I was in Milan when a guy told me Italian men carried three mobiles. One for work, one for the wife and kids, and one for his lover. Keeping worlds apart by giving them different phones to call.

GrandCentral says with enough control, you could keep them separate, and treat them differently, by using one number not tied to any device or service provider. And with their very slick software.

I shot this demo at GrandCentral's Fremont, California, headquarters earlier this month. It stars Craig Walker (CEO in the dark blue shirt) and Vincent Paquet (COO in the pale blue shirt). 2.5 minutes.

In the video:

1. Craig calls Vincent's GrandCentral phone number.
2. Several of Vincent's phones ring.
3. Vincent picks the desk phone and puts the call on speaker.
4. Vincent listens to Craig leaving a voice mail. (You'll hear some echo and latency because you're hearing Craig speak in the room and his voice through the speakerphone at the same time.)
5. Vincent decides to take the call.
6. Vincent presses a key code and joins Craig in the important call. If Vincent didn't take the call, Craig would have continued leaving his voice mail message.
7. Craig explains whey sometimes he wants to take calls from Mrs. Walker and sometimes he doesn't.

From a user view:

• GrandCentral restores call screening, a feature we haven't had since answering machines.
• It shows a call to one GrandCentral number rings on all of your phones.
• Call screening controls incoming calls, the better to manage your time, your privacy and your relationships.

Other notes:

• GC numbers are free.
• GC works from any phone, nothing to download.
• The magic engine behind this lets you do things like transfer a call from one phone (like my Cingular mobile running out of battery power) to another (like my charged Verizon mobile) in mid-call.
• Like Iotum, you can define rules for how to handle incoming calls in a web control panel. You tailor caller experiences and routing. You can tailor for a specific person, or have GC apply rules based on groups the caller belongs to (like family), time of day, or even challenge and response.
• GC's web interface to voicemail rocks. Everyone should take note and steal the ideas liberally.
• The magic is courtesy of their proprietary soft switch. Everything else in their business extracts value from having such a scalable, smart switch.

Yesterday's Second Life client update improved in-world instant messaging and presence. From the change log:  

• Added: a new Profile tab shows a web page of the profile owner's choice without launching a browser. (more than Skype)
• URLs in chat and IM are now clickable links. Supports http://, https://, secondlife:// (hmmm, wish skype: links were clickable in 2L)
• Log IMs and/or chat (hmmm. Are my Skype moods and presence logged?)
• Permit friends to see you online/on the map (Presence, availability and location. I'd like that, maybe let GPS or cellular tower codes update Skype via SMS/texting?)
• Conference IM multiple friends by multi-selecting in the Friends list (multichat! only one step to conference calls.)
• See who granted you permission to modify their objects in the Friends list. (this personalized presence is almost relationship brokering: who can see and do what with me when, where and in what ways.)
• Set whether you show as online in Search (Spreads your presence data, making people-search more actionable.)

2L's on a great trajectory: 

• it's matching features with the popular IM clients,
• expanding presence depth and accessibility, and 
• making it slightly easier to blend the outside world into the 2L experience.    

Don't get me wrong, I love Skype. It's saved me a fortune, and is way more convenient than the alternatives.

But sometimes it lets me down. Yesterday, I was expecting an important SkypeIn call at 4pm. Never came. I was online, for sure. Finished work after 5pm.

This morning when I log on at 3am (hello jetlag), I get the voicemail from that person -- timed at 4.15pm yesterday. So it never rang, and I didn't get notification of the voicemail. Annoying.

I've also had problems with conference call quality at times. SkypeOut isn't as good as BT's VoIP voice quality. SkypeIn is generally pretty good though.

What this is telling me is that the field is wide open for competition in the small-medium business space. And a telco brand could be just as good as an Internet one. I don't mind paying for business-class quality -- I just need something that works at a reasonable price. There are additional feature like web conferencing (synchronised Powerpoint, desktop sharing) that need to be in there too.

PS - Downloaded Sightspeed this morning. Looks like a nice product, but they make the users jump through far too many hoops to get going.

You can miss Martin just as often at the Telepocalypse.

