events « Skype Journal

Work Design: Translating the web a few words at a time

Phil Wolff 9 December 2011 3:21 pm

Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.

Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.

Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.

Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.

The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.

Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

YouTube video: TEDxCMU — Luis von Ahn — Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation.

admin | events | hookflash | skypejournal

I’m hooked.

Phil Wolff 14 September 2011 6:37 am

For the last few months I’ve been helping Hookflash prepare for launch. We came out of stealth mode Tuesday, announcing Hookflash for iPad at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference (Booth D6, if you’re there). I also showed it yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley. Preview signups are on the home page and following @hookflash on Twitter should keep you in the loop. I won’t go too much into the company or product here but you should check out Jim Courtney’s post, HookFlash: Elevating the Business Video Calling Experience? and Julie Klein’s Demo: Hookflash aims to make phone calls at work more productive.

I believe computing and communication can amplify collective power. Skype’s charter is helping the world to talk. Hookflash has a narrower mandate: to help people with common purpose work together to get things done. That’s exciting and meaningful and I’m glad to advance that vision.

I’ve been blogging here less often as Hookflash turned from vision to reality. My work at Hookflash can only keep Skype Journal editorially independent of Skype. For transparency’s sake, I’ll disclose my relationship with Hookflash with each post.

Happy 8th Birthday, Skype! Many happy returns.

Phil Wolff 29 August 2011 10:32 am

Wow, It’s been eight years since Skype launched. 2003 to 2011. I’ve been writing about Skype on my own blogs or on Skype Journal from the start. SJ alum Jim Courtney salutes Skype today and Skype pats itself on the back.

Looking back…

The company has been bought and sold, and sold, and sold. And soon to be sold again.

The founders were in, kicked out, then held key technology for ransom to get back on the board for their big payout from Microsoft.

Skype averaged a new leader a year.

Skype disrupted international telephone companies, displacing billions of dollars of hard currency with free or very cheap services. Their success has them banned in some countries and declared “an enemy of the state” in others. Didn’t stop them from partnerships with mobile operators from Hong Kong to Italy.

Roughly half the Internet has tried Skype on a personal computer, a mobile phone, or in a device. Skype isn’t ubiquitous but its brand is. And Skype continues to grow.

Why? What does the future hold?

As for why Skype’s been successful…

Skype’s timing was great, several times. Just in time for broadband to make consumer VoIP practical for millions. A few years’ later, just in time for a lift by eBay’s brand (did you know Skype was an eBay company for half its life?), Skype was able to hire GIPS expats and ready itself for the webcam explosion. And when the world economy imploded in 2008, Skype was a large enough network that people turned to video calling as an alternative to travel (airlines hate Skype).

Skype partnered intensely. If you could bring a million new users to Skype, Skype cut a deal. Large national web portals have Skype sub-sites, laptop manufacturers preinstall Skype on Windows, mobile operators install Skype on Android phones, and you can find Skype on TVs and soon on game stations.

Skype focused on customer acquisition. During its eBay years, Skype pursued new users at the expense of product innovation.

Skype gets the viral business. It takes two to talk and Skype made sure you had every reason to drag your friends and family into the network. Skype keeps removing roadblocks to onramping and adding reasons to subscribe. This could be Skype’s first billion dollar year.

Skype delivered real value, consistently, affordably, to millions of people.

So, a few longer-term Skype predictions:

In 2011:

Microsoft will close the deal.

Skype will have more than 1000 employees.

Luxembourg will become Skype’s HQ in name only. Palo Alto is the new Luxembourg.

Microsoft Watch starts covering Skype closely.

In 2012:

Microsoft’s Skype division will absorb the Lync business unit.

Lync will be rebranded Skype.

Skype will launch its cloud products.

Skype will hit its Q1 peak of 35 million concurrent users, 220 million active users.

Victims sue Skype for not offering emergency dialing after a family dies.

Skype’s new cloud loses the US Presidential campaigns to Twilio, powering team and phonebanking apps.

A Skype toolbar and skinny-client comes with a new release of Internet Explorer.

Skype fuels LinkedIn chat.

