to care for, to attend, to garden.

As we measure our wealth in friendships and family, Skype makes us wealthier.

What do you do?

I warned folks at this week's Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference not to ignore Skype or its kin. To continue...

Second, Skypers are having their "communications of the future" moments now. If you're thinking about selling video conversation someday at a premium, it's too late. The market's already commoditized and more useful. And it's happened without fast lanes, using the dumb IP network.  

With:

• free calls
• free conferencing
• free video calls
• free video conferencing
• integrated with instant messaging
• file and folder sharing

All at the same time, in the same call.

Please don't think your rivals in this market are your first mile competitors. Your customers are downloading free software from foreign cities like Shenzhen and Luxembourg and Redmond. And from global brands like Yahoo!, AOL and Google.

And your customers are talking to each other, now more than ever. By one measurement, seven percent of all long distance traffic is on Skype. Seven percent. This isn't at the expense of long distance carriers. It's making the pie bigger, making intercontinental conversation carefree and impulse friendly. Changing caller behavior.

From the portal player point of view, this is a continuation of their moves to win and keep attention. It's all of a piece with event sharing (like Yahoo!'s upcoming) and social calendaring (Google Calendar), social networking (MySpace, facebook, Google's Orkut), social bookmarking (Digg, Yahoo!'s del.icio.us), photo sharing (Yahoo!'s flickr) and blogging (MSN Spaces, Google Blogger, SixApart). You know the funny thing? These systems all talk to each other! Open protocols let you see your flickr photos on your MySpace page and Skypecast schedule on your TypePad blog. When was the last time any two of you, let alone your whole industry, agreed on something as technically simple as exchanging voice mail, a twenty year old technology?

All today, used today, engaging your customers today.

But wait, there's more.

All of this is coming to a mobile near you. Location aware applications are exploding as GPS geocoding becomes cheap and transparent.

But that's just the easy stuff.

Third, eBay will build on that enrichment this year. It will come in at least three parts.

Send money. If you didn't know it, eBay the auction house, car dealer, and flea market owns a bank. PayPal will be built into Skype this year. (screenshots as shown at eBay's 2006 Analyst Day via flickr) Forget Western Union for remittances, you'll just call up your friend, ask for $50 and she sends it. No email, no browser, just money. p2p money transfers via this "phone." As lucrative as this will no doubt be, this is just a baseline service.

Send me money for something. eBay is using Skype to enter the consumer-to-consumer intangibles markets:

• Information,
• Entertainment,
• Knowledge, and
• Service.

They're not just helping people buy and sell figurines, they're selling 3D structural simulation of architectural wind forces, and independent medical opinions, and Arabic and Mandarin language tutoring. Information, education, entertainment, and service. No atoms to ship via UPS. Intangibles.

This plays to eBay's strengths. They master services that free people to buy online with confidence. Fraud detection, private police, strong identity, reputation management, and escrow services. Trust, in short. Which brings us to the third leg...

Find someone to send me money for something. eBay are masters of category management, communities that share a common passion and redefine their markets hourly. They bring millions of people together from around the world. Their directories of people and businesses evolve quickly and richly.

This year Skype will build searc of those directories, and new ones specific to intangibles, into Skype's search forms. So users that let their mice do the walking through Skype's white pages will also use eBay's classified yellow pages and new interest searches straight from the Skype client.

Again, no browser involved. Portable to a mobile client. Just look up a Motown expert, ask for the best Marvin Gaye song a tone deaf groom can sing at a wedding, and pay your $2.  Three minutes, $2, and PayPal and Skype get their few pennies of the transaction.

If Skype's rates of adoption and defection stay flat, they'll have 150 million participants in this new economy by year end. This before eBay spends one dime on advertising. And before they wave the flag and get eBay's own customers to embrace this new medium.

So this ain't your ma bell's plain ole phone call.

And those competencies are so hard to buy or build they are formidable barriers to entry.

Where does that leave you?

Thursday morning I'll be in Lansing on a panel for the Telecommunications Association of Michigan's Politech conference.

These are mostly lobbyists from the bigger phone companies, reps from the smaller ones, and interested state legislators. What should I say to them?

First, you dare not ignore Skype and its kin. Just to get a sense of scale, here are Michigan's top 16 cities by 2003 population [on the right], collectively 2.5 million. Skype is picking up 200,000 new users per day. If all of that energy were here in Michigan, Skype would penetrate 100% your bigger cities in two weeks. And the whole state of 10 million in 50 days. Dear TAM member, how many new customers did you pick up last year? And how much did you pay for them? Skype has less than 400 employees. 

Skype/eBay is not alone. Microsoft Vista comes to a desktop near you later this year. Watch adoption of their Windows Live Messenger with voice and video. What's Microsoft's installed base in your geography?

Your response may be to respond in kind. Everyone and their brother is licensing or building up their softphones. Others are creating consumer non-PC VoIP solutions through Skype or softphones embedded in home phones. Yet others are following Skype onto mobiles or leapfrogging them. Are you used to competing in a very crowded market?

