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!

Just off the phone (21 November 2006) with Jeff Black, ceo of TalkPlus and star of the demo I posted 13 November 2006: calling from a mobile to echo123 without a Skype client anywhere in the loop.

He confirmed:

1. TalkPlus does not use SkypeIn.
2. TalkPlus does not use SkypeOut.
3. TalkPlus does not use the Skype-operated SIP gateways now.
4. TalkPlus conversations going from a mobile to a Skype user are only encrypted in the usual Skype way from TalkPlus's servers to the Skype client.

Black said he's been to Skype's London's headquarters several times, most recently about 30 days ago. He said they fully shared what TalkPlus does and how it does it to Skype's management and technical people, right down to engineering diagrams. They continue friendly discussions. He said TalkPlus filed multiple patents which predate Skype on mobiles.

Black declined comment when asked if TalkPlus was building something for Skype.

If you'd like to chat about this, join the Skype 3.0 discussion. You can view the video of the demonstration on Revver, Vox, and Google Video.

.. 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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Yesterday Skype released its initial Skype for Windows 3.0 beta with several new features. However, the press release does not really show the entire picture and, in fact, two of the four features mentioned were available in the previous 2.6 beta - namely, Click-to-Call and Skypecasts Live. Click-to-Call is simply an embedding of the previously available Skype for Web Toolbars supported by the Phone Number Recognition COM-component. It is a very handy feature that I have been using for some time.

But the other two -- Public Chats and a User Interface refresh -- bring some significant changes:

Public Chats -- my first activity was to walk through the Public Chat setup wizard. But I quickly realized it should be called the Skype Watercooler. The algorithm allows you to control who will participate; you can invite via emails, chat session or via a web page. You can control if a participant is active (able to contribute to the discussion) or passive (can only read the discussion). Lots of flexibility here. Whereas Skypecasts are publicly exposed such that anyone can join, the level of participation here is determined by the level of exposure you provide for your invitation.

But most interesting is to get the experience that comes from the persistence of a public chat. Yesterday I joined the Skype 3.0 Public Chat started by Phil; this morning when I came to my PC I could quickly review all the conversation that had occurred overnight (hey, those Europeans start their day early). Skype's Public Chat will become an interesting tool within the social networking landscape but Skype Marketing needs to look at a more definitive, attention grabbing name for the service. Let me say it again: Skype Watercooler.

User Interface: Lots to talk about here but I will just highlight some features:

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As mentioned elsewhere I have had significant exposure to a variety of phones that have been designed to work with Skype, either as the primary purpose of the device (Skype WiFi phones, Skype Cordless phones) or as an application within a more versatile mobile "personal assistant" platform (Windows Mobile platforms and, by year end, Symbian platforms such as the Nokia N-series). In addition I have now had the opportunity to work with a few wireless phones made by Nokia and Research in Motion (Blackberry). A few comments that could help Skype ecosystem product managers going forward:

Battery life: many of these phones have a battery life of four to six hours idle time. Probably best to license RIM's Blackberry power management -- I can get four to five days of idle time on my 8700. Any device that will have a hope of broad market acceptance should have at least two days idle time.

DTMF tones: This is a fairly basic and widely deployed feature of the Voice 1.0 phone infrastructure; yet I am constantly amazed at the cavalier approach taken to making sure "TouchTones" work with any Skype client, whether a softphone or a hardware device. Here are some of my experiences:

• Skype itself would not work reliably with DTMF tones prior to version 2.0; that issue has been resolved at this point (within the Skype client's "Dial" tab).
• The Skype WiFi phones do not support DTMF; therefore they limit the usefulness of SkypeOut when calling businesses that use IVR systems or other services, such as voice mail systems, that require a DTMF response. I have also experienced USB phones with the same issue.
• At the other extreme the RTX Dualphone and VoIPvoice Cyberphones do provide the appropriate support; the Sony Mylo aslo supports DTMF but you have to remember to put their unique keyboard in NUM mode to enter the tones.

Chat: I view Skype as having two primary features: Instant Messaging (presence and chat) and Voice. For USB phones, the IM activity remains on the host PC; however, for PC-independent devices there are issues:

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Yesterday came out of stealth mode the TalkPlus project that has been over two years in development; underlining this project's viability was a coincident announcement of a $5.5 million financing by Menlo Ventures. Om broke the story early yesterday morning; Ken Camp, Stowe Boyd, Voxilla and Alec Saunders, amongst others, have posted their initial impressions. I spent an hour yesterday afternoon discussing TalkPlus with Jeff Black, Founder and CEO. Jack provided some of the operational details that were not covered in the press release. First an overview from the press release:

TalkPlus today announced plans to revolutionize the way people use mobile phones by offering new and innovative Voice 2.0 calling services that work with existing mobile phones globally. Under development for more than two years, TalkPlus' patent-pending technology will provide customers a wide array of new and advanced calling services previously unavailable from mobile phone carriers.

