Product management has a natural tension between features and elegance, the richness of more and the simplicity of less. This is true for APIS as much as for user interfaces. Telecom technology is complex, a high learning curve for outsiders. In the last year I’ve seen Voxeo, TokBox, Skype and now Twilio expand their reach to web developers by simplifying the programming experience, hiding the details of making connections and streaming media.
Twilio announced this morning that its “Twilio Client” is just three lines of javascript.
<script src="http://static.twilio.com/libs/twiliojs/1.0/twilio.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Twilio.Device.setup(token);
Twilio.Device.connect();
//you decide what happens next
</script>
With minor code variations you can build call center, conference call, intercom, softphone, audio recording apps, and text-to-speech apps in the browser. Promoting the launch, “five developers who write the most awesome Twilio Client apps in the next 2 weeks will win new Macbook Airs, tickets to the Twilio Conference, and Twilio Swag.” I’m loving the t-shirt. For those who use the Client, Twilio is cutting the cost of audio to a quarter penny per minute.
There are similar examples. A tiny Skype client powers Facebook’s first video calling app. Its API was also dramatically simplified, removing even usernames. TokBox embeds video calls and conferences with a few lines of javascript. Voxeo launched Phono last year, also a few lines of javascript to invoke their telecom APIs.
The gold standard for realtime communication: can you reduce your cloud service to a few lines in a language four million web programmers use every day? Can you simplify the object model, prune your parameters, and limit option so what is left is pure, elegant, beautiful and useful?
art credit: Twilio
 Skype Journal called for a “naked Skype” or a “headless Skype” in 2005, before eBay bought Skype. We wanted a Skype engine without a user interface, fully scriptable, that would let us build gateways that talk to the Skype network, include Skype inside desktop applications, and embed Skype in hardware. How hard is it to leave out the user interface the next time you build a desktop client?
 Skype previewed SkypeKit at the January 2010 Consumer Electronics Show and announced a closed beta program six months’ later. One year ago today I applied to that closed developer program.
It is still closed. Out of the thousands of publishers and developers who applied to the program, nobody has been releasing apps, sharing code frameworks, revealing design prototypes (with the exception of a CES 2011 in-car OnStar with a Skype app) or otherwise showing signs of life. Skype PR is not commenting on this anniversary. Is SkypeKit dead? Or are thousands of developers exceptionally good at keeping secrets?
Beecher Tuttle speculated Skype bought the assets of group text startup 3Jam. Skype’s texting features are… uninspiring? Hiring 3Jam’s Enlai Chu might fix that. Or is it feature creep?
CallByText compromises Skype security, requiring your Skype name and password, setting you up for identity theft. (Thanks, Hudson)
Reuters reports Google and Facebook talked about buying Skype. They didn’t talk to each other, although that would be interesting. Like this is something new? Skype’s corporate affairs folks must talk to potential buyers, if only to understand a non-IPO deal space.
Transit Telecom screws Brazilian Skype users, cancelling Números Online Skype, using the service since January 2006.
Sony firmware update adds Skype to Bravia TVs.
3CX adds Skype Connect to its Windows PBX software.
Azerbaijan minister wants to ban Skype as a security risk. via Tamada Tales.
Ubergizmo unboxes the Logitech TV Cam for Skype. “At CES 2011, Skype on TV was a huge hit, particularly among seniors. I’ve never seen so many seemingly retired people at CES, and they were almost all excited by this.”
Mumbai police analyze Skype calls to find gangsters.
Australian Skype for Vodafone mobile users will pay $3 monthly for Skype-to-Skype calls. Cheaper than previous plans.
California “elder law” attorneys to bill for Skype consultations. “…legal documents professionally produced in a virtual law firm environment.”
MyChelle Dermaceuticals licensed estheticians to bill for Skype consultations. “MyChelle’s expert team is on-hand to provide professional, effective treatment and skin care recommendations with a custom selection of pure, clean MyChelle Dermaceuticals products.”
Skype’s Skytools framework used to “construct a large fault-tolerant cluster of PostgreSQL.” Hundreds in production. Skytools.