I shot this demonstration on Halloween, 31 October 2006, in the offices of TalkPlus in San Mateo, California. The video is uncut, no editing at all, including about five seconds in the beginning of Jeff Black, TalkPlus CEO and founder, warming up. The call is from an unaltered mobile phone. You will see the Jeff send a text message and automatically download a Java program. That app shows his Skype address book, and he clicks on Skype's echo123 acount. For those who don't know it, echo123 is one of Skype's first test accounts. It doesn't have a SkypeIn number, so you couldn't fake access by dialing a PSTN number that forwards to echo123. TalkPlus doesn't have any access to Skype's private SIP gateways. So this demo shows that TalkPlus customers can dial any Skype user by their Skype name.

It also shows that TalkPlus has engineered a server without Skype components that talks to the Skype network as if it were a Skype client using Skype's own language. It will scale to thousands of simultaneous sessions. TalkPlus has no plans to license this technology or turn it into a product. They built it to solve their customers' need to talk with millions of Skype users.

Jeff demonstrates that Skype's protocols have been reverse engineered, and shows unmet demand for a high performance, highly scalable, "headless" or "naked" Skype server.

VoIP Now wrote yesterday that "Skype's closed protocol seems to be ruffling feathers everywhere" as he mentioned Jordan's brief Skype ban.

It's a question of whose feathers are ruffled, I think.

First, you have those protecting economic interests, like phone companies and those who tax long distance calls. They'll get over it when they bring their own rival solutions to market or when consumer demand is overwhelming.

Second, you have those opposed to encryption (and secret speech) in the public's hands, like law enforcement, intelligence and internal security agencies. If they can't kill Skype when it's small, they'll wait for a monsterous event they can blame on Skype's security.

Third, there are people paid to be control freaks who run private networks. It's their job to be skeptical about new things, to protect and nurture their information and communications infrastructure. They get over their anxieties as the true nature of useful tools becomes clear and they learn to bring deployment of new tools under daily and lifecycle management.

For all of these "hostile" parties, Skype's biggest enemies are the apathetic, the millions of people who're saturated to the point they don't want to try new channels of communication.

This is Skype's breakaway marketing challenge in every market. Yes, Skype will compete against other VoIM products, but that's straightforward and more of the same. The real challenge will be getting those who live offline to come online, joining the 21st Century's social fabric, using Skype as they come online. And to convince mobile lifestylers to blend Skype into their communication habits. Both are very hard marketing challenges, like getting tea drinkers to switch to coffee, or futbol fans to embrace chess. Skype is doing its bit with free trials, but it's a long game, just beginning.

by guest blogger David M. DeBartolo

I would like to update you and your readers on the situation of Skype in Jordan. As you reported, the Jordanian Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) recently reversed its decision to block Skype in Jordan, and Skype is back online. On Oct. 17, I had the opportunity to meet with the Jordanian Minister of Information and Communications Technology, Eng. Omar A. Alkurdi, who shed some light on the situation.

Minister Alkurdi, a Skype user himself, stressed that he and the Jordanian government are committed to an open, competitive and transparent telecommunications environment. He stated that the telecom market is practically fully liberalized, and that the government looks at the telecom sector as a main contributor to national GDP and as a major enabler of further economic growth.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission does not resort to blocking services, Minister Alkurdi said, unless there is a genuine security justification and all other options to address the issue have been tried. In this case, the minister said, Skype had been blocked by the TRC because of legitimate security concerns relating to its codes and protocols. He noted that similar steps had been taken in the United Arab Emirates, and perhaps soon in Egypt. He added that the government will address these issues by approaching Skype directly, and he said that he sincerely hopes Skype will be able to remain online.

Minister Alkurdi also emphasized that the TRC is an independent regulatory body and that its decision was based upon security concerns alone. The minister said that when he was notified of the TRC's decision, he immediately asked for written justification. After investigating the issue, he said he wrote a letter to the prime minister, and within a week the issue had been resolved and Skype was back online in Jordan.

As a dedicated Skype user here in Jordan, I very much appreciate the government's expeditious investigation and resolution of this situation in accordance with its principles of openness and competitiveness. Jordan's initiatives fostering a free and transparent telecommunications environment, in addition to Jordan's welcoming people and sublime natural beauty, make Jordan an attractive place for Americans like me to live and work.

Sincerely,
David M. DeBartolo
Fulbright Researcher, Jordan, 2006-2007

I could do a long critique of every softphone out there, and there's plenty to pick apart. I thought I'd just select one little detail to show why the portal IM clients and Skype remain top dog: they just deliver what the user wants, no hassles.

