When eBay bought Skype in 2005, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and AOL all added talent, bought technologies and beefed up their messenger products. Six years’ later, how will Microsoft’s rivals respond to Microsoft buying Skype?
Apple. FaceTime gets more headcount, gets group video, comes out on Windows, distributed with QuickTime and iTunes. Maybe by WWDC.
Google. Renewed commitment to build out Google Voice. Internal partnership with YouTube speeds up, seeking to enable live video conversation in comments, Ustream-style broadcasting, and WebEx-style video meetings.
Salesforce. Has Chatter, buys TokBox for video chat at scale, developer channel dives in and video enables customer service.
Facebook. Waits for Skype cloud services to power next generation of fb chat.
Aol. Reinvests in AIM. For six months. Then partners with Microsoft/Skype for sign in and text chat interoperability.
Comcast. AT&T. BT. Orange. Myopic attempts to squeeze old POTS into new media. (Think Morse code mobile app.)
Cisco. Spins out video conferencing products as their own company, refocuses on networking products.
Bkis blogged the new computer worm is targeting both Skype and Yahoo! Messenger IM clients. W32.Skyhoo.Worm sends encouraging messages with a web link to your contacts, some of whom may click through and download it as you did. A fast way to be de-friended. Be careful what you click, even from friends.
 We try to be good to one another. Sometimes it’s just about power.
The Associated Press newswire told search engines to pay for showing stories, or to stop showing them. [Ironic link above: AP story hosted on Google.] How quickly would AP enter bankruptcy if none of their stories showed up in Google News or search results?
Google’s playing nice. They can, because they have the power in this relationship.
Yahoo! will kill Geocities later this month (26 October 2009). Millions of web sites, stores, online communities, blogs will vanish, along with their google juice. Geocities is a chunk of history for some, an online home for others. Yahoo! gave six months warning in its eviction notice. Yahoo! will move you to their paid hosting service.
Yahoo! holds the power over Geocitizens in this landlord-tenant relationship. [Kudos to The Archive Team and the Internet Archive for trying to back up Geocities.]
AT&T blocked wireless access to VoIP on the iPhone for two years. Just to see what Skype and Google would do. They had power over Apple before the first iPhone launched. Less so now that Apple is a worldwide success.
Renters get power over landlords from their contract and from their government’s landlord-tenant laws. Those laws rebalance power, create some process for notice and appeal, and define penalties for abusing process or power.
Skype is in the middle of a network of alliances, partnerships, antagonists, and dependencies. While some relationships are defined by market forces, many are driven by the struggle for industry and government power. Skype steps lightly. For every Skype government affairs person, the telecom industry has thousands. For every euro Skype spends on publicity and advertising to influence the public and regulators, the telecoms spend thousands. Skype is deft and agile, a guerilla going up against vested interests, avoiding brute force confrontations they could lose.
Meanwhile Skype earned its own power. Skype spent six years defining a global brand people love and trust. Skype quietly framed regulatory issues in Brussels and Washington placing Skype on the side of democracy and freedom. Skype proved its legitimacy as a profitable business (although still a rounding error in AT&T’s 2009q2 Net Operating Cash Flow of $15.8 billion) and a competitor (8% of international minutes).
Skype is investing in its power. Geek cred will come if its Skype as a Platform service is successful. Skype is spreading its political attention to smaller governments. Skype has new PR, advertising, marketing partners to reinvigorate Skype’s brand for what the company will become. Skype is building products to diversify its business model and create new sources of income.
Skype is approaching a half-billion users. Skype will no doubt be a US$2 billion a year company by 2013. Skype will sit at the table with Internet and telecom giants.
So I’m left with an incomplete thought.
Will Skype be as tender with its power as Google? Will Skype be as courteous as Yahoo! with trusting customers? Will Skype abuse market power through partnerships as AT&T?
Winston Churchill said the price of greatness is responsibility. What in Skype’s cultural DNA says do no evil?
Products:
Skype for iPhone: Now Legally Available for Canadians. Congratulations, Canada! tip: type (flag:ca) in Skype chat.
Skype For Asterisk "is available to download now from Digium for $66 USD per concurrent call or from Digium Authorized Resellers and Distributors worldwide, and comes with 90 days of installation support from the time of purchase."