In a very crowded market, how will customers choose? What are the drivers of consumer choice in the world of Skype, QQ (the largest single-language IM/voice network on Earth), and AOL? What are their goals? The risks they're managing? If you answer cost containment, you're right, of course. But that just gets their attention.

So, this shift is big, it's real, it's happening now, and it's affecting your customers' relationship with you. More to come.

PGA.com's new Tournament Central dashboard provides a perfect example where an Internet-enabled PC can be a more effective way to watch a golf tournament than simply a television set:

The convergence comprises:

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I'm looking forward to blogging the Conversations that develop from the sessions at mesh 2006 tomorrow and Tuesday. With featured Conversation Mentors such as Om Malik, Michael Geist, Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky there should evovle some interesing perspectives on how the a Web 2.0 world will evolve.

Mark is getting excited in preparing over the weekend, he says:

I couldn't help but think that we are a long way from a cold winter night a few months ago at the Paddock Tavern when someone raised the idea of putting on a conference. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into! I'm looking forward to meshing as much as possible so if you see me wondering around, please introduce yourself.

As a media sponsor, Skype Journal will be reporting back daily with a particular focus on how Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 can be integrated into, impact and influence a public beyond the geeksphere.

Lots of developments in preparation for the Toronto mesh Conference:

Mark Evans reports on the selections for 15 Minutes of Fame. They're "giving three people a day 5 minutes each on stage to talk about their ideas, their companies or themselves."

Mark also reports on how they have organized this conference with no budget largely using web-based communications via the blogosphere. (I think he meant to say they have been able to "sell a whole bunch of tickets".)

Matthew Ingram expands on how Web 2.0 is rewriting the rules for the marketing business and how, with appropriate credits to Seth Godin, their success has turned out to be the result of using the web to "create a relationship, a dialogue -- a conversation".

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The Skypecast service, announced today, is a fun and useful app. A quick and dirty internal project, about a month old, it lets you log in to a Skype site and create a public voice auditorium for up to 100 people. If you catch this in time, we'll be hosting Skype Journal forum - Today's Skype Announcements - Good, Bad, Great, or Useless? today at midnight Eastern, 9:00pm Pacific, GMT

I love it and will be using it.

But Skype didn't give the people in its third-party Skype developer programme or their online partner programme the tools to build it themselves. Skype staff built the plumbing, then built the app, but kept the plumbing closed to the public.

Skype must carefully and quickly build out their application infrastructure. Their focus must be on seducing entrepreneurial engineers, enterprise IT technologists, and phreaks around the world to a rapidly evolving and increasingly capable Skype platform.

Investors must care. In the coming battles for control over technical standards, over market share, and over conversational commerce, Skype will need friends. In particular, Skype will need a strong, confident, committed ecology of businesses building on Skype as a platform. Skype's bizdev seems up to the task, but Skype's API remains an afterthought.

Who is the product champion at Skype for the API? Which senior executive is driving the client and service APIs forward? Who is committing developer headcount to architecting and constructing server APIs and server agents?

Skype's independent developers want to know. Now. Some certified partners have told me they are limiting their investment in the Skype platform for just this reason, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other platforms to be the beneficiaries.

There are many bases for competitive success. This one is key.

When I moved from academia to a (public company) technology business over 30 years I ago I had a VP-level supervisor who would always talk about the need to keep margins up. "Why?", I would ask. "What's so important about margns?" "Because that's all there really is to keep a business growing: Revenues minus operating costs."

Alec Saunders has published an excellent post on margins in the VoIP business: Reading Between the Margins: Vonage vs. Skype.

Look out! Aswath's talkin' business. Vonage, that is...

Riffing on Cynthia Brumfeld's analysis of the revised Vonage S1, and the iotum / Phonegnome announcement, Aswath concludes that reduced churn and increased revenues are the keys to success for VoIP providers. Moreover (and thank you for the kind words Aswath), new applications are the way to deliver those revenues. Hear hear!

The real issue is margin, not revenue.

Once again, the real issue is margin, not revenue.

Alec then goes on to do an excellent analysis of Skype revenues (rapdily increasing ARPU, ultra low costs of significant customer aquisition) and to do a comparison with Vonage's potential margins. With their infrastructure taken into account Skype comes in with revenue of $0.80 per month per hard core user with $2 million annual cost (acquisition and operating) while Vonage, based on the S-1 numbers, probably has revenues of $27.70 per subscriber per month with $8.70 operating cost leading to a loss of $167 million annually and 25% customer churn.

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PhoneGnome offers Relevance-based Call Management with Iotum's Relevance Engine. Over the past few months I have been a beta tester for the iotum Relevance Engine which has a number of interesting applications that are providing a taste of what my future real-time communications activities may have in store.