Patch to Skype for Mac zero day vulnerability coming next week.
Don Kennedy announced his update to a working example in C#. “The latest version 4.1.0.0 Includes a fully customizable complete IVR system. You can still use the DTMF command/response interface.” From the release notes:
- Optional Complete Custom IVR for Skype ("Interactive Voice Response") system
- Secure and limited access features
- Process calls from only specific Skype Online numbers as many as 10
- Supports running multiple copies for single or groups of Skype Online numbers
- Skype inbound/outbound Skype call processing including:
- Skype to Skype calls
- PSTN to Skype calls
- Skype to PSTN calls
- Skype conference calls using both PSTN to Skype and Skype to Skype
- Skype call transfer
- Voicemail playback in calls
- Skype Speed-Dial Numbers
- Asynchronous TCP port processing using Skype public API methods
- DTMF recognition for both inbound and outbound calls using the Goertzel algorithm
- Same call recovery logic for DTMF commands. No need to hang up and try again
- "Call Me Back" mode for Skype
I cannot tell if Don’s sample code is in the public domain or otherwise licensed.
Don Kennedy is a fixture in the Skype Forums and an adept at the Skype desktop client Public APIs.
I posted 8 Skype hacks for decentralized Agile teams earlier this week. Assembla provides tools for programmers and posted about their mostly positive experiences with distributed pair programming. They tweaked the experience to avoid synchronous (live) work, supporting different time zones.
 Great session at the Bay Area Agile Manager’s Meetup last night. A frequent question at these meetups is how to adapt agile software development practices, including scrum, to distributed teams. These processes are intensely social, usually with physical barriers lowered so co-located teammates can see the card walls and each other. Nobody had universal answers or a comprehensive theory. A few Skype suggestions:
- Dial in. For team cohesion, offsite team members video Skype to the daily standup meeting. [I forget which scrum veteran told this story; thanks!] You can extend this to the other scrum meetings: sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Video, with a good speakerphone, is almost like being there. Skype’s new group video conferencing lets you bring nine off-site people into your meeting.
- Remote pair programming. In pair programming, two programmers work together at one screen. One codes, paying attention to the mechanics of code construction while the other reviews the work and navigates within the broader context. The two produce more relevant and higher quality code than they could separately. How can we get the benefits of pair programming if the two are at separate computers? I’ve never tried this but it should work: Turn on Skype desktop screen sharing during a voice call with your programming partner. You’re both seeing the same things and can talk to each other. You might even be in the same room but give yourselves elbow room.
- IM team backchannels. If your team doesn’t have an IM backchannel, it should. Skype’s persistent chat means your conversations continue, even when other people are offline.
- Translation bot. I’m only assuming your backchannels are in your company language. Take advantage of the free Chat Translator and Speaker for Skype, which pipes your IMs through Google for live machine translation.
- Ambient video wallpaper. Open up a full screen video call on a large monitor (or television) and just leave it on. Skype uses this to connect two offices in different cities at two water coolers. It offers for a sense of being connected and the opportunity for chance conversation. No reason not use them to bring remote/home workers into your workspace. (Just remember to dress for work at home.)
- IM notifications and alerting. The Skype Public API makes it easy to write apps that will pipe notifications from code repositories, test frameworks, and work tracking into Skype text chats. Ping me if you’d like an introduction or referrals to programmers who can guide you through getting started.
- Avoid distractions. Skype offers the ability to turn off bells, beeps, and bloips for each chat room. The /alertsoff and /alertsoff IM commands give you control. Skype says:
“/alertsoff” Disable message alert notifications.
“/alertson [text]” Allows you to specify exactly what needs to appear in a chat for the chat to pop up. For example, /alertson London will only alert you when the word “London” appears in the chat.
P.S. A quick poll showed Pivotal Tracker is the community’s second favorite story status tracker. First is physical post-it notes or cards on a wall. The user experience was so delightful that whole teams used the tool without fuss, including non-techie types and scrum newbies. It’s hard to beat adoption.