Skype For SIP channels are on sale for € 19.95 per month (without VAT – EUR) plus Skype’s standard per minute call rates (no country, global calling plans).
ASUS Eee Reader could be built for Skype video calls, near the £100 mark. via Times Online.
IPEVO TR-10i speakerphone is now $49.99. Value hat tip to Michael Rose.
Business:
Skype to run ads on CNN’s Connect the World show.  Off-air chats to follow.
Om interviews Brad Garlinghouse, formerly the Yahoo! exec who owned Yahoo! Messenger, lately an in-house advisor at Silver Lake Partners (soon to own 50%+ of Skype), and soon to be president of AOL’s email and AIM service. Interop with Skype is on the table. Mmmmm, peanut butter!
Exabytes per month worldwide in our mobile broadband future. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. How much will be people lifestreaming video? Skype video multicasting?
tags: skype, asterisk, iphone, canada, sip, asus, eee, ipevo, cnn, exabytes, bradgarlinghouse
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta came out last week,  switching to the Global IP Solutions’ VideoEngine for 1-to-1 voice calls.
Y!M video calling is not backward compatible; all users must be on Y!M 10. Interop with MSN doesn’t extend to video calls, so friendship across networks is still limited to commodity text IM.
Yahoo! recommends at least 300 Kbps download and 128 Kbps upload, video cards with 96 MB memory, and Microsoft DirectX. This compute burden comes from the audio and video codecs.
Yahoo! adopting GIPS’s video plumbing is a coupe for GIPS. Yahoo!’s choices influence other software companies; GIPS just became a safer choice for video. Despite Yahoo! only using the GIPS VideoEngine for limited 1-to-1 video chats, this opens up room for Yahoo! to expand to video conferencing and game-related video applications.
So far this year Skype published its home-grown SILK wideband audio codec, Google bought On2 for its video codecs, the telecom industry held its first conferences on "HD telephony," Microsoft released a bandwidth-consuming HD webcam, and Yahoo! boosted the quality of its video codecs. Moore’s Law and mobile broadband seem to be pulling industry to higher fidelity.
Screenshots and comments:
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Step 1 of 4 – Welcome to Yahoo! Messenger – Typical Install
"Typical Install" includes everything: two browser add-ins, setting Yahoo.com to your home page, and making Yahoo! your default search engine.
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Step 1 of 4 – Welcome to Yahoo! Messenger – Custom Install
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Step 2 of 4 – License Agreement and Terms
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Step 3 of 4 – Ready? Set. Install!
The payload is about 16 MB without toolbars. Skype comes in around 20.
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Progress Message – "More friends = more fun"
Progress messages set expectations and guide users to features they may not discover on their own.
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Progress Message – "Keep Friends at your Fingertips"
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Progress Message – "A better video and voice experience"
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Progress Message – "Continue the conversation on your phone"
Installing Yahoo! Messenger – Step 4 of 4 – Installation is complete!
Yahoo! Messenger 10 – Login panel
It’s a loooong panel.
Import Contacts
The import contacts wizard suffers from the Password Antipattern, asking you to trust Yahoo! with your logins to other services. Most of the sites Yahoo! imports contacts from support OAuth.
Still no contact import from other Yahoo! properties like Delicious, flickr, and upcoming. Or from Skype.
Yahoo! Messenger Video and Voice Setup – 1 of 3 – Microphone
Yahoo! Messenger Video and Voice Setup – 2 of 3 – Speaker
Yahoo! Messenger Video and Voice Setup – 3 of 3 – Camera
Goofy face not included.
Yahoo! Messenger 10 Home Page
A Messenger "home page" isn’t new. This design keeps the distracting advertising apart from news and tools.
The Yahoo! Mail tab again shows messaging media are converging experiences, just as Web Messenger is part of Yahoo! web mail and the Yahoo! home page.
Global IP Solutions Powers The New Yahoo! Messenger Video Calling
New Video Call Feature Available for Everyone on Yahoo! Messenger
San Francisco — August 24, 2009 — Global IP Solutions (Oslo Børs: GIPS) announced today that Yahoo! Messenger, a leader in real-time communications with more than 133 million users worldwide, is using GIPS VideoEngine™ to enable new high-quality video calling with the launch of Yahoo! Messenger 10.