Hackers reverse engineer Skype’s p2p network, make it public. Vulnerabilities and prior hacks exposed.

In 2013:

Skype for Mac catches up with Skype for Windows.

Skype for Windows Phone has cooler features than Skype for Mac.

Skype ships on the next Windows, in the next Office.

Skype becomes just one of thousands of products using in-browser WebRTC for calls, presence and IM.

SkypeKit becomes a standard component of Windows.

Skype kills the former Lync product family as PSTN hardware sales drop sharply. Lync becomes a Sharepoint feature, phone stations are all mobile, tablet or PCs.

Skype works with with Windows Live Messenger IM and voice.

In 2014:

Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue through Microsoft internal customers. Bing ads, Xbox subscriptions, Office, Windows.

Leaks reveal Skype cooperated with law enforcement in a totalitarian regime to shut down resistance. Leaks prove false.

Facebook drops Skype as a partner, as their internal pendulum swings to owning.

The Vatican IT department picks Skype as its telecom standard.

Skype for Layar brings talk to augmented reality RayBans.

In 2015:

Skype will deliver one billion minutes of live talk through developers using its cloud platform services.

Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue from platform services.

Skype and Bing launch YouTube competitor.

Skype is banned on student tablets in 903 school districts as a distraction.

Half of all televisions come with Skype inside or in an attached box.

Mass exodus as pre-Microsoft Skype employees fully vest and leave.

In 2016:

Phone banks using Skype for Web prove decisive in Get Out The Vote campaigns.

Facial recognition plug-ins reveal micro expressions and give live commentary.

Stallone Skype’s fighting instructions to his son in Rocky Junior.

In 2017

Platform products deliver half of Skype’s revenue.

Tony Bates named as Ballmer’s successor.

Photo credit: 8th Birthday Cake by Jim Capaldi for Emily’s 8th Birthday Party.

Thanks for all the Skype.

Vote for my “Let My Data Go!” SXSW panel

Phil Wolff 16 August 2011 6:38 am

People need more power over their data. If you think so, vote for my SXSW panel called “Let My Data Go! Open data portability standards.” I need your vote before Friday, September 2nd. This will let us bring this issue to an important audience.

“Another year and corporate silos still hold your data hostage? Our panel will review technical standards that restore personal control of personal data. Privacy is a happy side effect of personal data control and of new business practices, communication protocols, and IT technologies. We’ll highlight progress on all fronts and list the top reasons companies give for keeping their control over your data.”

I’m drafting a stealthy startup’s data portability policy; disclosure is a practical way to live up to these values. And even though I’m a director of the not-for-profit DataPortability Project, the exercise is still difficult. Tracking down the answers, having the abstract and detailed conversations across the company, making time for a policy document are distractions from readying for launch. The policy will get short shrift for a month or so.

Meanwhile, these engineers have been architecting some elements of user-centric data portability into their products from the ground up. I love that portability values will be part of this company’s DNA. What’s better is these founders and engineers are not the exception; personal control is now a central tenet in tech startup culture.

Our panel will recap exactly how organizations are delivering portability today. So vote for my panel right now! And spread the word: Let My Data Go!

apple | ecomm | iPad | SkypeKit | Technology

Skype for iPad; SkypeKit launching at eComm next week?

Phil Wolff 24 June 2011 2:52 pm

A Skype for iPad demonstration video leaked on YouTube. Skype’s Jonathan Christensen, Vice President, Emerging Opportunities [cool title] is speaking Tuesday at the Emerging Communications Conference on “The Next Wave of Video Communications.” The blurb suggests two product announcements: an iPad client and SkypeKit:

Late last year, IMS Research reported that we’d passed the 5 billion mark – 5 billion internet connected devices – and predicted we’d connect 22 billion devices by 2020. That said, internet connectivity is no longer enough to differentiate your product. So, what will be different about the next 17 billion devices? Video.

