When three or more people are in conversation, that's conferencing. Across all media: text, chat, video, voice, screen sharing. Across all gear: PCs, mobile phones, speakerphones, webcams. From your best friends to a full auditorium. Many voices in one conversation.

First, download Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows.

1. Open the Skype main window. If it's closed, you can double-click on the Skype icon in the system tray.

2. Pick the command: Tools | Start Public Chat

This launches the Public Chat Wizard

3. Describe your chat.

Create a chat topic. This will show up at the top of the chat and in any web html you post on a blog.

Optional: pick a picture for the chat. This will also show up at the top of your chat dialog.

Think of both of these as semi-public information.

Press the Next button in the bottom right corner of the wizard.

4. Set your moderation rules.

You have three host control options.

The default is an open forum: "Anyone can post messages".

A little more restrictive is "Participants need permission to start posting." While the public can lurk about and watch the conversation, if they want to join in they must get permission first. This is great for panel sessions with guest speakers, or if you are holding forth before taking questions.

Control freak is the third option: publicly listed but private. "Participants need permission to start reading and posting."

If you have directions you want people to always see in the chat window, you can write "Community Guidelines." My generic one is "Be kind to each other and stay on topic" but suggestions are always welcome.  

Click Next to continue.

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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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I was being interviewed for a podcast last night. As always, the purpose of the "stupid network" is to enable crazy new things, not connectivity arbitrage. The setup was that I'm in my hotel room using the woefully over-contended in-room Internet access. The caller could only record calls made using his landline phone, so he called me on my SkypeIn number.

The audio experience was OK, but about that of a typical cellular call. Not ideal for a podcast.

This does, however, provide great fodder for a "Voice 2.0"-ish story. Normally, VoIP uses the UDP protocol for media transmission. If the packet doesn't get there within 300ms, or whatever, forget it. No point in asking for reliability and re-transmission of lost data. The TCP protocol is used for signalling and other purposes where a reliable, in-sequence connection is required.

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Skype did a great job packaging Skype into the new Mylo. And I'm desparate for a device like this that lets me carry Skype around. But Sony's Mylo doesn't deserve this moment of love. Like the T-Mobile Sidekick, Mylo:

• is a closed device and platform when we need open platforms;
• only has Wi-Fi when we need the ubiquity of wireless edge networks; and
• lacks authoring tools when everyone creates, mashes up, and publishes photos, sound, and video.

Definitely not for the MySpace generation, despite the great job at embedding Skype, Yahoo! and Google IM clients.

Save Mylo, Sony.

1. Add a good still and video camera. We're sharing our work and our lives. I want this to replace my mobile camera phone, but you are betting it won't, at least for now. Please try! 
2. Add audio, video and photo recording software. Surely Adobe is ready to come out with pocket versions of ImageReady, Audition and Premiere.
3. Add authoring (or at least uploading) tools for blogs, vlogs and podcasts. A browser can only do so much, even with Web 2.0 goodies.
4. Publish developer tools and seed an open ecosystem. I want to code rich clients (feedreader, please) to run on Mylo, especially apps that work offline.
5. Open the device to third-party apps, without prior Sony approval. So I can buy Mylo editions of Quicken, Flight Simulator, QQ, and embedded Firefox (with extensions). It's much easier to be closed, but a Sony bizdev tax is a barrier to user adoption.
6. Add AIM. Still being used by millions, even adults.
7. Let me use Skype without a plug-in earbud (built in noise-cancelling microphone). Just one thing to carry, please.
8. Support the U3 flashdrive standard for better desktop integration.
9. Bundle more memory. 1 GB is too small to do the job needed, and an insult at this price point.
10. Support IMAP and POP3 email servers. How can Sony segment work from life when work and life are blended for most people?
11. Talk through GSM and EDGE data networks. Wi-Fi-only is premature in most places for most people.
12. Add bluetooth. The better to play with desktops, cameras, and mobile phone.
13. Lose the big orange and blue lights (or at least make them optional). Nobody around me needs to know when I'm using Mylo or I'm online.
14. Add batteries. So you can do all that and sustain the long battery life you offer now.

Mylo represents a great stab in the right direction. Product managers trade off time, features, cost, quality, risk and prices. Here's hoping Mylo continues to evolve and expand into a development platform to rival the Playstation, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS, and Symbian.

P.S. Good luck to the musician Mylo, who's had no Google juice competition until now.

Since its introduction at the final Fall Comdex in 2003, I have been following the SightSpeed video communications service as it has evolved into one of the more highly respected personal video calling services. Today they are releasing a new version 5.0; last week I spent an hour talking with Peter Csathey, CEO of SightSpeed, about SightSpeed, its direction and their forthcoming new version.

