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.

"When you go online,
you can see the world.
Richard Pombo hates that.
So he's selling control over which sites you visit
to strangers,
gatekeepers to the Internet.
People who get to choose for you.
Pombo is selling your freedom for cash.
The freedom to read what you want,
to say what you want,
on the Internet.
Fight for your Freedom of Speech.
Save your Free Internet.
Fire Pombo."

You haven't seen ads like that in this campaign. Not on TV, radio or the web.

Because Net Neutrality never cost anyone an election. And NN advocates aren't peppering the Internet or the airwaves with independent advertising for/against candidates.

Russell Shaw doesn't expect Tuesday's US election to remove Republican control of the Senate, so doesn't expect a shift in Congress's net neutrality stance.

I'll go further.

Even if the Dems win both houses of Congress, it will not matter.

Since nobody will win on a "net neutrality" platform, no political capital will be earned for NN. So NN won't be a priority in the 2008 election. It's not like anyone tied NN to big issues like jobs, the war in Iraq, political corruption, or public morals.

And nobody raised a million dollars to advocate for net neutrality.

eBay North America expands Skype buttons in seven more categories, for a total of 24 catgories.

"AuctionBytes has not seen signs of wide adoption of Skype click-to-call buttons in eBay listings."

Money talks. And eBay sellers listen.

Most I've met love being able to squeeze all their customer encounters into email and eBay forms; they really hate interruptions or wasted time. I wouldn't go so far as to call them antisocial... Most, especially those who sell part time, need to fit eBay into the rest of a busy life.

The eBay forums for Skype switched from overwhelming doubt last summer (should we or shouldn't we?) to demands for access and questions about using Skype buttons to drive sales.

As more powersellers stand up and testify that Skype buttons means cash, Skype will continue to spread at a natural, unhurried pace. It feels really slow to me, but unforced and comfortable. This may improve retention as those that adopt Skype buy-in and stick with it.

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?

continue reading.....

Not much to do with Skype but I have just watched (via my Slingbox) the press conference where it was announced officially that Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion, has signed an agreement to purchase the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. Jim's comments were interrupted at one point as his Blackberry phone rang (even in Silent mode mics will pick up the rf signal coming in and "buzz" nearby speakers). At the end photographers were taking pics of him holding his Blackberry with a Penguins logo on the display. (He spent most of the press conference saying he was committed to the previous owners' commitments to a new arena in Pittsburgh.)

I have been lucky enough to have had some behind the scenes exposure to hockey as a business (my neighbor's son plays for the Boston Bruins); as a RIM shareholder for the past eight years I have been watching Jim (along with Mike Lazaradis, Co-CEO) demonstrate how to build and operate a very successful high tech business.  (Who else can take a patent settlement and get more marketing buzz than any traditional marketing campaign costing the same amount?) It will be interesting to observe how Jim adapts to the professional sports culture and what contribution he can bring to professional sports in terms of business expertise and acumen. Jim has always been approachable and has integrity beyond reproach. (Maybe HP should recruit him to restore their image?) At this year's annual meeting he took time to give me a personal demonstration of the new Blackberry Maps GPS-based navigation feature that will be available this fall (yes, it will retrofit to more recent older models). His enthusiasm is infectious.

While most of the local press will speculate on whether he will move the Penguins to Hamilton, Ontario (it won't happen -- remember I said Jim has good business acumen), I wonder how long it will be before Penguins games become available on your Blackberry. Now there would be a revenue generator for the service providers and RIM gets some fraction of all that service provider revenue. And if they got to the Stanley Cup finals, the traffic demand could bring down the (at least Canadian) wireless networks! (I did watch one period of last spring's finals via my Slingbox during an intermission at a theatrical performance.)

And, let's face it, Jim is living the Canadian dream. How often will we find high tech entrepreneurs who can build their business virtually from scratch  to a level where they can own their own NHL franchise?

Now if we could just get a Skype client onto the Blackberry!

Powered by Qumana

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

Never wonder about the power of telephone companies. A few weeks ago Wessel van der Vyfer spoke for Telecom Namibia at the Telecoms World Africa conference on "The future prospects of the African telecoms market.. new players ... the latest strategies."

This week The Namibian's Christof Maletsky reports van der Vyfer's Telecom Namibia arranged the arrest and arraignment of five people for selling unlicensed telecom service, in this case Internet phone calls. They were operating out of three storefronts in the port city of Walvis Bay.

Jan in Malaysia comments "It makes you realise how lightly Skype got off in South Korea after it was discovered it had set up shop and was providing VoIP services without the proper licence."

Namibia's six telephones per 100 people leaves them at a competitive disadvantage. Mike at TechDirt says small countries protect their tiny telco monopolies at the expense of economic prosperity. It must be hard to trade proven cash flow for theoretical growth.

Consider this.

I'm a cheapskate, and I'm with Tesco Mobile's prepaid plan. I hardly use my mobile except as a camera and for brief voice notes. Under $10/month expenditure.

