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.

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?

Skype 3.0 Dev Notes including one element I advocated and requested many times over. Call Transfer is finally here in the Skype 3.0 API. That's a big deal and will grow Skype's appeal with developers who now have all sorts of call routing options. At a meeting in Estonia just over a year ago (that happened as the eBay sale was going through) a group long term adovacates put the case for it. I'm very pleased to see it has finally happened. I'll have some other comments on Skype 3.0 although I want to share them in a broader competitive context. My buddies at Skype Journal are writing plenty on the new public chat feature. See Phil and Jim.

See Alec's comment. Skype Dev Zone (lots re extras), Antoine's Dev blog:

Skype 3.0 introduces the long-awaited interface to enable call transfer. Call transfer is being phased in over two releases, and won't be exposed to users until the 3.5 release. The reason for this phased release is to ensure substantial penetration of Skype 3.0 among users, because call transfer requires that all parties are running Skype 3.0 or higher. Our goal is to enable you to start building and testing great new apps now which will be ready to blow peoples' minds away when we release 3.5 next year. No more playing catch up with the client!

Don't miss this TechCrunch post. Important to understanding the changing competitive landscape. TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Skype 3.0 (beta) starts the communication platform wars [with the release of Skype4Java,  Skype4COM, and XPCOM wrappers].

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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The new Skype API command "SET SILENT_MODE {ON |OFF}" is only a baby step toward the idea of a "headless" or "naked" client. Silent mode tells Skype to turn off its user display and alerts. They are still there, just not seen, a programmatic parlor trick. A high tech version of Peek-a-boo! I see you! with the same old software.

This is progress, of course. All the app's user messaging is now under the control of fewer pieces of logic, a simplified design you need before allowing alternate user experiences.

Since the UI is only hidden instead of omitted, the operating system must have all the parts to run a full windowing interface. Linux servers, for example, often dispense with a display or presentation system to save computer resources and avoid bugs. Asterisk experts, for example, write that display overhead is contraindicated for Asterisk installations on Linux. So "silence" doesn't help service-oriented developers much.

Also missing: Skype hasn't brought all the client's UI functionality into the API. So there are still things you can only do in the UI. Nor does the client support multiple user accounts simultaneously. So servers need to make and run a separate copy of Skype for each user. And a web interface to admin the Skype service. All things you need for a server-friendly, scalable, extensible developer platform.

Skype has a long way to go if they want to offer a GUI-free server client or create an ultra-light client like Adobe or publish a naked API library like LibJingle. Those would open up new levels of integration and interoperability, new markets, new industries. Peek-a-boo is a game for babies or adults. I voted for the full featured adult version.

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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Just got home from the opening day of Yahoo!'s first open Hack Day. I thought it might be useful to contrast it with eBay's DevCon.

tags: skype, skypejournal, yahoo, hackday06, hackday, hack or die, yahoohackday06, ebaydevcon, ebay inc

How do you voice enable the whole web? With Adobe Flash. My host walks me into his tiny war room at Adobe North. The tables strewn with copies of VON magazine, and Sinnreich's Internet Communications Using SIP. The white board has an architectural map on the left, laying out the technologies he'll need to build, buy or partner, and revenue models for each. On the right he's listing interconnect standards for call termination.

The goal is audacious. Outside of Microsoft, however, Adobe may be the only place on the planet with a hope of making VoIP ubiquitous. My host, an Adobe entrepreneur in residence, is building a startup to "just add voice." And video. And conferencing. You know, voice 2.0.

He assumes Adobe makes platforms for developers, not end products. So he's looking at companies like Skype and Yahoo! as potential customers, not rivals. He wants to help them build applications without worrying about the telecom plumbing.

• The MySpaces of the world should be able to call their own directory services from Flash but let Flash make the connection.

• The Salesforce.coms should be able to design a video customer service widget without worrying about the cameras or the codecs.

• Amazons could create live chat rooms for clusters of related books without invading customer privacy or setting up data centers.

These businesses add value with their social networks, their workflows, and rapport with their communities. They don't want to be in the "Skype" business, just their own. Among other things, this means Adobe doesn't need to convince every user on Earth to get an Adobe ID; people will use existing namespaces.

Adobe builds on others' value by creating baseline, ubiquitous infrastructure. Making commodity features from expensive, risky, perishable, complex systems. It's a platforming strategy. If Adobe's growing voice team (open Senior Product Manager and Computer Scientist - VoIP) can make coding for calls simple and elegant, a million flash designers and developers will add it to their toolkits. Contrast that with the hundreds actively developing for the Skype API.

Adobe is already active in the telecom industry. They license flash to mobile phone manufacturers, promoting the Flash developer channel's flash apps to carriers. Some of the most compelling mobile experiences are courtesy of Flash designers. About 70 million devices have Flash embedded.

Flash is also important to the advertising industry. 77% of banner ads are in Flash, says Adobe. If you think click-to-call advertising has a future, wait until you have click-to-talk-with-a-satisfied-customer or click-to-join-the-concert-in-progress.

If the Masked Entrepreneur can make it work and sell it to his internal stakeholders, it will be part of the next major release of Flash in 18 months or so. Adobe says the "Flash player is installed on nearly 98% of Internet-connected desktops."

That's a short window for Skype and Microsoft to respond. Skype product management has pretty much deprioritized developer requests since Summer 2005 to plug into the Skype cloud via a "Naked Skype", "headless Skype" or "Skypenet." Skype could be offering web services and server software that cleanly plugs other systems into the Skype cloud. They aren't working on it according to several sources within Skype's development team. Will Adobe's signaling wake up Skype to the industry power of being not just a social network but the leading infrastructure provider? Skype management didn't return calls by post time.