Since early 2006, GIPS has provided the underlying voice technology for Yahoo! Messenger, allowing friends, family and colleagues to communicate. Now with the addition of the video calling feature, everyone on Yahoo! Messenger can enjoy video calls enabled by GIPS VideoEngine for superior sound, picture quality and user experience.
“With the launch of Yahoo! Messenger 10, we’re allowing people to instantly communicate with friends and family around the world through new interactive and social features like video calls,” said Dave Merriwether, senior director of Yahoo! Messenger. “The GIPS VideoEngine enables us to provide the Yahoo! Messenger community with the best video experience possible. Now people can enjoy full-screen, face-to-face chats with friends and family at no cost, in the familiar Yahoo! Messenger environment.”
“Yahoo! Messenger is the leading communication platform that provides people with the greatest choice to stay connected to one another through text IM, PC-based calling, mobile text messaging and now video calling,” said Emerick Woods, GIPS’ Chief Executive Officer. “We’re proud to work with Yahoo! to deliver a truly differentiated high quality video experience for the hundreds of millions of people on Yahoo! Messenger around the world,” added Woods.
To download the latest Yahoo! Messenger 10, visit http://messenger.yahoo.com/winbeta
tags: gips, codecs, yahoo, skype, video, voip, google, on2, videoengine, conference, conferencing, competition
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Yahoo! announced an update to Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone. download on iTunes or update from the App Store. Some bug fixes, the landscape QWERTY keyboard, and a new feedback form.
There’s still room to grow: no voice or video chat, no making or taking phone calls, no chat rooms or multichat, no gateway to Yahoo!’s IM partners (Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Lotus Sametime), no file transfer, no Yahoo! address book.
Yahoo!’s mobile messenger line also includes Y!IM for Sidekick, BlackBerry, and other phones.
screenshot credit: Yahoo!
IM as workaround for email?
File transfer is a feature of Yahoo! Messenger but it seems Ashlyn, Mischa and Val don’t use it. Despite using Yahoo! Mail. Is Yahoo! converting its mail users to Messenger faster than they’re switching to Skype?
Dell wanted to know about "Keeping Productivity High For On The Go Workers" for their Digital Nomads site. Here’s my small contribution to the theme.
Presence is a stream of signals you give off. You’ve seen simple availability presence signals in instant messaging: I’m online, I’m offline, Do Not Disturb. Some of us lifestream what we’re doing during the day: I’m in this meeting, I’m catching up on email, I’m making soup. We also give off contextual presence signals: I’m available for lunch on Tuesday if you’re a recruiter, my dream date, or someone I know.
Disclosure like this feels strange. At first. And then something unusual happens. We get used to it. It starts to feel familiar. Like being in an open plan office where you overhear small talk, see people come and go. Or having a break room where you catch up with people a little bit here and there.
And then presence becomes useful.
People use our signals. Strangers decide if they should introduce themselves. Colleagues decide when they should interrupt, and for what. And that makes your life better, because the people around you are making better choices about when and how to engage with you.
We use many tools to broadcast our presence. Twitter, blogs, public calendars, job sites, project status systems, IM mood messages. Even simple things like IM and email. So long as the people in your world can easily see your presence and update their own, tool choices don’t matter too much.
Presence is a social interaction. You share yours. You consume others’. And through this, you get to know each other in ways that may be more intimate and current than if you were in the same physical office.
Collective presence is what it sounds like. A stream or a place where you can see what a group of people are doing. Where you aggregate your group’s presence signals.
Collective presence is a mix of informal, unstructured, casual talk and structured messages. The Europeans in our team are coming online now. The programmers are working through a pre-release checklist. Someone’s dealing with a problem today.
Members of a team experience this collective presence through group chats, like IRC’s or Skype’s persistent chat rooms, or a listserv. At Skype Journal, we augment group chats with RSS aggregators and other software that pull in team member blogs, twitter updates, public calendars, public bookmarks, new photos and illustrations. So all through the day we keep in touch.
Three payoffs:
First, social media and presence tools sustain bonds that help a team know and trust each other.
Second, collective presence cultivates situational awareness. So people make better choices about what is important, what is urgent and what needs resources.
Third, collective presence means you are not alone. When those feelings of isolation kick in, it’s easy to drop into the group chat and see what everyone’s been up to.
The essence of productivity is choosing the right things to do and doing them. Collective presence makes remote team productivity easier and more immediate.
