It's a small Skype promotion for a good cause. The Food Network, a US cable channel, and Skype are auctioning video calls with chefs Emeril Lagasse (a charming New Orleans favorite, known for saying "let's turn things up a notch" and "Bamm!!!!") and Bobby Flay (telegenic with a tough New York attitude). Proceeds benefit a charity to fight hunger and poverty. Bid on eBay until 3 December for a 7 December call, and get some kitchen tutoring and troubleshooting before you dive into Christmas cooking.

Video is the difference, and a clue to Skype's positioning in 2007. Don Albert told me Skype is emphasizing qualitative features over price in the United States. This contrasts Skype with cable and Vonage VoIP: Skype does video, those don't. 

Darn. Now I'm hungry.

This is the third of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In the first post I outlined the problem; in the second post I proposed a proven solution; in this third post I want to review the recent Skype beta releases (3.0 for WIndows, 2.5 for Mac) and Skype's 3 Group partnering activity with respect to the proposed solution.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness? .... Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, 1964

One primary objective of public relations is to leverage media reporters, including bloggers, to provide an outside perspective on the subject matter of press releases, product announcements and corporate presentations at, say, industry events and to propagate corporate awareness through corporate interviews.  In turn, media reporters want to feel both sufficiently informed and experienced to have the background for providing objective, accurate and complete coverage while making assessments of the impact of a story.

Personally I prefer to report based on exposure to a product, not just a press release. I have also found interviews with senior executives (usually the CEO, one of whose roles is to be the Chief Company Salesperson) an opportunity to flesh out details that can make a more viable and credible story. I have also had a couple of executives point out that I have brought to their attention issues that they subsequently realized should be addressed in their public announcement.

Over the past two weeks we have seen four major press releases involving Skype: Skype 3.0 for Windows Beta Launch, Skype for  Windows - Business version, Skype for Mac 2.5 beta launch and Skype's participation in 3Groups' new X-Series program. The result has left behind a very mixed image of what Skype is offering and the direction it is taking. The first post in this series exposes some of this confusion; the second post proposes a cost effective solution that can help narrow, or even avoid, the confusion..

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Technology and Products

1. MobiGater GSM-to-Skype gateway, plugs into your PC, passes Skype calls to your mobile phone. Also lets you speed dial your Skype buddies from your mobile, ringing them on Skype. From Bulgaria to 20 countries

2. Accessing Skype APIs with Ruby. Pretty easy, if you know the Ruby programming language.

3. Moodgeist pinger for Linux. The better to let the universe know how you're feeling. Even if you're using Linux.

4. 10 Things to Know About Skype Ap2Ap Programming. Read this before you code. Adrian Cockroft.

5. Skype on Solaris. More Sun bloggers spread the word.

6. US Robotics' webcam. Is the 9640 cheaper (at $40) and smaller than the Logitech Fusion?

Advanced topics

1. Project San Dimas, an experimental eBay desktop, built on the Adobe Apollo platform using web services. Congrats to eBay's Alan Lewis.

2. Nokia: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones. "Nokia researchers are working on a system that allows physical objects to be identified and connected to the Internet through mobile-phone screens."

3. MashupU. Anyone from the Skype developer community available to teach at MIT, 15-16 January 2007?

4. Everything is Miscellaneous lecture. David Weinberger's speech mp3 (46:53, 22.5 MB) at the Scottish Learning Festival.

5. Cooperation Commons. Research project by the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold to study cooperation and collective action.

6. A Voluntarily Loosely Organized Organization. How does Skype support emergent management practices?

Business

1. Boom when UAE's Etisalat opens up to Skype? Skype Wi-Fi phone vendor Belkin is hoping UAE lifts Skype ban sooner than later.

2. Death of the phone company: "There will be a custom communications experience generated dynamically for every context, and it may be personalised for the individual communicators."

3. Death of Skype: Australian ISP: "Skype packets, in the world that we are heading to, will be able to be seen by all telcos and all telcos will have the capacity to prioritise or de-prioritise those packets."

4. ISP Xtra: No Skype shaping. Computerworld: Despite terms of service which allow it,

   Telecom's retail ISP Xtra says there is no rate-limiting for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, contrary to reports in the media and complaints in web and Usenet forums. "Applications such as Skype can be used," Xtra spokeswoman Lenska Papich says. No traffic management is applied to Skype, she adds.

