Tom Green pioneered using Skype video to bring viewers into his home television studio. Here’s Tom testing a combination of twitter, Skype and his pet huskies.
I noticed you can’t see Skype’s logo, which is a requirement of their broadcast terms of service. On Skype for Windows 5, Tools > Options > Advanced Settings > “Show Skype watermark during calls” will do the job.
When you Skype your guest appearance on Oprah Winfrey‘s talk show, Harpo Productions overnights a "Skype Kit." It’s a briefcase with goodies. Here’s what’s inside:
Foam padding to protect the contents.
A laptop with Skype pre-installed, clickable from the Windows desktop, set to start on Windows launch, and to automatically log in to a Harpo Productions Skype account.
Power brick for the laptop.
Ethernet cable to connect to the laptop to your router or DSL/cable modem.
A one-page color guide to connecting your Harpo skype kit in 8 easy steps.
A RØDE directional condenser microphone (NTG1 or NTG2) with WSVM foam windshield for studio quality audio.
A desk-sized microphone tripod.
A keepsake pen
A prepaid return shipping label.
You’ll want to do a few things on the provider side to keep your kit fresh.
Clean the laptop. You really want to remove flopsweat from the screen, keyboard, and trackpad.
Check for new Skype updates monthly. Newer versions are more stable, improve quality, and use your bandwidth and CPU better.
Replace your webcam annually. The quality goes up, the price goes down. If you buy new kits, you’re better off buying an In Store SolutionsFreetalk Everyman HD webcam. Same price point, but 720p if processor and bandwidth allow.
Other instructions arrive separately: where to set up, lighting and sound concerns, what to wear, makeup and hair tips, reminders for other people to keep quiet and out of the shot, etc.
Oh, and this has nothing to do with yesterday’s SkypeKit announcement.
Skype earned market acceptance when Oprah said "I love Skype" in 2008. Skype started to become a household name as Oprah brought guests to her her weekday show.
Thursday, a year later, she spent an hour in Skype’s honor. Nothing happened; Skype’s download rate didn’t budge.
The "Where the Skype Are You?" show aired Thursday, 05/21/09, at 4:00 pm in most US and Canada markets, rolling across time zones. U.S. Memorial Day weekend might have dampened the "Oprah Effect." A few weeks’ earlier, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a Nielsen Television rating of 5.4, 6,197,000 audience, and 7,110,000 viewers for the week of 04/27 – 05/03 2009.
Why didn’t Oprah’s Skype day work?
The small problem: The tone was wrong. It felt like an infomercial more than a celebration of broadband Internet’s ubiquity. Oprah’s delivery was wooden, the Skype conversations banal, video quality variable.
This episode must have looked great on paper. Skype reinforces several Oprah themes: Surviving tough economic times by using free or cheaper tools. The importance of family and communication. That we live in a connected world and affect each other.
Sadly, Oprah’s regulars already knew the Skype basics, having seen dozens of guest appearances over Skype. Skype day became a "best of" show; not the most exciting format.
The huge problem: Fans could not Skype Oprah.Unlike twitter, where Oprah created an account that everyone could follow and message, Oprah did not give out a Skype account for fans to befriend. People want to be closer to their celebrities so, for example, they followed Oprah on twitter; 1,182,301 at last count.
Why couldn’t a million fans Skype Oprah?
Twitter scales well for their news and celebrity users (ones with high TV ratings). Fame changes relationships from symmetrical (we friend each other) to off the charts. 1,182,301 twitterers follow Oprah, Oprah follows 14.
Could Skype handle an Oprah account? Or a Coke, a White House, or an American Idol account? What would happen if someone with a fan base used the web and television to invite a million people to befriend them in Skype? No PSTN, just in-network Skype activity. One user with a million friends.
Skype is engineered for the average user, with a handful of contacts and modest levels of activity. For the most part, Skype’s network is thin, flat, like the long tail in a power curve.
Power skypers, like Skype Journal readers and those who work at Skype or who use Skype for selling, may have a few hundred or a few thousand contacts.
Stressors come to mind:
Approval work flow. Can you imagine opening up your Skype client in the morning to approve a hundred new contacts? You might get through 100 in 15 minutes if you click ‘add to contacts’ blindly. 1000 per day at 6 seconds each? Almost two hours. A million? 1,666 hours, about nine months. For all practical purposes, this must be automated.