Since its inception the secret sauce that results in the excellent voice quality of Skype-to-Skype calls and facilitates quality in Skype-to/from_SkypeIn/Out calls has been the Voice Engine for PC and Voice Engine for (Windows) Mobile licensed by Skype from Global  IP Sound (often referred to as "GIPS"). Monday came the announcement that Skype has licensed a second player for voice engine software in embedded, PC-free consumer devices, namely, Trinity Convergence. Trinity's VeriCall Edge^TM software  brings their many years of silicon-device independent software development into the Skype stand-alone PC-free device space.

The agreement benefits hardware manufacturers by providing a software bundle that allows them to efficiently and cost-effectively design Internet calling and the Skype user experience into devices such as wired phones, WiFi phones and multi-function personal communication devices. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) will leverage the software bundle to shorten product development cycles and accelerate their time-to-market.

The first device to employ Trinity Convergence's software will be the forthcoming Sony Mylo which should be available later this month. Additional devices under development include a Skype phone from Universal Scientific Industrial, a Taipei-based ODM (prototype in the photo) and a currently anonymous dual mode WiFi-GSM phone.

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Skype DevZone's Triona Carey wrote about the Tallinn Beta Tester Days just completed (we're eager for Bill Campbell's comprehensive report). She lists the topics ("roadmaps, the forthcoming plug-in framework, Skype for Business, components, and the Skype4Java API.") without actually transferring that knowledge.

And then she does something smart and nice (which is not unusal for Triona). She writes:

International gatherings cost time and money - for attendants and for Skype. None of us can afford to have as many of them as we'd like. We are working on other ways to enrich communication in our community - newsletter coming soon, Skypecasts, conference calls, wiki.

If you can suggest useful ways to enrich networking in our community, please let us know.

Hi, Triona. I wish I'd been there.

You're on the right track. I'd urge the Skype team to look to the needs of the people outside the room. For every attendee, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, who would be there if they could. Four stages for addressing this:

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This is the second post in a series reviewing wireless devices in the emerging Personal Handheld Assistant space; the ultimate aim is to identify roles that Skype can play in this market of converged functionality devices. This is a special post in the series that was triggered by a VON Fall 2006 session. Links to other posts in this series are available at the end of this post.

Monday afternoon I attended the first Fall VON plenary session: IM: The State of Presence featuring a panel of executives and managers from the GYMAS-five representing over 90% of the IM usage worldwide. Carl Ford ran his usual vibrant Q&A format, offering each member of the panel an opportunity to provide commentary on several topics surrounding IM and where it is going. It was a very informative and stimulating discussion overall.

One major direction for IM is the extension of IM's access and reach by its incorporation into wireless devices. We heard about many of the issues that challenge the ability to provide seamless wireless IM clients, including login barriers, coverage and the relatively high cost of data services.

But the session confirmed a belief I had started to hold about a month ago during my evaluation of several wireless platforms. In particular, my evaluation of one Skype WiFi phone demonstrated to me the futility of providing such a device:

• The battery life was about eight to twelve hours in standby mode
• It could not handle DTMF tones
• The basic clock would arbitrarily drop a couple of hours
• It provides the presence functionality of Skype's IM client but no text chat capability
• Skype was the only application that runs on the device
• While the Skype client provides Skype names and the Contacts' other phone numbers (if available via the Contact's registration), there is no address, email or other information such as provided by synchronization with Outlook.
• They would only work in open access WiFi zones; they would not work in WiFi hotspots requiring a browser-based logon.
• They were purely engineering toys that demonstrated one could make the concept work but they badly needed an experienced wireless phone product manager to get the feature set right.
• In a market of multi-function devices in a similar price range, a Skype-dedicated device could not be price justified.

I came away with the feeling that, while they perform more or less as advertised, Skype WiFi phones are nothing more than a prototype engineering demonstration of Skype on a wireless platform.  Certainly they would have a very limited market -- maybe in enterprises that wanted to provide "walled garden" communications amongst geographically disbursed nomadic employees. But they certainly are not a wireless phone that will gain broad consumer acceptance and market share of any significance.

Combining this experience with my experience with Nokia N-series phones, the Blackberry and Skype for Mobile on the Dell Axim I have to recommend that Skype drop the concept of a dedicated Skype WiFi phone and focus their efforts on getting Skype incorporated into those other wireless platforms. (It is for this reason that I did not bother to mention which brand of Skype WiFi phone I evaluated; it's the entire product concept that is a problem.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Skylook 2.0 for Skype and Outlook is coming next month, beefs up sophisticated alerting and remote controls. The coolest thing is it uses Skype to bring live activity in Outlook to your mobile phone when you're away from your desktop. If you live in Outlook, take a look at their preview page for screenshots and a 10% discount coupon.

15 Apps for Recording Skype Conversations. I think this is the most complete list at the moment. Good job, Andy Boyd. 10 for Windows, 5 for Mac. I'd add YapperNut's Amy recorder for Windows, free download, and bundled with the YapperMouse mouse+phone for Skype. Any recorders for Linux or Skype mobile? For Skype video calls?

Transcribe your Skype conversations. Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 for Windows is out, $99 upgrade. This should be built-in functionality for enterprise versions of Skype. One of the ways you add value is convert Skype calls to text, and post them to team blogs as meeting minutes.

Skype for Windows Beta Preview updated today. The latest version 2.6.0.74, a hefty 12 Mb, takes care of a few rare but nasty bugs and adds a Google toolbar for Internet Explor