Skype Journal

Culture shift as Skype moves from Republican eBay to Democratic Microsoft?

Phil Wolff — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:56:25 +0000

Welcome to 2012 where Skype is joining Microsoft’s management culture. If we hearken back a few years, was politics one of the problems Skype had with eBay?

Skype in early 2005 was a mostly European team. They held what Americans would call liberal cultural values. Once sold to eBay, they tried to work with an eBay management team overtly embracing a conservative value system.

eBay’s management team strongly supported the US Republican party when they bought Skype in 2005 and in the years leading up to Meg Whitman’s support for 2008 GOP presidential and local elections and her 2010 run for California governor. Meg personally held eBay town hall meetings for eBay sellers across America, pressing the flesh and honing her retail political skills before declaring her candidacy. Much of eBay’s language invoked the rhetoric of populist and free market capitalism, rugged individualism, and small hands-off government. Meg and her management team donated heavily to Republican candidates, institutions and causes and many left in 2009 to work on her campaign.

In contrast, Skype avoided politics. Its lawyers were wary of telecom regulators. Its leadership was conscious that local politics didn’t fit its transnational scope and worldly staff. If anything, Skype started off embracing non-partisan geek culture, with an anti-establishment (“we’re taking on the phone companies”) and universal populism (“talk to the world for free”).

I don’t want to overstate the differences. Both teams cared about success, both spoke business, self-identified as leaders.

Yet something went wrong.

Skype was never properly integrated with eBay. I look to Whitman’s narrow charge to Skype’s founders and the technology myopia that followed. As part of the purchase, Whitman dangled a billion dollar payout to the founders if they met a few hard-to-meet goals relating to adoption, activity and revenue. The founders reacted by stifling all business and development activity that didn’t directly and quickly support those goals.

A side effect: strategic Skype technology was proposed but never seriously funded. If you want to integrate realtime conversation into eBay and PayPal experiences you need web services like cloud platforms for non-Skype developers. Skype desktop integration would never work in an environment where more than half of all eBay transactions passed through third-party applications. Had Skype had been thoroughly blended into the eBay buyer and seller experiences, would eBay have sold Skype?

Aside from executives desperate to make their gigadollar payday, eBay did little to promote integration. In fact, integration and synergy, while promised to eBay’s investors, was never a priority. eBay never appointed a VP, director, or even a manager to oversee their side of Skype integration.

With Skype’s third sale, (first being to VCs, second being to eBay), management was free from eBay culture but had private equity culture imposed. Politics wasn’t in the air; just decisiveness in preparation for sale.

And now Skype is at Microsoft, a company whose management is relatively quiet about politics, whose expedient corporate giving supports incumbents, and whose memories of painful encounters with the US Justice Department and many European regulatory bodies left a bitter caution for even talking politics.

Will Skype and Microsoft blend well? Do they share common geek and corporate values over more partisan and nationalistic ones? What core differences in world view could keep them from partnering well together? Could Skype be better off in the dynamic, rapidly growing entertainment division where radical innovation is ordinary or in one of the slow, staid and stable divisions where Skype might shine by contrast?

Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products, finds useful pivots, sees both both forests and trees. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

Christensen leaves a cloudless Skype

Phil Wolff — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:56:56 +0000

Big changes need an executive champion. When Jonathan Christensen left Skype last month, he was the last advocate for a developer-centered strategy.

His departure is bad for Skype, bad for Microsoft, and bad for Skype’s users. This is good for rivals who understand github culture, developer programs, cloud operations, and API business strategy. Here’s why:

Skype’s third-party development products are failures.

The Skype Extras program collapsed from tens of thousands of desktop apps to a few dozen before Skype shut the program down.
Skype tried for a UI-free Skype engine but SkypeKit is unattractive. It’s feature-incomplete. It’s a time sync requiring orders of magnitude more effort (about twelve thousand hours for the first Skype-on-TV apps) than alternatives (1 hour for a TokBox or Twilio integration). It’s burdened with outrageous defensive business terms: Skype can withdraw your license at any time for any reason and you may not run SkypeKit on servers, sell your service to business, or serve Chinese markets.
Skype is very late to the cloud communication market. Voxeo, Twilio, Jajah, TokBox, and Vidyo (powering Google Hangouts) have been offering hosted telephony and video conferencing APIs for mobile and web developers for years.
Skype’s few developer successes rely on cultivating personal influence, on sycophantic access to Skype insiders. Unless you know someone, you don’t get the resources to build or the waivers to release your product. This doesn’t scale and comes off arrogant and sleazy.

This post-Christensen senior management team understands finished goods. They even understand freemium models. But their hearts don’t beat faster at the thought of Skype powering a million web sites and apps. Their eyes don’t light up when talking platform economics. Their guts don’t tell them to bet on APIs, to open up and let a million designers and programmers plug-in to the Skype network.