We’re finally at a place where we’re moving from the PC to non-PC devices being rich communication endpoints – from your mobile phone and TV to your in-car navigation system. Internet + voice + video is emerging as the ultimate trifecta for cutting-edge devices, and increasingly what consumers will expect from their electronics. However, as demand for video-enabled electronics continues to increase, development bottlenecks caused by closed API standards will continue to plague the industry and hinder the growth process. During his presentation, Skype’s Jonathan Christensen will discuss:

The historical context and early communications pioneers that took VoIP mainstream

The inefficiencies and hurdles that spurred industry-wide change in the early 2000s

How broadband penetration, multimedia PCs and P2P file sharing set the stage for rich mainstream IP communications and the proliferation of video calling

The future of communications in which devices are no longer isolated, and open standards will shorten development cycles Christensen will also give an update on how Skype is working to enable developers to leverage the power of voice and video to create a new generation of communications experiences, gaining access to a huge market potential by bringing video to a wide-range of consumer devices. With this next wave of connected devices, ‘video anywhere’ becomes a real possibility.

The line “Skype is working to enable developers to leverage the power of voice and video to create a new generation of communications experiences, gaining access to a huge market potential by bringing video to a wide-range of consumer devices.” is what brings SkypeKit to mind.

See you there. I’ve an announcement of my own.

ecomm | events | Microsoft | Skype

eComm is coming up in June. Get your invite.

Phil Wolff 3 June 2011 11:53 am

If you’re interested in telecom, the Emerging Communications Conference is one of a handful of thought leadership events you should apply to attend. These are my peeps.

The session I want to host: a panel on Skype@Microsoft. Good for Skype? Good for VoIP? Brand collision? Borg avoidance? What could this look like in 2012, 2014? What new opportunities will this create? Will there still be a Skype Journal?

On stage or in the hallway, I’ll see you there this year.

games | GDC | Skype | SkypeExtras

#Skype Extras partner EasyBits releases game uninstall tool

Phil Wolff 31 May 2011 9:35 am

A year after eBay bought Skype, EasyBits became Skype’s biggest developer partner, releasing dozens of desktop games through the Skype Extras Manager. The May 27th release of Skype for Windows included the Gold release of the EasyBits GO console. The update surprised and upset some users. EasyBits’ responded to user concerns:

EasyBits Games has been part of the Skype Extras family since 2006 and we have been steadily improving our offerings since. Our users have made many suggestions during the years and our last update was driven by making as many of the suggested improvements as possible in the EasyBits GO update. Since the update, game sessions have jumped from 850,000 top daily game sessions to over 7 million game sessions globally yesterday.

EasyBits GO is NOT a malware, it is a legitimate application distributed by EasyBits Media as part of our scheduled update.

Unfortunately the user interface in the update installer has defects causing confusing user experience that leads to unintentional installations. EasyBits Media has confirmed this problem and currently has stopped the update process and implementing a fix. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused to Skype users.

Users can remove EasyBits GO using a separate uninstaller that can be downloaded here. It is a digitally signed executable and EasyBits Media warrants that it has been checked for viruses and malware.

When you have partners, especially long time trusted partners, things occasionally go wrong. It’s how you work together to fix them that matters. It seems like EasyBits is stepping up.

EasyBits games played an interesting role in the Skype ecosystem. Casual games give people something to talk about. Checkers or backgammon fill a lull in conversation. Hours in Skype calls create trust, intimacy and brand loyalty.

EasyBits also convinced the current generation of Skype managers that gameplay is a huge market for Skype. While EasyBits showed casual gamers love to talk, there’s ample proof that live in-game voice chat is important to MMO RPG players too. I look forward to seeing how Skype blends with Xbox and other services as Skype’s platforms for developers come to market.

pii | privacy | Skype | USA

USA: Does the Fourth Amendment protect your Skype data?

Phil Wolff 21 May 2011 8:36 am

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in December 2010 that governments much have a search warrant to secretly seize and search emails stored by email services, ensuring protected privacy of personal communication and due process. I take it this requirement applies to Skype voice calls.

Does this precedent apply to conversation metadata like chat histories, call logs, contact lists, file transfers, IP addresses, and profile data? As Skype continues building cloud Skype platforms and gateways, more user data will live on Skype-controlled servers. Will Skype store that data encrypted, so thieves won’t be able to use it? Will Skype give up those encryption keys without court orders? Should you trust Skype with your personal and corporate conversation data?