First Offering: A Second Number That Works on Your Mobile Phone

With an additional phone number from TalkPlus, mobile users can now take advantage of having two numbers on their mobile phone. This additional mobile number is fully functional and unique; it works just like a mobile number issued by a carrier. By having a separate number to both place and receive calls on the same phone, subscribers get greater convenience and flexibility, as well as the benefit of an additional layer of privacy. With a second number, TalkPlus subscribers will be able to easily manage personal and work lives, while carrying only one mobile phone.

Subscribers will also benefit from an online management center, where they can easily control the TalkPlus Number's advanced call screening, voicemail, and contact management features.

Incorporated into the "Second Number" feature set will be an independent voice mailbox, a rules based engine for call management, bidirectional calling (in and out) such that a user can, say, separate her personal and business life, while using one phone handset with one carrier account. If you want to apply these management features to your original (well publicized) mobile number, you can port that number to the TalkPlus service and have a new (probably unpublicized) number applied to your basic carrier service.

But the calling support services go beyond capturing voice mail. Here are a couple of  examples:

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Today Skype released Skype for Pocket PC 2.1, a release whose accompanying documentation reflects the reality of the limited resources of handheld mobile devices. A full list of new features is available here; however, key items include:

• A new multi-chat interface which supports chats with several participants.
• Skype Launcher, a small 'launcher" application that checks available memory and verifies that Skype is installed correctly. (Hopefully this will avoid the situation I previously encountered where sometimes I had to reboot a Windows Mobile device before Skype for Pocket PC would start if other programs, such as SliingBox Mobile, were running.)
• Built-in call management that detects incoming mobile calls (via your normal mobile service) during a Skype call and offers the user the choice to hang up or ignore the call. You can switch to Skype calls when in a mobile call.
• Detailed contact search including specification of country, city and language as options.

However, buried in the details are the following that reflect a more realistic approach to Mobile Skype:

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In the file sharing world of Kazaa and bittorrents, members of a network share two things: the files, and offers/bids for those files. More specifically, they ask for or offer little chunks of files ignoring the chunks' order in the file. You pass along what chunks you have and grab the chunks you need and, eventually, getting little bits from many sources, you have all the parts you need to assemble a copy of the whole file.

But what do you do with a live event, like a news broadcast or a university lecture? How do you get the benefits of scale-free p2p distribution while keeping all the viewers in sync? How do you accommodate people tuning in and tuning out during the event?

Skype conference calling goes part way. It distributes little bits to/from the conferenced people in streamed order. To keep a conversation rolling it will tolerate dropped chunks and accommodate resource challenges like poor CPU power.

The Company That Will Soon Be Formerly Known As The Venice Project promises to extend this to sharing your bits with strangers. Like bittorrent, you're giving the network a little control over distribution of the bits. You shouldn't mind sharing a little upstream bandwidth with the community since you're sipping from the same stream. Part of their art will be a balance of:

1. Centrally managing the publishing and initiation of streams (think YouTube),
2. Peer to peer distribution of those streams (like bittorrent, but first-bits-first), and
3. Playing on a rich client (like Skype).

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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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Last week's Voice 2.0 Conference in Ottawa exposed examples across the entire range of infrastructure and services that lead to voice-related applications. Martin Geddes led off with a keynote asking What's telephone for? What's the unmet user need? Where's the money and What's next? Sam Aparicio of  Angel.com provides an excellent commentary on Martin's presentation ending with Martin's economic model for Voice 2.0 telephony:

• Martin talks about an inversion of the model. While most of the money was being made once the call was connected, now most of the money is to be made pre- and post-talk.
• Before talking you have devices, connectivity, privacy, presence, availability, directory and integration
• After the call, social networking.
• Google managed to create $400B of market value by exploiting digital social gestures around hyperlinks, but Telcos still fail to see how CDRs are a goldmine.
• Some of the growth areas: B2C (I'm soo glad he mentioned this...), C2B -- whenever you cross the trust of a social boundary. An example: In Finland, some people organized a grassroots, non-official Voice Idol type system, creating tons of value for the carriers without much of their involvement.
• Some examples of new thinking: considering a cell phone as a retail outlet you get to carry with you wherever you go.
• In the end, whoever controls the context in which conversations happen. (Following the Starbucks model, where they get to capture the bulk of the value generated by the chain starting at the bush of Juan Valdes). He mentioned how, in the future, when in a hotel, options for room service will be in a buddy list.

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Thursday I received, as an evaluation unit, a Sony Mylo via the folks at Trinity Convergence whose voice engine software is embedded in the device. The Mylo has turned out to be an interesting personal companion and nothing has changed my opinion that this could be for Sony in the 2000's what the Walkman was for them in the late 80's.