So management lacks ambition for platforming. This shows in underfunded cloud projects, a closed (vs. public) developer program, staff defections, and belittling expectations. From management’s behavior you’d think outrageous success by Skype developer partners should trigger a publisher’s acquisition or sudden death. Ouch. Real platformers consider customer successes proof your network is attractive.

Skype’s platform-avoidance strategy will fail, probably this year. Skype cannot hope to deliver meaningful integration at Microsoft without the Skype versions of OpenTok and Phono; they will hit a technology wall. And new users from Skype’s Microsoft products won’t hide the overall slowing of Skype user adoption and revenue, or high defection to services that meet specific needs in specific contexts. As Microsoft’s Bing, Xbox, Kinect, Windows, and Windows Phone know, APIs bring you new revenue and new markets.

Circumstance will drive Skype’s managers to an open cloud platform architecture.

They’ll need entrepreneurial leaders like JC to take them there.

But they’ll have to believe.

Do you believe in platforms?

photo: Jonathan Christensen

Phil Wolff designs and positions realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journalis independent of Skype.

Should the CWA organize Skype workers? Facebook workers?

Phil Wolff — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:35:54 +0000

The Communication Workers of America convened this week, rallying around their legislative agenda. Do you think Skype@Microsoft would be a good organizing target? Live talk is still fleeing to over-the-top services, outside the direct control of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Comcast.

Could CWA find fresh blood at Microsoft’s Skype, Google’s Motorola, Facebook, Aol, Yahoo!, et al? What workplace problems could collective bargaining solve for workers? Can the more white-collar and tech-friendly unions function in and relate to Silicon Valley and Redmond culture, rapid business tempo, labor-ignorant tech media, and free-agent labor markets? Can they adapt to how these organizations are distributed across cities, states, and countries? I think unions inspired to action by Occupy Wall Street demonstrate new life and leadership. They may be ready for the challenge.

If they want in, they should start now. It takes time to learn why those building our new conversational media seek collective power at work.

Could Skype and other social connections increase travel instead of displacing it?

Phil Wolff — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:40:27 +0000

A California friend kvelled over snapshots of her new grandniece in New Jersey. She’d spent a good chunk of her time traveling there for the birth. And she’s still connected thanks to the immediacy of Skype and a stream of photos MMS’d to her iPhone. Airlines see Skype and other meetingware as a substitute for travel. Why fly when you can spin up Skype and a speakerphone?

My counter-argument is that these social media are creating stronger connections. So people are more likely to want more intimate face-to-face, body-to-body, same-time-same-place experiences. The gap between our imagined and our physical intimacy is reduced by higher fidelity (wide-band audio and HQ video) and lower latency (1 minute old baby photos by phone instead of four-week-old by post). We can almost taste being there.

We are in that heightened state of almost-being-there more of the year with our strong ties. Airlines used to run commercials showing people talking on the phone then getting on a plane to see family. I think we’ll see those stories again, this time with digitally-mediated communication precipitating the trip. When virtual isn’t enough, we’ll travel to get that heightened intimacy. Maybe we can close the sale. Or play basketball.

Or kiss the baby.

photo credit: Who dressed YOU? cc-by Juhan Sonin

Google Chrome browser (Dev release) now has Skype-like plumbing

Phil Wolff — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:39:15 +0000

Google is building WebRTC into Chrome. WebRTC code and standards will let web developers and designers build realtime IM, voice and video into web apps and browser plug-ins. This milestone means we could see WebRTC apps in Chrome in the next few months. Nimbuzz and others are working on it. This removes one obstacle to Skype for Browsers, without downloading a fat client. How soon will Microsoft’s Internet Explorer follow Chrome? Or will it adopt another technology, making choices harder for developers and users?

New FFT algorithm could improve Skype speed, quality

Phil Wolff — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:18:09 +0000

Electronista writes up a new approach to Fast Fourier Transforms from MIT. It could improve signal processing ten-fold. The paper: “Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier Transform.” When NOSFT finds its way into codecs, Skype users might find Skype working on devices with less computing power.

Attention: Skype is Half-a-Facebook in user activity, a Quarter of all International Phone Calls

Phil Wolff — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:27:47 +0000

How many people use Skype? How much? @Skype tweeted yesterday:

“Steve Ballmer announces new stat: Over 200 million avg. monthly connected #Skype users #CES”
“And a 2nd new #Skype stat: More than 300 billion total calling mins annually, with approximately 50% being video calling mins #CES”

The 200 million average monthly connected users for December 2011 is consistent with an end-of-year bump as people substitute Skype for travel. Skype has been running weekly highs of 30+ million and lows of 15+ million concurrently connected for the last six months, more consistently high than in previous seasons.

Skype’s 300+ billion minutes of live talk is a little less than half the time people spend on Facebook, if we go by the 53.5 billion monthly minutes reported by Nielsen for May 2011.

