Skype Journal

Culture shift as Skype moves from Republican eBay to Democratic Microsoft?

Phil Wolff 6 February 2012 7:56 am

Partisan Alignment vs Political Intensity

Welcome to 2012 where Skype is joining Microsoft’s management culture. If we hearken back a few years, was politics one of the problems Skype had with eBay?

Skype in early 2005 was a mostly European team. They held what Americans would call liberal cultural values. Once sold to eBay, they tried to work with an eBay management team overtly embracing a conservative value system.

eBay’s management team strongly supported the US Republican party when they bought Skype in 2005 and in the years leading up to Meg Whitman’s support for 2008 GOP presidential and local elections and her 2010 run for California governor. Meg personally held eBay town hall meetings for eBay sellers across America, pressing the flesh and honing her retail political skills before declaring her candidacy. Much of eBay’s language invoked the rhetoric of populist and free market capitalism, rugged individualism, and small hands-off government. Meg and her management team donated heavily to Republican candidates, institutions and causes and many left in 2009 to work on her campaign.

In contrast, Skype avoided politics. Its lawyers were wary of telecom regulators. Its leadership was conscious that local politics didn’t fit its transnational scope and worldly staff. If anything, Skype started off embracing non-partisan geek culture, with an anti-establishment (“we’re taking on the phone companies”) and universal populism (“talk to the world for free”).

I don’t want to overstate the differences. Both teams cared about success, both spoke business, self-identified as leaders.

Yet something went wrong.

Skype was never properly integrated with eBay. I look to Whitman’s narrow charge to Skype’s founders and the technology myopia that followed. As part of the purchase, Whitman dangled a billion dollar payout to the founders if they met a few hard-to-meet goals relating to adoption, activity and revenue. The founders reacted by stifling all business and development activity that didn’t directly and quickly support those goals.

A side effect: strategic Skype technology was proposed but never seriously funded. If you want to integrate realtime conversation into eBay and PayPal experiences you need web services like cloud platforms for non-Skype developers. Skype desktop integration would never work in an environment where more than half of all eBay transactions passed through third-party applications. Had Skype had been thoroughly blended into the eBay buyer and seller experiences, would eBay have sold Skype?

Aside from executives desperate to make their gigadollar payday, eBay did little to promote integration. In fact, integration and synergy, while promised to eBay’s investors, was never a priority. eBay never appointed a VP, director, or even a manager to oversee their side of Skype integration.

With Skype’s third sale, (first being to VCs, second being to eBay), management was free from eBay culture but had private equity culture imposed. Politics wasn’t in the air; just decisiveness in preparation for sale.

And now Skype is at Microsoft, a company whose management is relatively quiet about politics, whose expedient corporate giving supports incumbents, and whose memories of painful encounters with the US Justice Department and many European regulatory bodies left a bitter caution for even talking politics.

Will Skype and Microsoft blend well? Do they share common geek and corporate values over more partisan and nationalistic ones? What core differences in world view could keep them from partnering well together? Could Skype be better off in the dynamic, rapidly growing entertainment division where radical innovation is ordinary or in one of the slow, staid and stable divisions where Skype might shine by contrast?

Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products, finds useful pivots, sees both both forests and trees. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

Christensen leaves a cloudless Skype

Phil Wolff 6 February 2012 5:56 am

Big changes need an executive champion. When Jonathan Christensen left Skype last month, he was the last advocate for a developer-centered strategy.

Jchris boards His departure is bad for Skype, bad for Microsoft, and bad for Skype’s users. This is good for rivals who understand github culture, developer programs, cloud operations, and API business strategy. Here’s why:

Skype’s third-party development products are failures.