One of the first applications that Iotum has built automatically manages incoming phone calls and directs them in context to an appropriate home, business or mobile number or to voice mail. Iotum's engine is an expert system that understands my work environment and helps me prioritize which calls are important and which ones can wait, under different circumstances based upon:

• Who's calling
• What I am currently doing and my schedule for today (according to Outlook)
• My availability (according to MSN Messenger)
• My assignment of up to five priorities for my Outlook contacts, and
• My designated business hours

Martin Geddes included a request for such a call management service in his "wish list" of premium services for which he'd "gladly pay some small up front fee and a regular subscription" charge as part of a proposed Skype bundle for small business.

For a benchmark example of a response Skype can now look to iotum; this agreement between PhoneGnome and iotum demonstrates a revenue generating service that manages my calls based on my work environment.

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Skypenomics 101. The constant question since 12 September 2005: how does eBay get back all that money? Forgetting any performance payout, nobody supposes Skype will sell $1.3 billion in services in the next few years. When they did the deal, eBay had a market cap of $56 billion. So eBay paid 2.3% of its market cap. If Skype management beats their targets, they'll earn another $1.5 billion in 2008 or 2009. With the up-front, eBay paid 5% of its 2005 market cap.

What does 5% mean?

eBay's market cap changes that much every few days, 8.87% on Thursday alone. So it's within the range of noise for a company growing as much as eBay (42% year over year).

eBay's 2005 revenue was $4.55 billion, so 5% is $228 million. Skype might make that number next year if it figures out how to:

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What would Skype's response be to someone wanting to give away a "Million" Skype minutes? That's just the sort of question I get asked from time to time. Now a million minutes is quite a number and yet at 2 cents per minute represents only K$20. While this promotion could be all sorts... from "lifetime" of free Skype calling, to providing "rewards" or minute points for participation the key question for this reader was can it be done? Or can they do it via an affiliate program?

It did get me thinking about reward programs and how a Skype client might in the future be leveraged to "disperse" the wealth. In fact Skype just becomes a wallet.

At the moment there is no way to go online and buy a million minutes. There is also no simple automated way to distribute them. To obtain them by making lots of purchases would fail, for Skype payments would stop you adding the largest $ amount and repeating at roughly minute intervals. .

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Apple's "digital living room" follows the money of passive media consumption (iPods and iTunes) instead of Apple's traditional role of enabling expression through content creation. We spend more time reading than writing, listening to radio than podcasting, watching TV than shooting and producing video. So Apple's just following human behavior, and the money.

I'm disappointed, though. I've always prized the culture of the Mac for emphasizing creativity, artistry, action and collaboration, at work, school, public service and the arts. That spirit attracted me to blogging in 1998 and to Skype in 2003. Giving people tools to express themselves and to connect with one another ennobles us all. It decentralizes power and makes our world civilization less fragile.

As Apple conditions the channel surfing reflexes of iPodders, are we losing something?

Here's three Skype products that aim to enhance your Skypeing experience that leaves me questioning exactly what I'm buying with Skype Certified. The three products are the VoSky Chatterbox, Jawbone Headset and the Motorola Wireless Interenet Calling Kit. Each provide a different angle on bettering the standard Skyper's headset and as you might expect each has their pro's and con's.

VoSky Chatterbox.

This simple USB device provides an easily portable plug and play speakerphone for Skype. It's simple to use and requires no additional software to be loaded. It has a volume and mute button on top and works probably as expected, as a low cost speakerphone. I'd liken it to the solution we had as kids when we could finally plug in a speakerphone box between the old phone and the whole family sat around. In principle great, in practice it left something to be desired. The Chatterbox is a little like this. It works. It's also no substitute for a decent headset. The caller on the other end of the line will know and possibly complain. Handsfree solutions curently work better with a good set of speakers and a proper stand mic. Locate them correctly and the caller won't get a any feedback. Many laptops work as good as the Chatterbox. If you feel the need try it. Just don't expect it to be a Polycom and ready for the office. For kids it may be more robust than a headset - read youngsters talking to Grandma.

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"Expressive content" is Skype's words for their latest experiment in personalizing your Skype with ringtones and pictures. I'd not blogged it earlier simply because it held little interest to me in the format launched. It's currently available as part of Skype beta 1.4 for Windows.

I'd heard from focus group reports that Skype was looking at adding ringtones. However, I think they missed the real opportunity. By modelling their solution off the mobile phone they made two key assumptions. First that the mobile model applies and second the rate is appropriate. They apparently missed the most basic questions. Why have mobile ring tones been so successful? And why are they so viral?

Ringtones are a very vocal method of pimping out your mobile phone. They provide personality, add visibility and ring in public places. By contrast Skype ringtones are often taken in an office, or simply heard behind a headset. While it may be nice to change your ring tone at home or in the office, you are unlikely to get the attention the same money secures for your mobile. In the current mode it appears too expensive to be interesting.

