UK’s OFCOM drags it’s heels on mobile net neutrality, leaving Skype users banned by many mobile operators. Same in other European markets. Jonathan Browning interviewed Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel, head of European regulatory affairs at Skype.
I met a bunch of people at the Enterprise 2.0 conference who don’t use Skype, more who only use it for family video calls, a few who use it for international calls, and several who’ve never been interested enough to try it. It reminds me that, with roughly 180 million active users worldwide and likely only 30 million active in the US and Canada, Skype has a greenfield of more than 200 million North Americans who aren’t using Skype. Building market reach looks like an important strategic goal through 2015. Skype’s net adoption rates (adoption less abandonment) have been large but linear. How will Skype redesign their products and rebalance their portfolio so net adoption rates accelerate?
New rumors iChat may come to iOS. So far it looks like IM, not voice or video. I’d be more interested f iChat came to operating systems outside the Apple universe.
Pre-flight check in at Sheremetyevo International Airport over Skype. @svo_skype connects you to an operator for an interview, like a video call CAPTCHA. News release: Now for “flights operated by Air Astana, Royal Air Maroc, China Eastern Airlines, Estonian Air, Hainan Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines, Iran Air, Jat Airways, Turkish Airlines, Transaero Airlines, Aerosvit, Ariana Afgan Airlines, Belavia , Dniproavia, Donbasaero, Nord Wind, Oren Air, Air Algerie” although Aeroflot hasn’t committed. Yet.
Skype pays musicians to sing Happy Birthday to your friends in their Say It With Skype Facebook app. All the flavors are great but I like The Parlotones’ cover.
New betas: Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, both approaching feature parity, both now with group screen sharing for Premium subscribers. You can IM and video call Facebook friends from within Skype, although this does not include voice calls (unless you unplug your webcam), conference calls or group video calls. Jonathan Rosenberg explains Skype is hosting supernodes on AWS EC2, is operating a gateway for Facebook identity/directory interop, the calls are flowing p2p through the Skype network, and Facebook is keeping some records about users and their activity. Darrell Etherington thinks this could make Skype even more popular, and Skype should integrate Facebook into Skype’s mobile and tablet apps. Skype promotional video for the release (QuickTime).
Sync contacts. Not just import, but synchronization. Keep my contacts fresh. TO DO.
Sync user profile data. My Skype profile is shallow and often stale. Sync my profile data semi-automatically: “Do you approve this update?” TO DO.
Sync availability. Online, Offline, Busy, In A Call, Do Not Disturb. Facebook has some presence indicators too, from their own chat and from their mobile clients. TO DO.
Sync currency. What’s the exchange rate between Facebook credits and Skype credits? Let me pay for a long distance SkypeOut call with Facebook credits. TO DO.
Facebook updates in the Skype contact list. Give me fresher social objects for talking with my contacts. Make it easier to sort contacts by the last time they updated, not just by alpha or the last time they talked with you. DONE.
Skype history in Facebook’s timeline. Show my friends’ Skype history with me in my Facebook updates. Make it easier to dive back into a Skype conversation from the timeline. TO DO.
Sync personas. Skype is already asking people to create multiple personas, so they log in with one ID for each job and another for home. Facebook will probably offer something similar so you can choose to keep your professional friends from learning too much about your hobbies and dating habits. Skype and Facebook will negotiate the data models and privacy policies that go with it. TO DO.
People search. For all the importance of the Global Index to Skype’s operations, the real value is being able to find the right person to talk with. Both parties could do well to blend their search technologies to improve result relevancy and speed. TO DO.
People recommendations. Skype can’t suggest people you might like or people you might know. Facebook can, so build recommendations into Skype. Skype has very specific data about times of day and places you call from and call to, which Facebook could use to improve recommendations. TO DO.
Events and scheduling. One of the best social objects is an event. Before the call or chat we often plan and invite and schedule our talk. Skype should integrate with personal calendars and with public and semi-public event listings. Facebook’s have taken off as one of the top event directories along with Eventful and Upcoming. TO DO.