Meanwhile, Skype continues stealing cross-border-calling minutes and hard currency from international telecoms, per Telegeography. PSTN traffic was 438 billion minutes in 2011 compared to their estimate of Skype’s 145 billion minutes; about 1 in 4 cross-border minutes are on Skype. This is up from about 1 in 5 last year.

Roughly half of all Skype minutes cross a national border if we trust these figures.

Skype is capturing share at a much faster pace than the international calling market as a whole:

Alumni: Christopher Dean joins Urban Airship

Phil Wolff — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:25:15 +0000

Congrats to Urban Airship, the mobile platform-as-a-service company, on landing former Skype strategy and bizdev czar Christopher Dean as their chief revenue officer.

Skype’s GroupMe drops mobile voice chat, saying group text enough

Phil Wolff — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:57:22 +0000

Skype bought two mobile app companies last year: GroupMe for its group SMS service and Qik for its live mobile video streaming and sharing. GroupMe stripped out its voice conferencing as of 1 January 2012, they say for lack of use. Taking them at their word, why weren’t people using their voice chat?

Self-selection, where people who love group texting don’t want voice?

Was mode-shifting from group text to live or asynch voice too hard?

Was the audio quality sub-par, calling for a complete retooling?

Was the feature buried, never getting a fair chance?

Was it too hard to drag everyone else in your conversation from text into voice mode?

Did voice use-cases occur infrequently?

Was there another app that delivered group voice chat with more speed, quality, and convenience?

You might cure any of these problems with marketing or engineering.

Or is there some natural limit to how many features or kinds of features people will use in a handset app, one core-value-proposition-per-app? If so, Skype might keep its portfolio of Skype, Qik Video, GroupMe and SkypeWiFi apps.

Whatever the reason, paying more attention to fewer features should improve user experience. Someone at #ProductCamp once told me “product management is editing.”

It’s a graceful exit; no customers left hanging. More details on GroupMe’s sunsetting voice conferencing below the fold…

From their blog:

As the service continues to evolve, it’s important that we focus on and enhance the features that people use most. GroupMe messaging has helped bring people closer together across the globe. In fact, push messaging within the app recently exceeded total text messages across our network.

As we continue to focus on our core functionality of group messaging, we believe it’s important to sunset features that are not widely utilized. Starting January 1, GroupMe will disable the conference calling feature by default across the network. We’re working to improve the overall GroupMe experience for our users and it’s important for us to stay focused on what we do best: helping people stay connected with their real life network through group messaging.

There’s good news, though: if you have made a conference call in the last month, you will still be able to make conference calls on your existing group number indefinitely. Additionally, if you start a group and find that you could use the benefits of conference calling, you can email us at conference@groupme.com and we’ll set your group up with a calling-enabled number.

Cisco kills Umi before Skype shows more TV apps at CES

Phil Wolff — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:24:06 +0000

BI reports Cisco’s telepresence unit is ending Umi, a webcam and set-top box for living room video calls. No patience for consumers to learn about it, no chance to iterate and find what works. Why is Cisco giving up on consumer products when the consumerization of corporate IT is at an all time high?

My 2012 Skype Journal Wishlist

Phil Wolff — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:43:34 +0000

My top 15 for 2011.

15. Skype for iOS reboot. Launch and connect fast. Go back to basics and invent a tactile, visual experience. Pursue delight.

14. Skype for Metro. Miró me, baby.

13. Scriptable desktop and mobile clients. I want a bot API.

12. A social graph API for better integration with social networks and web services of all sizes and degrees of privacy. The world isn’t just MySpacebookIn.

11. Better people-search. Find the John Smith in a given city or who knows me on LinkedIn or who tweets about movies.

10. Skype cloud services. Hosting for developers.

9. LDAP client service, the better to have company directories inside my Skype clients.

8. Skype interop with WebRTC/RTCweb so off-the-shelf web browsers can make and receive Skype calls.

7. Free group video for three people. Build the habit.

6. Better whiteboarding than GoToMeeting. Especially on tablets.

5. A calendaring and scheduling API. Invite people to a Skype meeting, and launch them into it at the right time.

4. Formal launch of a “hangouts” feature.

3. Unleash developer terms of service. Freedom to deploy your Skype-inside apps on servers, to serve businesses, and reach the Chinese market. Freedom from Apple-like app pre-approval by Microsoft employees.

2. China User Transparency. Skype for desktops are delivered with censorware and who-knows-what-else to users in China and Hong Kong. Help me know who to trust. Show me which client they are using (safe, subject to lawful interception, and/or poisoned at the client), how their communication first enters the Skype network (a Skype desktop client, a server gateway, a SkypeKit app), jurisdictions where my conversation is routed (by country), and the physical location of the other parties (subject to their privacy preferences). Help us trust the Skype network at least as much as we trust governments and the Internet.