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Is the Skype – eBay – PayPal strategy enough to win in a world of telecom and IM Portals? Can this emergent company topple these incumbents and revolutionize economics? Is there a glowing outlook for Skype? I wrote the rest of this piece before I heard about eBay. It points to hidden value and telecom and IM weaknesses that still exist. I’ve added a couple of updates as commentary in it below.

When Skype launched, it capitalized on the growth of broadband and demonstrated that voice is just another computer software application. A small cadre saw something more and began experimenting, exploring the “eBay of communications”, and the “online presence spiral” while working on ways to serve Skype presence data and apply it to call centers. In the last two years, Skype has changed the way we connect. It has been adopted by volunteers in global relief efforts (Katrina) and by language teachers. This flood of good will, community spirit, and innovation is emerging from one idea. “Communication wants to be free!" Tom Friedman wrote the world is flat. Skype has eliminated distance, created a new form of intimate conversation, and brokered new business opportunities. As a result, underpinning this revolution is a burgeoning desire to ensure the “Freedom to Connect”.

From this core value of “freedom” emerges a competitive challenge and a set of strategies both visible and hidden that is taking the revolution all the way to the mighty halls of telecom companies, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. All of these businesses are trying to understand 1) Skype’s business model and 2) how to squash this upstart. None of them has an effective Skype strategy. After two years they are still unable to answer the question “What’s your Skype strategy?”.

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Deal done. Retail VOIP in the offing? Views later.

eBay has agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA, the global Internet communications company, for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

Skype generated approximately $7 million in revenues in 2004, and the company anticipates that it will generate an estimated $60 million in revenues in 2005 and more than $200 million in 2006. For Q4-05, eBay expects the acquisition to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.01 and $0.04 respectively. For the full year 2006, eBay expects the transaction to be dilutive to pro forma and GAAP earnings per share by $0.04 and $0.12 respectively, with breakeven on a pro forma basis expected in the fourth quarter of 2006. On a long-term basis, eBay expects Skype operating margins could be in the range of 20% to 25%.

The acquisition is subject to various closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Full text of news release...

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The Ebay rumors are hilarious. Nobody can verify or confirm anything. Not even vague denials from any of the parties. Who benefits from the leak? Skype's VCs pushing valuation buzz and Skype's bizdev team, both to better arm-twist partners.

Everything Skype can offer eBay or its subsidiaries (technology, network access, Skypification of its user experience, PayPal currency conversion of Skype Minutes) can be delivered as a service, without an equity entanglement.

And then you get the Skype Voice announcement. Bill Campbell does a fine job skewering the outrageous charges imposed by Skype. Can you imagine paying 30% of a sale to your credit card company? Or to your phone company for letting you hook up your computer to the phone network? That's Skype's program!

But that's not the worst of that deal. It's that Skype's BizDev team is driving for tactical profit but creating a strategic disadvantage. I'm tempted to say they're trying to think like a mobile service provider but Bill says it looks like simple opportunism.

This deal is an innovation killer.

This type of deal, cherry picking three players out of an entire industry, only reinforces Skype as a "walled garden," a private, tightly controlled place with one master. The other way to do it is to set things up so anyone who wants to compete can do so. Publish protocols and specs and some common tools for call termination (SkypeLite, maybe?) and for commerce. Set rates comparable to what credit card processing companies charge for debit transactions; Skype minutes are risk free since all funds are prepaid cash.

By the way, do you understand what Skype Voice companies do? They are middleware. You call a number. Their computer picks up the phone and answers with a recorded message. It creates a user experience for you using a library of prerecorded messages, a little speech recognition, Voice-XML to guide the conversation, and whatever database of content you're sharing. Like calling up for movie times and making it easy to search for the blockbuster playing near you.

Enormously helpful.

And these companies offer the service now, on regular phone lines, on toll free numbers. They make their money by selling their service to companies that want to engage their customers over the phone. Like banks for bank balances. Or a newspaper for delivery problems. Or a shipper for tracking problems. In none of these examples does money change hands. It's just my business process talking to customers in a convenient, narrow, well structured conversation.

They don't pay the phone company extra for the privilege.

Skype's partnership model doesn't allow this. If there's no revenue, nobody gets paid. And Skype must be paid before they let you pick up when a Skype caller rings you.

Skype's model doesn't allow public service implementations. The volunteers who put together KatrinaHelp would love to implement a service like this but will not charge the dispossessed to find a lost child.

And companies that want to plug in their own IVR systems are shut out too.

Like Bill said, it's a mess.

Instead of putting up a new api, protocols, etc. upon which vendors can innovate and add value the way tellme adds value (terminating calls and doing something with it), they are doing custom deals for a handful of players for short term cash, closing out the developer and entrepreneurial ecosystem including dozens of Tellme rivals.

Skype can fix it but, as it stands, the Skype Voice program is one step back.

I received some feedback when I floated my previous post on Katrina earlier today. So being naive I sent the following response which outlines what appears possible to me.