Chat interop. My facebook friend chatting with me on facebook while I’m in my Skype chat. We each get the medium we choose. Lots of things to work out including persistence, behavior for adding people to a chat, privacy rules, encryption, archiving policy. STARTED.
Groups sync. Facebook lists and groups should sync up with my Skype contact lists. Define once, update everywhere, always fresh.
Voice enable facebook chat. TO DO.
Video enable facebook chat. STARTED (No group video, no screensharing).
Advertising exchange. Skype has a small but rapidly growing yellow pages business directory, the better for prospects to Skype and SkypeOut your salespeople. Faceskype can cross-sell ads, offer buy-once-and-show-up-everywhere campaigns, improve the sociability and relevance of Skype client ads, offer click-to-call features to Facebook advertisers, etc. TO DO.
Location check-in sync. Start showing my Facebook Places check-ins in my Skype history and offer to let me check into Facebook Places using mobile Skype. TO DO.
Workplace editions. Is Facebook’s Yammer-killer just a rumor? Skype is committing to the enterprise too, so both teams should be imagining together. TO DO.
Comcast briefed GigaOm on their new Skype product (720p@30fps webcam, RF remote control, adapter box with HDMI) and an app designed for television, coming early next year. Some integration with your Comcast account for importing contacts. Skype will only partner with Comcast for the next few years, so too bad if you are one of the 81% of customers served by other ISPs. You’ll have to buy a television with Skype inside or dedicate a computer to running Skype on your television.
Licensed family counseling and psychotherapy over Skype. The BC practice says “the new virtual service removes the factor of geographical proximity, and caters to clients who find traditional settings limiting.” Don’t miss your session because you’re in a small town or far from home.
¶17. (U) Use of New Media: Post is continually searching for ways to expand the reach of our programs using new technologies and social media. We have provided laptops to grantee organizations to loan to exchange participants so they can blog and skype while in the U.S. This year’s Youth Ambassadors blogged about their experience in the US on Globo’s internet site, the number two internet portal in Brazil. The Youth Ambassadors also regularly use MSN, Yahoo groups and Orkut – a social networking site more popular than Facebook in Brazil – to keep in touch with each other and friends. PA has established a Mission "New Technologies" Working Group that will bring together members from across the mission to brainstorm ideas for the best uses of new media to transmit our messages and expand our programming, especially to the young and tech-savvy. Opportunities for New Educational Programs and Challenges to Implementation
Skype is diplomatic kit, like all other social media.
Catching you up,an 18-year-old first-year female cadet reported consensual sex with a male student at the Australian Defence Force Academy “was broadcast, without her knowledge, to six other Defence Force members watching in another room.” Some of the other cadets were under 18. Photos were taken of the video, then shared. The secret sex video was streamed via Skype.
Rounding out the story: the ADF started a criminal investigation; the female cadet was offered counseling for privacy violation; the female cadet was punished at the same time for an unrelated matter, raising questions about insensitivity; ADF heads have started to roll; and it’s now a political football. Some call it “the Skype affair.”
The privacy Skype offers users is what made it an attractive tool for the college students.
As people use technology more, online behavior more accurately reflects good and evil offline behavior. This incident is more evidence Skype is becoming ordinary, showing humanity with all its flaws and glory.
Channel 10. ADF cadet sex ‘broadcast on webcam’. Video interview with ‘Kate.’ 5 April 2011.
Sydney Morning Herald. Defence ‘culture’ to go under microscope after sex scandal. 11 April.
ABC. ADFA head stood aside pending multiple inquiries. 11 April.
Think of Skype as a game. Skype’s gameplay and the game mechanics optimize for SkypeOut. Anything which doesn’t produce SkypeOut behavior, directly or nearly so, is hidden or removed. Skype to Skype calling is merely training for SkypeOut. Free Skype video calling is just bait to keep you playing until you’re ready to pay for a SkypeOut subscription (or a premium video subscription). The game’s navigation topology (topography), reward and punishment loops, models of character portrayal and self expression, social gestures, twitch-reflex conditioning, control surface design — all of it screams "move just one step closer to SkypeOut."