Client Account Storage. Can your Skype client hold a million contacts? No. Even if it was the only software running and you had all the memory in the world, your Skype client was never built to hold that large a contact list. While some enterprises have hundreds of thousands of employees and and millions of stakeholders, Skype for Windows or Mac will slow to a crawl and crash when loading that many contacts. Let’s say each new contact’s profile, avatar, and history uses .1 MB. The contact list alone would be 100k MB. Skype still thinks like a phone or mobile phone company, not like a social network.
Presence and Activity Streams. Skype updates your friends when you log on, log off, or otherwise change your presence. A Skype client would be very busy with hundreds of thousands of mood and availability updates. Presence data might be very useful to the celebrity if you want to narrowcast updates ("today’s show is about puppies") only to people who are online; no need for you to see the message when you log in next week.
Navigation. Skype’s UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
Filtering contact activity. If you friend them, they will IM, call, and send you files. I sometimes have a dozen public chats and private conversations going at once; dizzying. What happens when ten thousand people try to chat with you during today’s financial conference call? You must automate your responses in ways that produce meaningful experiences and that route callers to relevant people and services.
Public vs. shades of private. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman revealed a deep flaw in Skype’s identity system. Her MegAtWork Skype account was different than her personal account, and she could only log in to one at a time. Techniques vary, but a celebrity must be able to manage personal, family, workplace, acquaintances, and fans from one login, disclosing only as appropriate.
Swamping Skype supernodes and relays. What happens when one node on the Skype network connects with five to ten percent of the whole network? Can enough supernodes emerge in Chicago for Oprah, for example, to support all the new connections, updates and conversations? Will this hurt the experience of other Skype users in Chicagoland? How much of updating is done directly between a Skype client and Skype’s presence and client-backup servers? Can that client-server connection be swamped as the volume rises four to five orders of magnitude over the norm?
No server side messaging, voice, video APIs. No software developer in their right mind wants to build and operate their own IM gateway. Think thousands of Skype clients running on hundreds of boxes, each needing careful administration. Instead they want to talk to a web service API. Services like IMified (congratulations, Voxeo!) let you design and run bots for the AIM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google networks in hours, and without your getting into the gateway business. Skype isn’t on the list because it doesn’t host a public web service interface to the Skype network.
Why would Oprah want a million Skype fans?
Why would a brand or celebrity want to have a Skype relationship with so many people? For companies on Cluetrain 1.0 (markets are conversations) and moving to Cluetrain 2.0 (markets are relationships), Skype offers opportunities for engagement and intimacy. Unlike blogs or services like twitter, Skype conversations are held privately.
How will Oprahs engage?
Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
Deliver services. You could sign up for Oprah’s book club, update Oprah’s magazine subscriptions, get the link for the episode you missed, get local show times for next week, or suggest a show topic. Harpo Productions could support those services through a blend of voice mashups and call centers. How about Skyping an Oprah account that played a Skype video of her last show, or a show on demand?
Bring fans together. Introduce fans with similar interests to each other. Host thousands of small salons in Skype public chats before or after a show, or about a theme or a magazine topic. Help the millions find others to solve problems, share burdens, and make sense of the world.
Remote participation via Skype in television production is disruptive technology: vastly more convenient, orders of magnitude cheaper, and lower but tolerable quality than other forms of electronic field production.
Cost. Today’s remote live video shoots might cost $25k+ for satellite time, gear, van, and a crew (camera operator, sound recordist, producer, hair & make-up artist, lighting technician). This is more production value than a field reporter
On the other hand, let’s say it costs $10k for a high-end Mac including free Skype software, webcams, insurance, geek time, mobile Internet, and a mobile phone for the control channel. Spread the cost over twenty guests/interviews, you might spend $500 for a shoot where the guest hooks themselves up in 15 minutes (power into the laptop, plug in the webcam, turn it on, fire up Skype, press the green "Video Call" button). And now guests like Kutcher are Skype-ready; no cost to you.
Convenience. With broadband in many places, with laptops and webcams benefiting from Moore’s Law, you can overnight a Skyped-up laptop with a good webcam and a good microphone, ready to go tomorrow. Or your guest runs out to Best Buy or RadioShack for a webcam and is back and ready in 90 minutes.
Acceptable Quality. Skype doesn’t capture in hi-def and most webcams don’t use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Skype can reproduce 640×480@30fps with high end webcams, good enough for talking heads. You can see that Ashton’s end of the show is poorly lit, color balance is off, he’s not been through hair or makeup (or wardrobe), his office is badly decorated to get unlicensed art off the wall behind him. Nobody cares.