P.P.S. I have a notion to generate Skype conference rooms for each story using the Skype GoLive chat command and a unique story code/number. Could be automated but I’m petrified of the easy interruptions GoLive brings.
Let me know if you’ve tried any of these methods and how they worked for you. Perhaps they’ll find their way into common agile life.
This is a guest post by Tim Panton, telephony/web 2.0 troublemaker. @steely_glint.
I’m a regular visitor to the Voipuser’s conference – which is a weekly conference call about VoIP. The call is hosted on ZipDX’s wideband conference bridge. The quality of the guests combined with the HD audio on the bridge means that the recordings make decent pod casts.
For about a year now, we have been running a Skype gateway so that people who couldn’t or didn’t have time to set up a SIP device could call in (free) via skype.
Like most conference calls, it works best with a text back channel so that URLs, part numbers, email addresses etc. don’t need to be laboriously spelled out. For historical reasons this is an IRC channel on freenode.net. So a typical user would have a softphone fired up on their laptop for the audio and an IRC client for the text.
Skype users are very loyal to skype chat, so a few weeks ago I started looking at trying to bring the IRC chat to them in a more convenient way. Last week I got an experimental system running that did just that. Here is a sample of the result:
A skype chat bridged to gtalk via irc.
In some ways that looks like an ordinary skype chat. Indeed for the skype user, that is exactly how it behaves, except that messages from the vuc.me user are in fact from multiple IRC users.
If you look a little more carefully, you’ll see that there is discussion of a gtalk connection (google talk). That’s because I’d also made the system support connections from gtalk too.
So users from all three of the ‘islands’ in the VoIP world (SIP, Skype and GoogleTalk) could all participate on an equal basis in a conference about VoIP. Not only that, but their IM messages were also exchanged freely, all with the correct attribution.
How was this done?
Asterisk is the key ‘glue’ here, with it’s support for Skype and Gtalk channels. But even Asterisk doesn’t support the kind of gatewaying we needed for the IRC . For that we needed the (excellent) asterisk-java package which communicates with Asterisk and allows you to manage and control calls in Java. I used the PircBot package to implement an IRC connection in Java.
As this was a prototype, I didn’t want to get bogged down in writing the gateway in Java, I wanted to use something more expressive and easier on the keyboard, so I used Groovy.
The end result was a very few lines of Groovy, here is the meat of it (sorry Jay) :
Now the fun and powerful thing about this code is that it is asynchronous and event driven. Each event from Asterisk is checked to see if it triggers any of our desired actions, but this triggering is done on a fine grain – in the last block we are only interested in Skype chat messages that are to the skype id ‘vuc.me’. We can write expressive filters in code to do the matching, then define the action to carry out in just a few lines. The over all effect is like the syntax of unix’s AWK pattern matching language.
This is quite different from the kind of scripting you see in twilio, asterisk dialplan, tropo and other telephony scripting environments. They are all about call control, this is about call enhancement. A traditional telephony scripting language sets up the call, but once the 2 (or more) parties are talking they step out of the way. Here I’m adorning a live call with extra asynchronous information.
There are systems that do this sort of adornment – ZIP DX sends messages to the SIP clients throughout a call allowing phones to display the name of the current speaker – but that’s more of an endpoint feature (see also the very cool thrutu). In this case the adornment is taking place in the middle of the network and in the middle of the call – and that’s new (at least to me).
I’ll be polishing the prototype and hopefully have it deployed in a stable basis in time for next Friday’s VUC.
Phone booths in the elevator lobby of The Standard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles around 4:30am. Glass, metal, stone aren’t the warmest of places to call. Phone booths are changing from payphone anachronisms into mobile phone privacy chambers.
I startled awake at four this morning in the minimalist aesthetic of The Standard in Downtown Los Angeles, brain dissonant from the ITExpo West 2010 Avaya event last night. And a caffeine OD from the reception.
Thrown to recruit software developers, the event didn’t showcase any third-party software or show how you might build on Avaya‘s and Nortel‘s platforms.
Paul Pugh of frog sprinkled the otherworldly mind candies of modern design, cultural anthropology, industrial organization, and pretty slideware. It was like having a prestigious sculptor talk to a plumbing convention, supporting his patron and trolling for new ones.