This is a limited and self-defeating game design strategy. Skype is the only game in this space right now. That will not last long. So let’s consider the basis of competition among games or gaming platforms that endure.
Some platforms follow the Hollywood portfolio model: produce a hundred games and a few will be blockbusters that pay for the whole business. Others emphasize different mental states like martial kata training that leads to victorious personal combat, or the diligence of farm cultivation, or solving mindbenders. Some software that promotes positive real world social behavior, like sharing restaurant reviews or updating map locations or endorsing events.
Most games, per Zynga, have a shelf life of weeks. So you can appreciate their portfolio model. How do you break from the flavor-of-the-month mold? What games spread? What games persist? What games evolve with mass culture, the aging of their users, advances in technology?
I’d look to World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. Their game mechanics are tied to ongoing subscription revenue, like Skype. Yet their approach to game design is fundamentally different. Warcraft hits at multiple levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy like physical survival, security, prosperity, belonging, friendship, family, and esteem. Warcraft even provides a medium for expressing morality, pursuing curiosity, enjoying spontaneity, solving problems, stepping back for bigger pictures, and developing new talents and skills. People find meaning in their WoW experience. It changes how they work and live. It changes who they are.
Skype is shaping itself as little more than a utility, like a headset you put on to talk while you do something else. There is no higher purpose, no deeper fulfillment, no rewards beyond figuring out how to dial the phone.
As Skype stands, it cultivates the illusion that nothing is between you and the other people in a call. Skype staff want fidelity and a palpable sense of being there that dissolves the walls and windows and leaves you immersed in the conversation. This is hard. And admirable. But it is only hard the first time; once someone has shown the way, fidelity can be replicated. We saw that when rivals adopted the GIPS codecs Skype used. And fidelity is only admirable at first blush; high fidelity suffers from the tolerance we build to good things we take for granted.
So Skype needs more than fidelity. It needs more than being everywhere.
It needs a higher calling.
That higher calling will require rethinking Skype as a game.
Which higher calling? Let me suggest a few.
Immersion. Fidelity is just the first step into an immersive experience. Skype could fill The Augmented Reality Gap for conversation. Mobility lets us talk untethered. Augmenting conversation lets us use newly commercialized technologies to have better conversations wherever we are. Today we go to the Internet to talk. Tomorrow, Skype could bring your slice of the Internet to and into your conversations. Skype for Talk That’s Real.
Work. Help people work together, collaborate to perform knowledge work. This is a deep vein to mine and profitable. Focus on work cultures, work organization structures, on work planning, on the fight for resources. Unleash the world’s cognitive surplus. Skype for people who Get Things Done Together.
Learning. Students are taking control of their learning. Like the shift from linear cable channels to on demand video, education is moving from lockstep classrooms to just-in-time education, learning journeys, self-directed and learning in small teams. Conversation is fundamental to how kids and adults learn and remember. Knowledge flow, people sharing what they know, affects corporate values. Know more through Skype.
Play. Young men spend more hours playing video games than watching television. Or YouTube. Become the must-have tool for team talk, the height of realtime collaboration. Be the engine for talking during casual games, where checkers give you the excuse to just hang out. Be the back channel for amateur sports where fans share a game when they can’t share a room. Skype for Fun.
UPDATE: Tying this back to game design (or software design in general), Why shapes What shapes How. For example, a Skype for Getting Things Done Together might trade Skype’s instant messaging metaphor for a calendar/scheduling + status update metaphor. Instead of contacts+history you’d emphasize plans (for conversations) and actions. A calling beyond talk offers Skype a precious freedom to reimagine user experience.
Whatever your take, Skype needs more relevance than a can with string.
Shelly Terrell lists 21 Skype resources for teachers. The community of educators using Skype as instructional technology is growing quickly, but is still small compared to the millions of teachers who could use it now. A small investment by Skype would change that. Here’s how I’d start spreading Skype faster in education this October.
Establish credibility.