The Mylo merges personal entertainment and personal communications  into one device. I expect I will be learning its many features over the next couple of weeks but a few initial comments:

• That blue ring around the right side is not an illusion; it indicates that it has an active WiFi connection.
• It is a device through which a group of friends can maintain ongoing remote contact, whenever they are in WiFi range, sharing (but not swapping) music, pictures and video, talking and IM'ing. (The agreement with T-Mobile in the U.S. is an ingenious piece of marketing.)
• On our first Mylo-to-Mylo call this evening with Andy Abramson, who bought one today, we both remarked it had the best Skype voice quality either of us has experienced. Suffice it to say that, remotely, Andy got right inside my head! (I have yet to decide if that is good or bad <gr>.)
• The Skype experience on a stand alone WiFi device has been all positive. The user interface and Skype feature set is much more intuitive and feature rich than on those Skype WiFi phones. It reinforces my recommendation that Skype move beyond the simple Skype WiFi phones, especially given that the Mylo can handle the full combination of voice communications, instant messaging and file transfer inherent to legacy Skype.
• Is there some irony that you can only IM with the embedded GTalk capability? (Same for the Yahoo Messenger)

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(The second of three posts on the newly released Skylook 2.0.)

Two legacy features carried over from earlier versions are the Skylook Answering Machine and Skylook Recording, both of which recorded Skype voice mail messages and calls as MP3 files.. Building on the experience with handling audio in developing these features, Skylook 2 has been enhanced such that voice mails can be incorporated into business processes for timely follow up and retrieval while Skylook Recording is an ideal solution for recording podcasts. The new features include:

• Recording in multiple formats: MP3, PCM, etc.
• Record the caller side or both sides of the call
• Split the recording of each side of a call as "raw PCM audio" into separate WAV files; this facilitates later editing of recordings as podcasts.
• Store audio files either in Outlook or in any Windows folder. This allows call centers to store files in Public folders accessible to all members of a call center
• In the Skylook Call Monitor window you can also store (free text) Notes to associate with the recording. These notes, which can be made either during or after the call, become searchable tags that facilitate later retrieval of audio files.
• When deploying Skype Answering Machine a voice mail (optionally from designated callers) can be automatically forwarded to any designated email address as an attached MP3 file.

As with earlier versions of Skylook all Answering Machine and Recording activity is archived within Outlook.

If you are looking for more than simply receiving voice mail and want to not only have several recording options but also have all your call activity archived for later search retrieval, Skylook 2 offers some interesting value-add features, especially for call centers, customer support operations and podcast producers.

First Post: Skylook 2 - Building Business Processes Around Skype

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Those handsome guys at the big CES booth in the Skype Journal banner are from a startup called YapperNut. I coulda sworn I wrote them up last January but a quick search didn't pull it up. Fresh out of Stanford engineering (some of them not even out of school), they started YapperNut to create products for Skype.

First came Amy, one of the first answering machines for Skype, and still a very nice and free program. It was the first add-in to screen incoming calls based on the caller's social proximity, leading Iotum by more than a year. Amy offered voice messaging before Skype's. Skype still doesn't have scheduled voice transmissions or office hours that direct calls to voice mail when you're sleeping, a feature Skype still doesn't have.

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Earlier this week Skype announced a new Skype 2.6 beta release for Windows.  Two new features:

• Skypecasts controls are now directly available within the Skype client
• A bandwidth indicator is enabled via the Advanced Options (Tools|Optiions|Advanced)

However, the most interesting for partners is this line in the announcement:

For developers, there's a feature here that has been requested a lot: you can turn off the visible Skype UI through the API now. For more info on this, please stay tuned for updates on our developer zone and the developer blog.

As Alec Saunders points out, this is Silent Skype where developers can turn off the visible Skype UI.. Is this on the path to the long requested Naked Skype where developers can build around a core Skype engine?

Skype's Developer Program has launched a developer newsletter. But it begs the question as to why it is simply a traditional web page as opposed to being published with RSS feeds for those who want automatic updates and all the other benefits of RSS use.

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Last weekend Netralia launched Version 2 of Skylook - a tool that links Skype to that ubiquitous contact management and email tool, Outlook 2000/XP/2003, and extends facets of the Skype experience to your mobile phone. In an interview with Jeremy Hague, Skylook's CEO, I learned that Skylook is rapidly becoming a key business tool for that 30% of users who use Skype in business. Key points include:

• over 60% (and rising) of Skylook licenses are known to be for business use;
• its major appeal is to hard core Skype users
• its business users have as many as 15,000 contacts in Outlook
• its US$99.95 per year per user price tag includes a 12 months 24 hour response time support warranty as well as all updates during this period

While working with Outlook, Skylook 2 also introduces audio technology for several key features, incorporates enhanced SMS messaging into Skype's Instant Messaging features and uses Skype's API's to forward voice and email messages to your mobile phone. In the image above I have "wrapped' the toolbar to show all its features. Skylook 2 offers six key functions:

• Communicate with Outlook Contacts: for instance, you can even send an SMS message to any Outlook contact, including those who do not have a Skype account, provided they have a mobile phone
• Record Skype calls (with several new features in Skylook 2.0 - the subject of a separate post - ideal for creating podcasts using Skype)
• Alerts and Forwarding: a totally new feature that will be the subject of a separate post.
• Answering Machine provides full voice mail functionality
• Archiving and organizing all your communications: emails, IM sessions, SMS activity and voice mails.
• Synchronize your Outlook and Skype Contacts.

Skylook has a more detailed outline of its functions on its web site along with links to examples of how several features work.

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