Skype’s dialtone made that show possible without blowing the show’s budget, without flying Kutcher from his office at Katalyst Films to Chicago for three days, spending five hours hosting a remote crew at his office, or even three hours to drive to a local television station for fifteen minutes of air time. It was almost as easy as having someone phone in. But with better audio and with live two-way video.
This changes the economics of television production. Don’t ration your remote guest spots because they cost too much or take too long to prep. Just Skype them to your studio, enrich your program with live, just-in-time feeds on the cheap.
People are bringing Skype into the workplace. Millions solve problems, lower costs, create new services, work more effectively, and unleash human talent. The O Show is just one of the most visible.
Skype is what iChat could have become with funding and management support. Although we’re still waiting on multiparty video.
Skype Lite For iPhone OS 3, later this year.
The best Skype experiences need push and sync services you’ll find in 3.
Verizon buys Skype.
Or another US mobile carrier. 0% growth in wireless minutes, 20% growth in data; time to sell services that drive data growth.
Three US carriers will sell low end Skypephones this year.
Maybe if carriers won’t spend a few billion to buy Skype, they’ll partner to build data plan sales and consumption.
Skype asks the new FCC to force mobile Carterfone rules on US carriers.
A new administration could be very interested in the political appeal of consumer-friendly rules.
Google buys Skype.
Would complement Google Voice, Goog411, Google Talk, Android and all the other realtime conversation projects, filling in gaps and serving non-Google customers. Skype’s new evidence-based management culture might fit too.
Cisco buys Skype.
Telepresence at the high end, WebEx in the bigco, Skype everywhere else.
Skype Lite now supports video.
I wish. Completely depends on the handset, on features turned off/on by carriers, on the quality/capacity of 3G.
Rupert Murdoch buys Skype.
Skype already partners with MySpace, a NewsCorp company. Could Skype branded mobile and desktop tools help sell other NewsCorp television, sports, business, and games content?
Skype launches DENIM, a new video codec for mobiles.
Skype depends on On2 for video codecs. How long before Skype decides it’s better to own than to rent? Skype’s SILK codec proves they’ve decided that before.
Microsoft buys Skype.
MSN and Windows Live Messenger are both insanely popular IM products, but neither of the ad-supported products convinced people to use voice, video, or PSTN features. After Microsoft buys Yahoo!, they may have enough loose cash to pick up Skype. Skype has a newly upgraded client for Windows Mobile.
Skype mobile clients support video calls.
An oft requested feature.
Nokia buys Skype.
Just a long ferry ride from Tallinn. It would explain Nokia’s Barcelona announcement to ship smartphones with Skype later this year. Skype has mobile products all three Nokia OS’s: Symbian, Maemo/Linux, and java.
Skype becomes location-aware.
Sort those contact lists by proximity. Update mood messages automatically by zone ("leaving the office"). Filter directory search results.
Columnist David Pogue in a New York Times article reviewing Skype 4.0 starts by going back to the AT&T video phone demonstrated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and user experience from then. Not a lot of calls due to technical and psychological issues. He talks about why Skype has been so widely accepted (did he remind us it was “free”?) and why Skype has been a survivor when up against iChat, MSN Messenger, SightSpeed and others.
He goes on to mention several issues that have inhibited video calling in the past but then says:
The video quality still varies when you use Skype. Fast Internet connections and fast computers still work better than slow ones. But if you do have a good setup — wow. With certain Logitech or Philips webcam models, Skype 4.0 can deliver a picture that’s as big and sharp and smooth as a TV picture (30 frames a second, 640 by 480 pixels), with almost no delay.
In my test calls to friends in California, New York and Virginia, we were amazed at what a difference it makes when the delay goes away. (Maybe, for its next trick, Skype can lend its technology to the world’s cellphone carriers.)
He then went on to make calls using iChat, ooVoo and SightSpeed: “None of them matched Skype’s immediacy or video and audio quality.” He discusses Skype’s new level of audio quality (with the SILK codec) and reduced network bandwidth speed requirement. He mentions some features that he would still like to see and mentions what differentiates services such as SightSpeed. His closing comment places Skype video calling into a historical perspective:
….. Will we one day adjust to the idea of being on camera every time someone calls?