Every time I log in to Windows I get this:

Go away! Shoo! Don't irritate me with unnecessary login screens. Fade into the background. I don't want to think about you until you're needed. (If the wireless Internet connection comes up too slowly, it also tends to crash.)

I suppose I should also point out some of the other usability issues. As Amazon long-ago discovered, the way you present the login/new user screen makes a big difference. If it's confusing (high cognitive load) people bail out, probably (rightfully) assuming the rest of the experience inside will be equally bad.

Gizmo fluffs this with a strange radio button layout. In the user's mind, registering is a different process from logging in, even if the information requested is identical. The drop-down text entry box is the wrong cue for creating an account name, because it implies a selection of existing data. (Yahoo is superb at managing this process in a crowded namespace.) Gizmo operates from the perspective of the programmer, not the user. Contrast with Skype:

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By now you've read the BusinessWeek interview with Janus Friis and Om Malik's interview with Friis. The Venice Project is Friis and Zenstrom's video play. We still can't believe eBay let them build this outside of Skype. As I wrote in July, The Venice Project steals an opportunity from SkypeBay by not building video distribution into Skype's network. The whole point of Skypenomics was to bring eBay (c2c cash-for-atoms) into the intangibles economy.

21talks sees the problem when asking: "Does it mean that sharing TV content could be already available through Skype and its video functionality? At an average quality and requiring a small to medium size bandwidth. Is their next move to combine the Skype's, Kazaa's and Venice Project's networks to enhance the general quality of service of the service?" Sorry, but the few indications say no.

They are designing this new network to follow the money, fitting its rules and architecture to the special needs of the content producers and advertisers. I'm sure they won't have any problem lining up anchor tenants like television channels and movie archives for their DRM'd TV streaming network. If you want a taste of the TVP experience, sign up for a very limited Beta Test of the client.

I can only hope eBay owns a little of Baaima N.V., the Netherlands Antilles limited company doing business as The Venice Project.

Jordanians have been using Skype without problems for years. Until now. For example, JRBT wrote "My ISP is Batelco and it does appear to be blocked. I am unable to gain credit for skype out from Jordan I have to get a friend in uk to get it for me."

Researcher David DeBartolo confirms that Batelco blocks Skype as directed by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission. Presumably for "security." Here's the letter from DeBartolo and the fax from the ISP.

Dear Philip,

My name is David DeBartolo, and I am an American working in Amman, Jordan. I am the chair of a nonprofit organization with colleagues in Washington, London, and Cairo. I have been using Skype to keep in touch with all of them, and it has been tremendously useful -- until two weeks ago.

At that time, I started to have severe interruptions to my Skype service here in Jordan. It is forbidden to access the Skype website, and I have even been unable to make regular Skype-to-Skype or SkypeOut calls. Other colleagues of mine in Jordan have reported similar problems. The problems abated for the last week, but have now returned.

I inquired with our ISP in Jordan, named "Batelco," and they claim that the Jordanian Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has required them to ban access to Skype's website and to its authentication server. As proof they sent me the attached fax that they received.

I called the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, and they confirmed that they had ordered it banned, for "security reasons" responding to concerns of the government of Jordan. Most folks here don't believe this ridiculous justification; they believe that the state communications companies are upset about losing long-distance customers to Skype.

I've been told that complaints should be directed to the director of regulatory department of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, Dr. Al-Ansari. His email address is alansari.almashagbah@trc.gov.jo. The contact information for the commission is on the attached fax; Dr. Al-Ansari's extension is 2300.

I wanted to let you know about this issue because I am furious at the Jordanian government's self-serving decision. I hope that you will get a good blog post out of this, and that you may be able to mobilize Skype executives to officially protest the commission's decision. Jordan has a very close relationship to the US, and if they believe that Americans are upset at the decision, or that international investment will be jeopardized, they may be persuaded to change course. I also hope that you may be able to get Skype technicians working to counter whatever obstacles they have created to using Skype in Jordan.

Thank you for your time and please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any additional information.

Sincerely,

David M. DeBartolo
Fulbright Researcher, Jordan, 2006-2007
Binational Fulbright Commission
Amman, 11185
Jordan

Are you having difficulty with Skype and your ISP? Do you believe the "security" reason for blocking Skype.com?