My toolkit:
- Skype public chats, Skype contact groups
- iGoogle and Google Reader (aggregating news and blog feeds)
- twitter, TwitterBar (so I can post from Firefox), TweetDeck (aggregating tweets), Twype (putting my latest twitter into my Skype mood),
- Yahoo!’s flickr (images), delicious (bookmarks), upcoming (events)
- Google Groups for email lists
See also: Presence evolving, Skype Journal, September 2007. Describes Collective presence, Faceted presence, Presence attributes and dimensions, Presence federation, Presence prediction.
tags: Collective presence, Faceted presence, Presence attributes and dimensions, Presence federation, Presence prediction, presence, skypeweb, social software, social media, collaboration, productivity, work, telework, distance, twype, twitter, twitterbar, tweetdeck
Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.
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Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) Developer Evening, London. Wednesday, 26 November 2008. Yahoo! UK, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, England WC2H 8AD.
 Phonebook Art. Cheap paper that takes a pencil well.
Kill Your Telephone. "A step-by-step guide to Skype, the cheapest and easiest way to make a phone call." Replace your landline.
Xobni brings the internet into Outlook… 4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. New release adds your Outlook contact’s Skype calling info to your Xobni Outlook profile. Best feature: automatic discovery of the Skype name for the people that send you email.
Thoughtpile.org. Herman Miller’s open brainstorming about design, creativity, innovation and work.
eBay Traffic Plummeting. October 2008: –10% uniques, –33% page views, –19% time per user year over year. Page views may be less of an issue with Web 2.0 designs keeping people on a page. But 10% fewer people? Spending 80% of the time they spent last October? eBay is just not that efficient.
Heaven’s Call Center. Feist the Angel puts Stephen Colbert’s prayers on hold. An opportunity for fonolo?
I’d like to make two points.
First, the Democratic party learned grassroots organizing on W’s watch. There’s an exponential curve moving:
- from nothing in the 2000 Gore/Bush election,
- through substantial roots activity in the 2004 Bush/Kerry campaign,
- to overwhelming in the 2008 Obama/McCain victory.
Second, the elements that made campaigning so lively, engaging, social and meaningful may show up in Obama’s governance.
You may not know this about me but my gig before Skype Journal was volunteering on the John Kerry presidential campaign.
Ten of us met in  Berkeley a few months after the first Howard Dean meetups in San Francisco’s East Bay. We became five thousand full time volunteers over 18 months until election day 2004. Our two-county grassroots operation made more than one million phone calls to swing states. 1,000,000.
We had no control over the candidate and his campaign staff, so we focused on what we could do ourselves. Using an American football analogy, we thought of East Bay Kerry as the ground game and the national campaign as the air game.
We modeled many of the practices used today in the Obama campaign.
- Communications and coordination
- Local blogs. Feed aggregation. CMS. All with free/cheap technology.
- National event directory. Developed locally, adopted by the campaign, used to drive activity.
- Yahoo mailing lists.
- Focus on organizing, not policy/issues.
- Managing
- Grassroots organizational structures that scaled and split.
- Professional guilds (writers, coders, designers, speakers, lawyers) ran service bureaus for grassroots orgs in swing areas.
- Netroots fundraising.
- Meetups for recruiting volunteers.
- Operations
Lots of peopleware with just a touch of technology to
- speed things up,
- keep costs down,
- push activity out to the edge, and
- help more people make smarter decisions.
We also revealed many problems.
- How grassroots fund themselves without violating campaign finance law (or not).
- Web applications absurdly hard to learn and use.
- National message management vs. local enthusiasm.
- Strangers instead of locals in GOTV efforts.
- The speed and efficiency of offline missing the disconnected and offline.
- Difficulty pairing union efforts with grassroots efforts.
- Inability to activate and motivate stale and tired Democratic Party organizations at the state and local levels.
- Costly voter and geographic data sets that grassroots couldn’t afford. Weak geomapping software for precinct walking.
Most of these problems were tackled by the Democratic National Committee in the 2006 races.
The Obama crew really built on those basics, applying four years of advances in
- social media,
- GIS,
- cogsci,
- smarter/mobile phones,
- VoIM (like Skype),
- streaming video,
- agile methods,
- creative commons and open source licensing,
- emergent organization design,
- more reliable and scalable server hosting,
- SMS/texting (thank you American Idol),
- internet sousveillance and surveillance,
- flat rate long distance,
- cheap conference bridges,
- real estate 2.0,
- and all the rest.
