• Knowing Skype and its competitors may earn you the Product Manager – Mobile Instant Messaging job at Verizon.
• VoIP News: Phil Wolff Talks Skypenomics at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference includes a few highlights.
• YASP (Yet another soft phone): voipstunt.
• Chinagate-Skype, for the Chinese diaspora. Jaanus' post on the new portal partnership. Smart alliance; helping families and commerce that cross the globe stay connected.
• BT's Broadband Voice outage for a few hours this week. What uptime constitutes phone replacement?
• Nuvvo shows SkypeWeb presence for teachers and students in their learning community. Now they're waiting for SkypeWeb to be rolled into an update of Skype 2.0.
• Warner Music Group (WMG) will sell ringtones through Skype. Skype still doesn't offer the ability to tailor ringtones to a caller, a group of callers, or to the time of day/day of week. So I don't know how the whole ringtone thing is. In addition, nearly all Skypers use PCs, so they get visual cues, making ringtones less useful. For the 40% of us who use Skype in the workplace, "Like a Virgin" is sure to make us popular among our colleagues. This follows Warner's general model for licensing music samples to mobile carriers. Are these licensed to all Skype users or just to those living in countries where copyright is enforceable?

I’m a bit short of time, so I’ll keep my comments brief. But I have to echo James about the just-announced first phase of the Amsterdam municipal fibre network. They are creating an open “layer 1” fiber-optical network, with a diversified ownership model, low cost of deployment, and no public subsidy. This has more significance than meets the eye at first look, since muni network announcements are ten a penny these days.

I’ll chop out the tedious logic (and the effort of constructing an argument) and jump straight to the conclusions:

• The natural unit of purchase of connectivity is not necesarily the household. I see it polarising upwards around the municipal subdivision, and downwards around the devices tethered to a given access network. Application-level price discrimination disappears at one extreme, and is embedded in the form factor of the access device at the other. In response to James’s musing on the privatized market structure, I would only add that the failure was to make it easy for users to co-ordinate in their purchase decisions. We manage it for garbage collection and roof maintenance, but somehow struggle when it comes to telecom.

• The only escape routes from the paradox of the best network are (i) out-distribute the other guy by having a network that reaches places and offers capacity that the others cannot match. Verizon Wireless is following this in the USA, for example, offering speed and coverage the others can’t rival; (ii) move to a new ownership structure that better aligns user and network owner interests. OPLANs are an example, as are vertically integrated muni nets, mesh nets, user-built nets, etc; (iii) Get a politicaly-mandated monopoly/duopoly. This is the Baby Bell approach. Sustainability of this strategy remains in doubt.

• Telcos that divide connectivity from service, by design or through regulation, are in a better position to survive. I think BT will still be around in 30 years, and they’ll bless the day that the regulator forced their access division into being, and wish they hadn’t voluntarily gone further. But they’ve got to get leaner and meaner to compete against upstarts without legacy pension promises, union rules and wannabe media company distractions. Dig deep into your engineering, project management and finance talent and you’ll live to see another day.

• You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It only takes one Napster to make people see that the music and the disc were separable. It only takes one Amsterdam to succeed to blow away the “it doesn’t work” argument. Bit haulage and application service are equally separable and economically viable independently.

If you’re ever invited to a funeral for a tired and expired telco, I suggest bringing some tulips to lay on the grave. Just don’t grin too much, folk will get suspicious.

via Telepocalypse

Skype $3 billion dollar sellout? Is there a real story here? Robert X. Cringely adds to the rumor mill by reporting that Skype was almost sold last week for $3 billion to Rupert Murdoch who just bought MySpace for an extraordinary sum. Was that the reason for Tim's exuberant chatter at AlwaysOn?

Some facts and figures in this piece are clearly wrong to Skype watchers. Some numbers, e.g. the value of the "customers," suggest a possible valuation method. I do agree with part of his conclusion that Skype should partner with an independent mobile carrier. (T-Mobile? in the US) Still his assumption: no IPO in Skype's future; with a buyout nearly certain. The creative speculation appears shrewd and informed. So the questions?

• Is Skype worth $3 billion? 30 billion?
• Does Skype's M&A rumors affect partner plans and willingness to commit?
• Which buyers are more acceptable to Skypers? To Skype's business ecosystem?
• The money from an acquisition goes to the current owners (founders, some employees, investors). If you buy Skype for billions, how much more money would you want to invest and where would you put your money? If you and raised billions where would you spend the cash you raised?

What do you think? Can you substantiate? Read his blog Skyped.

Google is a perfect example of this latter effect, entering the market years after Alta Vista and Excite. And the Google of VoIP looks like it might be Skype, which was almost sold last week to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $3 billion. PBS | I, Cringely . July 28, 2005 - Skyped

Others that are talking Skype sell stories...
Om Malik
Newswireless
Mark Evans
Loic on Murdoch
Andrew Hansen
Jim Courtney: A Skype Investment Primer
Robert Scoble
Carlos N Velez: "Let's start a new rumor... Google is in serious merger discussions with Skype. The new company, to be called GooSky...."
Carlo at TechDirt
Jeremy Wagstaff: "I suppose we should steel ourselves for the possibility that it doesn't last, at least in its present format."
Michael Parekh: It's all Rope-a-dope
OnoTech: "Wrong, wrong, wrong"