I just reinstalled SightSpeed on my "rebuilt" laptop and am always impressed with the video quality. It is reminiscent of the days about 25 years ago when the first color monitors became available for the mini-computer-based instrumentation I was selling at the time. My budget-limited customers (mostly university based researchers) thought they could get away with budgeting for a black and white monitor until they actually saw the color monitor ... it took all of two minutes to change their mind once they realized the features color added. Somehow the additional funds for color magically appeared quite quickly. (I won't mention the price they paid for simple monitors at that time!) When you see a SightSpeed video its quality just hits you instantly as being the benchmark for video communications.  And this week PC Magazine thought so also.

While it is a challenge to market in a space containing the GYMAS-five, SightSpeed CEO Peter Csathy and hist team seem to be ringing up the wins by working with partners who can take advantage of SightSpeed's video messaging functionality.  Two of note: a deal with MTV who is using SightSpeed on their Total Request Live offering to bring viewers into the show; SightSpeed is also making its debut in politics as a campaigning tool. Would be interesting to see if my university colleagues Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae start to use SightSpeed in their tight run for the leadership of Canada's Liberal party this fall where they need to approach 4500 delegates spread across 4,000 miles.

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Skype moved their Mac 1.5 from beta to "gold" release and launched the Mac 2.0 beta today, Beta version 2.0.0.2 is Universal, needs OS X v10.3.9 Panther or newer. Congrats to Skype's Mac team; someone should buy that group brews for shipping under intense pressure. 1.5 offers a stable release of Skype video. Change log (just a few bug fixes).

This morning's news release puts the number of Skype users worldwide at 113 million.

Screenshots from Skype's PR team confirm what we've been saying for a long time, and what 21talks summarized: "Compared to Apple iChat, the new feature still is limited. Multi-person video chatting isn't allowed. No 3D view that makes user experience a lot richer. No fancy video backdrops." Still on our video wishlist:

• recording of video conversations
• a "lenscap" privacy button that does for video what the "mute" button does for audio
• piping screen areas from your PC into Skype video, for application sharing
• piping video files from your hard drive into an existing video call to share your video

Monday afternoon's first Fall VON 2006 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:

• Dan Casey, Director, Windows Live VoIP and Messenger Product Management, Microsoft
• Jeff Bonforte, Director of Voice Product Management, Yahoo!
• Nitzan Shaer, Director, Mobile Devices, Skype
• Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager, Real Time Communications & Google Talk, Google
• Ragui Kamel, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, AOL Voice Services, America Online.

As mentioned previously 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. Carl's questioning covered why IM, video usage, the role of presence, mobile reach, business models and projections in for the future.

Why do users want Voice with Instant Messaging? From the students avoiding contention when sharing one phone line in a five-student apartment to business productivity enhancement, we heard stories about new scenarios enabled where IM and voice facilitate social networking to newly announced collaborative applications that share spreadsheets. Oh, and for the younger generation, IM allows students to avoid being seen holding discussions in the classroom; did I say to allow private discussion sessions in the boardroom? The new challenge arises when a group of youth want to do a conference call but Stephanie is is not on IM but at the mall shopping for new shoes.

Nitzan talked about how IM with Skype allows users to create one centralized ID that can be used across weblogs, sharing pictures, and enhancing a discussion using video.

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In a previous post I talked about the announcement of the Open AIM PhoneLine initiative and how, as one of their launch partnerships, they will be working with iotum to incorporate iotum's Relevance Engine call management service into AIM PhoneLine. But there is another story behind the scenes in terms of how iotum and the AOL PhoneLine API development team came together to bring about this service.

Driven initially by its military connections where Halifax, Nova Scotia is Canada's major east coast naval base as well as home to a major oceanography research center and four universities, Halifax has been a hotbed of Internet technology since the early days of ARPANet. In the late 1980's one of the navy's custom software vendors, Software Kinetics, got involved with ARPANet and ended up migrating the technology to open one of Canada's first Internet Service Providers called NSTN.  When the first national Canadian event on the commercial Internet was held in Toronto in early 1994, NSTN was the poster child for what could be accomplished over the Internet; they even had a bookstore making sales worldwide.  During the late 1990's I was consulting for Software Kinetics, visited Halifax many times and came to appreciate that Halifax was an "under-the-radar" mini-hotbed of Internet technology and innovation. So it was no surprise to me when I learned that AOL had setup their AOL PhoneLine development team in Halifax through an acquisition of InfoInteractive who had previously developed some infrastructure software for use with AOL's services.