Thank you for the FCC perspective. However if I understand correctly you can’t transfer it to a VoIP provider like Vonage or Skype. Thus the regulations aren't going to help much at all. This group is still tied into the tyranny of the fixed line. People need their numbers where access may be difficult and messages can be left.

I was approaching it from the following point of view…

• Minimal infrastructure. Minimal set up and training.
• Implementation in hours rather than days or months
• Put in the Astrodome an Internet café along with headsets.
• Provide broadband and WiFi
• Enable Skype on those PC’s / phone handsets. Word would spread rapidly.
• Enable account holders to open a Skype account and assign their home number to it (SkypeIn)
• They would be enabled with free voice mail at the same time.
• Using the latest version they could call forward if required to a mobile number (cost two cents per minute) or to another Skype account – buddy for free, thus establishing a more online point of contact.
• It costs nothing to open accounts.
• Presence would enable them to create support groups and networks quickly amongst neighbors.
• Bell South could probably arrange to keep ownership of the numbers if they wish, e.g. loan them to a service.
• There is no need for a switchboard; it does require some bandwidth….

Rather than ponder the outcome, it should be done for humanitarian reasons. The old system doesn't have an emergency response that is acceptable any more.

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The recently launched DNA, a national English-language newspaper, has bagged the first interview with Niklas Zennstrom in Indian media. No surprises really, as he talks about how Skype has taken off, the thinking behind creating Skype and the way forward for Skype. Partnerships with handset manufacturers, and wifi enabled devices, neww payment options, and additional premium offerings such as video-conferencing and workgroups focussed offerings.

A non-committal 'perhaps' to the question of whether India could aid in product development going forward, and the statement that India ranks 36 in Skype's top ranking countries of use, with more than 279,000 users. Ending the interview with this thought :

"As one of the world's emerging leaders in IT and associated services, India certainly has a major part to play in the future development of Skype."

279,000 is a small number really, I think there is tremendous potential to expand the base in India. Perhaps a starting point would be to scope the opportunity with different segments of potential Skypers in India - the Indian with family abroad, the villager with low communication access otherwise, the internet kiosk user, the small and medium businessman.

Then there is the business model ... free vs paid services – should Skype look at 100mn subscribers to free service or 10mn who pay? What are the critical success factors, brand strategy, media streams etc both short term and longer term ?

And to scope different areas of operation and affiliates - appropriate partners, hotspots, cybercafes where often there is a lot of VOIP usage, social networking sites (dating and match-making sites for instance are huge in India – not sure they currently use VOIP or presence), the whole BPO industry, portals and programmers who tend to use more of these technologies (and are a huge number).

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Ok I'd like to get a little input from the community. Should Skype be selling 99 cent prepaid phonecards? Maybe two dollar cards? Is the 10 and 25 Euros denominations for SkypeOut the most effective way to grow the business? Choosing Euro 10 and 25 denominations for Skype made sense when they launched SkypeOut. It flooded Skype's coffers with cash and the business funded it's growth. They had a fraud problem which is apparently under control. So why not introduce lower / smaller denominations. In many parts of the world a 99 cent card would significantly expand business. The cards could even be sold through traditional outlets.

So....

What if Plazes had a Skype plug-in? What if Skypers could display their Plazes location in their presence information? Would that be cool / useful? What if each time you logged on you had an option of confirming your Plazes location? Thus Online Library vs Online Office, vs Online Starbucks Lafayette. Would this help to accelerate the building of a database like this. It confirms people's hangouts, and locations of importance for them. Wouldn't that make Skype instantly more sociable? Wouldn't that help Plazes to develop?

What is Plazes?

Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world.

Could Plazes be made more interesting by integrating its launcher with Skype? Would timezones and location information integrate more appropriately within the presence info rather than the buddylist? Will Skype enable such services to add value to the presence fields? At a minimum, Skype should open up a presence field into which we can insert our own definition of a "presence" update.

Note Plazes already integrates Skype callto: features. Maybe Plazes and Jyve should work together?

Skype's performance in the US generally sucks by comparison to other countries. One of the reasons is the way our tariff structures are set up, another is the impact of mobile phones. So if you were Skype, what's your next move to connect mobile phones up to the SkypeNet.

While we have seen experiments SMS to Skype and iSkoot, neither of these enable a simple call connection solution. I've thought for quite a while that an IVR solution could be in the works.

Here's how it works.

I'm on mobile and dial my SkypeIn number and add a #. I hear Hello Stuart, which Skyper would you like to speak to. Please enter their name or dial their SkypeOut number now. I answer "Bill Campbell" - Connecting to Bill Campbell press 1 to connect, 2 to cancel. My connection to Bill Campbell is now billed at the SkypeOut Global rate of approx 2 cents per minute. If I wanted to dial a SkypeOut number I simply would have spoken the number or used my keypad. Calls forward from a Mobile to a SkypeOut number would be billed at double the rate. Ie for the forward and for the SkypeOut connection. Thus four cents per minute.