The Skype Extras program collapsed from tens of thousands of desktop apps to a few dozen before Skype shut the program down.
Skype tried for a UI-free Skype engine but SkypeKit is unattractive. It’s feature-incomplete. It’s a time sync requiring orders of magnitude more effort (about twelve thousand hours for the first Skype-on-TV apps) than alternatives (1 hour for a TokBox or Twilio integration). It’s burdened with outrageous defensive business terms: Skype can withdraw your license at any time for any reason and you may not run SkypeKit on servers, sell your service to business, or serve Chinese markets.
Skype is very late to the cloud communication market. Voxeo, Twilio, Jajah, TokBox, and Vidyo (powering Google Hangouts) have been offering hosted telephony and video conferencing APIs for mobile and web developers for years.
Skype’s few developer successes rely on cultivating personal influence, on sycophantic access to Skype insiders. Unless you know someone, you don’t get the resources to build or the waivers to release your product. This doesn’t scale and comes off arrogant and sleazy.

This post-Christensen senior management team understands finished goods. They even understand freemium models. But their hearts don’t beat faster at the thought of Skype powering a million web sites and apps. Their eyes don’t light up when talking platform economics. Their guts don’t tell them to bet on APIs, to open up and let a million designers and programmers plug-in to the Skype network.

So management lacks ambition for platforming. This shows in underfunded cloud projects, a closed (vs. public) developer program, staff defections, and belittling expectations. From management’s behavior you’d think outrageous success by Skype developer partners should trigger a publisher’s acquisition or sudden death. Ouch. Real platformers consider customer successes proof your network is attractive.

Skype’s platform-avoidance strategy will fail, probably this year. Skype cannot hope to deliver meaningful integration at Microsoft without the Skype versions of OpenTok and Phono; they will hit a technology wall. And new users from Skype’s Microsoft products won’t hide the overall slowing of Skype user adoption and revenue, or high defection to services that meet specific needs in specific contexts. As Microsoft’s Bing, Xbox, Kinect, Windows, and Windows Phone know, APIs bring you new revenue and new markets.

Circumstance will drive Skype’s managers to an open cloud platform architecture.

They’ll need entrepreneurial leaders like JC to take them there.

But they’ll have to believe.

Do you believe in platforms?

photo: Jonathan Christensen

Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journalis independent of Skype.

Should the CWA organize Skype workers? Facebook workers?

Phil Wolff 6 February 2012 4:35 am

The Communication Workers of America convened this week, rallying around their legislative agenda. Do you think Skype@Microsoft would be a good organizing target? Live talk is still fleeing to over-the-top services, outside the direct control of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Comcast.

Could CWA find fresh blood at Microsoft’s Skype, Google’s Motorola, Facebook, Aol, Yahoo!, et al? What workplace problems could collective bargaining solve for workers? Can the more white-collar and tech-friendly unions function in and relate to Silicon Valley and Redmond culture, rapid business tempo, labor-ignorant tech media, and free-agent labor markets? Can they adapt to how these organizations are distributed across cities, states, and countries? I think unions inspired to action by Occupy Wall Street demonstrate new life and leadership. They may be ready for the challenge.

If they want in, they should start now. It takes time to learn why those building our new conversational media seek collective power at work.

Could Skype and other social connections increase travel instead of displacing it?

Phil Wolff 1 February 2012 10:40 am

A California friend kvelled over snapshots of her new grandniece in New Jersey. She’d spent a good chunk of her time traveling there for the birth. And she’s still connected thanks to the immediacy of Skype and a stream of photos MMS’d to her iPhone. Airlines see Skype and other meetingware as a substitute for travel. Why fly when you can spin up Skype and a speakerphone?

My counter-argument is that these social media are creating stronger connections. So people are more likely to want more intimate face-to-face, body-to-body, same-time-same-place experiences. The gap between our imagined and our physical intimacy is reduced by higher fidelity (wide-band audio and HQ video) and lower latency (1 minute old baby photos by phone instead of four-week-old by post). We can almost taste being there.

We are in that heightened state of almost-being-there more of the year with our strong ties. Airlines used to run commercials showing people talking on the phone then getting on a plane to see family. I think we’ll see those stories again, this time with digitally-mediated communication precipitating the trip. When virtual isn’t enough, we’ll travel to get that heightened intimacy. Maybe we can close the sale. Or play basketball.