Christian Von Reventlow proudly told of Avaya’s touch screen tablet eye candy. He said its design emphasized delightful moments in communication and collaboration, bringing joy and immersive experiences as opposed to relieving points of pain. (Immediately followed by Wendy Mikklesen‘s sales pitch to relieve CRM points of pain, in this case a generational divide: millennials don’t call. Wendy, check out danah boyd‘s field research on teens online.)
The Flare Experience team sought input from a wide range of Avaya stakeholders. Not non-Avaya stakeholders, mind you, but this is an improvement from feature bloat and blind alleys led by the biggest customers. The research led them to choose a direct-manipulation interface (touch and drag, vs. click and drag) on a proprietary tablet. Touch may give a wow! factor but simplifying and speeding up common tasks may trigger ongoing use. I hope to try it later today. The Flare software is a front end control (a service avatar) for a deeply complex and mostly closed server suite, so they are headed in the right direction. I’ll be surprised if Avaype’s (SkypAya?) promised back end integration doesn’t show up in the Flare’s Android app a year from now.
The Flare app hides complexity, and that’s great. It’s also a closed, locked-down service delivery system at a time when everyone and their brother wants to extend user experiences by writing their own components. Why not let someone mashup Google Maps with Avaya presence for new Flare wallpaper? Or add new classes of presence to the rolodex? Enrich caller ID with call center data? Enhance social peripheral vision by updating profiles with news from outside the firewall. Or add games or whatever the heck else developers want to add. So users have the choice. Hubris is the first lesson of design; the world knows more than you, so you should observe and take it in. Our software universe is an efficient marketplace of ideas and Flare launches as a closed mind.
The ITEXPO developer track (#itexpoDevCon) starts Tuesday morning in the LA Convention Center. I’m hosting three 45-minute developer panels in room 306A.
I’m looking for an audience who is more informed, vocal and opinionated on these subjects than I am. The topics can be changed and I’m up for suggestions. Care to join us? Questions you want to make sure we address? I’m at @evanwolf on twitter, evanwolf on Skype, +1-510-316-9773 on mobile or editor@skypejournal.com.
See you at the show.
After some coffee.
CORRECTION (25 Sept 2010): "we (Twilio) aren’t putting in any money… all the investment is coming from Dave McClure’s fund 500Startups."
– Danielle Morrill, Twilio
Twilio is putting $250 thousand into a seed fund for startups that use its technology. Incubator and investor 500 Startups will administer the fund.
Nobody in the Over The Top Calling Platform market has pursued the startup community with Twilio‘s fervor and effect. I’ve seen them sponsor telephony meetups, the SuperHappyDevHouse hackathon, Hacker Dojo, and are national sponsors of Startup Weekend. It’s funny for me to run into Silicon Valley acquaintances that introduce me to this cool thing called Twilio that lets you whip out phone features in record time. This leaves Voxeo, Jaduka, Skype, and Jajah struggling for mindshare among early stage IT entrepreneurs.
I’d love to see a Skype fund for startups when the Skype network API comes out. Skype could partner with angel networks and microfunds to source the talent. Skype could also be more global in its outreach than Twilio can.
Update: Don Kennedy asked me about the ROI for Twilio. Here’s how this project pays off…
- Developers see economic value associated with the 500startups co-brand of Twilio. You may not know this but 500startups is a rock star in the NYC/SF/Silicon Valley seed/angel community. See also: Dave McClure, master of 500 hats.
- Entrepreneurs learn Twilio financial basics (services, costs, prices).
- Social proof is the way developers choose their tools. This program not only builds informal social proof through personal word of mouth, it also builds public proof points.
- Today’s model of entrepreneurship requires rapid prototyping to reach Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – so they can test market demand. Twilio lets developers get going for free ($30 in free credit, where calls are $0.01/minute inbound, $0.02/minute outbound, and $0.03/SMS) until you start charging customers.