Tesco's MVNO only offer Web (ports 80/443 HTTP/HTTPS) access on their GPRS gateway. This is a means of the host operator (in this case, O2) to segment the market and avoid competition from the MVNO for its premium customers.

Now, if you have neutrality rules, you get two unwanted effects:

• Tesco may have to close down their GPRS service, because it discriminates against service providers who happen not to use HTTP as their only protocol. The customer loses if the only type of Internet access allowed is 100% unfiltered.
• Tesco can never expand the service to, for example, allow POP email access whilst disallowing VoIP by inducing jitter and using deep packet inspection. The customer loses again -- in this case the marginal one who may even be willing to pay a little more.

continue reading.....

Jon Arnold is a Toronto-based communications consultant and IP blogger who does a weekly podcast on the Pulvermedia Podcasting Network with IP industry players. Jon and I also share in interest in the Boston Bruins, largely because he originally came from Boston and because my neighbor's son was one of the high points of what was a "down" season for the Bruins last winter. However while Jon is a dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox fan, I still maintain my loyalty to the Toronto Blue Jays when it comes to baseball. So we have our interests both outside and inside the VoIP arena.

Last week Jon invited me to participate as the guest on this week's podcast. Recorded late yesterday it turned out to be timely as a large portion of the podcast covers the Google-eBay announcement which resulted in several posts, not only on Skype Journal (here, here and here) but also by many of the VoIP bloggers such as Andy Abramson and Alec Saunders.I agree with Mathew Ingram in that the Google-eBay deal may turn out to be more important for Google than the Google Office announcement.

You can follow up (with a link to the podcast) here. It's been twelve years since I did media interviews as President of the then newly formed Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft. So if it sounds a bit rusty, it's just my nervousness associated with my first experience with doing a podcast and yet my sensitivity to try to keep a freely flowing conversation.moving along.

Thanks again to Jon for the invitation to participate.Give a listen (iTunes Player recommended) and hope it can provide some additional insight into where Skype is going.

Powered by Qumana

Jaanus has pointed out that today, for the first time, over 7,000,000 users were on Skype earlier today.  I usually find Skype peaks at some time between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT. And this benchmark is reached on Skype's third birthday.

Now if Skype would fix the bug whereby presence information is not always current in version 2.5, we could get back to saying Skype is a real time communications service. I have noticed the same problem that Rachel, Rick Segal's very articulate daughter, has blogged about. For Rachel and her MusicIP team associates, Skype and its IM presence/chat engine has become "our office":

I'm criticizing because up until a couple weeks ago, the MusicIP team wasis as dependent on Skype for connecting with one another as an all-in-one-office company would be dependent on the water cooler, or for that matter, chairs [modified because after I thought for a minute...we still are dependent on it - we just complain about it now where we didn't before]. Taking to each other from a number of cities (which is usually at about six, but at other times people could be spread out among up to 10 different places), brainstorming via group chats, or simply sharing an interesting link for a laugh - more than our actual office, Skype is our office.

I have it on good authority the Skype development team is looking into this issue as I write. At the same time, Rachel's experience demonstrates, as Skype becomes mission critical to virtual communities worldwide, the importance of thoroughly testing new Skype releases to ensure they are backwards-feature-compatible. It also demonstrates that Skype's presence engine is just as important as, if not more important than, the actual voice communications features.

Let's hope we don't have to wait for version 2.6 going gold to fix this problem.

Update: Rachel has received a response from Roman in Skype Customer Support. Let's just say it's one more indication that Skype employees have just as much passion for their work as Skype users have for using Skype. Quoting Rachel again:

I've done customer service on an absolutely miniscule scale compared to what he's dealing with on a daily basis; his job isn't easy. We're cranky, we're put out, and we want answers. Roman clearly takes his job seriously and is representing the company he is a part of extremely well. It's not easy sometimes to articulate the right reply to a customer inquiry. But it takes a ton more courage and time to respond to said whiny customer in this much more public format.

Powered by Qumana

Jaanus Kase. Skype's Chief Blogging Officer who visited Phil in Oakland, is also the Chief Skype Forum Officer and has recently completed leading the transition of Skype's Forums to a new platform that provides both visible and backend improvements resulting in a much more resilient and secure forum ecosystem. Key issues included login protocol, security and anti-spam measures. So what's changed? From Jaanus' Announcement: Welcome to the new Skype Forums post:

Here are the most important changes.

• separate forum logins discontinued - you now use Skype Name
• new forum platform - means more security, less spam, new features
• layout and skin changes - you can now use the Skype Emoticons and Skype My Pictures
• admin team reorganization - see below, "Who's who"
• structure changes

The most important "first use" change is the "Identity Re-claim" process for transitioning to using your Skype login information as the login to the new forums. But it's effectively the usual Skype login web page process; you do need to think about what you want to use as your Forum Display Name (which is independent of your Skype Name and becomes your identity on Skype Forum posts). The details are on the Announcement page linked above.

