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?  

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.

Last week, Skype changed the NorthAm VoIP landscape with free SkypeOut until year end. Skype downloads picked up right away.

This week Vonage speculators caught on about 24 hours too late. Vonage, its bankers and investors took in half a billion dollars. That'll buy them a mix of time, talent, features, and paying customers. We'll see how well they use it. 

StreamCast Networks' little litigation engine ups their lawsuit's ante by going for deep pockets, including eBay's, and naming Skype's founders in the expanded suit. Reading their complaint, they think they're facing the Sopranos. ♥ The ammended complaint (4.6MB, PDF) is full of juicy language like "fraud", "exclusive rights", "secretly siphoned-off", "conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act", "steal", "hatched a scheme", "theft", "secret disabling feature", "sweetheart deals", "hijack the 28 million Morpheus user base", "scheme", "scheme", "conspiracy to restrain trade", "pattern of racketeering", "mail and wire fraud", "are currently being aided and abetted in their efforts to fraudulently tranfer funds and properties by their families, accountants and attorneys". ♥ They say Skype's p2p technology is owned by StreamCast, and that Skype's founders cheated them out of the technology. They also say Skype lied to eBay about owning its technology free and clear, or that eBay (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). To make their case, they must pierce several corporate veils, show they had rights to the technology in the first place, prove the people and companies named messed with their rights. The parties span the globe, from Estonia to Vanuatu, but they may have enough to assert California jurisdiction. ♥ The kicker: StreamCast asked the court to shut down Skype. Right now. Protect your Skype SuperPowers! Should you tell StreamCast's management how you feel about it? Using your free or cheap SkypeOut minutes? Just by clicking on the phone numbers below? Maybe you'd say something like "Hands off my Skype, Mr. StreamCast!"? ♥ Do Skype's users have any legal standing in this?

• Michael Weiss, ceo, (818) 887-8610 x110
• Matt Neco, counsel, (818) 887-8610 x105
• Elizabeth Cowley, vp bizdev, (818) 887-8610 x108

The eBay/Yahoo deal seems healthy. Partner with a symbiote, not a parasite. Don't fuel Google's rising threat with ad dollars. ♥ It's an opportunity. Generalizing for a moment, eBay is great at making markets for goods. Yahoo! is better at making markets for intangibles, like jobs, movies, travel. Both create rich communities, but very different mechanics and cultures. As eBay uses Skype to embrace an intangibles strategy, Yahoo! could be a great partner. ♥ What happens should the Skype and Yahoo! Messenger teams swap spit? The best bits of both products could show up in the other. Might they resolve digital ID spaces and data models for users and conversations? Agree to strong interoperability for chat, voice and video? Standards for distributing in-client adverts? API co-development, blending the Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal and Skype developer communities? Together, they'd be an unbeatable team.

Skype updated Windows and Mac clients, bug fixes and repaired security problems, including a bug that exposed millions of SkypeOut call records to the NSA and other Internet snoops.

Dan Houghton, Skype's answer to Shelley Vision, started blogging about new Skypecasts.

The Skype ecology has been active too. VoIP Voice launched a new Mac phone in the UK. ♥ Actiontec is hiring a director of bizdev for VoIP products. "Actiontec is expanding its presence in the Skype Certified VoIP business! As a leader in this marketplace, Actiontec plans to capitalize on it's first to market advantage in the commercial space, and leverage it's intellectual property and strategic relationships in the VoIP adapter business. This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated professional to drive a huge up and coming business segment for Actiontec." If you apply, let us know what you learn. ♥ PhoneGnome to Skype came out, using the Uplink SIP to Skype Adapter.

Sometimes people ask me how I find something to write about just focusing on Skype. It's weeks like this, my friend.

I was starting my evaluation of the beta PhoneGnome to Skype feature today when I found that the GnomeLink client is really the (not yet rebranded - it's beta!) Uplink SIP to Skype Adapter available free from Australian-based NCH Swift Sound. If you look at their Typical Applications, it appears to be targeted more at the SME PBX market as an interconnect from the PBX into Skype. From their website:

The SIP protocol has become the industry standard for VoIP. Thousands of telephone companies, IP phone manufacturers and virtual IP based PBX systems use this protocol to connect calls. The problem is the proprietary IP phone 'Skype' has an almost cult following in the youth market and sometimes the call rates for SkypeOut are discounted. This software lets you connect calls between the two systems.