- The fund will seed 20 startups. These are investments, not gifts or loans. 500Startups Twilio has a fair chance that at least one or two will have liquidity events that more than pay for the whole program. Most portfolios like this pay for themselves.
- Twilio builds investment banker cred for when they eventually IPO or merge.
- Twilio has a chance to learn more about startups (their customers) through their close working relationship with the 500startups incubator/fund.
- For each of the 20 startups funded, 200 will apply and 2000 will think seriously about it. That’s a lot of mental rehearsal for pitching the use of the platform.
- With any luck, Twilio will discover new talent that might join the company, contribute to the platform, and nurture its ecosystem.
- With any luck, Twilio will discover new ways to use its platform that will become amazingly popular among web developers and entrepreneurs.
As a marketing project, this has the advantage of being crisp (defined spend, defined audience, defined message, defined brand value, defined publicity moments), proven (a long history of corporate and government venture and adventure funds), and respected in Silicon Valley.
Skype designed software for Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android smartphones, Nokia tablets and Symbian phones. With the launch of SkypeKit, Skype is encouraging others to design their own versions of Skype, either as a full Skype client or as Skype features in another app.
Grandstream built their own Skype client for the GXV3140 IP multimedia desk phone. If you have a GXV3140, you can point your phone’s browser to the firmware page (Beta Test page) and download the latest version. Skype provided Grandstream with broad design guidelines, which remain a proprietary secret. The team could pick any combination of SkypeKit features. The Grandstream team took six weeks to learn the SkypeKit SDK and build a working prototype, fast as these things go. Let’s walk through the 31 screenshots below and see what they chose to include or leave out, what to emphasize and and what they chose for defaults that change user behavior.
This is what the phone looks like (below). The GXV3140 supports video calling with sister phones, without Skype. The screen is 4.3”@ 480x272px. The video camera is 1.3M pixel, supporting up to 30fps. The screen is not a touch screen, so typing and navigation are through the keys on the the front of the phone or through a full USB keyboard.
You get to Skype from the main menu. Skype is one of the "Social Networks". Skype could have been in "Applications" or, with integration, you might have been able to launch a conversation from the "Phone Book" or "Call History" apps. Choices.
Skype’s logo is prominent when you highlight it. "Select" Skype using the function key corresponding to the command on the bottom command bar.
If you’re new to Skype you’ll be offered the standard disclaimer. Not enough room to read the whole thing so it gives the Skype web pages for the Skype End User License Agreement, Skype Terms of Service and Skype Privacy Policy. And disclaims Skype’s "No Emergency Calls" policy: "Skype is not a replacement for your ordinary telephone and can not be used for emergency calling."
Create your Skype name, password and tie it to your email address. Save Password isn’t checked by default, possibly a good thing in a busy office. Neither is "send me Skype news and special offers."
I don’t have screenshots that show if the app tests the password for minimum security strength. Skype requires that new passwords have at least one digit, for example.
Sign In with your username/password. You can get a Skype name if you don’t have one (see the screens above), recover a password (no screenshots). Two preferences: "Sign in automatically next time" and "Start Skype when I start the phone."
The Skype home screen starts with five tabs across the top: Contacts, History (now called Conversations in Skype for Windows 5), Chat (text IM), Call, and Profile. Your Skypename and status are shown top right.
Full Story »
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.
Nimbuzz blends several IM, status, and voice calling services into one mobile user interface, Skype included. Fring, a similar service, shut down its Skype features in July. I had a chance to discuss how people really talk, Nimbuzz’s experience and hopes for Skype, and the future of communication with Tobias Kemper (@tek). Mr. Kemper is General Manager of Nimbuzz Inc. USA.
Nimbuzz Skype call on Nexus One.
photo credit: Nimbuzz
Skype Journal: What have you’ve learned since launch about how people use Nimbuzz and talk with each other? What behaviors are changing or emerging?
Tobias Kemper: What we have learned since launching Nimbuzz is that consumers use the product for a variety of different reasons which are also dependent on their geographic region.
In developing markets, consumers are looking for cost saving communications more than those in developed markets. Consumers love the fact that they can make free and low cost calls over Nimbuzz.