Nah.
In the end, video chatting isn’t a replacement for phone calls, but a supplement to them, a perfect way to check out someone’s new place, check in with distant family and friends or show off a new talent (or baby). They saw the possibilities back in 1964 — they just didn’t realize that we wouldn’t always want to use them.
Go read David’s post (free registration may be required); it’s an excellent yet objective review of the personal video calling space from the end user perspective. I guess David doesn’t watch Oprah; she seems to be using Skype High Quality Video almost daily according to reports from my wife.
About 1 minute 40 seconds into this bit on Monday’s Oprah show. Asked how it felt to win the election…
Dr. Jill Biden: It was so bittersweet for me just because I was so happy that we had won the election. Our son was in Iraq. Behind the stage we were holding up a computer and we had our bow on –
"Millionaire has teamed up with Skype for "Ask The Expert," one of our most fun and innovative lifelines!"
From an August 2008 ABC press release: "Contestants are invited to ask an expert’s advice on any question beyond the $1,000 level. Experts appear via a live face-to-face Skype video call and will include newsmakers, journalists, former "Millionaire" contestants, politicians, doctors, professors and trivia champs, among others. Bill Nye appears during the show’s first week, airing September 8-12, and Ogi Ogas, a former "Millionaire" contestant who won $500,000, appears during week two, airing September 15-19."
This version of Millionaire is in syndication in the US. It hasn’t made Nielsen’s top-twenty-most-popular-syndicated-shows lately, but it is seen by millions of households every week.
Experts Skype in to the television studio. In this clip, Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, calls in from Pleasantville, New York.
See the little white mark in the upper left corner? He’s using Skype’s High Quality (640×480@30fps) video.
The expert is shown on a large screen in the studio, exposing him to the in-studio experience and letting the contestant get a feel for how much to trust the expert with a lifeline.
When called on, the expert and the contestant talk to each other and the production team shows them side-by-side to the audience. The expert’s reactions to being right, wrong, or not knowing add to the drama.
On the web side of the business, this is the Millionaire home page. See the Skype artwork (bottom middle with the rainbow)?
The Skype badge takes you to the "Ask an Expert" landing page. It encourages you to download Skype. "It’s free, easy and quick to get on Skype so check out all the great information below on how you can use Skype to connect with family and friends!"
This afternoon I came across this article by reporter Chris O’Brien in today’s San Jose Mercury News: “Video Chat has entered the mainstream“. It appears that the worlds of Oprah viewers and Silicon Valley geeks and reporters have more than six degrees of separation. The story starts out by talking about an email he received from his mother:
Seemingly out of nowhere, this note from her landed in my inbox: “Have you heard of Skype? Apparently you can use it to do free video calls on the computer.”
My mother, who lives just outside Kansas City, tends to be a reliable barometer for when a technology is gaining adoption outside the hermetically sealed bubble that is Silicon Valley. Well, my mom, and Oprah. As one of only a handful of people on the planet who don’t watch Oprah’s show every day, I had missed the fact that she’s recently begun using Skype to make regular video calls with her audience.
Chris goes on to report on a brief interview with Skype President Josh Silverman whom he quotes with:
And Skype has a new version in beta that will make video calling much more central to the service, according to Skype President Josh Silverman.
…. And in its new release, Skype users will be able to enlarge the video to fill the entire screen without degrading the picture quality.
Well we now know what Chris is giving his mother for Christmas. For his benefit, listed below are previous Skype Journal posts on both Skype High Quality Video and our reporting last March on Oprah’s use of Skype Video.
Chris, keep up with Skype Journal and you won’t be learning about how Skype is used from your mother.
By the way, how did I know to follow up on Chris’s interview with Skype President Josh Silverman last Wednesday? He set it up via Twitter messages with Skype PR. They had found that Twitter provided the most “immediate” asynchronous communications mode as compared to, say, email exchanges. Also speaks for the device independence of Twitter.
A final question: will we be seeing a new version of Skype High Quality Video (or better) introduced at CES in January?