Near the end of the 2004 campaign we hoped to bring the Democratic netroots into the new administration.
- Would there be a Chief Blogging Officer (CBO) as part of the white house communications office?
- Would local groups be able to meet and have a say on national policy with a channel not just to their safe congressman but to the cabinet and to the white house policy advisors?
- Would the conversation started in San Francisco’s East Bay with 10 people sitting in a coffee shop, ending with 5000 full time volunteers in liberal Berkeley and Oakland and conservative Walnut Creek and Danville, continue into the new year?
We lost then. But what about now, after the Obama-Biden win?
Today, the hundreds of thousands of people who gave up work, family time, and school to volunteer want to continue the experience of being connected civicly with each other and of influencing their nation.
Chris Hughes posted Moving Forward on My.BarackObama on Friday.
Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama. The scale and size of this community and its work is unprecedented. Individuals in all 50 states have created more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign. There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations played a critical role in Tuesday’s victory.
What has made My.BarackObama unique hasn’t been the technology itself, but the people who used the online tools to coordinate offline action. My.BarackObama has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world connections between people who are hungry to change our politics in this country.
And the site isn’t going anywhere. The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact. Our victory on Tuesday night has opened the door to change, but it’s up to all of us to seize this opportunity to bring it about.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be a great deal more information about where this community will head. For the moment, let’s celebrate this victory and know that the community we’ve built together is just the beginning.
More than 1400 comments on that thread.
We’ll see what the election laws permit. The Obama Administration is already creating tools for change that may become a vital part of the national discourse, a force for good in our little-d democracy.
Competition fuels innovation. The pursuit of power, the struggle to help millions of people climb ladders of engagement and participation in your cause. These are a crucible with real consequences, measurable results, and strict fitness tests. How many lessons can we draw for the private sector, for education and for governance from what politics invents? Let’s pay attention and dive in.
tags: skype, politics, campaigning, organizing, roots, grassroots, netroots, barackobama.com, barackobama, change.gov, eastbaykerry, eb4kerry
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Skype can give away free video calling because customers pay for all the expensive marginal costs.
- With every account, Skype hosts account creation, account backup, and presence service on their servers. These are very lightweight, low cost services but they grow linearly with the user population.
- Skype also provides technical support, customer service, security and R&D, spread across all users, fee and free. The costs of these services grow slower than the user population.
- Skype’s customers pay for their own microphones, cameras, computing, and P2P connectivity. So while this is a linear marginal cost, Skype doesn’t pay.
Contrast this with Yahoo!, Microsoft, SightSpeed and other VoIM providers. They have Skype’s fixed costs and more. They pipe all talk through hosted servers. So every additional free user requires them to pay for more server capacity, bandwidth, and server farm management.
Skype doesn’t pay when customers
- speak more often
- to more people
- for longer times
- through more bandwidth-consuming media.
P2P’s low marginal cost helps Skype scale and tweak their freemium rate.
 Global IP Solutions today announced a white paper on Desktop Video Conferencing, providing a background for their video infrastructure technology that has the potential to make video calling and video conferencing available to a much broader user base beyond Skype’s (even though it is quite large) and SightSpeed.
Many of you will recall that Skype’s original voice engine came from Global IP Solutions (formerly Global IP Sound) and contributed to Skype’s initial adoption through both its ease of use and voice quality. In April 2006, Skype acquired Camino Networks whose voice engine provided improved features such as echo cancellation. Camino’s President and CEO was Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s current General Manager for Audio and Video.
Global IP Solutions went on to supply their voice engine to other players, such as Oracle and Yahoo but, as a company, they have been struggling; their most recent quarterly report demonstrated the extent of the revenue drop-off after loss of the Skype royalties.
This past April, GIPS announced the appointment of a new CEO, Emerick Woods (see full disclosure below). Since joining GIPS Emerick has led a reorganization of the company that included dropping their professional services offerings due to not only lackluster revenue but also the channel conflicts that operation created for their core audio and video infrastructure technology business. They have also closed a Tokyo office and settled outstanding customer lawsuits, including one with Skype where GIPS’ previous claims were denied in an arbitration resolution. As indicated in this interview with iLocus, they are moving to extend their customer base for their Voice Engine product line. As an initial move in August there was the announcement of Voice Engine for iPhone accompanied by a white paper.