Jaanus, on his personal blog, has written a much more detailed description of the more than year-long process his Skype team went through in identifying problems with the previous php-BB-s platform, determining the objectives of the "forum remake", deciding on a new platform (Invision Power Board) and then executing on the transition in as seamless a manner as possible. In addition to making the change in login protocol, the most important considerations was to not lose access to three years of user feedback and passion. Makes for an especially good read if you're involved in managing a similar user forum.

Our congratulations to Jaanus and his team for such a successful transition. And may the user passion continue to be expressed!

Powered by Qumana

Jaanus, the blog marketing face of Skype, has posted details of a contest to celebrate Skype's third birthday along with some brief historia about the launch of Skype on August 29, 2003 and their efforts to get the first 100 registered users..

If you want to celebrate our 3rd birthday with us, you don't have to send us expensive gifts or flowers. But you can send a birthday card. Please e-mail your birthday card to happybirthday@skype.net. It can be a picture, photo, video, just written wishes, anything really. If it's a picture or video, you can put it on Flickr, YouTube or any other of those Internet things and just send us the link. Please include your Skype Name.

Go join the celebration of bringing together over 100 million registered users. There are prizes offered; Skype Journal editors are not eligible even if we are not Skype employees.

Powered by Qumana

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.

continue reading.....

BlogHer starts today, perhaps the live blogger event with the least recycled blatfarb and the most human context. In honor of women bloggers everywhere, here's a guest post by Matt responding to our SkypeMe Eve post by Dina Mehta. 

You know, I haven't really given much thought to what it would be like for a woman in skypeme mode, but for myself I put it on when I just want to talk to someone and all my friends are busy. I don't often think of speaking with someone intimately that I don't know in real life, so the idea of meeting someone on skype, or anywhere else on the internet on intimate terms is kind of disconcerting to me, but what I have been thinking about is that the internet has slowly been taking the place of other social avenues.

At one point in time, people looking to find 'true love' as well as people looking to find 'a quick lay' would converge in physical establishments such as bars and clubs, and by being there it was like they were announcing themselves to be open to society (that is to talking with strangers). In such situations the people there would have to gauge what others were after by various signs that the person would make, as an example, if there was a woman sitting in a booth alone quietly, I would assume she wanted to remain that way, however if she were at the bar, I would assume she would be open to company at the bar.

continue reading.....

Declan McCullagh breaks down the FBI's new Net-tapping push. Requiring manufacturers of VoIP systems (including Skype) and IM (like Skype) be as tappable as your plain old telephone system. I suppose it comes down to trust, your world view, and how you balance risks with freedoms.

Law enforcement, for example, keeps pressure on legislatures to widen authority, at the expense of citizen privacy, in the name of being efficient and effective. They form an organized lobby putting safety over liberty. Do you know of lobbies that push back the other way?

Laws makers are aware that the threats are personal. For example, this bit from the official site of Ohio Senator Mike "Coingate" DeWine (R-Ohio):

NOTE: Due to heightened security restrictions in the Senate office buildings and elsewhere on the Capitol complex, mail addressed to members of Congress continues to be significantly delayed. Mail addressed to my office must now be sent off-site for irradiation treatment and other preventative measures to ensure safety.

Those wishing to quickly contact my office are encouraged to correspond by telephone or fax. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Senator DeWine will introduce the FBI's bill. If you're a U.S. citizen, Skype him to say the new CALEA extensions are over-the-top and intrusive. Or that you don't mind being spied on. Here are his public phone numbers. If you click them, you'll dial straight from Skype, free in the US:

• D.C. Office: (202) 224-2315
• Xenia, Ohio: (937) 376-3080
• Cincinnati, Ohio: (513) 763-8260
• Cleveland, Ohio: (216) 522-7272
• Columbus, Ohio: (614) 469-5186
• Marietta, Ohio: (740) 373-2317
• Toledo, Ohio: (419) 259-7536

This is an election year for DeWine. He is running for reelection against blogging Congressman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). If you think privacy and freedom should be a campaign issue, Skype Brown's campaign office at 440-282-3314 or his congressional offices: Lorain County (440) 245-5350, (440) 365-5877; Summit County (330) 865-8450; and his Washington Office (202) 225-3401.

Does making phone numbers clickable (click once to call) make you more likely to call, just for the convenience?

Skype on your razr?
incompatible today.
SoonR might do it.

Net neutrality
astroturfed, lobbied and shelved
telcos win again

fcc taxes Vonage
maybe SkypeOut too
Save the Internet!

pick friends well, Yahoo!
AT&T messenger
now with NSA

Supernova word:
people Curate their passions
a new meme rises

Calls in US free
June promo: call the world free.
Skype teases America

Censor carefully:
Global Online Freedom Act.
Do you read Chinese?

Packard-Bell laptop
push keyboard to call
or answer the phone

Phishing in Skypeland
Suckers waiting to be fleeced
Study the handbook

Technorati Tags: politics, activism, netneutrality, askaninja, ninja, rights, ebay,