How likely is this? How difficult?

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We have Podcasting, Skypecasting and perhaps this community variant is buddycasting. While you can't have it today this mock-up from Uri Levanon displays the kind of thinking required to take the IM client to the next level. It also enables behavior similiar to what's seen on Live Journal, Xanga, MySpace etc.

Here is Uri's example. Everyone would have the opportunity to share the topic of their latest mini-cast.

Here's something I'd really like to have in Skype.

An option to share a single short voice message with my contacts list.

Gogelmogel

How would this work in Skype? Why is it such a neat idea?

1. Voice Messaging. Uses the current voice messaging system in a slightly different way. The recording stays resident unless requested by one of your buddies. When requested it is simply uploaded and delivered as a voice message.

2. Enhancements. We already need a topic name for voice mails. This illustrates how topics could add value to a voice message. Additionally, pinging a minicast server for "public" rather than "Buddy" only mini casts would enable this effectively to be a podcast distributed by Skype. It would be good for low volumes. With the topic enhancement you could tag for conversations.

3. Reply enables buddies to jump into a multi-chat for that mini-cast. The behavior is then very similar the high number of comments we see on Xanga, or MySpaces. Quit the multi-chat and you just left a comment. Close it and it will pop back up with the next comment etc. A simple way to network with your buddies buddies. Add a number of of replies counter and it becomes even more interesting. You may even want to sort your buddylist on most active mini-casts.

4. Format. This doesn't need to be audio. It could be video or even just a text message. It's a blog and not a blog. It's certainly social and enables people to find out more about others. Similarly the multi-chat reply means people can comment and leave the thread or stay and get the updates from others. Thus opt-in to multi-chats. Each mini-cast has it own-multichat. The records could be added to profiles etc.

Wow first time I've been called a "Skype Head" and now I have my very own technorati tag. Thanks to Stowe who again confronts the which IM sytems should I be on challenge from a Mac users perspective. He asks if there's "An End In Skype"?

.....one outcome of that battle is likely to be consolidation of the fragmented instant messaging world. If and when someone wins that battle I believe it will be like Betamax/VHS, and the standard will become ubiquitous. It's early to call a winner, but Microsoft's flabby innovation these days when contrasted with iPod's market dominance in digital music makes me nod toward Apple. And if Skype wins big as a result, thats cool with me. I just want one buddylist, and if the government isn't going to force interoperability, like they should, then I am rooting for an instant messaging monopoly. And please, God, don't let it be Microsoft. Corante > Get Real >

Good post which highlights that we need the Mac SkypeAPI quickly. Plus I just learned I need to create some new tags for some special people. PhilWolff, BillCampbell, MartinGeddes, DinaMehta. We've been experimenting with Tags on the back end of this blog. I'll see how this goes.

Wade Roush writes a brilliant essay titled "Social Machines". For anyone that hasn't had their head down testing social software , thinking mobility, and communications for the last few years it is worth reading all the way through.

Continuous computing: the proliferation of cheap mobile gadgets, wireless Internet access for everyone, a new Web built for sharing and self-expression... suddenly, computing means connecting. Continuous Computing Blog: Social Machines

Skype features in there. However that is not why you should read it.

Skype's new video challenge really highlights their current strategic crisis. With more than half a million Skypers playing around with various video solutions for Skype, it shows what even a nascent developer community can achieve quickly. Do the new video entrants suggest Skype rethink strategically their development attention?

Other companies are learning Skype is a perfect piggyback to success. Both vSkype and Video4Skype (now Video4IM) have "relationships" with investors in common with Skype. With well over 500K users trying these products in days of their launch it's clear that Skype users are willing to try new things. The value of the SkypeAPI just become even more attractive.

Concurrently we are seeing the first clues to problems Skype is having coping with developers. These video products are being developed often without any input from Skype at all. So with video, Skype has gone from working on their own video solutions to watching three other companies prototype increasingly sophisticated applications. In a well-managed developer world these would not be surprises. I have good reason to think they were.

Questions Raised by Video:
Should Skype be trying to develop their own video solution? Or should they be working with developers to enable better video solutions? Should they turn over what they have learned to developers so far....? Do they need control over video to have control over their platform strategy?

This feels like a prime opportunity to create a real developers platform. If they can only let go and think on a dime. Think Playstation. Video is the game equivalent. By contrast what video needs is 3D audio. Skype didn't invent their audio codec. However, they must find a way to keep their lead in voice. The rest of the VoIP market now understands that. Video without voice has limited appeal.

A more detailed look - starting with video examples.

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Stuart Henshall, Skype Journal's publisher, posted his Grade "D-minus" for Skype's developer ecosystem. I think it's too harsh. Slightly. I give their developer program to date a "C".

Two reasons: My metrics biases are a hair kinder. And I cut Skype a lot of slack for their small size and tender years.

"Doctor, the labs are in."