Or kiss the baby.

photo credit: Who dressed YOU? cc-by Juhan Sonin

Google Chrome browser (Dev release) now has Skype-like plumbing

Phil Wolff 19 January 2012 1:39 pm

Google is building WebRTC into Chrome. WebRTC code and standards will let web developers and designers build realtime IM, voice and video into web apps and browser plug-ins. This milestone means we could see WebRTC apps in Chrome in the next few months. Nimbuzz and others are working on it. This removes one obstacle to Skype for Browsers, without downloading a fat client. How soon will Microsoft’s Internet Explorer follow Chrome? Or will it adopt another technology, making choices harder for developers and users?

New FFT algorithm could improve Skype speed, quality

Phil Wolff 19 January 2012 1:18 pm

Electronista writes up a new approach to Fast Fourier Transforms from MIT. It could improve signal processing ten-fold. The paper: “Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier Transform.” When NOSFT finds its way into codecs, Skype users might find Skype working on devices with less computing power.

Attention: Skype is Half-a-Facebook in user activity, a Quarter of all International Phone Calls

Phil Wolff 10 January 2012 10:27 am

15 to 30 million people were online today

How many people use Skype? How much? @Skype tweeted yesterday:

“Steve Ballmer announces new stat: Over 200 million avg. monthly connected #Skype users #CES”
“And a 2nd new #Skype stat: More than 300 billion total calling mins annually, with approximately 50% being video calling mins #CES”

The 200 million average monthly connected users for December 2011 is consistent with an end-of-year bump as people substitute Skype for travel. Skype has been running weekly highs of 30+ million and lows of 15+ million concurrently connected for the last six months, more consistently high than in previous seasons.

Skype’s 300+ billion minutes of live talk is a little less than half the time people spend on Facebook, if we go by the 53.5 billion monthly minutes reported by Nielsen for May 2011.

Meanwhile, Skype continues stealing cross-border-calling minutes and hard currency from international telecoms, per Telegeography. PSTN traffic was 438 billion minutes in 2011 compared to their estimate of Skype’s 145 billion minutes; about 1 in 4 cross-border minutes are on Skype. This is up from about 1 in 5 last year.

Roughly half of all Skype minutes cross a national border if we trust these figures.

Skype-to-Skype minutes gain share share of minutes

Skype is capturing share at a much faster pace than the international calling market as a whole:

Skype steals cross-border minutes from PSTN telcos

Alumni: Christopher Dean joins Urban Airship

Phil Wolff 9 January 2012 5:25 am

Congrats to Urban Airship, the mobile platform-as-a-service company, on landing former Skype strategy and bizdev czar Christopher Dean as their chief revenue officer.

Skype’s GroupMe drops mobile voice chat, saying group text enough

Phil Wolff 4 January 2012 1:57 pm

GroupMe screenshot

Skype bought two mobile app companies last year: GroupMe for its group SMS service and Qik for its live mobile video streaming and sharing. GroupMe stripped out its voice conferencing as of 1 January 2012, they say for lack of use. Taking them at their word, why weren’t people using their voice chat?

Self-selection, where people who love group texting don’t want voice?

Was mode-shifting from group text to live or asynch voice too hard?

Was the audio quality sub-par, calling for a complete retooling?

Was the feature buried, never getting a fair chance?

Was it too hard to drag everyone else in your conversation from text into voice mode?

Did voice use-cases occur infrequently?

Was there another app that delivered group voice chat with more speed, quality, and convenience?

You might cure any of these problems with marketing or engineering.

Or is there some natural limit to how many features or kinds of features people will use in a handset app, one core-value-proposition-per-app? If so, Skype might keep its portfolio of Skype, Qik Video, GroupMe and SkypeWiFi apps.

Whatever the reason, paying more attention to fewer features should improve user experience. Someone at #ProductCamp once told me “product management is editing.”

It’s a graceful exit; no customers left hanging. More details on GroupMe’s sunsetting voice conferencing below the fold…

Full Story »

Cisco kills Umi before Skype shows more TV apps at CES

Phil Wolff 4 January 2012 1:24 am

BI reports Cisco’s telepresence unit is ending Umi, a webcam and set-top box for living room video calls. No patience for consumers to learn about it, no chance to iterate and find what works. Why is Cisco giving up on consumer products when the consumerization of corporate IT is at an all time high?

