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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Post: Skylook 2 - Building Business Processes Around Skype

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Marcelo Rodriguez rounded up five products that connect Skype and SIP products in his post, Is a Skype-SIP Peace At Hand? 

• VoSky Exchange
• Skype2PBX
• Uplink
• ChanSkype 
• Pika Connect for Skype

We all want interop, and these products are gaining loyal followings. They build audio pipes between SIP and Skype voice callers. We've been calling these Level Three Skype integration in our Skype Journal Connectivity Maturity Model. 

Skype Journal Connectivity Maturity Model

Level 0. No connection.
What's VoIP? What's Skype?

Level 1. Skype indifferent.
Devices doing nothing but input or output like the most basic of USB phones. On the software side, the only software is Skype.

Level 2. Skype aware.
Configurations are Skype-aware or Skype-smart devices, like the Kensington Vo300, the YapperNut YapperBox.

Level 3. Skype conversant.
Level 2, plus audio pipes between apps, especially across the SIP barrier. You call with your SIP phone, something happens in between, and my Skype phone answers.

The move from Skype to SIP at Level 3 costs you all the benefits of rich conversation. You lose:

• Availability and geopresence
• Mood messages
• Caller authentication
• Access to caller profiles
• Launching text chat or video in the same call
• File transfer and folder sharing
• Voice messaging
• Access to Skype voicemail
• Skype multichat and conferencing
• Broadband audio quality 
• End-to-end encryption
• Chat/call permalinks 
  (e.g. skype:?chat&id=%23leedryburgh%2F%24evanwolf%3Bd5b446f89da627a3)

Level 4. Skype equivalent.
Level 3, plus restoring most of the missing elements. 

Does this model work for you? What's Level 5? What do you call it when the other system has capabilities beyond or different from Skype and you can't translate them?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by: Julian Bond.

Julian is CTO of Ecademy, an online network "connecting business people." He Skype-enabled the Ecademy website to facilitate communications amongst members. The following is a post he made on the Ecademy Skype Directory Club forum in a discussion of the "code cracking" news.

Here's some ways to think about this. The first point is to understand what interop means. There are 3 ways of linking IM/Audio/Video networks.

1. At the network level. Transparently route chat, voice and video by linking the networks. Skype can't do that because there is no central network. MSN, YM! and AIM have a big centrally controlled part of the system even though a lot of the communication is P2P so they can link, at the cost of running that big central system.
2. At the server level. This is what some Jabber servers do. Because all communications go partly through a server they can be switched. It's the same as 1) except that anyone can run a Jabber server.
3. At the client. GAIM, Trillian and others let you have one client that speaks multiple protocols. You need an official account with any system you want to talk to but it blurs the differences between them.

So if there's a library that can be built into client code that duplicates the Skype protocols, 3) can be built. And 2) can be built where it's appropriate (eg Asterisk PBX).

Then look at two conversations that are happening on the Skype forums already: (i) Building audio/video stream access into the Skype API and (ii) release of a Naked Skype which is a library that provides the API without having to have the Client.

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One of the key challenges for Skype market penetration will be providing the ability for consumers to make voice calls over Skype in a manner that is totally transparent and seamless to the average consumer. In a recent interview with Ron Sladon, President and CEO of Multi-Link, Inc. he explained how their Skype strategy has become an extension of Multi-Link's overall business mission: Providing cost saving telephony.

In executing on their mission, Multi-Link has several guidelines:

• Provide a seamless experience to the end user
• Maintain a <0.02% failure rate for their devices
• Support Skype as their platform for VoIP offerings

Multi-Link was founded in 1984 by several engineers who had developed devices that would recognize various DTMF tones to allow for line sharing across multiple functions such as voice, fax, alarm systems and, modems used for applications such as credit card/debit card transaction authorization. With over a million units installed, Multi-Link's most prevalent product is a line sharing device known as "The Stick":

The Stick® is a state-of-the art telephone line sharing device that screens and automatically routes all voice, fax, and modem calls to the right equipment every time - eliminating the need for costly dedicated phone lines.

Multi-Link also offers products designed for industrial applications including remote access power switches. For example, their IPS can be used for remote rebooting of computers via telephone, heartbeat software and/or web browser when a problem or interrupt occurs.

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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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Using Bubbleshare (well, you're all tired of Flickr, right? and it's a local product coming out of the Toronto area), I have finally organized my pics from the eBay/PayPal/Skype Developer's Conference two weeks ago.

Double click on any picture for a larger version and the slide show in a separate window. Enjoy!

This album is powered by BubbleShare

Aplogies for not taking full advantage of BubbleShare and putting words in people's mouths...;-)

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The official release of Skype verion 2.5 became available as of today; download it here. Change Log.

New features:

• Can stop Import Contact search at any time.
• Flag Emoticons: no graphic to click for flag but rather enter "(flag:cc)" where "cc" is the two character country code. You need to include the brackets.
• SMS API and a couple of other new API's
• Lots of bug fixes

Still no right click menu item for PayPal. And they still need to address the "+1" issue for setting up SMS logisitics. When we will have waving flag emoticons? to give them "emotion"?!

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I just spent twenty minutes interviewing Lenn Pryor, Director of Skype's Developer Platform Business Unit. Lenn joined Skype just over a year ago; that year has provided plenty of opportunity to not only to assess the potential but also to make the changes required to have a successful Developer Platform business.

Skype Journal: Lenn, what is your vision for the Developer Programs going forward?

Lenn: Let's start by going back a year or so. The Skype API's were launched just over 12 months ago; we spent the first year laying the foundation. We introduced several basic support services including the website developer zone, forums, a developer weblog, and support documentation all at the same time as building a developer community. It was a learning experience for both our team and our developer partners; we learned a lot about what is required to support hardware, software and services built around Skype. We identified two key needs:

• on the product side: better and more API's; we have made several announcements at this meeting
• and on the business side: raise awareness for the new applications offered by our developer partners. The Plugin Framework announced at the DevCon (available in Q4-06) will help to address this issue by:
  • building applications that have a tighter fit within the Skype User Interface
  • facilitate both awareness and buying logistics associated with monetizing the applications.

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The Session "Servers and Plug-Ins: The Future of the API", led by Mat Taylor, Skype's API Product Manager, provided the Skype API roadmap for the API's over the next six to nine months. (Click the link above for the slideshow.)

Mat started out by reviewing the current status and highlighting what he felt were the top enhancement requests, based on feedback from the Skype developer community. He then went on to release the schedule for release of various new features:

• June/July 06: New Extras Gallery, Skype 4 Java, Skypecasts API, SMS API, Skype 4 Web
• Q3, 2006: Voice Access
• Q4: 2006: Call Transfer API (Skype2Skype only); Personalisation API and Plugin Framework.
• Early 2007: Call Transfer API (Skype2 PSTN)

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The slideshows that accompany many of the presentations are available at the eBay DevC