We also have seen that consumers utilize the chatroom feature on our Symbian and Java platforms as a way to meet and connect with each other. Those markets do not have well-established social networks or this maybe their first Internet experience, on the mobile. They use Nimbuzz and our chatroom service to create their own mini social networks from their mobile phones.
In developed markets, consumers love the fact that they have all their friends from all popular IM and social networks in one place and they can see who is online, when and where. In the end, this is about freedom to control how consumers communicate free of what the operator dictates in terms of minutes and messaging. Having all your social networks – Facebook, AIM, MSN, and Skype — in one app is a great advantage to consumers. It’s their choice, not the operators.
Skype Journal: Can you tell us about the technical architecture you’ve built to interop with Skype?
Tobias Kemper: Because Nimbuzz uses all of the public connection points for Skype, our relationship with Skype hasn’t changed. We continue to invest in our technology to provide the best quality when making Skype calls over Nimbuzz to match our user’s expectations.
Mangrove Capital, the original investors in Skype, are also investors in Nimbuzz. This backing has been advantageous for Nimbuzz because they bring extensive expertise to our VoIP play.
Skype Journal: Your wishlist for improvements on Skype’s side of the service? 
Tobias Kemper: We are looking forward to the official SDK to further enhance this user experience. It is in our best interest to make sure the consumer always gets the best quality and the Skype brand is presented in the best possible way. The fact that Nimbuzz works on more than 2000 types of mobile phones effectively brings Skype into a very large community of users worldwide.
Nimbuzz is all about doing more mobile – chat more, reach more, connect to more, share more, message more, call more — all mobile. Universal communications via your mobile. Because we believe in openness, we built our platform on XMPP and JINGLE protocols making it very easy to interoperate.
For example, in Saudi Arabia, since the announcement of the Blackberry communications ban, we are seeing extreme user growth and we have already captured 20% of the entire BB user base there. Every two seconds a user from Saudi Arabia logs on to Nimbuzz; as of today, growth has increased from 20 registrations per day from Saudi Arabia to 35,000 per day on Thursday because of the bans and impending bans on BlackBerry services.
Skype Journal: In your blog post Mobile communication in 2010 and beyond! you write: "Nimbuzz believes in a global mobile community across all platforms, communities, devices and operators that gives users the ability to choose how they communicate. Calls will be free. Revenue will be generated from enriched mobile communications for all industry players, including users and operators." If Skype-like features will be free, what sort of premium conversation enrichments might we see over the next few years?
Tobias Kemper: This is how we envision premium features: Assume that in the future calling and texting will be completely free. The money will be made in the consumer lock-in and selling people a fully unified communication service with personalization and customization options. Expression tools – nudges and emoticons (already wildly popular in Asia) will be a huge part of this equation. Status is equal to social connectivity. Consumers want to be in control of the way they communicate and want to be able to monitor their communications. A Facebook message has a different meaning than a text message. An email an different meaning than a chat message, and a call a different purpose to a voice message.
People want to enjoy presence or socializing features wherever they are — presence and location information will be part of the same solution in the future. I certainly would pay extra if my phonebook was powered with presence information so I would know if someone is online so I can send a chat first instead on blindly calling them. Yes, it is nice if the call is for free, but since it is over the internet, I expect it to be free.
However, what I love is the presence. I am happy to pay for that, or pay for the upgrade option to enjoy free communications to everyone else on this operator network – but I want that to come straight from MY address book. Nimbuzz believes that the true long game for mobile communications will come from all the pieces that consumers use daily — not just mobile voice or chat – but all those pieces tied together. The value lies in a user’s address book that combines calling (VoIP and mVoIP), messaging, connecting and socializing – all in one service.
Bottom line? We want to give users the freedom to communicate from their mobile to anyone in the world, on any network, in any social community, on any device, at any time, the way they want to. This doesn’t have to be overly complicated, shooting social media feeds and multimedia content in your address book, but simply allow you to do more, and be more, mobile.