Generally, you model what you want the system to do. You diagram the states and flows. Then you seek out metrics that sense general system health, that help diagnose problems and prescribe solutions.

In this case, you want a large and vital business ecosystem. It's many outside developer subcommunities, several subcultures within Skype, and the processes you design and deploy to keep virtuous cycles going.

Some of my favorite measures...

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by Jan Geirnaert, an IT/Internet Business Consultant in Malaysia.

I have worked here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as the IT manager and network administrator for a small non-IT business. One of the many things I did is cutting the cost of the phone bill by implementing Skype as a VoIP solution. These thoughts are not purely IT/technical. My wage was paid by the cost-savings on the telecom-bill.

Here are some issues to be taken into account before implementing Skype. What you read below is how I did it, these are my personal experiences. The standard setup-recommendations can be found on the Skype web site.

Make your case gently and with numbers

Explain properly to all involved management levels and teams (especially Finance and higher management-levels) what the solutions consist off. Don’t go too much into IT-technical issues. Focus on the advantages and the low cost (only your time and skill are important here). Take into account that VoIP (Skype included) is something new and a low-level entry is better than no entry at all. If you make things sound complicated, it just won’t work.

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By Jean Mercier, Ghent, Belgium, Monday June 1, 2005

Some weeks ago I searched a way to record the users on-line without staying awake the whole night. Perhaps this is possible with the Skype API and some programming, but I am not a programmer anymore! But I found a trick ... View image

Some time ago I found also interesting data concerning the Skype Users by Country.
Of course Users on-line peak around 17h GMT+1 (means 16h GMT), because according to the Skype statistics more than 42% of the users are Europeans located in the GMT 0, GMT+1 and GMT+2 time zones. At the same moment the USA, Brazil and Canada and some other American countries are starting to work!

There is also a "dip" in the curve between 12h and 14h GMT+1! Could it be because a lot of Europeans are leaving the office to lunch, and log-off their Skype? And could it be that the other "dip" in the curve (around 6 AM) has something to do with the Americans (South and North) going out to lunch? Pure speculation, but if somebody has another explanation, I am willing to discuss it.

My curiosity did not

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Skype said it will be re-launching their Software Developer Program, SDP, this month. They have 2 days to go! Please hurry!

Since I was the first member of the SDP eight months ago I can say this is a much-needed upgrade. Skype continues to innovate. But the real long-term innovation engine will be driven by an ecosystem of global software and device developers. Small, like Khaoslabs in Toronto, Canada, with the two genius Kevin’s (Kevin 1 and Kevin 2) who we work with, and large, like Motorola.

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Akshaya wins the PrixArts Digital Communities Award.

Akshaya is a project undertaken by the Kerala state government in India, to bring e-literacy to its people. Malappuram has become India's first e-literate district, with over 600,000 individuals having basic knowledge of computers, including the Internet.

From their website :
"Wiring up Malappuram, 3,550 Sq.KMs spreading from East to West section of Kerala is a huge challenge. Connectivity Requirements:
- Should support data and voice
- Should support Internet browsing
- Voice over IP,Multimedia, Video conferencing (at a later stage)
- E-learning
Minimum Internet bandwidth requirement:
- Maximum Information rate (MIR) : 64kbps & Committed Information Rate (CIR) : 16kbps.
- Should be possible for any of the Akshaya centers to enhance the bandwidth and/or download limit on request."

I also read Villages may get Net, telephony on cable in the Business Standard yesterday, where the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is planning a convergence of voice data services. It is expected to send a proposal to the government for allowing cable operators in rural areas to offer basic telephony and Internet services.

Good to see plans for VOIP and conferencing being integrated into these programs. Access is one part of being connected, communications takes it to a different dimension. And is so integral to really bridging the digital divide.

A great opportunity for Skype!

This is another update on SkypeVM, voice messaging in my language and voice mail in theirs. In my initial post I figured that VM could be one of Skype most profitable early money raisers. Currently it's not performing to my adoption expectations and that traces to their execution. Let me illustrate with a story.

I spent time reconnecting today with a colleague who has a friend who doesn't like interruptions. It's the type of job they do. They don't like chat messages that popup they don't like incessant ringing of their cellphone which they just turn off. For my colleague it puts her off ringing them.

How'd this all come up and and does it predict Skype strategy? Well I was sharing an aspect of Pamela-Systems' soon-to-be-released Pro version. I was experimenting with personal answer messages and sharing that I could customize one for each one of my friends. Now she jumped at it for this guy. She said.. you mean I can leave and update messages for him when he calls.. so even if I am not here he gets them. The answer is yes!

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Martin Geddes provides a neat idea and wants a less interruptive communication system. Next time I'll send him a voice message! The objective is to send a message "I want to talk to you" with it's own signal. I'm pretty sure I've seen another IM system that has already done this. It effectively sent a highlighter to your buddylist. Thus I could quickly see who wanted to reconnect. Under the SkypeAPI it would then be connected to a contact management system which would provide the topic and follow-up context whenever the caller rang back.

