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

.. in the UK at least. Today, as one partner participating in the 3 X-Series service announcement by Hutchison Whampoa's 3 Group, Skype has announced its first truly mobile offering where Skype users can make "free" Skype-to-Skype calls on a mobile phone. Starting December 1, 3 Group will launch a new flat fee mobile broadband Internet service in the UK. In the press release related to this announcement Skype CEO Niklas Zennström said:

With 3, I am very proud to say that for the first time, our users can now try out making Skype calls on the move using a mobile phone. We always want to delight our users by letting them try out new ways of keeping in touch. This is a real milestone for Skype because now you can use Skype beyond the PC, no matter where you happen to be.

CIO Now has an excellent detailed description of the impact for Skype; the key points being:

• 3 Group will launch the new X-Series service December 1 in the U.K. and roll it out to the other countries in which 3 Group operates (including Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Israel, Australia and Hong Kong) in early 2007.
• While it will be a flat-fee mobile broadband Internet service, no pricing has yet been announced.

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

Last May Skype announced their first "free" SkypeOut promotion -namely all SkypeOut calls within North America would be free until Dec. 31, 2006. In early September Skype announced a similar program covering France. Basically, if you were not already a Skype user, you simply sign up for Skype, and all your SkypeOut calls within the designated territory are free; however, you pay normal SkypeOut rates for calls outside the designated region. And the promotions expire in just over two months, Dec. 31.

Last week Skype UK announced Talk for Britain, a new promotion that probably gives a hint of what will happen to these earlier promotions after December 31. Talk for Britain involves :

• Purchase £10 of Skype credit using PayPal or a UK-issued credit card
• Wait for up to 72 hours to confirm eligibility
• Free SkypeOut calling within UK for the subsequent six months.
• Program expires Dec. 31 for acquiring the six months free SkypeOut credit. (If you buy Dec. 31, you have free calling to June 30, 2007)
• Call Forwarded calls are not included in the promotion.

Over the past few weeks I have had several queries as the what will happen to these promotions after Dec. 31. Does Talk for Britain start to provide some clues?

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Messagr launched yesterday to help you find other people to talk to. Messagr is a new presence-based search engine. Register yourself, describe topics that interest you, and give your Skype name. When you want to discuss rugby with someone right now, messagr shows people both interested in those topics and available to talk. 

Messagr gets that value is rapidly shifting from the metered call to everything surrounding the call. In this case, bringing callers together. Unlike Jyve's focus on expert answers and consulting services, messagr aspires to all topics for everyone, a general hub for social, business, academic, and other conversation.

I like the collective interest tag cloud, updated as members change their Skype presence. Reminds me of the moodgeist experiment that aggregates Skype moodie messages. There are other sites where you tag yourself for more specific purposes. Like Ziki, where you tag yourself to manage your professional network, jobster to find work, or Consumating to "find people who don't suck." Skype Ltd. tags job postings too.  

Joel Selvadurai built messagr, now in beta, with java and jsp and the SkypeWeb presence service. A recent computer science grad from Durham University in Newcastle, Joel and his laptop can be found in the cafe of the British Library many days.

tags: skype, startup, london, uk, messagr, searchengine, search, ebay inc., skypejournal

Jean Mercier is our Skype Numerologist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other coverage:

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

The walkthrough...

1. Go to Google.co.uk

2. Search for jet2

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

3. Click on the ad with the phone.

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Peter Burch skyped me from Paris to ask why France is the first country in Europe to get a promotion like the USA's and Canada's. Unlimited SkypeOut to French landlines until 31 December 2006.

Sadly, France is its own zone, so no calling between France and North America. Also, Monaco not included. And doesn't include SkypeOut due to Skype forwarding or to mobiles.

Is four months long enough for a promotion like this to build buzz? To teach French Skypers le joy of SkypeOut?

• DEMO China. Sep 06 - Sep 08, Tianjin.

• Star Trek 40th Anniversary Celebration & Conference. Sep 08 - Sep 10, Seattle, Washington at The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. But you can celebrate anywhere. Remember, Gene Rodenberry's folks were showing wearable combadges, machine translation, and flip-top phones on television in the 1960s, setting expectations we rose to fill. "Skype Trek" anyone?

• VON - Fall 2006. Sep 11- 14, Boston, Massachussetts. This is old-school VoIP's big get together, where everyone's selling to carriers and the huge enterprise. They've had a year since eBay shocked them by paying billions for Skype. Now everyone's had a year to react. How smart are the responses?
  
  Several companies will launch Skype-related products at VON.
  
  Skype Journal's Jim Courtney, Kevin Delaney, and Martin Geddes will be there; Kevin and Martin speaking.

• Digital ID World 2006: Managing The Decentralization of Identity. Sep 11 - Sep 13, Santa Clara, California. Managing user directories, architecting name spaces, authentication, authorization, identity banking, identity brokering, ID lifecycles, namespace harmonization. Managing digital identity is just one thing that Skype helps user do but that others do better.
  
  Stuart Henshall and I will be there.