1. Digital Identity reboot. Skype’s identity systems are stuck in 1995. The world and our lives are more complex. Without a serious rethink, Skype will lose out on partnerships, Microsoft integration, enterprise integration and millions of users. On that roadmap, if you choose to accept it: Multiple profiles per account. Multiple forms of authentication. Permissions and relationships by profile. Shared profiles (roles). Transferable profiles. ToS by role. Sign in with Skype. I’d be pleased to introduce you to the world’s identity practice leaders at the next Internet Identity Workshop this Spring.

Bonus points:

Skype for Kinect. Gestural interface, baby. Bonus points for multilingual fingerspelling.

Emergency Dialing. Save lives, please.

Phil Wolff builds realtime collaboration products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

Phil Wolff’s 57 Scurrilous Skype Predictions for 2012

Phil Wolff — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:20:35 +0000

Every year I see into Skype’s future, foretelling with unconvincing accuracy, cynicism and hope.

Platform:

SkypeKit licenses open up for servers. Blue Jeans Network already cut a private deal to run Skype on their servers. Skype will open this up widely, with a few strings.

Skype launches SkypeKit hosting. Why set up your own server farm when you can use Skype’s?

More developers come to market with Skype inside. Seven smart TV or over-the-top TV hardware add-ons will announce they come with Skype inside at CES 2012 in January.

Skype introduces its voice user interface API. Taking lessons from Nuance and Siri, Skype defines a command vocabulary for Eesti and 20 other languages so you can dial, answer, and mute calls without using a keyboard, tablet or mouse. No voice-to-IM transcription at launch.

Skype for Cars. A US 4G wireless operator will announce hands-free skyping standard in a partner auto company’s 2013 car dashboard system. Recalled when dead car batteries are blamed on Skype.

Skype Desktop API remains a bastard stepchild, without full access to Skype video and screensharing features.

SkypeKit supports Skype Premium features like Group Video and new presenter/moderator features. Skype reports developer-related revenue for the first time to set a baseline.

Skype’s first Microsoft devcon isn’t Skype-only, piggy-backing on other MSDN events. Skype’s devrels team has to earn independent Microsoft developer cred from scratch.

Skype clients:

Skype for Metro, as Skype for Windows gets a dose of Metro chrome.

Skype for Windows gets chat style formatting features from the Mac. Still no rich-text or html browsing and inline objects.

Skype for Mac gets better. The five most awful things about Skype for Mac will be improved. Slightly.

Skype introduces emoji, the emoticons widely used throughout Japan.

Skype for Kindle Fire 2. As Microsoft allies with Amazon.

Qik ends its life as a brand. Skype will finish migrating popular client features to Skype mobile apps and scaling features/services an order of magnitude or two.

Skype for iOS gets better. Major technical and UI overhauls. Injections of Qik experience. Client will finally load a power user in two seconds, ready to chat and call at least as convenient as FaceTime. Skype’s iPhone and iPad apps will go from useful to delightful.

Microsoft Integration:

Internet Explorer. We’ll see further integration with IE. Click-to-Call will continue to highlight phone numbers, making them clickable. New actions will include adding a Skypable link to your Skype contact list, making Facebook contacts clickable, and enabling Facebook video chat. When IE supports WebRTC/RTCweb, Skype will also support browser-based apps.

Windows. Skype for Windows will ship with the consumer build of Windows 8. Unless the lawyers nix it.

Windows Tablet. Skype for Metro works sooo much better than Skype for iPad.

Sharepoint. Unlikely to see synergy in 2012. Perhaps at the user and department directory level?

XBox. Skype for XBox should be Skype’s best living room app, more intuitive than the apps build for televisions if only because it will support game controllers and Kinect and game designers will know what look and feel will work for gamers. (I might buy an XBox for this, maybe even a TV too. Do I need a TV to use an XBox?) Will Skype build the client? Probably they’ll help the Entertainment Division to build their own. Will the XBox teams open an internal design competition to explore a broad solution space? Here’s hoping.

Microsoft Office bundles Skype. Word, Excel and PowerPoint come with Skype extensions, making phone numbers and Skype names clickable.

Outlook and Exchange start Skype interop without third-party apps. Call a contact from within Outlook. Look up workplace contacts in the enterprise directory.

Skype for Bing advertisers. When you buy ads on Bing, you’ll see an option to make your phone number or Skype name clickable. It may be free, since a raft of up-selling opportunities can follow if advertisers and shoppers further adopt click-and-call behavior.

Windows Live Messenger. Messenger will interop with Skype by year end at least as well as Skype does with Facebook. I expect federated presence, IM, voice and video, though maybe not group video. Messenger-Skype will raise non-trivial identity challenges.