In my interview with Emerick at that time, he pointed out that, while GIPS offers, through its various Voice Engine products, a total solution linking the Internet inbound/outbound connection to the user’s microphone/speakers, customers can also customize the voice engine, particularly when it comes to codecs. Customers can use either the GIPS codecs available with the voice engine or any other standard codec. Another feature he emphasized was their independence from operating system restraints and their support for various mobile platforms.
 One additional focus has been on working with their current customer base to build stronger customer relationships that can extend their various Global IP Solutions implementations. Going forward, GIPS will be investing in innovation with video as a key focus. Today GIPS released a Desktop Video Conferencing (DVC) white paper, authored by analyst Jon Arnold, outlining “the value proposition behind desktop video conferencing, especially in conjunction with other solutions, such as telepresence. Supporting this is an analysis of the trends that create the momentum we believe will make desktop video conferencing as ubiquitous as PCs themselves, and even mobile phones in the years to come.”
Jon talks about the spectrum of video conferencing solutions from telepresence systems employing large “real life” HD video displays, such as offered by Cisco and Polycom, to boardroom systems that provide the basics of teleconferencing via standard display monitors, to desktop conferencing where the user does not have to leave his/her desk to participate in a video conversation.
In short, compared to other video conferencing solutions, the value proposition for DVC is based on three variables: quality, cost and flexibility. Today’s DVC solutions can deliver a high-quality experience, at an affordable price point, and across a wide variety of environments. Aside from complementing the other types of video conferencing solutions, DVC can be deployed in a host of scenarios that are simply not practical any other way.
Jon goes on to provide tables comparing the three scenarios and then goes into details on potential market size for DVC as well as enabling trends that will help provide an appropriate infrastructure for DVC. On a SquawkBox conference call this morning we discussed one aspect: support for HD video. Its minimum 720p resolution will require higher bandwidth upload speeds (> 1.5 Mbps) that I have been told will be coming to Rogers Internet next year with an implementation of the DOCSIS 3 infrastructure and probably to other cable Internet services; recall that the widespread availability of broadband Internet was one factor in the rapid adoption of Skype back at its launch in 2003.
He then goes on to discuss the complexities of the providing and adopting the underlying technologies starting with video quality. Synchronization of audio and video, a consistent user experience, the variability of DVC end point configurations and support for a wide range of camera devices are other factors.
And, now for the commercial: GIPS is offering four products, Voice Engine and Video Engine for the PC client side and Voice Conference Engine and Video Conference Engine for the server side, that will allow ready embedding of desktop video conferencing into their customers’ services. Basically GIPS is providing platforms that allow developers, enterprises, service providers and end users to have a high quality DVC experience. Jon concludes:
With GIPS, they have a complete engine that handles all the complexities of IP communications, and with that, a clear path for allowing DVC to reach its full potential, not just at the desktop, but in the mobile world as well.
GIPS has put up two demonstration videos for comparison: one “Traditional Video Conference” and the other “Video Conference Using Global IP Solutions”.
The only current customers using these services are Oracle and Baidu, the Chinese portal; however, discussions are being carried out with several prospective customers, probably including many in their current customer Most interesting is their potential for mobile video; the only North American carrier supporting video to date has been Rogers; however, its most obvious problem is finding other users who can take video calls. Introduction of the Nokia N95 8GB was supposed to expand the video calling-enabled user community; however, iPhone and BlackBerry Bold have stolen the 3G phone market.
Skype’s High Quality Video, SightSpeed’s acquisition yesterday by Logitech, Qik on Blackberry and Nokia N-Series combined with news of GIPS video engine offerings are all precursors to a much broader adoption of user-friendly video in both business and personal conversations in the future. (Yes, we all know users have been looking for Skype video conferencing; when?)
Skype Journal: On2 Powers Skype High Quality Video
Full disclosure: GIPS CEO Emerick Woods was the Vice-President, Internet of Quarterdeck Corporation in the mid-1990′s with whom I worked on several business development projects involving partnerships with ISP’s of the time. Over the past 12 years, Emerick, in his capacity as CEO of several startups, which have gone on to be sold, has hired the author at various times for his business development services. The author, however, has no business relationship with Global IP Soltuions. One more clarification: Emerick has the same initials as a well known Tiger and loves golf just as much.