My 2012 Skype Journal Wishlist

Phil Wolff 3 January 2012 7:43 am

make a wish

My top 15 for 2011.

15. Skype for iOS reboot. Launch and connect fast. Go back to basics and invent a tactile, visual experience. Pursue delight.

14. Skype for Metro. Miró me, baby.

13. Scriptable desktop and mobile clients. I want a bot API.

12. A social graph API for better integration with social networks and web services of all sizes and degrees of privacy. The world isn’t just MySpacebookIn.

11. Better people-search. Find the John Smith in a given city or who knows me on LinkedIn or who tweets about movies.

10. Skype cloud services. Hosting for developers.

9. LDAP client service, the better to have company directories inside my Skype clients.

8. Skype interop with WebRTC/RTCweb so off-the-shelf web browsers can make and receive Skype calls.

7. Free group video for three people. Build the habit.

6. Better whiteboarding than GoToMeeting. Especially on tablets.

5. A calendaring and scheduling API. Invite people to a Skype meeting, and launch them into it at the right time.

4. Formal launch of a “hangouts” feature.

3. Unleash developer terms of service. Freedom to deploy your Skype-inside apps on servers, to serve businesses, and reach the Chinese market. Freedom from Apple-like app pre-approval by Microsoft employees.

2. China User Transparency. Skype for desktops are delivered with censorware and who-knows-what-else to users in China and Hong Kong. Help me know who to trust. Show me which client they are using (safe, subject to lawful interception, and/or poisoned at the client), how their communication first enters the Skype network (a Skype desktop client, a server gateway, a SkypeKit app), jurisdictions where my conversation is routed (by country), and the physical location of the other parties (subject to their privacy preferences). Help us trust the Skype network at least as much as we trust governments and the Internet.

1. Digital Identity reboot. Skype’s identity systems are stuck in 1995. The world and our lives are more complex. Without a serious rethink, Skype will lose out on partnerships, Microsoft integration, enterprise integration and millions of users. On that roadmap, if you choose to accept it: Multiple profiles per account. Multiple forms of authentication. Permissions and relationships by profile. Shared profiles (roles). Transferable profiles. ToS by role. Sign in with Skype. I’d be pleased to introduce you to the world’s identity practice leaders at the next Internet Identity Workshop this Spring.

Bonus points:

Skype for Kinect. Gestural interface, baby. Bonus points for multilingual fingerspelling.

Emergency Dialing. Save lives, please.

Phil Wolff builds realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

Phil Wolff’s 57 Scurrilous Skype Predictions for 2012

Phil Wolff 3 January 2012 5:20 am

The Future road sign - next exit

Every year I see into Skype’s future, foretelling with unconvincing accuracy, cynicism and hope.

Platform:

SkypeKit licenses open up for servers. Blue Jeans Network already cut a private deal to run Skype on their servers. Skype will open this up widely, with a few strings.

Skype launches SkypeKit hosting. Why set up your own server farm when you can use Skype’s?

More developers come to market with Skype inside. Seven smart TV or over-the-top TV hardware add-ons will announce they come with Skype inside at CES 2012 in January.

Skype introduces its voice user interface API. Taking lessons from Nuance and Siri, Skype defines a command vocabulary for Eesti and 20 other languages so you can dial, answer, and mute calls without using a keyboard, tablet or mouse. No voice-to-IM transcription at launch.

Skype for Cars. A US 4G wireless operator will announce hands-free skyping standard in a partner auto company’s 2013 car dashboard system. Recalled when dead car batteries are blamed on Skype.

Skype Desktop API remains a bastard stepchild, without full access to Skype video and screensharing features.

SkypeKit supports Skype Premium features like Group Video and new presenter/moderator features. Skype reports developer-related revenue for the first time to set a baseline.

Skype’s first Microsoft devcon isn’t Skype-only, piggy-backing on other MSDN events. Skype’s devrels team has to earn independent Microsoft developer cred from scratch.

Skype clients:

Skype for Metro, as Skype for Windows gets a dose of Metro chrome.