SkyDrive. Skype clients will support file transfer and filing using cloud storage services, starting with Microsoft SkyDrive. Send from or save to SkyDrive with your Skype contacts. It’s a fast and cheap MSFT loyalty feature. Will they follow with integration to Box, Dropbox and other popular services?

Presence. Skype needs dramatically better presence and status messaging. Perhaps Microsoft has a service or five that Skype might use to share availability, user profiles, and mood messages?

Lync. Microsoft’s workplace telephony products will be be folded into the Skype division. Work will start in building the Skype stack into their products. Rebranded as Skype.

Skype’s Performance:

US$1 Billion in sales, broken out in MSFT’s form 10-Q coming Thursday, 19 Jan.

$100 million in advertising, ten percent of Skype’s total income. Driven by a mix of click-to-call from browser plug-ins, Bing-driven links, and in-app brand partner messaging.

Falling termination revenue per user (SkypeOut to phone numbers) even as more people use Skype. Dollars per minute continues to fall to zero, even as cost per mobile MB rises.

Skype Premium service revenue grows as small businesses pay for group video conferencing, choosing Skype’s convenience over GoToMeeting’s features, WebEx’s reliability, and Google’s informality.

35 Million Dialtone: Peak concurrent users will top 35 million.

210 Million Monthly Active Users late in 2012.

More than 1200 people work for Skype. Joining Microsoft just increases the need for engineers, product managers, developer relations and marketing communications staff. Skype’s Palo Alto offices overflow, even after a second buildout.

Skype still doesn’t offer emergency services. Seven people die while someone fails to reach police or an ambulance over Skype.

In Skypelandia in 2012:

Tokbox gets first paying customers for new premium video chat APIs.

Google+ lets you record and save video hangouts to YouTube.

The US Congress discusses voting on bills via Skype in an election year.

Schedule your Google Hangouts in Google Calendar.

Apple squares off against Skype as FaceTime expands to every desktop and mobile device.

Apple adds FaceTime to iChat.

Invite people to a Google Hangout in Gmail. And Orkut.

Amazon partners with a VoIP company to offer scalable hosted cloud telephony like Voxeo or Twilio.

A political candidate holds 40 town halls in one week, attending by Skype video. Four of the gatherings have problems with the connection.

Twilio and Voxeo pilot hosted video chat APIs.

#OccupySkype protests local jobs lost to remote work.

25% of all PBXs shipped in the Americas and Europe come with ViPR features turned on, quietly shifting millions of B2B calls from plain old telephone services to VoIP.

Chinese government agencies deploy stronger surveillance- and censor-ware with the TOM-Online version of Skype.

The US Department of Defense further restricts the use of Skype to non-secure networks and communications.

Cisco buys RIM and folds it into the Flip division.

The Chrome browser for desktops and Android will drive 50 million new Google Voice users.

The Vatican’s broadband chokes when a million people try to call after a rumor spreads the Pope’s Skype name.

Google Voice launches in 10 more countries.

A 50th developer deploys Asterisk as a video conferencing switch.

Police negotiator talks with cornered kidnapper over Skype.

2012 runs a whole day longer than 2011, but feels shorter.

A Skype developer showcases a teledildonics product at the January AVN Conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft declares company-wide support for NSTIC, forcing Skype to create a 21st Century identity system.

Skype dialtone soars when LinkedIn pilots Skype and SkypeOut links in posts and job ads.

The Slow Startup movement earns counterculture credibility as Lean Startup matures.

Google lets you save video Hangouts to YouTube.

AT&T buys capacity piecemeal after the T-Mobile deal died. Lots of small-company consolidation.

Sprint’s mobile infinite bandwidth offer stops at 4G.

Workplace deskphones lose share to iPad apps and docks with handsets.

Anonymous attacks the Skype network.

Cisco ships a Skype appliance for enterprises.

Five of the ten best selling games come with in-game voice conferencing, serving a Billion minutes of talk in 2012, none of those minutes through Skype.

Skype is boring

Phil Wolff — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:04:30 +0000

I consulted with companies wanting to compete with Skype. Some, like Yahoo!, wanted to understand Skype’s technology and APIs so they could match it. Large telcos wanted a map of Skype’s ecosystem. Startups wanted to position themselves against Skype’s brand to secure funding. That’s mostly over.

Skype is much less interesting now.

Skype remains powerful, racing to keep up with growth and scale and new opportunities. But the Skype Stuart Henshall, Bill Campbell and I blogged about from launch in 2003 to eBay’s purchase in 2005 is only vaguely like today’s organization.

Skype is a top dog, not an underdog. Direct rivals all walked away from trying to beat Skype, looking now to coexist or even partner.

Skype is one-sixtieth of the Microsoft behemoth, its story chained to a broader narrative.

Skype is less unique, with hundreds of companies delivering high quality talk and conferencing services over mobile and internet connections.

Skype didn’t look innovative in 2011. Or 2010. Or 2009. Or 2008. The core products haven’t changed much. Nobody expects Skype to produce startling breakthroughs in 2012.