This is a USA-centric post. Transnational services like Skype’s and Microsoft’s are only as secure as their weakest local leak. This is as true for country-by-country legal protection for your personal data as it is for physical and software protections. Where does Skype host data centers? What rules apply for surrendering user data to governments or to private parties in law suits? A thorough security appraisal would require Skype to disclose data center locations.

Another Google I/O without Google Voice

Phil Wolff 16 May 2011 3:54 am

I was ticked-off I missed the registration window to get in to this year’s Google I/O conference after so much excitement and insight from last year’s. I was relieved, and a little sad, learning that none of the sessions featured reps from the Google Voice or Google Talk teams. Where’s the platform, folks? Will Skype’s platform come to market first and better? Or is Google ceding the field?

Steam gets Skype’s SILK for higher quality in-game voice chat

Phil Wolff 23 March 2011 8:11 am

Valve’s Steam MMO RPG game delivery system (~~rent, don’t buy~~; play without downloads; one identity across games; common APIs) will use the free SILK codec. This will build SILK’s wideband audio quality into the Steam player, although games may exploit it. Correction: You do in fact buy games; but the games have the option of storing and using social elements from the Steam cloud: PTT, saving games, or achievements. Steam is one of the largest game sales systems on earth, “a license to print money” one customer told me. They moved from the Speex codec to SILK but the driving forces are customer engagement. The higher the voice chat fidelity, the better you communicate, the more you enjoy the team aspects of gameplay, and the longer you play. Good for all.

The announcement:

Steam’s voice chat system now leverages the SILK audio codec, developed and used by Skype, makers of the world’s most popular voice communication service. The SILK codec provides a significant quality improvement over Steam’s previous voice technology, at the cost of some increase in bandwidth usage. Steam Voice used to require 15 kbps of bandwidth, whereas SILK is a dynamic bit rate protocol which varies in its use of bandwidth between 8 and 30 kbps, depending on the range of data in the voice signal and current network conditions.

As of today’s Steam client update, voice chat using SILK is available to all users of Steam. To start using Steam chat with SILK, simply click the ‘Start Voice Chat’ button within a friend or group chat on Steam. You can access chat from both the friends list at the desktop, or while in game using Steam’s in-game overlay. You’ll find voice chat connectivity and reliability have also been improved with this release.

Steam chat with SILK is now also automatically available for all games that take advantage of the Steamworks Voice API. Valve’s own Portal 2, set to release in mid-April, uses this newly updated system to enable voice chat in its cooperative gameplay mode.

iSkype nominated for CTIA award

Phil Wolff 23 March 2011 6:02 am

Skype for iPhone is one of five apps up for best Productivity, Utility and Public Safety app at the Emerging Technology awards, to be awarded today in Orlando at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference. The others are LogMeIn Ignition (LogMeIn, Inc.), GadgetTrak (ActiveTrak), Opera Mini (Opera Software), and SwiftKey Tablet (TouchType Ltd.).

mobile | Qik | sxsw | video

Qik technologies should flow to Skype users

Phil Wolff 15 March 2011 4:37 pm

Qik updated their latest iPhone app. Download release 6.1 (4) built 5 March 2011. Dead simple, pretty, and full of features missing from Skype’s other mobile apps.

I’ll show Qik’s features below the fold but expect all their technologies to show up in Skype’s consumer mobile software, consumer and enterprise desktop clients, and Skype’s platforms. Qik’s plumbing that makes this possible is now a Skype asset: cloud video storage and video streaming, proper integration with YouTube for file uploading, video chat performance tuning for a wide range of mobile phones. For the record, Qik’s APIs are Skype’s first web service APIs.

Full Story »

design | events | identity | inboxlove | privacy

12 thoughts on Email+Skype before Inbox Love

Phil Wolff 25 February 2011 7:34 am

I’m looking at today’s Inbox Love Conference agenda through a filter of Skype product and ecosystem strategy. What can Skype learn from email’s long legacy? Where might they fit together?