Peter, who has been CEO since last December, has SightSpeed focused on offering "best-in-class" personal video services. These services are envisioned to come in the form of

• Communications: private, secure video and voice calling communications;
• Community/Content with the introduction of a public directory, video blogging and other user generated content and SightSpeedTV
• Commerce: video-enabled e-commerce,  video mail marketing; "click-to-call" video sales and support.

Previous versions of SightSpeed, a cross-platform service running on both Macs and Windows PC's, have included video calling (with up to four in a conference), video mail messaging, video blogging support, chat and, recently, a beta outbound PSTN service. SightSpeed operates using direct (node-free) peer-to-peer connectivity for 1:1 video and audio calls. Multi-party video conferencing with its additional processing demands passes through a server.

SightSpeed 5.0 fleshes out what Peter calls "a complete personal video services suite", offering several new capabilities;

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Skype for Outlook Toolbar has become one of my key tools in day-to-day communications. In fact, I am at the point where I seldom actually "dial" a phone number; just look it up in Outlook Contacts, click on the Toolbar and click on the relevant "phone" number to launch a Skype or SkypeOut call..In his post on GizmoProject's All Calls Free offering, Alec Saunders says: "At iotum, Steve Lecomte and Julien Raynal, who spend lots of time on the phone, are using Skype for business calls.  Integrated with the Outlook Toolbar, it's a natural, since most of our calls are North American."

Peter Kalmström, Skype's Toolbar Program Manager, has written an informative post on how to launch conference calls across both Skype and SkypeOut using the Skype for Outlook Toolbar in any of three scenarios:

1. Select any meeting - you will see a conference button on it

2. From an email - starting an ad-hoc conference call with all the cc:s etc of an email

3. By selecting more than one Outlook contact in your contacts folder

Also works with the Toolbars for Outlook Express and Thunderbird.

The best part about using Skype for conference calling is not receiving a $200 bill from a legacy telco for a five person one hour conference call as recently as four or five years ago! The biggest challenge for Skype is getting a significant base of their users to realize they can easily do multi-party conference calling at little or no cost.

Note that there are Hotfix releases of each Toolbar put out this past week to fix some minor issues.

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Skypers should be very interested in event syndication, the technology behind sharing event information over the Internet.Yahoo! Upcoming and Google Calendar are Skype rivals' strong tools. I use the venture-funded Eventful every week (great API). I'd be using iCal If I was on a Mac. How might this fit into Skypeland?

• Event discovery. How can I find Skypecasts I want to join, meetings to attend/avoid, conferences to cover, parties to plan? How do I help others find them? All these services make it fast and easy to post an event to yourself, your  friends or the public. Some of them, like Google, make it simple to publish the data on your blog or another web site, or to subscribe to an event feed in your browser or feedreader.
• Calendaring. These data formats let me add found events to my personal calendars. They also make it simple to invite others (part of what makes event data sharing such a social medium).
• Alerting. Skype is mostly about real-time talk. I love it when an alarm rings telling me it's three minutes until my next call. Alerts and reminders help me change my own behavior, help me manage my time and keep my commitments.

What might eBay and Skype do in the next 90 days?

1. Publish open Skypecasts.
2. Publish eBay Auctions in iCalendar and related formats.
3. Publish eBay investor events (analyst days, conference calls, etc.)
4. Publish Skype business events. You have lots to share, like gift days, conferences where Skype participates, job fairs, focus groups, etc.
5. Support consuming calendar feeds in a Skype account. For instance, let me subscribe to the list of Spanish language casts using the word "futbol". And let me get my Outlook and Yahoo! events (including scheduled phone calls) too. Subscribing to the public calendars of my family, friends, customers, and work colleagues reinforces Skype as an instrument for managing my relationships.
6. Show my updated event feeds in a Skype tab. Right in the client.
7. Alert me to upcoming events. Trigger phone calls, conference calls, tuning in to auctions, joining multichats. Prod me to wind up my active call so I can be on time for the next one.
8. Publish my call/chat history as a calendar feed. So I can see whom I talked with, when and for how long right in the same Google/Yahoo!/Outlook calendar I use to manage my time. With access controls, of course.

Just playing around with here's a calendar of public Skype events, as I know them. You can click on the big button to add it to your own Google calendar. So far I've added the published SkypeOut Gift Days for July and the three U.S. Skype research days. Google makes available three links for subscribing or viewing a public calendar: , , and . I'll show a calendar below.