Skype staff don’t talk to the public. A wall of corporate silence sanitizes their conversations; Wall Street banks have more open bloggers.

Skype abandoned its revolutionary People’s Product identity, where it was destined to radically disrupt phone companies. It worked hard to become a GlobalConsumerBrand telco, just like all the other phone telecoms.

Skype is clearly pleased with being boring.

Skype should end 2011 with about a thousand employees, about a billion dollars in sales, a portfolio of more than a dozen clients and a few platform products, and hundreds of millions of users.

Most of Skype’s work in 2012 will be more of the same. Getting new users. Holding onto existing users. Inducing users to Skype more. Putting Skype on more devices. Keeping the network running. Boosting ARPU. Diversifying revenue.

Boring stuff.

Blogworthy only for investors, partners and direct competitors.

“A skypes B” was the non-M&A news story of 2011. Soldier with family. Classroom with sick student. President with campaigners. Orangutan to orangutan. The same generic story of people using Skype instead of a telephone.

Stories we didn’t see in 2011:

No new patents filed (they did file, but didn’t tell that story).
No jaw dropping technologies (Skype continues to invest in anti-POTS technology but doesn’t tell that story).
No shareworthy user experiences (Skype had a “hangouts” feature before Google but never told that story).

Skype keeps its product innovation stream burbling underground, submerged, hidden. It’s hard and useful stuff, improving Skype’s plumbing and availability. But users just don’t see it.

Skype is no longer a revolutionary or disruptive brand. Can Skype inspire again? Capture passion? Define a moral conviction for users to love and support? Should Skype try?

Work Design: Translating the web a few words at a time

Phil Wolff — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:21:42 +0000

Luis von Ahn presents the Duolingo project. Like Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood kids to paint his fence for him, Duolingo exchanges language lessons for help translating the web. Duolingo builds on predecessors like reCAPTCHA, which uses the free labor from proving you are human to translate old books, Duolingo addresses a massive task, breaks it down into small fragments, and aligns the task with a strong motivator. Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

This design looks obvious in hindsight. I think it is harder than it looks.

Selecting the right problem from the universe of problems is hard. You need a problem that lets people feel good about participating, aligning with common values. You need a problem that is already understood by the public or that can be explained in a few words. Your problem should have measurable value in time saved or in money. And the problem should have a major component that can be solved by humans.

Breaking down knowledge work to 5 to 30 second snippets is a fairly new skill, although industrial engineers have designed simple repetitive snippets of work for factories for more than a century. Now we must learn to decompose to exploit what the human mind does well, leaving the rest to algorithms.

Motivation is the last leg of this triangle. We don’t have prior art or proven models to discover contexts that marry the human task to incentives. We have a few examples, like getting access to something valuable, learning a language, or running a cool screensaver. In each example the contributor benefits are immediate, in your face, and powerful enough for high completion rates.

The last project I saw that worked like this was 1-800-GOOG-411. GOOG411 was a directory assistance robot; you’d call for the phone number or directions of US businesses. It used caller voices and behavior to build a vast corpus of speech and search data. Google used the data to engineer its transcription service and to learn about mobile-local search. I loved it; it usually had better answers than expensive phone company operators.

Big project, tiny tasks, strong motivation.

YouTube video: TEDxCMU — Luis von Ahn — Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Computation.

You know cyberspace is better than sex when…

Phil Wolff — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:33:09 +0000

You know the line about men and women thinking about sex n times per day? My digital life is more on my mind than sex.

I left my phone in the car. My folks and I arrived in Fairhaven, a neighborhood of Bellingham, Washington, to shop for children’s toys and browse the Village Books store. iPhone in coat, coat locked in car, I went iPhoneless for two hours.

A half-block from the car I had my first phantom limb experiences. I saw an abandoned London red phone booth and reached for my phone to take picture. I settled for a camera but I wouldn’t be able to twitpic that photo or share it with my telephony buddies.

Over the next 120 minutes I wanted to:

price compare books via Red Laser,
endorse an oil and vinegar tasting boutique on Yelp!,
check on expansion packs for Cataan (found something complex to level the playing field),
photograph some beautiful chutney at lunch,
look up Washington State’s counselor licensing (saw an office building full of therapists),
log how far off-diet my meal sent me,
check in from Village Books,
look up that indie-book-seller coalition they belong to,
read about their anti-Kindle campaign,
download the Fire & Ice four-pack to my Kindle app,
snapshot the cover of the last Gaiman book for friends in a science fiction Skype chat,
ask Quora a question about the DIY book industry,
remind myself to pack warmer next time,
read more about Washington State investigations into Whatcom County budget magic,
bookmark a book on business modeling for a friend,
check the hourly weather for that evening, and
peek at my sister’s family Amazon holiday wishlists.