Skype for Windows gets chat style formatting features from the Mac. Still no rich-text or html browsing and inline objects.

Skype for Mac gets better. The five most awful things about Skype for Mac will be improved. Slightly.

Skype introduces emoji, the emoticons widely used throughout Japan.

Skype for Kindle Fire 2. As Microsoft allies with Amazon.

Qik ends its life as a brand. Skype will finish migrating popular client features to Skype mobile apps and scaling features/services an order of magnitude or two.

Skype for iOS gets better. Major technical and UI overhauls. Injections of Qik experience. Client will finally load a power user in two seconds, ready to chat and call at least as convenient as FaceTime. Skype’s iPhone and iPad apps will go from useful to delightful.

Microsoft Integration:

Internet Explorer. We’ll see further integration with IE. Click-to-Call will continue to highlight phone numbers, making them clickable. New actions will include adding a Skypable link to your Skype contact list, making Facebook contacts clickable, and enabling Facebook video chat. When IE supports WebRTC/RTCweb, Skype will also support browser-based apps.

Windows. Skype for Windows will ship with the consumer build of Windows 8. Unless the lawyers nix it.

Windows Tablet. Skype for Metro works sooo much better than Skype for iPad.

Sharepoint. Unlikely to see synergy in 2012. Perhaps at the user and department directory level?

XBox. Skype for XBox should be Skype’s best living room app, more intuitive than the apps build for televisions if only because it will support game controllers and Kinect and game designers will know what look and feel will work for gamers. (I might buy an XBox for this, maybe even a TV too. Do I need a TV to use an XBox?) Will Skype build the client? Probably they’ll help the Entertainment Division to build their own. Will the XBox teams open an internal design competition to explore a broad solution space? Here’s hoping.

Microsoft Office bundles Skype. Word, Excel and PowerPoint come with Skype extensions, making phone numbers and Skype names clickable.

Outlook and Exchange start Skype interop without third-party apps. Call a contact from within Outlook. Look up workplace contacts in the enterprise directory.

Skype for Bing advertisers. When you buy ads on Bing, you’ll see an option to make your phone number or Skype name clickable. It may be free, since a raft of up-selling opportunities can follow if advertisers and shoppers further adopt click-and-call behavior.

Windows Live Messenger. Messenger will interop with Skype by year end at least as well as Skype does with Facebook. I expect federated presence, IM, voice and video, though maybe not group video. Messenger-Skype will raise non-trivial identity challenges.

SkyDrive. Skype clients will support file transfer and filing using cloud storage services, starting with Microsoft SkyDrive. Send from or save to SkyDrive with your Skype contacts. It’s a fast and cheap MSFT loyalty feature. Will they follow with integration to Box, Dropbox and other popular services?

Presence. Skype needs dramatically better presence and status messaging. Perhaps Microsoft has a service or five that Skype might use to share availability, user profiles, and mood messages?

Lync. Microsoft’s workplace telephony products will be be folded into the Skype division. Work will start in building the Skype stack into their products. Rebranded as Skype.

Skype’s Performance:

US$1 Billion in sales, broken out in MSFT’s form 10-Q coming Thursday, 19 Jan.

$100 million in advertising, ten percent of Skype’s total income. Driven by a mix of click-to-call from browser plug-ins, Bing-driven links, and in-app brand partner messaging.

Falling termination revenue per user (SkypeOut to phone numbers) even as more people use Skype. Dollars per minute continues to fall to zero, even as cost per mobile MB rises.

Skype Premium service revenue grows as small businesses pay for group video conferencing, choosing Skype’s convenience over GoToMeeting’s features, WebEx’s reliability, and Google’s informality.

35 Million Dialtone: Peak concurrent users will top 35 million.

210 Million Monthly Active Users late in 2012.

More than 1200 people work for Skype. Joining Microsoft just increases the need for engineers, product managers, developer relations and marketing communications staff. Skype’s Palo Alto offices overflow, even after a second buildout.

Skype still doesn’t offer emergency services. Seven people die while someone fails to reach police or an ambulance over Skype.