Then I found a post from Michigan Telephone Blog that speculates about its potential as a Skype to Asterisk@Home interface:

Now, I haven't tried to do it, but maybe you could set this up on a Windows box along with a compatible softphone and use that as an interface between Asterisk and Skype.

I'm not the geek techie type but would be interested to hear Comments about its potential in the ongoing Skype vs SIP debate. (As would the people at Michigan Telephone Blog -- comment there or here.)

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Here's three Skype products that aim to enhance your Skypeing experience that leaves me questioning exactly what I'm buying with Skype Certified. The three products are the VoSky Chatterbox, Jawbone Headset and the Motorola Wireless Interenet Calling Kit. Each provide a different angle on bettering the standard Skyper's headset and as you might expect each has their pro's and con's.

VoSky Chatterbox.

This simple USB device provides an easily portable plug and play speakerphone for Skype. It's simple to use and requires no additional software to be loaded. It has a volume and mute button on top and works probably as expected, as a low cost speakerphone. I'd liken it to the solution we had as kids when we could finally plug in a speakerphone box between the old phone and the whole family sat around. In principle great, in practice it left something to be desired. The Chatterbox is a little like this. It works. It's also no substitute for a decent headset. The caller on the other end of the line will know and possibly complain. Handsfree solutions curently work better with a good set of speakers and a proper stand mic. Locate them correctly and the caller won't get a any feedback. Many laptops work as good as the Chatterbox. If you feel the need try it. Just don't expect it to be a Polycom and ready for the office. For kids it may be more robust than a headset - read youngsters talking to Grandma.

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Skype’s problem now is maintaining growth. The second challenge is to get Skypers to adopt premium services and think about dropping their home phone. There are many barriers to this. The PC must be always on. There is currently no embedded Skype device. People just don't want to lose their numbers. Free local calling may apply and be an advantage, as is 911. Many early adopters that have Skype have not yet added SkypeIn (lack of numbers availability) or SkypeOut, as they aren’t making either enough calls, or they are making them on another service.

Let’s consider what a Skype partnership with PhoneGnome would enable:

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By Michael Gough with Bill Campbell

Being a security consultant, I am always amazed when I read articles like the one I recently found on blocking Skype. The firm Info-Tech Research Group in Australia cites in their report “Five Reason’s To Ban Skype” claiming that the popular VoIP technology is just too insecure for business use. These blanket statements are grossly inaccurate as each business is different and has the responsibility to set their own policy to match their specific need. Many very intelligent Fortune 500 companies approve and use Skype for internal use.

First and foremost a company should create a policy for any and all new technologies. The policy should ban their use until specifically allowed. This should be the policy for most organizations that try to manage, control and secure their IT resources. From this perspective, Info-Tech is correct: Skype should be treated like any other IM product which many companies allow, but do have policies that state "Not for company sensitive business use." This means chatting abouyt the weather is fine; discussing mergers is not. Most of us know the difference. Info-Tech estimates that roughly one-third of Skype’s 53 million registered users are business users.

Among dangers Skype poses, according to Info-Tech:

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Skype as a VoIP PBX Gateway application has some interesting appeal.
We all use Skype 2 Skype to call across the Internet to bypass the PSTN costs or to interconnect with the PSTN through SkypeOut. Some of us purchase a Gateway like Actiontec’s Internet Phone Wizard to connect our residential phone to Skype. But what about using a Skype Client as a Gateway to bypass the PSTN off your PBX? Who is doing that? Skype as a VoIP PBX Gateway application has some special appeal. You can use Skype as a Single Point Gateway between your firm’s PBX and the Skype Network or interconnect two remote office PBXs together to create a Skype2Skype link between them. This should have great appeal in the European Common Market as well as for businesses doing business between Asia-European-America. Or for those who are managing outsourced relationships offshore.

Just think, if your PBX supports Call Forwarding, Call Transfer, Call-on-hold, Call Recording, Voice Messaging, etc this rich environment becomes available to callers from SkypeIn, SkypeOut and Skype2Skype.

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In all the talk about Google Talk many missed Microsoft's release of MSN 7.5.