That’s at least 18 reflexive reaches for my iPhone. 9 an hour, every 6 or 7 minutes. According to one recent study, this is more often than we think about sex. And this was just a casual family holiday stroll through a suburban shopping district.

Many of us are getting used to augmenting thought; in our ongoing internal dialog, conversations with others, shopping and working. Life is better with apps and live data. Heck, we think more complete thoughts, plan our future better, and interact with others in more informed ways with our digital life. Each time we reach, we’re getting mind candy, positive reinforcement. Our operant conditioning is strong.

So disconnecting causes withdrawal symptoms. How long offline does it take you to stop reaching for your laptop, tablet or mobile? For the conditioning to break down? Could observing a digital sabbath give us more freedom and control over our reflexes, more power to alter and adjust our behavior? Or should we not bother? Should we accept this new twitch response as an improvement?

This mind enhancement comes with strings and risks.

Does this new conditioning tie us to one company more than others, like mobile operating system publishers?

How can our new behavior shift power among corporations, governments, and individuals?

When you reach for your brain-augmentation-device, are you missing things because of that reach, causing new problems? Can the impulse to reach cause distracted driving, even without the gadget at hand?

At what point does personal dependence become a public necessity, like water, air, safety, and roads?

Can this behavior be exploited like sex? Sexy advertising bypasses our executive cognition and taps something more primal. Are printed www links and QR codes a first stab at triggering our digital reflex?

So here’s the test: Without hyperlinks in this post, how many times did you think to click on something? More times than you thought of sex? Aha!

Skype Journal – December 2011 News Roundup

Phil Wolff — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:20:00 +0000

Zennstrom decides to disrupt another fat, usurious, oligopolic industry: wireless broadband. “FreedomPop is aimed at making access to the Internet over wireless free.” “The Internet is a right, not a privilege.“

Free calls from Google Talk in the US and Canada through 2012.

Skype for Android 2.6 release added new features.

Skype for iPad 3.6 and Skype for iPhone 3.6 fixed a few bugs, improved stability, minor UI improvements and fixed a problem with chat deletion.

Skype updates its Firefox and Chrome browser toolbars on Windows, speeding Click-to-Call markup and improving compatibility. Which release of IE will come with a Skype plug-in preinstalled? When will Skype offer a click-to-call service for content management systems? And when will Skype add people-search to browsers? With all the browser publishers working to build in realtime IM/voice/video/ communication protocols in 2012 releases, a widely adopted browser plug-in is an important point of future customer contact.

Skype’s man in Washington, Chris Libertelli, now leads the Netflix government affairs team. While at Skype his deft touch with the FCC helped Skype assure access in US markets and partner with wireless operators. He also led Skype’s government affairs operations for the US states, Canada and Latin America. Paul Bond says usage-based-billing is the hot issue. With Chris on hand, I expect net neutrality to continue to be on Netflix’ agenda but take a backseat to battling for Netflix and its customers’ right to stream. Skype hasn’t announced who will fill Chris’ shoes.

A November 18 Survey: Mobile operators predict they’ll lose SMS traffic to Skype and other messaging apps. Mavenir’s survey says they’ll respond with IMS services. Good luck with that: BGR reports there are almost a million apps for the major mobile platforms.

A Forbes reporter rehashes an October New York Post security story about a few NYU-Polytechnic researchers who use Skype’s peer-to-peer network to see user IP address. Then they layer on hype that this is a security flaw. This is odd: having two computers see each other’s IP addresses is how the Internet works, unless you want your data run through an intermediary. Intermediaries pretty much defeat the point of a p2p network. Here’s the research citation: S. LeBlond, C. Zhang, A. Legout, K.W. Ross, W. Dabbous, I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing:Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users’ Privacy (pdf), Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2011, Berlin, 2011.

Q. Does Skype not have push-to-talk functionality? Why?

Phil Wolff — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:22:06 +0000

CORRECTION: Skype for Windows 5.7 Beta includes a Push-To-Talk feature. “We have introduced a Push to Talk feature in Skype. Many people who are playing multiplayer games have requested this from us. With this feature you can set a hotkey which will toggle microphone muting on Skype call. You can set the Push to Talk up on the hotkey’s selection under Tools > Options > Advanced > Hotkeys.” — 27 November 2011.

Push-to-Talk is a style of voice call control reminiscent of the way you use a WW II era walkie talkie; on a common channel, the channel is silent unless a participant presses and holds down a button, turning on a microphone. Releasing the button turns off the mic. This is attractive when you have many people in a channel and want to avoid distracting background noise and extraneous chatter. Police radio and taxi dispatch are examples from the real world.

Technically, you might also think of push-to-talk as a call where mute is the default. Try this: start a Skype conference call then have everyone mute themselves. Want to speak? Unmute. Then, when you’re done, mute yourself again.

So why is that Skype operation not what realtime gamers need?