• MobileHCI 06 - Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. Sep 12 - 15. Espoo, Finland. Designing Skype for PCs is only vaguely like designing for devices that fit in the hand, with poor resolution, spotty connectivity, positional awareness, and that travel in your bag or pocket. We'll know Skype for mobiles are maturing as (a) their user experiences distill Skype's essence while (b) diverging from Skype for the Desktop's design assumptions and conventions.

• The Future of Web Apps Summit. Sep 13 - Sep 14, San Francisco. A killer cast of Web 2.0 luminaries (aka the people you see at all of these events.) AJAX and web services redux, maybe a few new ideas.

• Social Network Tools and their Business Application: Blogs, Podcasting, Instant Messaging, RSS and Wikis. Sep 20 - 21, London. Classes. Reminds me of the Social Tools in the Enterprise Symposium I spoke at two summers' ago. Euan, buy Stowe a glass of red for me.

• OneWebDay: A time to celebrate the Internet. Sep 22, all over the world. "One web, One world, One day." What will you do to share your appreciation of the net? I'm still working on my project.

• LoveParade SF. Sep 23 - Sep 24, San Francisco.

• Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences. Sep 27 - 30. Brisbane, Australia. Scientists from around the world sharing their findings. Huge conference, 200+ sessions. Brilliant hallway. Would love to see Pamela Koch's presentation: Beauty is in the Eye of the QQ User: Perceptions and Press about Instant Messaging in China. A shout out to fellow metablogger Alex Halavais.

Know an event we should cover? Leave a comment here or a tip.

Users of Skype in German and English VoIP forums have been complaining about the automatic withdrawal of their Skype credit after inactivity in their account. Now a German court rules: Prepaid account withdrawal based on inactivity must stop! Up till now Skype tells users to call your Mum at least every 179 days or you will lose your SkypeOut credit balance! Spending two cents twice a year can be important.

Those who occasionally use O2 to get airtime in Germany may breathe easier in the future! Germany's fourth largest mobile company gets the red card from the High Regional Court of Munich. Several prepaid clauses are declared invalid.

Hopefully this new court ruling will be a wake up call to Skype about this inappropriate business practice of closing out the account balance after 180 days.

I guess when the fourth person contacts you for your reaction to the week's network neutrality voting in the US, it's time to say something about it.

For newcomers, my reasoning why Network Neutrality is a last resort at fighting duopoly rent seeking can be found here. I won't repeat it.

Let me re-iterate something I said back in 2004:

Over time, the architecture of the telecom system will resemble the political system around it.

The AT&T (as opposed to at&t) years reflected the military-industrial era. A "commanding height" of the Cold War was the flow of information, and just like the interstate highways. AT&T was as much a creature of the government as rational free-market economics. The break-up of AT&T as well as the 1996 act both chose to cleave the industry across the connectivity grain rather than with it. The current situation was 30 years in the making. As I rather undiplomatically stated, it's a uniquely American mess that can only be solved by a uniquely American solution.

But it's really much deeper than that. From my shallow knowledge of American history, and short exposure to American culure, I've come to the following (probably widely unwelcome and possibly wildy wrong) conclusions. Network Neutrality is just a digital-era manifestation of much longer-running sores within the American political system and psyche.

• The outcome of the Civil War was that everyone lost. No winners, not even a draw. One side lost its soul, and the other its honour. It set the stage for a fundamental change from the United States to the United State.
• The Seventeenth Amendment upset the carefully-crafted balance of power between the public, states, federal government (executive), legislature and judiciary. The US is a four-legged constitutional stool that the public is sat upon. (This may explain why it is one of -- debatably, the -- longest continuously established democracy). But it's now an uncomfortably wobbly stool.
• This set the stage for an immediate assault on personal freedom, which continues today in other forms. Competing jurisdictions would have ensured the migration of ethanolics and psychedelics to happier places.
• The same over-reaching federal state also encroached into a whole bunch of other areas it would best have been kept away from, notably communications policy.
• The rest, as they say, is history.

I can't but help enjoy the irony of the often statist/corporatist/collectivist European Union being a paragon of devolved government, competing regulatory regimes and voluntary cross-border cooperation compared to the centrally planned US communications economy.

If the FCC were tossed onto the scrap heap, and those powers returned to the states, my American friends would find that the Network Neutrality issue would rapidly cease to have any political significance. By making the prizes of Federal Telecom Lotto so big, the temptation to fiddle with the rules of the game has become overwhelming.

Anyone fancy some salty tea?

PS - Next overtly political Telepocalypse post: March 2009. I promise to keep my libertarian ways quiet until then. (Note that does mean I don't fit into US Dem/Rep political stereotypes.)
PPS - I'll probably offend lots of people, but the short version is "Nice country, great people, shame about the government." (For the UK, it's "Nice people, great country, shame about the government", and Italy is "Great people, great country, what government?" Only kidding! Calm down!)
PPPS - Comments are open ;) Set status to "published" and be damned...

