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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Just over a week ago Phil reported that Jordan's telecom regulator had ordered that Skype be blocked. It was a short-lived blockade; the decision has been reversed. According to a report from Middle East North Africa Financial News:

Director of the commission's regulatory department, Al Ansari Al Mashaqbah, confirmed yesterday that the recent decision to block Skype had been reversed.

The official told The Jordan Times that the security issues, cited as the reason for the block, had been resolved.

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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!

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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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While well-known as Canada's capital and, for hockey fans, as home of the NHL's Ottawa Senators, the Ottawa region has transformed itself over the past quarter century into Canada's high tech capital (dare I say Silicon Valley North?). Ottawa is headquarters for Mitel, Corel, and Versatel Networks (amongst others), hosts significant facilities for Nortel, JDS Uniphase (the JDS part), Alcatel (formerly Newbridge Networks) and a major Dell support center, and is a breeding ground for many high tech startups, especially in the telecommunications sector. Under the sponsorship of OCRI,  Ottawa is the site of a new conference - Voice 2.0: beyond telecom - a week from Monday (October 16).

"There is a great need for a venue where practitioners at the forefront of building next-generation communications networks and applications can get a broad perspective on the changes in telecom," said Ross MacLeod, Voice 2.0's conference host. "Voice 2.0 will provide an environment where attendees can share experiences that will speed the adoption of leading technologies and practices in the sector."

As one primer check out Alec Saunders post: Voice 2.0 A Year Later.

Skype Journal will be there and reporting on the activities. Check out the agenda. If you are interested in attending you can register via their website. (Hint: check out Terry Matthews' Brookstreet Hotel. They serve a great Sunday brunch if you arrive a day early and want to work in some pre-conference golf.)

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After a lunch today at the Metreon entertainment complex's food court in San Francisco, Phil and I walked into the Sony store and found the new Mylo available for purchase. Yesterday was the launch day.

While we did not have an environment for any full testing (and the WiFi access was a bit flaky) three comments:

• Phil was able to call his mobile phone from the Mylo's Skype client
• I was able to access my Skype account from the Mylo's web service
• My first impression -- this may be for Sony in this decade what the Walkman was for them in the 1980's. Web access, photos, videos, WiFi connectivity, media player -- they were all there in a device smaller than the original Walkman.

An evaluation unit is en route; we will provide a more complete report once we have had a chance to work with it for a couple of weeks.

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Seems that the discussion of the merits of email and (Skype) Chat are warming up again:

• Andy highlights the delays in knowing who is really online in Skype; he also mentions he has been receiving some chat spam.
• Jaanus admits that, despite claiming Skype chat to have many advantages over email fifteen months, ago he is still a heavy user of email.
• Rachel needs Skype presence to work in real time to effectively operate her MusicIP activities. She did at least get a personal response from Skype Customer Support.

Today at 2:46 a.m. I received an email from Andy; being an occasional nighthawk I responded to it immediately as I thought he wanted me to do an interview with one of his clients later in the day.  Andy comes back (at 3:13 a.m.) with: "I just received this reply to a message from September 6th !!!!".  I looked again at the original and sure enough, the email was originally sent Sept. 6 as stated within the message. My network tells me I am not the only one to receive e-mails from Andy today (Sept. 20) that were sent Sept. 6.  I guess it's Andy's snail-based communications system working its way across North America. (SMTP: Snail Message Transport Protocol?)

Anyway, it's a great example for putting some perspective on the two nines (99%) reliability of the Internet. At least I seem to get most of my Skype chat messages within a few hours (minutes?) of their being sent.

May the debate continue!

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Our friend U. Yogu, a Ph.D. chemistry student at National Taipei University of Technology, attended a concert there today. Skype partner PCHome sponsored the event, had a booth and gave out prizes, like a Skype ball with a headset inside. More photos from the event.

I'm having a chat this evening with a client in Califormia. We'll be using Skype. His job is at a Big Company, but it works OK for him behind the corporate firewall. When we last talked the audio quality wasn't great, so I suspect he's tunnelling out via HTTP or HTTPS via some supernode somewhere. These protocols aren't designed to carry real-time audio, and it shows.