In Skypelandia in 2012:

Tokbox gets first paying customers for new premium video chat APIs.

Google+ lets you record and save video hangouts to YouTube.

The US Congress discusses voting on bills via Skype in an election year.

Schedule your Google Hangouts in Google Calendar.

Apple squares off against Skype as FaceTime expands to every desktop and mobile device.

Apple adds FaceTime to iChat.

Invite people to a Google Hangout in Gmail. And Orkut.

Amazon partners with a VoIP company to offer scalable hosted cloud telephony like Voxeo or Twilio.

A political candidate holds 40 town halls in one week, attending by Skype video. Four of the gatherings have problems with the connection.

Twilio and Voxeo pilot hosted video chat APIs.

#OccupySkype protests local jobs lost to remote work.

25% of all PBXs shipped in the Americas and Europe come with ViPR features turned on, quietly shifting millions of B2B calls from plain old telephone services to VoIP.

Chinese government agencies deploy stronger surveillance- and censor-ware with the TOM-Online version of Skype.

The US Department of Defense further restricts the use of Skype to non-secure networks and communications.

Cisco buys RIM and folds it into the Flip division.

The Chrome browser for desktops and Android will drive 50 million new Google Voice users.

The Vatican’s broadband chokes when a million people try to call after a rumor spreads the Pope’s Skype name.

Google Voice launches in 10 more countries.

A 50th developer deploys Asterisk as a video conferencing switch.

Police negotiator talks with cornered kidnapper over Skype.

2012 runs a whole day longer than 2011, but feels shorter.

A Skype developer showcases a teledildonics product at the January AVN Conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft declares company-wide support for NSTIC, forcing Skype to create a 21st Century identity system.

Skype dialtone soars when LinkedIn pilots Skype and SkypeOut links in posts and job ads.

The Slow Startup movement earns counterculture credibility as Lean Startup matures.

Google lets you save video Hangouts to YouTube.

AT&T buys capacity piecemeal after the T-Mobile deal died. Lots of small-company consolidation.

Sprint’s mobile infinite bandwidth offer stops at 4G.

Workplace deskphones lose share to iPad apps and docks with handsets.

Anonymous attacks the Skype network.

Cisco ships a Skype appliance for enterprises.

Five of the ten best selling games come with in-game voice conferencing, serving a Billion minutes of talk in 2012, none of those minutes through Skype.

Skype is boring

Phil Wolff 3 January 2012 4:04 am

Bored600

I consulted with companies wanting to compete with Skype. Some, like Yahoo!, wanted to understand Skype’s technology and APIs so they could match it. Large telcos wanted a map of Skype’s ecosystem. Startups wanted to position themselves against Skype’s brand to secure funding. That’s mostly over.

Skype is much less interesting now.

Skype remains powerful, racing to keep up with growth and scale and new opportunities. But the Skype Stuart Henshall, Bill Campbell and I blogged about from launch in 2003 to eBay’s purchase in 2005 is only vaguely like today’s organization.

Skype is a top dog, not an underdog. Direct rivals all walked away from trying to beat Skype, looking now to coexist or even partner.

Skype is one-sixtieth of the Microsoft behemoth, its story chained to a broader narrative.

Skype is less unique, with hundreds of companies delivering high quality talk and conferencing services over mobile and internet connections.

Skype didn’t look innovative in 2011. Or 2010. Or 2009. Or 2008. The core products haven’t changed much. Nobody expects Skype to produce startling breakthroughs in 2012.

Skype staff don’t talk to the public. A wall of corporate silence sanitizes their conversations; Wall Street banks have more open bloggers.

Skype abandoned its revolutionary People’s Product identity, where it was destined to radically disrupt phone companies. It worked hard to become a GlobalConsumerBrand telco, just like all the other phone telecoms.

Skype is clearly pleased with being boring.

Skype should end 2011 with about a thousand employees, about a billion dollars in sales, a portfolio of more than a dozen clients and a few platform products, and hundreds of millions of users.

Most of Skype’s work in 2012 will be more of the same. Getting new users. Holding onto existing users. Inducing users to Skype more. Putting Skype on more devices. Keeping the network running. Boosting ARPU. Diversifying revenue.

