Skype Journal

I pitched and demoed Practisimo tonight at the end of Startup Weekend – Education at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Labs. Practisimo is a foreign language practice service. Practisimo brings native speakers to people who already know language who need to practice to keep their language skills alive. We started from scratch Saturday night, after killing our language lab product 24 hours into the project.

Joining up, speed-dating style, to form new business teams was entertaining. Getting the business design right was hard. Trusting strangers was spiritual. Decisiveness at top speed exposing your ignorance was unsettling. Keeping our collective eyes on the-very-next-thing-to-do was tiring.

Leaving Skype out of this real-time, just-in-time, find-someone-to-practice-with service was really easy .

Our requirements:

• We need technology like Chatroulette’s, where we pair two users so they talk to each other.
• We want to serve some users on mobile phones.
• We want to serve 1-to-1 video chat and text chat inside of our web site and inside of other sites like facebook.
• We don’t want to pay for bandwidth for our first million users.

Skype just couldn’t get us there.

We might have been able to use Skype network APIs, still under construction. But that’s for another year.

We thought about building it on SkypeKit, but I’ve been waiting for 125 days to even see the secret SkypeKit SDK documentation.

So we’re using other technology to help people talk to each other.

Video chat ran on the TokBox API. For the telephony part, between Twilio and Voxeo we chose Twilio; it was more familiar to one of our programmers (and Twilio co-sponsored #SWBAY). In-browser text chat used a little open sourced PHP. Forms and surveys ran on Wufoo. We cobbled a barely working, unlikely-to-scale, first-draft experience together using less than four hours of programmer time.

Today was Skype’s 7th birthday. Happy Birthday, Skype!

I wish I’d had a different story to tell. The new practice of entrepreneurship taught at #SWBAY ruthlessly focuses on doing the right things, right now, with the tools at hand, in ways that teach you what you need to move forward. Dear Skype, wish you were there.