This brings into question whether his internal telco manager is adding or subtracting value. I've had terrible experiences inside big companies using their telephony systems, because nothing integrates with my life. As an IT consultant in times past, I'd have an office landline number I had to put on my business card. I could set up the voicemail system to call me whenever I got a voicemail. Inevitibly, I then ended up with voicemails on my mobile telling me I had voicemails on my desk phone. (No, I couldn't simply forward inbound calls -- not an enabled feature, I guess to avoid paying outbound landline-to-cellular rates.) Then you turn up at a client site, and you can't even connect to their LAN. They're paying a fortune to have you there wasting your time doing dial-up via the fax line to access the information you need. It's as if it it's 1950 and everyone sits at one desk for their whole career.

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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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A few days ago Alec Saunders, Mark Evans, Jon Arnold and a blushing Andy Abramson all drew attention to a "ranking" of VoIP blogs put out by Garrett Smith of SmithOnVoip. Even Garrett himself admits his poll is somewhat arbitrary; he did outline his criteria and they have been repeated (and praised) in some of the linked posts. Skype Journal came out well at a number 6 ranking in Garrett's Top 10 list. Very encouraging and rewarding to find we are that far up.

Luca Filigheddu, an Italian blogger on VoIP topics, reviewed Garrett's poll and then determined his own ranking based on Technorati rankings. Whereas Garrett's "Smith Blog Rating System" rankings are "agreeably" subjective, Luca's Technorati rankings are based on linkage statistics. Luca's rankings switch Andy and Om for top spot but they always (deservedly) want bragging rights (!) and we always like to see a little competition at the top. Six of the Technorati Top 10 appear also in Smith's Top 10. Eight out of thirty in each poll only appear in the one poll. Interesting, but purely coincidental that Skype Journal is the only Top 10 to have consistency of ranking in each system at sixth place..

Bottom line for me is that I have added a few more VoIP blogs to my personal blog reader and get a wider diversity of news and opinion for linkage in Skype Journal posts. And thanks to all who give us link love at Skype Journal.

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About a month ago a visiting friend told us that she was traveling to Mexico City the following weekend for her son's wedding. Her son lives in Minneapolis where he is involved in sales and servicing of mining equipment with lots of travel to southeast Asia and Australia; the bride was studying medicine in Houston. His mother started explaining to us how this was a match facilitated by Skype. So I followed up with Eric earlier this week now that they have settled into a new home in Minneapolis.

Eric learned about Skype a year ago May from a customer in Malaysia and started using it to communicate with this customer. He soon realized that Skype could replace his need for any calling card and now uses Skype routinely both from his home office from hotels, airports and customer sites while traveling.  In fact, he often uses Skype video for his presentations to make them more contextual. Within his sales presentations he talks about how his employer uses Skype, often including its free video conferencing, as one resource for providing customer service to customers who are half way around the world from the head office.. On one trip while making a sales visit in Orange, NSW, Australia his hotel did not have Internet so he did some "war driving" to locate another hotel with a free Internet signal to make his Skype calls.

However, Eric's more interesting story is about how he started to use Skype to facilitate his relationship with Lore shortly after they met a year ago this summer:

Skype definitely helped us to revolutionize our long distance relationship. We would have dates on Skype where we would do things together. For example, we would go out and buy the exact same sushi dinner and eat it together. We both enjoyed the same kind of sushi at the same time, but in different places. I even organized a Skype date for the day that I went down to Houston to propose to Lore. That way I knew she would be home! If we had to worry about long distance charges we definitely would not have talked as much over the past year.

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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.

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In a press release issued this morning, Google and eBay announced an agreement which comprises "two primary components involving text-based advertising and "click-to-call" advertising functionality";.In the course of the press release there are several implications for Skype; however, let me draw attention to where Skype already has incorporated Google searches, namely, as an option in the search icon of the Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Skype Toolbar for Firefox:

Other options in this Skype Toolbar's search element include Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, eBay and Shopping.com.

Lisa Leff at AP provides a good overview; combined with the press release we can see the following implications for Skype:

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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!

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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.

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