Net net, the new MS MSN 7.5 is impressive at least under the hood. It is like an old car that has been hotrodded with a new motor and at the same time they've upgraded the suspension without fixing the seats or interior. However they did stick in the new boombox. The control interfaces remain so yesteryear. Still it now kicks ass in the Voice - audio quality - and Video - department. Here it is very impressive. So real improvements and radical upgrades are under the hood. Even Leah contrasts usability with Google Talk, where she writes "I will improve my usability. Maybe your straightforward interface will bring people into the IM markets who have been intimidated out of it by the more complex clients."

Effectively we now have a defacto audio standard emerging with GIPS codec driven clients (Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, Gizmo etc.)perhaps tuned differently, while anything else remains inferior. Even so none of these conversation clients talk to each other yet.

Thus MS now has a platform in place to build on. The next generation will be very competitive. It will need to get off the PC to be really exciting. It's also limited to Windows XP at this time. Where is that multi-platform?

So why am I not that excited?

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Have just read Richard Stastny's comprehensive recount of the goings-on around ENUM at the IETF meeting in Paris. I can't but help feel that, despite the good intentions, some decidedly anti-competitive actions are going on here by the carriers.

In essence, the telcos are keeping control over a numbering business that is being run as a cartel that keeps out non-POTS VoIP applications, and discourages new POTS entrants. And since there is (today) no defensible service element in "VoIP service" other than the trivial routing function, the erection of artificial barriers to enable rent-seeking is priority #1, #2 and #3 in telcoland.

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Many of you will have heard of the famous Black-Scholes equation for the pricing of financial options. The basic idea is that an option contract to buy a thing at some future date at a fixed price has some potential premium over the current price of the asset because it may allow you to buy at a discount some day (i.e. the strike price is below the market price on the day the option is exercised). Black-Scholes lets you calculate this premium.

A stupid network is like an infinite sequence of discrete options to communicate between connected parties. At the finest granularity, every frame or packet contains a message from a pool of possible messages. A stupid network makes that pool of possible messages larger by deferring optimisation for any particular message type. (For example, IMS networks pre-optimise on SIP, which would exclude a more bandwidth-efficient signalling protocol such as IAX — which could be a problem for wireless devices.) The assumptions for a "stupid" network is that networks have considerable longevity, there is high uncertainty about the future returns of different "messages," and high initial cost — otherwise we could just build more and more application-optimised networks. These respectively map onto "low interest rate," "big standard deviation in returns" and "high current stock price" in Black-Scholes, maybe perhaps, if I interpret things correctly.

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Here's the scenario. Lady calls bank. Bank routes call to India. Nice chap in Indian call centre talks to lady. Lady can't understand half of what he says because call quality is a bit duff. (The IVR system sounded great, so it's not at her end.)

Here's the business opportunity. You're a VoIP "virtual network" operator. Deliver high quality encrypted speech over the Internet to Indian call centres. Indeed, when I use a service like SkypeOut and enter my bank's number, you just look up first if you have a non-PSTN route to them. (Be it ENUM or proprietary technology, I don't care.) Doesn't need anything new in the customer's eyes.

Customer satisfaction goes up. You take a tiny slice of revenue from your bank partner for delivering a wideband audio experience to a large public user base, many of whom are the bank's customers. Let's call them "origination fees" to make the analysts happy. Everyone walks away contented.

(And if you're an old-fashioned 1st-gen VoIP operator who just cloned vanilla PSTN service, you're out of luck. Again. The point of IP is new features and functionality, not arbitrage.)

No doubt some of the SIP-heads out there are wondering why anybody would pay someone like Skype to deliver customers when it can be done for free. Just remember, bottled water is big business, even though tap water is free. Same reason.

Now can you see why Skype might start to have a significant market value? And that some of the partners might be folks like Avaya, who stand to gain a ton of dosh upgrading call centres to new techology? How long until you can IM with the call centre agent you're talking to, and they can just cut'n'paste stuff into their forms? Just lift stuff straight from your Skype profile? Would you use Skype or the PSTN if the former relieved you of ever waiting in a queue, and simply IM'd you back when your turn was up?

The business model is out there. You just have to look.

I've been participating in Gordon Cook's report and list this month. It's been a fascinating ride as VoIP, SIP and Skype have been thrown into the ring. Now you really can't make a direct comparison. SIP is a protocol and Skype is an application. SIP still gets talked about with hardware and Skype is software. Yet it is easy to slip into a debate thinking SIP industry versus Skype. So last night when I received a draft of Gordon's summary I wrote back, taking what I thought would be a provocative and naturally contrarian viewpoint. At the heart of it I feel framing perspecitve for tomorrow is not about VoIP or SIP, they are just jargon.