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Last Wednesday Skype released five new toolbars - two are entirely new while three are significant upgrades of previous versions. They incorporate several features reported in my interview with Peter Kalmstrom at the Skype Developers Conference. This brings to six the number of Toolbars released in June; when you you look at the feature list you can see the impact of Peter's having a much larger developer team as a result of the eBay acquisition.

At this time I will point you to them; as I am on vacation, reviews will be forthcoming during July:

• Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer , version 2.1.0.10
• Skype Toolbar for Firebox, version 2.1.0.11
• Change Log for Web Toolbars
• New: Skype Office Toolbar, version 1.0.0.22; this toolbar was released just prior to the Skype Developer Conference.
• Skype Email Toolbars
  • for Outlook, version 1.0.0.43
  • New: for Outlook Express, version 1.0.0.43
  • New: for Thunderbird, version 1.0.0.38
  • Change Log for Email Toolbars

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Last week Microsoft cranked up the hype machine and had lots of people wondering if their announcement today would be something approaching earth shaking.  In the end it turned out to be about the consolidation of several communications related servers, such as Exchange and Live Communications Server, onto on Office Communications Server, available in Q2 2007. It was announced today so that IT and communications managers can start to plan architectures, hardware requirements and budgets for its implementation shortly after availability. Fundamentally it is a server product with clients that could potentially replace PBX's. But at what cost in revamping resources, redefining business processes and defocusing an enterprise's primary business strategy.

Two good posts I have come across:

Alec Saunders has an indepth perspective as both a former Microsoft product manager and a potential competitor to iotum's Relevance Engine. But, as Alec says:

When the announcement came, it was a damp squib. Microsoft will rename Exchange as Communications Server, and add telephony features to Communicator, and other products. It's an integration announcement, as opposed to a dramatic new direction -- a reprise of the 1993 announcement that created Microsoft Office out of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Interestingly, this tactic may backfire for them this time around. Today there's much more focus on open standards. The idea that you must buy all of your infrastructure from a single vendor just isn't palatable for many companies today. Certainly, that is the view expressed by TMC's Tom Keating in his coverage of today's announcements.

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The xing conference phone features four-way surround sound microphones. It is compatible with either a PC or Mac picking up voice from 5 meter (15 foot) radius. So you can walk around the room, work with a white board or a PowerPoint. In comfort; unconstrained.

Price point is $149.99 with an IPEVO online special at $129.99.

It comes bundled with with Convenos Meeting Center and a free 14-day trial offer of this web-based conferencing and collaboration software. Ships next week.

I will be testing this product in our labs, so check back in a few days to find out how fast it goes. I suspect it will match the usual supurb quality of the other IPEVO products. I see that it uses 16 KHz audio sampling so it will match Skype byte for byte on sound quality.

Yesterday I received an email from SightSpeed announcing

On May 24, 2006, SightSpeed will release the next version of our award-winning video calling service. This new release will include significant new beta features, including SightSpeed Phone Out, which you can use to make great quality, low-cost telephone calls from your PC or Mac.

Key Points:

• SightSpeed expands its voice capability from pure 'VoIP to VoIP" to "VoIP to PSTN" (Phone Out launched yesterday) and "PSTN to VoIP" (PhoneIn to be introduced soon).
• Rates for calls within North America are 2 cents per minute; rates to Europe start at 2 cents per minute but vary by country and modality (land line or mobile)
• Ability to make voice only calls (no video required)
• Improved video via a beta codec
• Enhanced Contact List Display options

I have followed SightSpeed since it was first introduced as a high quality video service at Fall Comdex 2003. From the initial press release:

SightSpeed Web matches the speed of the telephone, delivering audio/visual synchronicity at 30 frames per second through patented, human perception-based technology that is based on more than seven years of research at Cornell University.

SightSpeed has always been recognized for its video quality. It has also always had a VoIP capability for those who had headsets to use it as audio accompaniment to the video. Their "SightSpeed Pro" service offers additional features such as multi-party  voice and video conferencing for up to 4 participants. Unfortunately not many of my acquaintances were enamored enough to make it a viable communications service I could routinely use. And I did not find a real need to use their Video Messenger service; but that may just be me.

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by Stephen Klosky, Director, Federal Systems Engineering, Dataline, Inc.

I often demonstrate Skype and its capabilities to business associates. Crowding around a monitor is sometimes awkward. At my desk, I have a laptop, a docking station, and a second monitor which works well for me and one or two guests. For larger groups, I needed a better setup, so I decided to "Skypify" the nearby conference room.

Before

The typical setup in conference room before the upgrade was to take a portable LCD projector and connect it to any of the laptops in the office. The projector pointed at a whiteboard or a blank wall. This setup was functional, but had some drawbacks. Cords ran across walkways, image quality took some time to tune and setup correctly, there was no audio support, and there was no pc based VTC support.