Hire a Master Educator as curator, spokesperson, and convener.
Assemble advisory boards led by Skype’s Master Educator. Boards for K-12 Faculty, School Administration, Workplace/Industrial/Adult Training, EduTech, and Education Sciences.
Skype.edu thought leadership blog, video channel, facebook and twitter accounts
Annual Skype at School unconferences
Help teachers discover each other, triggering Skype conversations.
Classroom-to-Classroom Software Innovation grant. Sponsor an educational not-for-profit to set up and run a classroom matching service. "My second year Spanish language students will trade 30 minutes of 1-to-1 English conversation for 30 minutes of 1-to-1 Spanish conversation between 9am and 3pm London time."
Skype in Education forum category in Skype’s forums.
Promote the #eduSkype hashtag for everyone seeking a Skype conversation for learning.
Skype.edu is your education portal. Not a portal to sell to academic organizations but a portal to promote educational uses of Skype.
Cultivate communication for Communities of Practice. Each CoP has its own media and conversation channels, and you’ll reach out through them. A great way to build social approval, discover innovations, and spread better practices.
Instructional Technologists. Overview of lifecycle management, provisioning, Mailing list and forum.
Curriculum Developers (tailored to academic disciplines). Skype in Civics Education, in Maths Education, in language skills, etc.
Technology Curriculum Developers are a special case. Teach the Skype SDKs and APIs. Provide developer and education institutional discounts.
Administrators. Guide with an overview of instructional use, pricing, privacy and security measures. Mailing list for news tailored to principals, school boards, financial officers. Forum.
Students. Tailor to grade level, academic interests, dominant learning styles and sensory systems, subcultures, and non-academic passions.
Parents. Help parents share the best ways for their kids to enjoy Skype’s benefits and to manage the Internet’s risks.
Specialized Instruction. There are millions of students in home schooling, parochial schools, vocational schools, military schools, and other vectors.
Social services and justice systems. Non-school government agencies concerned with the education and welfare of children.
Work toward a 2012 eduSkype unconference tour of world cities. Bring educators and the other stakeholders together to share and learn and work together.
Kids introduce consumer technologies into the home and bring new technologies to the workplace. Digital Equipment put the PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers into colleges and high schools in the 1970s, becoming a fixture among graduates. Apple used its consumer power, built in schools with the Apple II, to sneak the Mac into the 1980s workplace. The strategy works.
Education is being rethought, retooled, and rededicated. Skype needs a house champion to speak for Skype, to find Skype’s champions in the education community, to bring the benefits of Skype’s network to students everywhere.
Some kinds of things you want sealed tight, no way to get inside and see how things work.
Software as a whole isn’t like that. The practice of software development depends on learning from the shared code of others. So it’s very useful for systems to expose parts of themselves to third-party programmers. It’s a way to share ideas, how the creators modeled things, to show how it was done so you can improve on it, to use it as a base on which to build. These affordances for programmers, these APIs, they are the shoulders of others, the foundations on which new generations build new structures, and express themselves with new arts, and solve problems not imagined by those who came before.
Where you show the guts and how to change them, a portion of the users become better informed. And a portion of them move on to become real engineers and artists.
This has always been true. For centuries. You could look at how a Jacquard loom worked or a Whitney gin and fix them. Or build your own.
Where games open up the ability to create levels or worlds or avatars or abilities or whatever, masses jump in to experiment and customize and create and share. Exposing your system’s guts unleashes innovation.
But we’re in a market economy. And keeping how you do what you do a secret is thought smart business. So we see Apple ban anything which would let an iPhone or iPad or iPod user write programs on the device they own. You have to buy a Mac and buy permission before you can code on your Apple mobile device.
So a generation will never get the chance to get under the surface. A generation will never get to play with how things work, to stretch themselves, to peel back the layers and layers of abstraction and functionality until their first Hello World! A generation is being denied the literacy to think critically about the software they use. A generation is denied the tools to express themselves through software, hobbling speech and the communities that emerge from that speech. A generation taught to be passive and helpless and rely on Apple Inc’s beneficence and their parents’ pocket change.