 Skype is readying SkypeKit, a component programmers can put into their software. I interviewed a software CEO about this idea. Paul Grayson runs Alibre Inc., makers of professional 3D CAD/CAM at a $99 price point.
You’d think there would be a strong need to build collaboration tools into the app. So about 2001 he did. IM, document/view sharing, voice chat, etc.
Five years later he ripped it out. Customers didn’t want it. The nuts and bolts of design is solitary, hands-on, heads-down work. All the conversations were taking place outside of the design tool between hands-on moments.
Alibre’s customers were using IM, conferencing, and desktop sharing tools from many sources. Tool choice was dictated by their social network; who in their network used Yahoo, MSN, Skype or an enterprise product for IM. WebEx or others for screen sharing. Skype or one of the toll-free conferencing platforms for voice. SharePoint, Zoho Office, and many other services for document sharing. Tungle, Doodle, Timebridge, Google Calendar, and others for meeting scheduling. DropBox, Box.net, Gmail, or Skype for large file transfer. I won’t even try to list task list, project planning, and progress tracking systems.
Meanwhile, 3D design had become part of Do-It-Yourself manufacturing. Designers were now talking with a more people, in more companies, in more countries. The range of tools continues to explode.
Paul determined it was better to leave communication, coordination and collaboration outside of the design app. Better for the company to invest scarce development funds on core capabilities.
There’s no need for Paul to embed SkypeKit. Skype serves his customers better as one of zillions of tools they can choose outside of the design system.
More talk within the DIY Manufacturing value network is great for Skype as a network.
Less than great for SkypeKit as an embedded solution.
SkypeKit’s features may fit an Alibre perfectly.
Features are not enough.
Three obstacles, inherent in Skype’s offering, stand in the way:
- A user must have a Skype name. Registration creates a conversion barrier and a huge complication for the software publisher.
- A user can only contact Skype users. SkypeKit’s value is limited to talking only within a large but far-from-universal pool of Skypers.
- A user, having paid for the SkypeKit features along with the rest of the product, must pay again for an outside suite when even one of their colleagues doesn’t use Skype. When comparing two products, one with Skype and one without, the SkypeKit’d product can look bloated and distracted from its central value proposition.
Skype has a few strategies for improving its chances.
- Allow SkypeKit publishers to create private Skype namespaces. A Skype name that looks like AlibreInc123456789, a unique publisher code and a string.
- Let publishers map those names to their proprietary namespace or to third-party namespaces. So your Alibre ID and your Skype ID are linked, and you can be found in both networks using either ID. Skype lets you map your MySpaceIM ID to your Skype ID, but only for that one network.
- Permit developers to store user logins; many applications would work better if there was no need for any mention of Skype and no added step to log in each time you want to be connected to your peers.
- Enable interop through gateways. This could be offered as a centralized service, connecting SkypeKit-powered apps to thousands of independent identity, calling, metawork, and collaboration networks.
Be Everything To Everyone is a losing approach. Skype believes this; you can see it in Skype’s focused product discipline and in its investment in developer products.
That same focus by independent software publishers means Skype must offer value beyond its features. 600+ million user accounts will draw some. Denying choice through interoperability and freezing developer freedom to design other social models are potent barriers to developer adoption.
Telecom platform geeks convened for the first SF Telephony Meetup. I linked to YouTube videos of most of the talks below.
 We were welcomed to the first SF Telephony meetup by Gabriel Sidhom, CTO of Orange Labs San Francisco. Gabriel teased us with a thought experiment: "What if the phone wasn’t the first thing that was invented but rather a computer? And email rather than voice telephony? Then how would we do voice?"
 Adam Kalsey , akalsey@voxeo.com, @akalsey for Voxeo and Tropo. "We’re an API for the phone system." V built their API support in Java for the JVM. They run your code in their cloud against shims that translate from your programming language to the JVM. http://labs.voxeo.com/moho. @tropo. Call or SMS: 415.894.9965: gtalk,XMPP: tropolocal@tropo.im
 Jason Goecke for Voxeo Labs [good to see you, Jason!] about Adhearsion. Telephony application framework that drives Asterisk. Integrates with Rails at the MVC model layer. Used by AlertPay, for example. Recent release: Asterisk 1.6 support, ActiveLDAP support. Next release in August to work with Asterisk 1.8, Ruby 1.9 compatibility, and bundler support. Learn more at AdhearsionConf 2010, August 14-15 in San Francisco: Talks, code-a-thon.