I did have some gear available for the project. The IT department had purchased a Polycom ViewStation H.323 station with a TV for a monitor. This setup was on an A/V cart. This was attractive because the remote controllable camera could be used for the video part of Skype. Also, the mic pod could be used for the Skype microphone.

There were several network drops - 100baseT Ethernet ports available in the room. Additionally, there was a spare Windows XP Professional workstation available as well.

Shopping on a $510 budget

So, there were definitely some areas for improvement. My plan was to add a stereo for sound reinforcement, a USB video capture device for the video support, a ceiling mount kit for the projector, a wireless keyboard and mouse setup, a ceiling mount kit for the stereo speakers, a manual pull down screen for the projector, cables, mounting hardware and power strips.

I was on a non-existent / small budget, so, after a brief eBay session, I found the items I needed. Fortunately for me, I work for an office with quick approval processing and was able to get the upgrade approved in about an hour or so. After getting the approval, I went back to eBay and ordered up the gear. Here is a spreadsheet I used to track the gear.

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The VoIPVoice CyberSpeaker-W meets all the criteria for a positive user experience outlined in my recent post questioning the comprehensiveness of Skype's Certification program:

• installs easly without interfering with any of my current PC programs and hardware
• is fully interactive with the traditional Skype client
• allows me to use my Windows Media Player and SlingBox unhindered while carrying on a Skype conversation
• has both the usual telephone dialpad interface on the handset but also has an independent set of handset buttons for Skype operations
• can operate in either conventional (private) telephone or speakerphone mode
• has a voice command feature to request Skype calls by the Contact's Full Name
• calls SkypeOut phone numbers by simply dialing "00-CountryCode-phone_number"
• easily handles Skype voice mail messages

The VoIPVoice Cyberspeaker-W - a Skype Certified hardware device -- combines a Skype handset with a speaker phone to give a comprehensive "personal" Skype phone suitable for the individual office desktop. At the moment the VoIPVoice CyberSpeaker-W sets the bar for Skype Certification of speakerphone and Skype phone products that deliver a positive user experience. A more detailed evaluation report will appear in the next few days.

In his recently published list of features desired for a small business Skype bundle Martin Geddes included "A cool USB conference call speaker phone to stick in your laptop bag" I received for evaluation the recently released US Robotics 9610 USB Internet Speaker Phone on Friday.

Opening the package to see the physical device brought back images of many meetings I have attended with conference table speakerphones by Polycom [Editor: see the Skype Journal overview of the new Polycom Communicator] and other vendors, designed to allow all meeting attendees around a table to fully and interactively participate in a conference call with outside parties. But the first generation of these devices often generated a "talking in a barrel" effect such that it was difficult for the outside parties to hear the table-talk; technology that was not totally transparent to the business at hand.

In evaluating this device I looked at both ease of setup, quality of the conversation and overall feature set.. For the first I simply had to plug the Speakerphone into a USB port on my laptop. No power adapter required! The installation CD includes a copy of Skype but, if not already installed, I would download and install the latest version. There are no software drivers required. You can verify the installation by going to Skype's Tools | Options menu and selecting Sound Devices. The C-Media USB Headphone selection should be available for all three settings.

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The Skypecast service, announced today, is a fun and useful app. A quick and dirty internal project, about a month old, it lets you log in to a Skype site and create a public voice auditorium for up to 100 people. If you catch this in time, we'll be hosting Skype Journal forum - Today's Skype Announcements - Good, Bad, Great, or Useless? today at midnight Eastern, 9:00pm Pacific, GMT

I love it and will be using it.

But Skype didn't give the people in its third-party Skype developer programme or their online partner programme the tools to build it themselves. Skype staff built the plumbing, then built the app, but kept the plumbing closed to the public.

Skype must carefully and quickly build out their application infrastructure. Their focus must be on seducing entrepreneurial engineers, enterprise IT technologists, and phreaks around the world to a rapidly evolving and increasingly capable Skype platform.

Investors must care. In the coming battles for control over technical standards, over market share, and over conversational commerce, Skype will need friends. In particular, Skype will need a strong, confident, committed ecology of businesses building on Skype as a platform. Skype's bizdev seems up to the task, but Skype's API remains an afterthought.

Who is the product champion at Skype for the API? Which senior executive is driving the client and service APIs forward? Who is committing developer headcount to architecting and constructing server APIs and server agents?

Skype's independent developers want to know. Now. Some certified partners have told me they are limiting their investment in the Skype platform for just this reason, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other platforms to be the beneficiaries.

There are many bases for competitive success. This one is key.