Boring stuff.

Blogworthy only for investors, partners and direct competitors.

“A skypes B” was the non-M&A news story of 2011. Soldier with family. Classroom with sick student. President with campaigners. Orangutan to orangutan. The same generic story of people using Skype instead of a telephone.

Stories we didn’t see in 2011:

No new patents filed (they did file, but didn’t tell that story).
No jaw dropping technologies (Skype continues to invest in anti-POTS technology but doesn’t tell that story).
No shareworthy user experiences (Skype had a “hangouts” feature before Google but never told that story).

Skype keeps its product innovation stream burbling underground, submerged, hidden. It’s hard and useful stuff, improving Skype’s plumbing and availability. But users just don’t see it.

Skype is no longer a revolutionary or disruptive brand. Can Skype inspire again? Capture passion? Define a moral conviction for users to love and support? Should Skype try?

Work Design: Translating the web a few words at a time

Phil Wolff 9 December 2011 3:21 pm

Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.

Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.

Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.

Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.

The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.

Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

YouTube video: TEDxCMU — Luis von Ahn — Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation.

You know cyberspace is better than sex when…

Phil Wolff 7 December 2011 6:33 pm

You know the line about men and women thinking about sex n times per day? My digital life is more on my mind than sex.

I left my phone in the car. My folks and I arrived in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington, to shop for children’s toys and browse the Village Books store. iPhone in coat, coat locked in car, I went iPhoneless for two hours.

A half-block from the car I had my first phantom limb experiences. I saw an abandoned London red phone booth and reached for my phone to take picture. I settled for a camera but I wouldn’t be able to twitpic that photo or share it with my telephony buddies.

Over the next 120 minutes I wanted to:

price compare books via Red Laser,
endorse an oil and vinegar tasting boutique on Yelp!,
check on expansion packs for Cataan (found something complex to level the playing field),
photograph some beautiful chutney at lunch,
look up Washington State’s counselor licensing (saw an office building full of therapists),
log how far off-diet my meal sent me,
check in from Village Books,
look up that indie-book-seller coalition they belong to,
read about their anti-Kindle campaign,
download the Fire & Ice four-pack to my Kindle app,
snapshot the cover of the last Gaiman book for friends in a science fiction Skype chat,
ask Quora a question about the DIY book industry,
remind myself to pack warmer next time,
read more about Washington State investigations into Whatcom County budget magic,
bookmark a book on business modeling for a friend,
check the hourly weather for that evening, and
peek at my sister’s family Amazon holiday wishlists.

That’s at least 18 reflexive reaches for my iPhone. 9 an hour, every 6 or 7 minutes. According to one recent study, this is more often than we think about sex. And this was just a casual family holiday stroll through a suburban shopping district.

Many of us are getting used to augmenting thought; in our ongoing internal dialog, conversations with others, shopping and working. Life is better with apps and live data. Heck, we think more complete thoughts, plan our future better, and interact with others in more informed ways with our digital life. Each time we reach, we’re getting mind candy, positive reinforcement. Our operant conditioning is strong.

So disconnecting causes withdrawal symptoms. How long offline does it take you to stop reaching for your laptop, tablet or mobile? For the conditioning to break down? Could observing a digital sabbath give us more freedom and control over our reflexes, more power to alter and adjust our behavior? Or should we not bother? Should we accept this new twitch response as an improvement?

This mind enhancement comes with strings and risks.

Does this new conditioning tie us to one company more than others, like mobile operating system publishers?

How can our new behavior shift power among corporations, governments, and individuals?

When you reach for your brain-augmentation-device, are you missing things because of that reach, causing new problems? Can the impulse to reach cause distracted driving, even without the gadget at hand?

At what point does personal dependence become a public necessity, like water, air, safety, and roads?

Can this behavior be exploited like sex? Sexy advertising bypasses our executive cognition and taps something more primal. Are printed www links and QR codes a first stab at triggering our digital reflex?

So here’s the test: Without hyperlinks in this post, how many times did you think to click on something? More times than you thought of sex? Aha!

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