5. The future is bright .. The future is 3 .. How 3's switch to flat rates for mobile data unleashes explosive growth. Great essay, by Ajit Jaokar, about taking down the "walled garden" (controlling everything in the ecosystem) in favor of an Open Garden. via John Furrier.

6. WordPress follows SixApart and SocialText into Corporate IT. SixApart needs this: one enterprise vendor is a novelty, four is a market. See also Traction and Blogtronix. Skype may benefit from enterprise adoption of other social media like blogs and wikis if they jump on the knowledge management and collaboration memes, and further integrate Skype into blogs.

7. Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever. Skype is number 9. Others: Hotmail, MySimon, BlueMountain, Lycos, Netscape, GeoCities, Excite, AOL, and Broadcast.com. A hard meme to kill.

8. The Peanut Butter Manifesto. Yahoo!'s Brad Garlinghouse rocks. Messenger's executive sponsor bets his career on focusing Yahoo!

CaptainAmerica Maverick gave me a bracelet tonight. A Skype presence bracelet. It shows my Skype availability when I wear it in Second Life. And if you're in 2L with me, you can use it to Skype me (I'm "Phil Arrow").

Stephen "CaptainAmerica" Klosky is using Skype's "SkypeWeb", a web service that takes a Skype username and returns that user's public status.

Web services are the life blood of Web 2.0, published protocols that open a company's software engines to programmers. SkypeWeb is Skype's only public protocol.

Skype must do more to empower developers who want to blend Skype into the rest of cyberspace. On Skype Journal's short list:

1. Turn the Skype client messaging APIs into web services. All of them.
2. Skype user authentication as a web service.
3. Directory service for public chats, public conference calls, and open contact groups.

Offering a "Naked Skype," (Skype devzone wiki, Skype issue database) a bundle of protocols to the cloud, would let developers blend Skype with any service, including email (like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!).

Skype is in an earnest race. (Skype management has not acknowledged this.) The company wins who publishes the most complete, friendly web services for live communication. The measure of success: developers everywhere mashing up your communications with their social networks, mashing up your social network with their services. Skype's performance so far: not in the game.

Today, for example, I must use the unscalable Skype client on projects to: 

• Write a web page that shows a Google map of the locations of a logged-in visitor's contacts, colored by contact group, indications of when they are likely to be online.
• Build a web based feed aggregator that crawls urls mentioned in buddy profiles, showing updated web pages and blog posts.
• Run gateways between the Skype network and SIP services.

In the Skype 3.0 public chat, Julian Bond said Skype's new Skype4com ActiveX wrapper gets us partway there. I suppose it does, if all you care about is embedding a Skype widget in web pages or rich clients. So much more is needed.

Web services will unleash the power of Skype's

• communication infrastructures,
• identity infrastructures,
• social infrastructures and collective social capital, and
• commercial infrastructures.

Web services open new markets, attract new customers, reinforce your value propositions.

In Second Life, web services literally open up new worlds. Skype's rivals get it and are acting now. Where is Skype's leadership in this race?

.. 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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This is the second of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In the first post I outlined the problem; in this second post I am proposing a proven solution; in the third post I want to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution.

Drawing from my management experience over the past couple of decades involving business public relations activities, from both a marketing and investor communications perspective, I think Skype can enhance both its market awareness and usage leveraging the enthusiasm, interests and various perspectives bloggers have the power to introduce into the market.  I have had employers who tried to ignore the need for PR (and dealt with the fallout) and others who were viewed as overly aggressive in their PR activities. But the one constant, both prior to and following the Internet's evolution as a business communications medium is that PR is about building relationships -- not only with your customers and users but also with those who have the potential to propagate the message, whether through traditional media or web-based media, such as blogging.

First three general comments:

• In the pre-Internet days, for every major software product launch at one of my previous employers, we sent out a team of product managers, executives and PR personnel to conduct individual press interviews. This took significant resources out of the office for up to two weeks. And then we had the overhead of delivering and supporting pre-release software prior to the launch such that reporters could write up their impressions based on actual experience. With VoIP and Internet-based real time communications, software distribution and feedback tools all such costs and overhead effectively go away.

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This is the first of three posts discussing Skype's PR management with the aim of improving the PR relationships associated with the launch of new Skype software and associated services. In this post I want to outline the problem; in the second to propose a proven solution:in the third post I want to review the Skype 3.0 beta release activity with respect to the proposed solution. .