I don't need to tell anyone who read Unbound Spiral that I'm a Skype advocate. I've been using Skype longer than the majority of Skype employees. I keep digging at SIP, to learn what it might do for me and I'm still wanting it explained in terms that add meaning to my life. While I may also wish in a perfect world for an open source Skype etc. etc. a good reason for starting this blog is to encourage the dialogue and make the skype user voices heard.

This is the rant pulled from my e-mail.

1. Skype spent the last year moving closer to the PSTN. With SkypeOut etc they created an interconnect that is satisfactory at best. Be careful not to accept too easily that Skype's opportunity is to act like a revolutionary phone company. Rather it could use this strategy to suck the lifeblood out of them. It stimulated a cost battle amongst the traditional incumbents. It destroyed international call rates, and is making the investment community "scared" of these same incumbents. Perhaps it forced the beginnings of a massive consolidation. All in all that helps Skype. For the new PoIP players they think they are still in the game. They are not, they are just cutting costs. The real caution is in the idea that "You can't play a CD on a record player. Skype has been trying / perhaps even encouraged to do this by investors. It's short-term. The direction for the product is well away from the PSTN. Look at the adoption of DVD's. Look at global uptake of mobile phones. Skype is going fast after cheaper Wi-Fi enabled handset devices. By Xmas the Broadreach type exercise will only involve a $100 - $150 handset and it will be small! The biggest flaw may actually be Skype is based on GIPS. Unless GIPS provides a dynamic 3D audio codec Skype is vulnerable on sound quality. I hope for their sake they keep it in mind. Every Skyper who tries a 3D conference call will switch if it is offered for free. Similarly there are some "always" on features that will make a difference. Conclusion, connecting to the PSTN is temporary.

2. I'm concerned when I listen to the "enterprise" discussion. I realize there is a whole industry that is set up to deal with the fortune 500 or 1000. The fact remains that the majority of business is not actually done that way. The complexity that ties the mega's up and the "security" approaches implied and referenced is not relevant to the way SME's operate. Skype is already capturing independent global workgroups. I'm one, running elements of my business that would have broken my bank account two years ago. For the same reason that blogs and wikis are beating mega buck content management systems, Skype and potentially other alternates are going to smash the traditional barriers. I'd really spend more time thinking about it in the perspective of SME's. You can bet that Skype will use a blog like approach to get adoption in enterprises. You start with a project team. You don't need approval for that. You just do it. Groups with a high element of travel will drive this faster and faster. I know Fortune 500's that are already in this situation and similarly groups within "major" players in China.

3. The enterprise argument is premised on the American/European/Japan? world of business. I'd look a lot deeper at China, India and ask yourself if you were organizing, creating a new mesh... what would be adopted and where and what infrastructure would you use? I have a suspicion that Wi-Fi handset could be very big. I'm afraid that the security issues above are predicated on a profile and understanding of desktops and laptops not cheap micro mobile devices. The global telecom replacement is likely to come out of China. We may be the late adopters. Users will also determine this standard.

4. I mentioned audio quality in passing above. This discussion should not be had without thinking about "presence" and "intimacy". When you have listened to a Skyper (like I did yesterday afternoon) tell me about how he was in his hotel room laptop on his bed talking to his partner (same setup) and telling me he could have left it on all night just so they could share breathing you are beginning to get to the reality. The phone can't and has never delivered this. So the challenge for new entrants is to work even harder on the senses.

5. The real end game may be in economics. When consumers have always-on connections and unlimited personal storage, then economic power shifts into their hands. Visa and eBay both model elements of what could emerge. Identity is moving to the fringe. It's a powerful aspect. Skype's long term role may be that of info market facilitator. Telecoms weren't designed with user reputations systems in mind, swarms, smart mobs or cooperative behavior. Are me moving a step closer? BitTorrent, Grouper and others may confirm that we are.

I closed my rant with the statement that the discussion was being framed as VoIP. In fact it should be framed on the quality of how we converse, how well we are enabled to talk and listen. Think next "gen" / net "work". VoIP continues to sucks as a term, so it is no wonder Skype is becoming a verb.