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AOL has a long history of innovation. Initially launched as a proprietary pre-Internet personal communications platform building up to several million users via dialup connections, AOL has evolved its integration into the Internet to the point where it recently broke down its "closed garden" business model and opened up the majority of its content and services to anyone visiting their site. It has certainly gone down a bumpy road with its history of balancing the conflicting needs of innovation against the needs of an operation bureaucracy looking for a profitable business model. At one point it was the poster child for the Bubble 1.0 bust as the business world tried to work out business models to provide a profitable combination of both infrastructure services and (syndicated) content. Breaking down the walled garden is but one example of the direction it is going under new leadership.

Last week there were several posts (Aswath, GigaOm) about the closure of AOL's TotalTalk, where AOL effectively recognized there is little to gain by playing in the pure legacy telephone replacement game and has decided to abandon it. Earlier this week there were several posts (Jon Arnold, Andy Abramson, Mark Evans) discussing Vonage's latest quarterly results; the common theme is that Vonage is spending such enormous sums on customer recruitment that there is little hope of profitability in the foreseeable future. Cablecos and legacy telcos offering DSL services have a leg up as they already have a customer base to whom they can market. But Andy at VoIP Watch sums it up best when talking about the demise of AOL Total Talk in his Requiem for the Future of VoIP:

Rather than look at it as a failure, my take on this is AOL really has seen the future sooner than others. Much like the BT announcement earlier this week about their softclient, and like their other online portal player competitors including Yahoo, Google and MSN, AOL's Voice Team has seen the future of telephony and is moving in that direction with AIM PhoneLine, and the burgeoning ecosystem that already has started to bubble earlier this month at the VoIP Developer's Conference, and will likely have a big boost at VON in Boston next month.

But unlike Yahoo and MSN who have so many internal battles to fight, AOL as part of Time Warner has leadership that is smart enough to not fight a marketer (Time Warner Cable) who wants to sell a phone 1.0 replacement, and instead is focusing on Phone 2.0 and where it can be.

Today AOL issued a press release outlining their execution on the Voice 2.0 Manifesto through building an ecosystem around their AIM Triton IM client and its AIM PhoneLine service called the Open AIM PhoneLine initiative. AOL will introduce three API's this fall that will give developers and hardware partners the ability to:

• Personalize the AIM Phoneline service by adding ringback tones and unique ring tones for frequent callers.
• Enable a wide variety of USB devices such as speakerphones and phone adapters that will allow standard cordless phones to initiate and receive calls with the AIM Phoneline service.
• Build new call management functionality into the AIM Phoneline service such as context and relevance-based call handling that could treat each call on the basis of rules that use Caller ID, online presence, calendar activities and more.

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This is the first in a series going deeper into the "softer" business case for using Skype in the workplace. The series' launching point is the Squidoo Lens 8 More Reasons For You To Pick Skype At Work.

People ask "Why did Skype take off?" One reason: fabulous user experience. The time from click-to-download to your first conversation is short. And Skype outperforms expectations for ease of use and sound quality. First timers smile, laugh - you should see their faces in a class.

I contrast this with the first time I used the 1998 version of SAP. You attended a two-day class to learn how to fill out a simple invoice. Then promptly adjourned to a local bar to drown the frustration and helplessness.

Back to feelings. Great experiences stimulate adoption, indifferent and bad ones trigger abandonment. As true for industry as for consumer goods. Any IT manager will tell you it's hard to redeploy a product once users have puked on it. So happy, confident user experience curtails this risk.

Comparing Skype to other solutions, how well do they deliver on first impressions? Which indicators of customer delight fit this context?

Let's look at some steps in a new user's experience.

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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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Microsoft Live Contacts offers developers 400+ million active users with 12 billion contact records. That's more than Earth's population, so should we assume a bit of duplication among the 30 contacts per active user?

A peak of 20 million simultaneous online (8.7% of the Live Messenger population, or 1 in 12) is 2 to 3 times more than Skype's reported raw peak usage.

Microsoft says Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls. Skype's decentralized conversation prevents us from knowing Skype's messaging traffic.

Microsoft is building Live into a hot software development platform, including Live Messenger tools. Live's demographics should be strong bait for Microsoft's developer, co-marketing, and distribution ecosystems. A mashup city worthy of serious phreaking.

More details from Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb, one of my favorite blogs, about from the Auckland Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference where George Moore, GM of Windows Live, spoke.

George Moore also told the conference attendees some stats of the current MS active audience -

• 240M Hotmail users,
• 230M Messenger,
• 72M Spaces