Tags: Global IP Solutions, GIPS, Emerick Woods, Jon Arnold, Skype High Quality Video, Polycom, Cisco, Nokia, BlackBerry, Qik.com, Logitech, video conferencing, video calling, video, Jonathan Christensen, Desktop Video Conferencing, Voice Engine, Video Engine
This is the fourth and final of four posts resulting from an interview with Nart Villeneuve, principle investigator of the Citizen Lab report “Breaching Trust”.
Having discussed some background to Nart’s research, the activities of the Citizen Lab and answers to Phil’s questions, Nart had a couple of recommendations for Skype going forward. As background, the Citizen Lab is a affiliated with the BerkmanCenter for Internet & Society’s “Principles on Free Expression and Privacy” initiative“to protect and advance individuals’ rights to free expression and privacy on the Internet through the creation of a set of principles and supporting mechanisms for ICT companies”.
The goal of this project is:
Through the articulation of a broad set of common principles, the development of resources for implementation and a compliance structure, this collaborative effort is working to formulate an industry-wide response to guide businesses when they encounter laws and practices that may contravene international human rights standards or be at odds with law or culture in their home jurisdiction.
Participants in this project include Microsoft, Google, Yahoo along with several human rights organizations. It is hoped that having a joint industry-activist initiative would help companies avoid situations similar to the one which Skype has encountered in its TOM-Skype relationship.
Update: as I was writing this post today, a New York Times story on this initiative, now called the Global Network Initiative, broke and has more details.
An initial draft document (update: final document to be released tomorrow) is under review amongst the participants but Nart brought out three recommendations for Skype that would be consistent with the guidelines in the draft document:
- Include in Skype and/or the TOM-Skype client, as appropriate, an ability to provide notification to all participants in a conversation that a contact is participating in the conversation via the TOM-Skype client. In effect, this could be included in a more general identification of the version of Skype that other participants in a conversation are using. The reasoning for the providing version information was to let other participants know, via the version number, which feature set a participant can use in their Skype client installation.
- When a user types a message that is diverted via the TOM-Skype filter, a message, indicating that the recipient is missing content due to government regulations, comes back to the initiating party. For example: “To comply with local laws, this message has not been displayed to your contact.” Often Nart found conversations where someone would type a message repeatedly when it was apparent the receiving party was not understanding the message being sent, yet the sender did not realize that the message was being filtered.
- Become a participant in the Global Network Initiative and its dialogue.
The hope is that, through an industry-wide initiative, foreign companies entering the Chinese market would have more negotiating power and a protocol for addressing issues that are raised in the process of establishing a business relationship in countries where the climate for free expression and human rights is restrictive. In an Opinion piece today, Om has other thoughts on the morality of this approach.
Tags: TOM-Skype, Skype, Nart Villeneuve, Citizen Lab, Global Network Initiative
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This is the second of four posts resulting from an interview with Nart Villeneuve, principle investigator of the Citizen Lab report “Breaching Trust”.
After discussing the report itself and some of the follow up activity, we went on to talk about The Citizen Lab, its mission and its activities. From their own website they are “focusing on advanced research and development at the intersection of digital media and world civic politics”. Nart described their activity as research on the politics of technology.
Under the leadership of Professor Ronald Diebert, their activities are carried out by graduate students with an undergraduate degree in either computer science or political science who join the lab to build up expertise in the other discipline while carrying out their research. They explore issues using their strong understanding of technology to “lift the hood” behind various politically and/or economically motivated intervention of web-based information exchange by governments and other agencies.
Assisted by a worldwide network of volunteers and a check list of relevant websites, they can develop a sense of the content that governments are censoring. According to Nart, all governments do some form of surveillance but definitely not to equal levels of resulting actions. At one extreme one finds outright blocking of content but the UAE has economic motivation to block Skype to protect a local communications monopoly. Apparently the Saudis are most interested in blocking porn. China obviously allows “uncensored” content to pass through but we are aware that Skype Journal is often blocked.
They will look at filtering techniques used by various countries, the type of content being blocked and try to determine the “local” government’s policy environment in which filtering is taking place. At this point in time most filtering addresses websites but gradually some countries are moving into screening applications (as we have seen with TOM-Skype). There is also “social filtering” censorship activity that involves blocking of porn, drugs and gambling.