I’d rather see is a little stack of names of people in the bottom right of my screen who want to talk to me. If they go offline, their entry fades out. Maybe the colour signifies the urgency of the request; a slowly draining sand timer icon indicates if this is a time-bound request. Telepocalypse

Ross has a way with transaction costs. My guess is rich presence is exponential. The very RSS "pull" versus Chat "push" that he refers to suggests a deep concern with "control" over interruptions. I'd prefer to believe that rich presence will bring "higher quality" interruptions. Interuptions perturb the system and as a result we learn faster.

So far I've not found the "cost" of presence that Ross refers to. My Skype buddylist now stands at 210. I think I will push for 300 and then start running an analyser on the SkypeAPI to monitor interuptions. There's probably even a way I can rate them. That might teach me something.

However, with the social network as a filter -- coordinates of time, space and activity (what am I listening to, my calendar, use of modalities) can automagically provide a reasonably rich presence. When the cost of presence and interruptions are reduced from the receiver, we may find it more efficient to connect. Many-to-Many: The Cost of Presence

When we engage and create personal dashboards for presence under who's control should it be? The links below suggest that it will be central servers. By contrast I believe that Personal Presence Servers will prevail. Presence solutions for the field and individuals need to follow emergent self-organizing principles.

Quite a few weeks ago I was pointed to a post by David Stephenson on presence applications for Homeland Security. I set it aside. One particular line caught my attention.

However, IMHO, the really exciting aspect of presence is real-time "communication dashboards," which allow you to visualize all these components -- such as names of team members, actions such as "meet now," or " send file" -- on a single screen. You can see instantly whether a team member was available, and how best to contact him or her.

In a crisis, the ability to visualize this kind of information and factor in real-time, location-based information could be invaluable.
W. David Stephenson

He also linked to a short piece by Nemertes Research. Bringing the data together in the traditional telephony model will be too difficult.

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Jeff Pulver writes a well balanced piece today on the 911 crisis. I'm wary of what's happening here. Part of that may be because I've never made a 911 call, and can't think of a single person I know that has either. However, taking that too far is like saying I've never had a heart attack or a stroke. Some things are required for the unexpected, and it may be even more important that they are provided on time to someone you know.

Still I believe regulators run the risk of making the mistake thinking that they know what users want. They are wrong. They base their experiences on the phone systems of the past and not on the future. Dealing with VoIP in the US today or any other country is not about addressing Vonage and asking how will they provide an effective 911 service. For those PoIP services aren't the ones defining the emerging user experience and what they will do with it. In fact rushing to reregulating the new with the old is plain stupid. In fact rather than regulating VoIP the solution really requires "opening" numbers to VoIP users while we transition to something completely new. By then the numbers won't matter anymore. This is how I get to that idea.

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With injury, age, disease, or an accident of birth, our abilities shift from the norm. Reasonable people understand it is useful to have everyone participate in society, especially in public spaces. So we make curb cuts in sidewalks for wheelchair access. Traffic signals and elevators chirp or announce their status. We accomodate to include.

I propose Skype and the Skype developer community set a goal:

Skype accessibility for the visual and hearing impaired by Summer 2006.

Some of the challenges:

• Technical Compatibility. How well does Skype work with today's screen readers? What can we do to make it work naturally?
• Relay service. Human relay services that help the visually impaired to hear a chat (reading the chat aloud) and the hearing impaired to have voice calls transcribed in real time and video calls closed captioned in real time. Programmers: consider relay initiation.
• Captioning. When Skype introduces video calls and conferences, how will we caption video from those using sign languages?
• Controls. What features will help a blind person navigate her Skype address book, search for a Skype user, be notified of voice mail? How will this differ from computer platforms to mobile ones?
• Alerting and notification. Other tools, including many not connected to a computer, are used to notify the deaf and blind of incoming calls. How should Skype work with them?
• Other concerns. While the Skype UI is simple, it is overwhelming for some with other cognitive modes like types of attention deficit or mild autism, for others with motor disabilities, and yet for others with sensory concerns like color blindness.

There are technical and business justifications. These new features will lend themselves to other applications. The challenges will strengthen the Skype API. The accessibility will extend the market. And the programme responds to PSTN/mobile telco lobbying.

But that's not why we must do it.

We can leave no Skyper behind.

It is the right thing to do.

It's possible to forward calls using the SkypeAPI although it really is a kludge solution. You raise a conference call and mute the audio outputs and the call can be autoforwarded to another Skype client or at your cost via SkypeOut to a mobile. Of course your PC has to stay on. Skype in time will offer a personal call forward solution, it's natural addition.

On a personal basis having a call forward to my mobile would be great. However, if my mobile carrier got smart and just offered to ring my Skype everytime my number was called then I'd be taking more calls on my mobile number. I bet I'd end up using more mobile minutes.

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