This is not a problem with Apple alone, not even of software alone. The same problem applies to household chemistry, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, and automobiles. We need generations empowered to hack their genes, to repair the flocking behavior of the bots inside their cars, to calibrate their neuroceuticals before an exam. Life skills, right?
That’s why society benefits when Apple, or Skype for that matter, chooses to expose more of how they do things to the world. And that’s why you should buy your kids and your schools and your day care centers the digital book readers and tablets and phones and desktops that are not child proofed. Buy the more open platform. Build on the more open platform. Invest in the more open platform.
The class of 2100 will thank you.
photo credit: Emma T photography: Fixing the Fiat 500. "Boys learn to be mechanics at an early age in Cuba. This nine-year-old was learning how to fix an engine under the watchful eye of his father."
This peer service delivery was asymmetric, each side of the conversation performing different roles. This is different than most mutual classroom exchanges where, for example, Spanish and English native speakers spend 30 minutes in each language at the same level.
Skype brought the two classrooms together without travel costs, parental permissions, and time spent out of the classroom.
Most important, it let two teachers experiment with their curricula, quickly, cheaply, without any new capital investment. Just two Skype webcams running on classroom computers.
Private lesson; live on the Skype video conferencing service. Intended for intermediate to advanced acoustic guitar players
Cost: $75 for one hour lesson ($ in US or CAN)
Requirements:
Skype application (available for free on skype.com); High-speed internet connection; Web-cam & Microphone and headphones; A Paypal account; Guitar
The lessons:
I’ll be teaching parts of my songs, exercises, technique, tricks, extended techniques, open tunings, interpretation, textures and how to incorporate all that in an original composition and answer any question regarding my guitar playing or gear, etc.
Robinson says bringing classrooms together to study each others’ language restores culture education, improving the quality of instruction. He demos Skype, shows how to find other classrooms through ePals, and offers a pedagogy.
He rightly ignores the sunk costs of computing and communications infrastructure. These new capabilities are free or nearly so, and ride atop previous investments.
Soldiers head to war, Skype their mothers. "I’ll Skype as much as I can. But Mom would like me to call every day, all day long, Skype every day, all day long. It doesn’t exactly work that way," joked SPC Forney. Capital News 9, Albany, New York.
The World Mind Network advocates Skyping to improve the world. One conversation at a time.
"Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love." New York Times Magazine.
Skype in Schools is a directory of teacher and educational technologists, their want-ads to find other schools to talk with over Skype, and shared experiences about using Skype in schools. It’s becoming a great resource. Is your school Skyping yet?
Kids will learn geography, and maybe a little more about people, using Skype this year. Silvia Tolisano’s Around The World with 80 Schools project will help her primary school visit briefly with other schools around the globe over Skype. Short calls to say hello and introduce yourselves. Your school can sign up on the Langwitches blog.
Such a great way to learn it’s a big world, people are different and the same, it’s a flat world with access only a click away, not everyone speaks English, languages are barriers you must overcome to be a part of the world, time zones matter in a flat world, and seasons differ.
Your kids can Skype Santa (Florida time, Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays through 7 December, 4-5pm) @SandestinResort.
ex Wilhelm: “Microsoft is a major player in the Business Software Alliance, along with Apple and 27 other companies. And the BSA supports SOPA.” Learn more and do more to prevent the Internet Blacklist laws.
Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, both approaching feature parity, both now with group screen sharing for Premium subscribers. You can IM and video call Facebook friends from within Skype, although this does not include voice calls (unless you unplug your webcam), conference calls or group video calls. Jonathan Rosenberg explains Skype is hosting supernodes on AWS EC2, is operating a gateway for Facebook identity/directory interop, the calls are flowing p2p through the Skype network, and Facebook is keeping some records about users and their activity. Darrell Etherington thinks this could make Skype even more popular, and Skype should integrate Facebook into Skype’s mobile and tablet apps. Skype promotional video for the release (QuickTime).
Join the Skype 6.X Text Chat Room