If you follow the VoIP blogosphere at all, you may notice that certain products and services, when introduced, get a lot of coverage such that readers can quickly assess if there could be followup interest.  SightSpeed and TalkPlus, whose beta program launches today, are two examples; this did not happen by accident. In both cases, while bloggers are open to make their own observations there is an underlying consistency of message as to what the service provides and what are the key features. SightSpeed focuses on high quality realtime and asynchronous video communications while TalkPlus focuses on delivering a means to manage your phone number infrastructure in a manner that protects individual privacy while providing helpful business and social networking tools.

On the other hand I have done a review of various blogger posts on the Skype 3.0 Beta launch; here is the original press release and a sampling of the initial "first impressions" posts (Ed: with my bolds):

Gizomodo:

The big new feature is browser extensions for IE and Firefox that let you embed SkypeOut links into web pages. ... The re-designed toolbar, contacts and call tabs look much easier to use. And Skype also added moderated public chat features, which makes me all wistful for IRC.

Skype Numerology

Nov. 9: Skype 3.0 beta released. And indeed, the differences between the previous version 2.6.0.105 and the 3.0.0.106 are (from my point of view) quite small, see the change log.

Nov. 11: Mea Culpa: My mistake (see my post below), Skype 3.0 has indeed quite some new features, as explained on the Skype website and in Skype Journal.

Tech Crunch UK

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Blogpulse tracks how much the blogosphere mentions a topic or brand. The unit of measure is percent of blogs that mention the keywords or an url. Nielsen BuzzMetric's blogpulse is slightly biased toward English language blogs although many blogs in other languages are represented.

In October 2004, Skype was mentioned in .015 to .020 percent of blogs.

In March 2005, Skype buzz was in the .045 range, doubling in six months.

Now Skype is in the .07 to .08 range, doubled in 18 months, with frequent spikes over .09 percent.

The chart above shows Skype's modest growth over the last six months. The bottom curve is "VoIP". When I first started looking at both of them, they overlapped. They used VoIP to explain Skype. Now they are mostly separate; Skype has its own identity independent of VoIP.

Just for comparison: Paris Hilton (.075), Harry Potter (.2), iPod (.5), election (.65), Iraq (.7) and sex (1.4%). From a marketing perspective, the new blogging service Vox is stable at .1 after launching its preview in August; Coke (.225, including all uses of the term) and Pepsi (.1).

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.

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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Naked Conversations co-author (with Robert Scoble) Shel Israel and American-converted-to-Canadian VC and blogger Rick Segal (and our former Microsoft evangelist when I was at Quarterdeck) are currently traveling through Europe. With an objective of learning about Europeans who have been bitten by the technology development bug, as well as about the integration of technology into European societies,. Shel is planning to write another book, Global Neighborhoods, while Rick may be seeking out new ventures that would complement current ones funded by  J.L.Albright Venture Partners.

Yesterday they met with Sten Tamkivi, Skype's 28-year-old COO learning about Skype's strategy, vision and operations.

The core of that strategy, according to Sten, is Skype 's intention to increasingly derive revenue from non-telephony services such as text, SMS and video.

"Very few VOIP services do not compare themselves to Skype." That means they are positioned to follow not lead. "Skype is more focused on staying ahead by focusing on its own opportunities," he told us..

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"WAP is Crap!"

Well, in fact it was quite good given the technology constraints it had to work within. As an implementation of the wired Web on mobile devices, it was well thought through, surprisingly effectively implemented, and funded to the gunnels.

The difficulty was that it was in general a solution to a problem the users didn't have. The power of the wired Web is the hyperlink and browsing of information. Users spend a lot of time "transaction hunting", where you decide where to put your money and attention. The wired Web is about bubbling up of important, interesting and useful information. This doesn't match the use case of the wireless Web, which is about quick hits with sites where you already have a relationship.

All this is well documented. So it's rather sad that the industry is about to go through the same harrowing learning process all over again with mobile instant messaging.

Once more, there's a well-established and successful model from the wired Internet. "Presence" as it is usually constituted grew up from the always-off world of dial-up Internet. Online rendezvous was hard, presence solved that problem. For the first time, you could have multiple conversations on the go at once. Distance didn't matter, a novelty for those separated by countries and continents. Parents and partners were excluded from this private chat world.