This is the fifth in a series of posts resulting from an interview a week ago Friday with Josh Silverman, Skype’s recently appointed President. In this post we talk about addressing the small-to-medium business market as well as various geographical markets. Over its five years, Skype has built up, almost totally virally, a significant base of users who take advantage of Skype to not only reduce their business communications costs but also to communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers around the world. At the same time various Skype software partners have built offerings, such as Pamela, PamFax and Skylook, that either focus on Skype as a business communications tool or include Skype amongst their options for calling. Within Skype’s own offerings, the Business Control Panel provides the tools for a system administrator to handle both the deployment of Skype and the administration of Skype accounts within a business’s operations. OnState is a primary example of the latter. They have built up a call center offering that takes full advantage of both instant messaging chat and voice in dealing with both inbound and outbound calls; they also take advantage of the three founders’ combined over sixty years’ experience participating in the call center market. Yet, they encountered many opportunities where they had to go back to Skype for assistance since, for one reason or another, Skype’s program were insufficient to address business users’ requirement. The result is that today OnState offers their customers “one stop shopping” whereby, on acquiring a customer, OnState takes on responsibility for addressing Skype subscription needs, hardware requirements (headsets and handsets, implementation issues and first level technical support. The Business Control Panel has had its limitations also; the main fear has been to mitigate potential for fraudulent or unauthorized activity through transaction value and volume licensing limits. As for geographical markets, Skype met a much larger need for communications cost reductions in Europe and Asia than in North America. As a result over 80% of Skype’s revenues continue to come from outside the U.S. The two primary needs met in North America are for “Friends and Family” calling outside North America and small businesses who are working to grow internationally – both internally and with their suppliers and customers. In growing internationally, there has been the challenge of building user bases in widely diverse markets; “free”, “easy-to-install” and a whole lot of viral marketing action have introduced significant adoption around the world. But this success has led to more business-oriented challenges in working out termination agreements, establishing effective multi-currency transaction systems (although being an eBay co-unit of PayPal certainly helps), multiple language versions of software (27 at last count) and providing multi-lingual, internationally available technical support. (We’ll talk about marketing and more about technical support in future posts in this series.) We asked Josh about the Skype’s approach to the business market:
JS: Skype in the business market. There’s more that needs to be done. (you guys are smart, you’re asking all the right questions). Platform is a huge opportunity for us; business is another big opportunity for us. About half of the communications market is business; we have a great solution, especially for small-to-medium size businesses. We haven’t tailored that solution to businesses very much; we haven’t communicated to businesses that we have that solution. In the new organizational design one of the pieces of that will be to build out a business unit focused on small-to-medium size businesses where we’ll have some resources available to tailor our product and some sales and marketing resources to work … I don’t think that we’ll be directly selling to small-to-medium size businesses but we can work with VAR’s to help support them in bringing Skype to businesses.
(Note this interview occurred two weeks prior to last week’s announcement of Skype for Asterisk, a program that leverages Digium’s Asterisk reseller channel for sales, implementation and ongoing support requirements.) We then moved on to ask about various geographical markets: SJ: North America. (Thank God for Oprah!) Skype has become much more a household name this past year (with an acknowledgement to Don Albert, GM North America). What does it take to keep that business going forward in U.S. and Canada and what are the strategies for U.S. and Canada?
JS: We’re very aware that the number one way to grow Skype is to build products the users love. That is our first mandate always. Once you have a product users love, we can accelerate it by some smart marketing programs. (By the way if you don’t have a product that users love no amount of marketing on earth will save you, right?) So we do have a product that users love and I don’t think we have done as much as we could to communicate that. Oprah is a great example. It is not our intention and people should not expect massive multi-million dollar marketing budgets from Skype. But there are some smart tactical things we can do working together with evangelists like Oprah to build awareness. It’s our belief that once you’ve grown awareness, people will try it; once they try it they’ll love it. and the rest takes care of itself. At the Democratic national convention we were quite happy to see many of the national broadcasters using Skype as a way to expand their coverage and you should be looking for more programs like that in the United States in the year to come.
SJ: China is your biggest market?
JS: In terms of total users it’s one of our top markets; the answer is yes.
SJ: QQ is still kicking butt in China? What strategy do you have in your existing partnership with Tom?
JS: We have a great partnership with Tom who knows the local market very well. Tom is also a very entrepreneurial, innovative, fast moving company. We’re very pleased to be partnering with them; they’re the right partner to continue building our presence in China.
SJ: Do you have your own people in Asia?
JS: A couple of people in Asia who work with our partners to make sure they’re getting the support they need and also giving us real feedback from the market on what we need to be doing on [our] core platform to be able to support Asia better.
SJ: How about India?