A unified inbox – with chats, social/work updates, emails, events, tasks, and calls – would be very useful; one place to check. http://mail.Skype.com? Twilio’s Jeff Lawson is speaking on this.
Rich caller ID. Rapportive could easily tell you about incoming callers and the other people in chat rooms. They could deliver a rich, social-media-informed caller-ID for incoming Skype calls, assuming Skype offered a useful web platform or in-client extensions.
With inbox overload comes the need for relevance filtering. Xobni could easily offer data mining of Skype conversations. That’s if Skype offered real client extension or cloud platforms. Xobni’s Jeff Bonforte will speak.
Most inboxes barely tell you about threads of conversation, let alone relationships. The folks at Graphight could help you renew old relationships, cultivate valuable ones, and invest in those that matter to you. Skype lets them fall off your radar if you’re not careful.
Spam, identity theft, and other security issues apply to both; crossover of lessons learned?
Email is part of our identity infrastructure. So are telephone accounts. When will we trust Skype accounts enough to authenticate users for authorizations that matter?
Email was one of the first identities that let us participate online anonymously, pseudonymously, or as ourselves. Skype could be better at giving us more control over how we present and identify ourselves to different people.
Hosted email is becoming the rule, not the exception. Yet the ability to migrate gigabytes of archives from one email account to another isn’t universally easy or even promised. True for Skype history and archives too, still tied to a given desktop and not stached (stash + cache?) in the cloud. Offer a graceful exit, please.
Inboxes come with contact lists, accumulated from the spew of email from subscriptions, strangers and acquaintances. Skype offers few opportunities for weak ties to become contacts, or for discovering potential friends, family and colleagues.
A contrast: Email is used for formal communication; IM for casual and collegial conversations. Do you break how the tools are used when you mix those contexts?
Email traffic had been losing out to instant messaging for years. Now IM (down 8.3%) is losing out to chat and updates inside of social networks. Clearly, conversation follows (a) where your friends are and (b) where the context is fresh and relevant. Do you have more friends in Skype than X? Do you find more things to discuss inside of Skype?
Would you want an email/Skype gateway? Email a message to a Skype name? Read it in your Skype client? Reply from Skype and read it in email? IM’s backed up or mirrored on a list server? Could be very useful in collaboration.

image credit: Claire Graves from Poke London from when she worked on the 2009 Skype Store makeover.

Skype formalizes thin-client mobile service

Phil Wolff 14 February 2011 10:38 am

Skype’s newly announced Mobile Partner Program for operators continues work it has done with mobile operators Verizon (US), KDDI au (Japan) and Hutchison 3 (UK). In each case Skype offered thin clients for mobile phones that talked to the Skype cloud through gateways hosted at the operator’s data centers. This meant lighter use of 3G broadband and deployment on a wider range of mobile phones.

Skype’s thin-client/fat-server approach moves most of the heavy bandwidth and processing to the operator-Skype gateways from the phone. Skype voice calls travel over the mobile voice channel using normal mobile quality, not on the mobile broadband data channel. Contrast this with the full Skype client like Skype for iPhone, where the mobile device is a node on the Skype network and voice, video and data travel over the wireless or Wi-Fi data channels. Full clients use Skype’s wideband audio codecs for cinema quality sound, where thin clients produce and consume normal, clipped, mobile phone sound quality.

So this is looking like three product tiers:

Skype ~~Lite~~mobile for 3G with light broadband coverage and low smartphone penetration.
Skype full clients for 3G and Wi-Fi.
Skype rich clients for 4G, ready for mobile video calling, video conferencing, and the latest smartphones.

Skype’s booth at MWC is at stand 7D49.

Skype buys a week of Wi-Fi for Spain

Phil Wolff 14 February 2011 9:58 am

Skype Access is a little known feature of Skype. It lets you buy Wi-Fi access by the minute from more than five million hotspots. Access’s two selling points: pay by the minute only for what you need, and pay with Skype credits at 19 cents a minute (US$11.40/hour). Skype Access is free in Spain this week in honor of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Access partners include BT Openzone (UK), Fon, M3 Connect (Germany), Row 44 (in-flight), Skyrove (South Africa), Spectrum Interactive (UK), Tomizone (Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific ), Vex (South America). Skype ran promotions like this before in other markets.

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