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AdhearsionConf 2010Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be joining us for two days of talks, discussions, hacking and pair programming on all things Adhearsion. We also have other folks on deck that will be sharing their innovative uses of Adhearsion. Free.Sunday, August 15, 2010 (all day)
Venue TBD
San Francisco, CA USA
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 Adrian Georgescu of AG Projects, Netherlands, for SIP2SIP. SIP service transparent for the end-points, publicly reachable sip uri user@sip2sip.info. Good for audio, video, fax, IM, file trans, SMS, presence, XCAP (originated by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg), NAT traversal. Launched 2008. 40k SIP accounts. Most devices are using more than VoIP. sip2sip uses a self organizing sip infrastructure (SIP Thor), applying p2p architecture to SIP. Talk on Thursday (the next day) about the highly scalable back-end systems. sip2sip is free for end users (without PSTN termination or SMS) and white label for operators with pre/post paid accounting. Easy provisioning for end users through scripts. SOAP/XML interface lets you build your own portal to administer sip accounts. For operators that want to offer Skype-like services to SIP devices. Contact info: ag@ag-projects.com. http://ag-projects.com. http://sip2sip.info. Project wiki.
 James Li, Dominic Lee and Adam Odessky of Orange Labs SF showed a television UI for a sip phone app accepting an inbound phone call from an iPad, sharing the television’s audio (CSI Miami) in the call, dialing out from the TV, and a fun demonstration of echo in a four-way conference call.
 @ChrisMatthiew of Teleku @teleku. Rails – RESTful Phone web service API. Competes with Tropo, Twilio. Hosted on ec2. Free Ninja hosting runs on free open source stack. paid Samurai Warrior hosting runs on Voxeo hosting. Teleku translates apps from its own PhoneML, a 7-command scripting language, or TwiML (Twilio’s language), or VoiceXML and translates them to VoiceXML. So you can run those apps on Teleku’s restful API. Now OpenVBX, built by Twilio, can run on Teleku with speech recognition, international text-to-speech, Skype, SIP, iNum, multi-channel support. "I applied to Twilio’s developer challenge. I haven’t heard back from them." Demoed an SMS from the Twilio app running on the Teleku API running on the Voxeo platform. Demoed Skyping a phone number answered by an OpenVBX IVR workflow running from Twilio’s software on the teleku platform on the Voxeo platform.
 Dan Miller of Opus Research spoke on this summer of recombinant communications (vs. unified). In the long run, everyone wants to be a platform. So everyone will be peers, cooperating with each other. The biggest companies will likely dominate at scale but small firms will continue to innovate faster.
 Darren Shreiber of the 2600hz project. +1-415-886-7901. How do you manage a network of Freeswitch instances? The BlueBox Project: Core is in Erlang, API-based. Heavy use of distributed software (db, messaging). "Let it fail" assumption so lots of redundancy; calls continue when servers go down. They monitor and virtualize integration. Completely Open-Source, not just the APIs. Designed to help service providers to spin up boxes faster, distribute boxes easily, cut costs, increase flexibility. modular services.
Orange Labs SF is hiring product managers and software architects. Peter Hallinan at Blindsight is hiring "not your grandpa’s android developer" now. 2600hz is hiring erlang and sip people.
Not news: No women there, aside from two Orange staffers helping with registration and video. For some reason Telephony remains a boys’ club.
Sometimes art frames a story. Here’s how a TechCrunch artist framed Skype telling Fring to stop its Skype gateway.
Here’s how Fring probably feels about it.
This is not a contest of equals. Skype is a heavyweight with more money, more cash flow, more brand and many more lawyers. Any contest would be unequal. Fring acted wisely to back off in the face of bullying.
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7 years and 2 days since Skype Journal launched as a stand-alone blog.
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