JS: We don’t have anyone working in India. We don’t have a partnership in India to announce but we are seeing good growth in India but we think it’s a terrific market and we are expecting to have more focus on that in 2009 My observation, five months in, [is that] markets where Skype has the most power are markets where you have high broadband connectivity, you have a large ex-pat population, and where the local telephony system is not as efficient as it could be. Many of the developing markets meet that profile so we think we have a huge opportunity in developing markets such as India and it’s our intention to focus more on that in the coming year.
SJ: To succeed in the mobile market place, mobile device manufacturers have had to build carrier relationships. What does Skype need to do with either handset manufacturers and/ or carriers to succeed in the mobile market?
JS: I don’t think the carriers should be able to dictate what software the users get to use. any company, the smallest startup in the world, if it has really outstanding software ought to be able to take on the whole world and not have to hire 50 people to develop relationships with 300 carriers.
Skype‘s fifth birthday is 29 August. As we count down, two huge milestones changed Skype’s future in the last twelve months.
The bad one happened last month.
29 July 2008
BT buys Ribbit natural monopoly talk for all onlives
1. BT purchased Ribbit.
Ribbit is the platform play Skype might have been. They are ready to start scaling. And now they have the money, customer base, telecom core, and international operations to reach their potential.
Ribbit seeks to become a natural monopoly for the web’s talkification.
Like Skype, Ribbit worked for years to build a software and network infrastructure that combines user computers, phone networks, commerce, social networks, and the Internet.
Skype treats voice like an application, where you control the user experience to control the end-customer relationship.
Unlike Skype, Ribbit thinks of voice as a feature. Features belong in other applications. Developed by the six million people who design and code software. People who solve problems in every country, in every culture, for every situation.
And those people don’t work for Ribbit.
Or BT.
They are in the wild. Out of control.
Both BT and Ribbit are happy with that.
Happy not to control the user experience.
Happy not to control the customer relationship.
Once upon a time (a few world wars’ ago) the phone company provided your phone. One model. And it was black.
Then the phone company became a carrier. And you could use whatever phone you liked. Even pink ones for princesses.
Today you can get your Skype any way you like it, so long as it is Skype’s user interface.
Ribbit will let you get your phone any way you like it. Period.
Made by anyone who can code.
That’s what it means to have a public platform culture.
And Ribbit is bringing that culture to BT. And BT is grooving on it.
The race to add talk everywhere heated up.
The frog is no further ahead in the race, but Ribbit now has the fuel to execute on its vision.
And Skype is catching up but remains far behind.
Ribbit/BT is far from the only company building and selling web talkification infrastructure, but they are one of the few with customers, with funding, and a with a compelling architecture.
Exactly how many talkification infrastructure APIs will programmers learn? That’s how much room there is in the market.
They didn’t mean to, but when eBay offered Skype’s founders US$1.7 billion if they hit sales and census targets, eBay forced a myopic tunnel vision on the company.
Any new hire, new feature, new product, new partnership needed to advance sales, to advance user adoption. Any new idea or opportunity, no matter how strategic, that didn’t meet that payout test starved for management attention and resources.
So the Skype products didn’t change much for two years.
eBay paying off the founders and writing down the purchase left Skype with a fresh start. Free to innovate and reengineer. Free to respond to competitive threats from phone companies (like BT). Free to experiment and examine Skype’s underlying purpose and value.
Proof?
Look at the new Skype directory. Hybrid web service and rich client.
Look at how the new Skype 4 beta client is running on top of a Skype for Windows 3.8 engine, further separating UI from services, the way you must to deliver talk via browser.
Look at Skype hiring leaders from outside the phone carriers with street cred at Evite and Motorola.
Look at the coming Skypecasts service retirement.
Each of these decisions speak to a company liberated. A company becoming decisive and thoughtful in its direction.
Very good for Skype.
To recap:
A bad day: Skype isn’t even in the paradigm-shifting race to talkify the web
A good day: Skype’s US and Canadian markets are warming nicely in Oprah’s glow
A great day: Skype freed from golden shackles.
Doesn’t year six look interesting?
See also:
Video of Ribbit’s Crick Waters describing the Ribbit platform ("the voiceware economy") at the Emerging Communications Conference earlier this year. 20 minutes.
Video of Trevor Baca of Jaduka at eComm. Jaduka offers much of the same infrastructure.
worked for years to build a software and network infrastructure that combines user computers, phone networks, commerce, social networks, and the Internet. 
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