At this point companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are modifying their products to address various “local” issues. For instance, Google has modified their process for enquiries from designated countries to “pre-filter” results delivered from their own servers in the U.S.. But then they put out a notification for “filtered” results with the wording for some search results: “to comply with local law, some results are not displayed”. On the other hand Google will not offer GMail accounts with a “.cn” domain name and does not make Blogger available in China.
The Citizen Lab also participates in a broader effort to develop guidelines for Internet companies operating in China. But, given that has much broader implications, it will be the subject of another post.
Next post: Answers to Phil’s Questions
Tags: Citizen Lab, censor, filter, Nart Villeneuve, Ronald Diebert
Reposted with permission from Michael Robertson’s blog.
A research firm recently revealed that eBay and TOM are colluding with the Chinese government to spy on users of Skype. Together they monitored user’s text chats and stored those containing politically sensitive topics like freedom, democracy, Tibet, opposition to the communist party and Falun Gong. They also track voice call participants. Presumably they turned this data over to the government and it’s impossible to track how that data has been used.
“What people have been implicated by their Skype usage and subsequently interrogated, imprisoned or executed?”
If history can be a guide it’s logical to assume that the data resulted in prison terms or worse. In 2005, Yahoo was involved in a similar disclosed incident in which it turned over emails to authorities which netted a 10 year prison sentence for a reporter who dared to talk about democracy. I wrote about it when it happened and questioned where one draws the line chasing the almighty dollar (or Yuan). Two years later Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was in front of Congress explaining the situation and apologizing to the mother of the imprisoned.
In response to the revelation of spying on calls and instant messages a spokesman for Skype incredibly stated that Skype is "the most secure forum of publicly available communication." eBay points the finger at their Chinese partner TOM claiming they had "no knowledge or consent" of this privacy breach. This level of compromise requires access to source code which eBay would have had to provide them. Maybe eBay didn’t have direct knowledge of these alterations. However no one can deny China’s well known efforts to police and censor their citizens net activities which surely eBay executives know about. To provide the source code with no auditing or oversight shows at best a convenient excuse. One wonders how long this would have continued without the whistleblower and how many other countries Skype cooperates with to allow the same spying.
More likely at least some within eBay/Skype knew exactly what TOM was doing and consented because it gave them access to the enormous Chinese market. Its estimated that nearly half of Skype users are from China. This is why Cisco and others design special networking equipment enabling the Chinese government to snoop and lock down their country’s net activities. Similar to Skype they are lured by the dollars awaiting any country that cracks the Chinese market.
I would call on eBay to be forthcoming with information on this situation by publicly disclosing details of this situation which will require tough questions of their partner and Chinese government. This would demonstrate that eBay’s publicly stated "concern" is more than a press tactic. Specific questions eBay should answer include:
- When did this spying start?
- What users did it affect?
- When specifically did it stop? Has it stopped?
- What specific terms were monitored? (Users have a right to know if their messages have been implicated.)
- What people have been implicated by their Skype usage and subsequently interrogated, imprisoned or executed?
- What steps will be taken to defend these people or get their convictions overturned?
- Has previously stored data been deleted? How can users be sure?
- What will eBay do to insure that this spying isn’t reactivated as soon as the press attention subsides?
- What other companies and countries are monitoring Skype communications?
- What auditing steps is eBay implementing to make sure this does not happen again?
Let me be clear about Gizmo5‘s policy and refute Skype’s spokesman’s claim that Skype is the "most secure". Gizmo5 doesn’t spy on calls and messages and we wouldn’t give that info to any government. We encrypt calls between Gizmo5 users and have given no one the decrypt key. We would not allow a partner or government to do wholesale monitoring of communications – no matter how many billions of prospective customers they have. If ordered to take action by a government that defies basic Western freedoms we would do it only under threat of imprisonment and the information would then be disclosed in this blog condemning the action and striving to defend any of those adversely impacted. I challenge eBay/Skype to do the same. Defend their users. Defend their brand. Defend freedom.
– MR
Michael Robertson is an entrepreneur, co-founder of Linspire, SIPphone, and MP3tunes.
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7 years and 12 days since Skype Journal launched as a stand-alone blog.
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