UPDATE: Something many readers won't be aware of is the different ways the US and EU constitutions work. As I understand it, the commerce clause of the US constitution means that if it relates to interstate commerce (and practically everything in a networked globalised economy does), then it "goes federal" by default. In Europe, it's different. The subsidiarity principle means everything should (in theory) be done at the lowest possible level of government. Just because something has an international dimension, it doesn't mean that the EU gets full power over it. And even where the EU legislates, it merely sets out the general requirements and objectives, and each nation translates that into local law. Again, scope is retained for competing implementations and jurisdictions. I'm no fan of the eurocracy, but it's illuminating nonetheless to see the practical consequences of different constitutional frameworks.

UPDATE: That means the EU constitution is "edge-based", and the US one doesn't scale. Oops. Hey, just skip a generation and move straight to anarchism: peer-to-peer contracts, and a state whose only function is to enforce them.

With the turbulent migration to VoIP occurring in 2006, it will be interesting to track usage and subscriber data to support the impact of VoIP and Voice 2.0 business models. A couple of items that appeared this week:

Skype vs Vonage in the UK: Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, an online Internet usage monitoring service, has reported on Skype, Bebo and Vonage -- Why Skype Visits are Through the Roof. Her chart that results from tracking visits to websites for each demonstrates how UK visits to Skype have climbed from ~1% of UK site visits in early February to 6.9% mid-May while Vonage has stagnated in the 0.8% range. And this happened in a market with no free SkypeOut! Score one for market penetration by a Voice 2.0 business model.

Earlier this week I reported on the $15 million funding of Bebo, a social network with 24 million members predominantly in the European market and Andrew Hansen's observation as to how Skype support was probably a factor in their financing success. Heather goes on in her post to report on how Bebo is responsible for over 50% of the upstream sources for visits to Skype. And this number has increased with a Bebo-Skype partnership tied into the launch of Skypecasts. A Voice 2.0 application driving adoption and market penetration in the social networking space.

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Continental Research reports 1.8 million UK Internet users used VoIP in the last twelve months, and that number should double in the next twelve. 48% of those surveyed used Skype, and 56% of VoIP users expect to increase their usage.

This consumer survey would not reveal enterprise use of VoIP, largely transparent to workers.

By Torben Nyhuus, Aalborg, Denmark

The contest to acquire market shares on the growing VoIP market is at full pace. The market is;

• the VoIP calls,
• the internet access,
• the devices.

VoIP calls:

Skype is reaching out to new customer segments. With Jubii and Skype in new cooperation!

(Jubii was the first and is the most successful web portal in Denmark, visited by 2.5 mill users monthly. DK has 5 million inhabitants.)

The Danish internet portal Jubii has commenced a cooperation with the world's most popular provider of IP-telephony, Skype. The new cooperation is a cobranding strategy, which shall broaden the knowledge of Skype in Denmark, and in return be a new source of income to Jubii.

The idea is to get Skype out to Ms. and Mr. Smith, using Jubii to reach them and fight the somewhat nerdish stamp on Skype. Skype can now be downloaded from on Jubii and Skype is expecting a Danish success making telephony free. In return for this exposure Jubii gets a part of the SkypeOut revenue generated.

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by Lee Dryburgh.

I took some pictures of the Skype marketing team in action near Torrington Place, London.

One of their flyers reads "Death to the don't-make -me-open-it phone bill", "...you can say goodbye to phone bills that would scare a small island nation".

Another piece of marketing literature they were handing out included marketing for the 6000 UK WiFi hotspots from The Cloud. This was interesting for me because it was what I would term co-branded. For those interested, a photo of the offer is here.

I can not help but wonder if Skype somehow plan to tackle Google in the access market by partnering up with ever more WiFi providers. Such a competition between two huge providers of free telephony combined with WiFi access could make very interesting play.

Here are their future dates (two days in each location) that the Skype marketing team will be visiting:

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Guest post by Lee Dryburgh, University College London.

A couple of weeks ago I slumped into my office chair with fairly depressed thoughts in relation to telecoms. I had been startled as a kid by wide area communications, in particular telephony. With a cheap handset I could transcend space seemingly to anywhere on Earth by dialling a digit string. It was with no surprise that upon university graduation (computer science) I began working in telecoms (writing SS7/C7 protocol decodes). Since then I have been fairly well remunerated by every major telecoms vendor (with the exception of Ericsson) and by a string of operators, both cellular and fixed line around the world for my technical services. Not only has the income been good but I have had the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of technology for the best part of my work life. It was with this in mind that I sat depressed with the thoughts of telephony becoming a freebie application like email; the resulting drop in operators and their respective vendors, the subsequent drop in demand for people like me and the lustre drop surrounding telephony. I had only just began to wonder if there was some hope in terms of maintaining a good financial lifestyle in telecoms and whether something would keep up the lustre when my Skype client began to ring.

I answered and it was an eight year old kid I did not know. He talked at me about Skype, Teamspeak, chipping Sony PS2s, P2P sharing for obtaining games and so on. I waited for social graces such as informing me who he was and why he was calling me as I was not even in Skype-Me mode. This did not come. So I asked if his father maybe wanted me and he seemed confused at my question. He got further confused by my questioning to obtain his motive for calling me. I eventually got his message though – he was calling because he can and this is now normal.

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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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