Mobile IM is also the solution to a crisis the user doesn't have. The buddy list reflects a closed world that doesn't match the openness of the actual tools the users prefer, namely SMS and voice. We already have a universal identifier system, the phone number. Users already manage multi-threaded conversations using SMS. The idea of the "chat window" doesn't make sense on mobile. The interruption model doesn't match, either. A new IM whilst you're browsing the web means a flashing taskbar icon and minor context change from one app to another. Mobile interruptions mean suspending real life. That's why you ask the sender to stump up a few cents to demonstrate the value of the interruption.

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During Canada's Centennial Year (1967) I was host for a student exchange with Finnish students; we have kept up contact over the past 39 years. Last week I asked one of them if s/he could translate the actual Helsingin Sanomat article reporting on their interview with Niklas Zennström (registration required) or at least give me the gist of it. Below (with minimal editorial correction of spelling and grammar)  is what my friend calls her/his "amateur translation".

The interview certainly goes well beyond the content of the Reuters summary report. (On the other hand there is nothing there that is going to impact eBay's stock price!) Note that, while my friend has been using English in both personal and business activities all these years, Skype Journal is not responsible for any mistranslation.

Of note in Niklas' comments:

• Niklas sees the future for wireless as being in WiFi (and WiMax) networks once they become more ubiquitous and more easily accessible. (reinforcing Ted Wallingford's recent comments on WiFi as the primary VoIP wireless medium)
• The issues with developing Skype for GSM or other wireless mobile phones relate to both processing power and memory issues (which translate into latency issues discussed in a post last weekend).
• He sees current rates for calls to wired lines as being the lowest we will see as someone has to pay for at least the connection.
• He only sees an explosion of mobile VoIP only once there are unlimited use fixed rate data plans available.
• The path to Skype as a ubiquitous mobile platform may be through "rebel" or "challenger" mobile operators who want to challenge the larger legacy service providers. But this is along the lines of what Andy was concluding in his recent "Being on the Inside" post.

A summary translation paragraph by paragraph goes as follows:

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Guest post by Hans Blaauw

Many many months ago I wrote a Skype plugin called Mood-o-Matic. It could retreive information from external databases and publish it in your mood. It was limited because Skype did not support clickable mood messages. Now they do!

There seems to be nothing in the EULA about what you are allowed to put in the Mood message (I just checked with some Skypers).

So in theory I could recruit 10000 popular people that are willing to display ads in their Moodmessage when they are away or busy. Imagine, each of these 10000 highly popular people have 25 other people in their list. That would make a interesting audience for advertising.

What if you would have the possibility to get free credits if you would put these ads in your Mood message, interesting?

It seems to me the Mood message can be used for many more things. What if it would support widgets from Widgetbox?

Absent any immediate threats, and after Monday's conference call with eBay's government affairs people, San Jose State University's University Computing and Telecommunications department (SJSU UCAT) said they will not ban Skype. [correction: it was Skype's government affairs person, not eBay's, on the conference call.]

I wasn't there, but if I were briefing them, I'd be telling them about:

• Skype's value to the University's academic mission. Bringing distant guest lecturers into the classroom, helping students collaborate on projects, improving language study, helping faculty to perform research and develop curriculum, curriculum delivery, sustaining family and social ties that support students far from home.
• Skype's popularity. It's great to make people happy. Skype is a small but growing hit with both SJSU faculty and students. The UCAT office had many calls after the student newspaper's first article. And there's overwhelming popularity and demand for Skype worldwide.
• Little budget effect. Nice that it's free to get and use. Support costs are unknown. No known revenue impact (selling SkypeOut credit at the campus bookstore?)
• Configuring Skype to run through your proxy service to get through the firewall. So Skype clients deal with the firewall in a known and managed way. And so Skype's activity and effect on the network may be monitored. Or shut down, if needed. Linux FAQ. Network administrator's guide (PDF).
• Intel's pilot of an IT-friendly release of Skype. It lets the IT department create a locked-down version of the Skype client. So they could turn off the ability to use Skype's file transfer feature, for example. Or configure all Skype clients to use a campus proxy server. A promise of things to come, and a gesture that Skype is listening to enterprise network managers.

This all happened in public, with lots of nasty name calling and bother. But UCAT's initial choice may not have been reconsidered without all the attention drawn to the decision.

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!