Gaurav Prasad, New Delhi. India

Lots is happening in India, most interesting stuff in Telecoms and IT related sectors. As of September TRAI (Telephone Regulatory Authority of India) slashed the rate of broadband connection to more 50- 60 % and there is talk convergence (which means single company can offer both telecoms and data services). Not surprisingly there has been 60 to 70 % growth in broadband subscribers base in India. The government has also legalized Internet telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VOIP for short) April 1, 2002. You must be thinking now what this got to do with Skype or VOIP, well almost everything.

One to two years back an Internet connection was too expensive or slow to be used in domestic sectors. It was also a government service, so the favorite place to access Internet were cyber cafes /office /school or college lab, so voip was used for quick short calls (due crappy voip software like Yahoo, MSN and low bandwidth) but most people preferred chatting to voice chat as matter of convenience . Now the provisioning of Internet services is privatized and large ISPs are slashing of rates This has led most people in urban areas to owing or planning to own an Internet connection especially when it costs as little as $5 to $10. (Editors note. For the average Indian this amount of money takes five to eight hours to earn.

Most Internet users adept with use IM like yahoo or msn but Skype is penetration is still low but gaining steadily. Most people at work or friends / family still haven't heard much about Skype or used and those who use them it simply love it. Skype is mainly used by power Internet users like college students or working professionals or by the families of Non Resident Indians, geeks /enthusiasts & many businessmen who do business in Europe (their European-based customers usually recommend Skype to them). Why do we not find Skype on Indian desktops as often as Yahoo or MSN? Especially since Skype offers better service /value. The later products are IM centric, while Skype is Voice centric.

Reasons can be following
• As broadband is new to relatively new to India it might take time for Skype to get a good market penetration.

• Majority of people extensively portals like Yahoo, MSN or rediff for checking emails/search/IM and if 9 out 10 of friends are part of one network switching to Skype wont make sense .

• But I think main reason is relatively low visibility of Skype among Internet users in India most of us just heard about Skype from cousin/friend who lives abroad or by Skype chance stumbled upon it.

I think following can be done to increase Skype market penetration in India

• Skype can tie up with leading Indian ISP (like Airtel, Satyam etc) or portals (like rediff , indya.com etc) and bundle free downloads (same strategy followed by Skype in China , Japan)

• Aggressively Advertise Skype out charges in Indian Media or on line (India has large no citizen working abroad not forget large no of customers who outsource to India)

• IM integration (generic idea not India specific) wont it be great it Skype IM can talk with other major IM like yahoo, msn , AOL , i bet we will see mass migration if and when this happens

• outsource marketing & development to some firm in India ....Just kidding ;-)

As you can plunging broadband rates , large no of citizens, customer base living/working abroad ,booming economy and sheer numbers makes India and also China very good markets and worth fighting for in future . Stage is set for VOIP for one the biggest markets in world

Ebay

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

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

Some folks don't like Skype

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

From the Skype Ecology

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

Look2Skype, the Outlook plug-in, is upgraded.

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

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

Recovery 2.0

This disaster is in a war zone.

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

Skype at Work

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

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

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

Thanks, Joe Schwendt

Another case:

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

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

Help Wanted:

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

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

Skype me and I'll pass along your interest.

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).

I couldn't find the article online so here's a scanned image of the interview.