Gamers need a default of mute. (but only for their in-world conversations.)
Gamers need physical (keyboard) shortcuts to turn the voice backchannel on an off. Their hands are too busy to navigate through the Skype UI to find the mute button; and their screens are reserved for gameplay.
Bonus points if the shortcut key can operate like the ”control” or “shift” key (only works when you hold it down) or the “caps lock” key (toggling between modes).
Ultra bonus points if you can recognize the difference between when a team’s open channel is getting swamped with talk and noise and game sound feedback versus the normal conversation of a pre- or post-game meeting. You only get points if you can switch the whole channel between normal Skype call and Push-to-Talk mode.

Why hasn’t Skype done this yet?

They’ve talked about it internally, according to one Skype exec who’s no longer at the company. Skype strives for simplicity in user experience, avoiding features to meet special use cases. Skype wasn’t convinced at the time that it needed to change its client.

What’s more, Skype had something in the works: tools for developers. Skype now has an engine, SkypeKit, that a developer can build into software. This would let someone passionate about gaming build an app for gamers with Skype features. And that app could meet gaming needs better than Skype could imagine. Skype is counting, in part, on third-party developers to build Skype apps to serve hundreds of thousands of niche markets and specific uses.

One of those developers will be Microsoft’s entertainment division, the folks who bring you Xbox and Kinect. You may see Push-to-Talk Skype features in some of their products some day.

via Quora.

Internet Outage Kicks 3.4 Million Skype Users Offline for 50-90 Minutes

Phil Wolff — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:43:59 +0000

Chart showing timeline of effect of North American Level 3/TimeWarnerCable Internet outage on 7 November 2011. cc-by Phil Wolff.

More than 3.4 million North American Skype users, about 12% of those online at the time, were affected by an ISP service fumble, with reduced or no access to Skype dialtone for up to 90 minutes today. Phyber Communications reports ISPs appear to have been affected by Juniper routers on Level3 networks, including TimeWarnerCable Internet.

Skype Journal – November 2011 News Roundup

Phil Wolff — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:29:49 +0000

UK’s OFCOM drags it’s heels on mobile net neutrality, leaving Skype users banned by many mobile operators. Same in other European markets. Jonathan Browning interviewed Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel, head of European regulatory affairs at Skype.

Skype PR supports a mountain climber who brings webcams to schools in developing countries.

Your kids can Skype Santa (Florida time, Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays through 7 December, 4-5pm) @SandestinResort.

I met a bunch of people at the Enterprise 2.0 conference who don’t use Skype, more who only use it for family video calls, a few who use it for international calls, and several who’ve never been interested enough to try it. It reminds me that, with roughly 180 million active users worldwide and likely only 30 million active in the US and Canada, Skype has a greenfield of more than 200 million North Americans who aren’t using Skype. Building market reach looks like an important strategic goal through 2015. Skype’s net adoption rates (adoption less abandonment) have been large but linear. How will Skype redesign their products and rebalance their portfolio so net adoption rates accelerate?

New rumors iChat may come to iOS. So far it looks like IM, not voice or video. I’d be more interested f iChat came to operating systems outside the Apple universe.

Looks like Microsoft (and therefore Skype) support the horrendous SOPA bill moving through the US Congress. Alex Wilhelm: “Microsoft is a major player in the Business Software Alliance, along with Apple and 27 other companies. And the BSA supports SOPA.” Learn more and do more to prevent the Internet Blacklist laws.

Pre-flight check in at Sheremetyevo International Airport over Skype. @svo_skype connects you to an operator for an interview, like a video call CAPTCHA. News release: Now for “flights operated by Air Astana, Royal Air Maroc, China Eastern Airlines, Estonian Air, Hainan Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines, Iran Air, Jat Airways, Turkish Airlines, Transaero Airlines, Aerosvit, Ariana Afgan Airlines, Belavia , Dniproavia, Donbasaero, Nord Wind, Oren Air, Air Algerie” although Aeroflot hasn’t committed. Yet.

Skype Bra Fittings from Butterfly Collection Lingerie deliver personal service from the privacy of your home.

Brad Garlinghouse leaves AOL. A real loss.

Citigroup predicts a 2012 Amazon phone. Can’t wait for the “shop” button.

Skype pays musicians to sing Happy Birthday to your friends in their Say It With Skype Facebook app. All the flavors are great but I like The Parlotones’ cover.

New betas: Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, both approaching feature parity, both now with group screen sharing for Premium subscribers. You can IM and video call Facebook friends from within Skype, although this does not include voice calls (unless you unplug your webcam), conference calls or group video calls. Jonathan Rosenberg explains Skype is hosting supernodes on AWS EC2, is operating a gateway for Facebook identity/directory interop, the calls are flowing p2p through the Skype network, and Facebook is keeping some records about users and their activity. Darrell Etherington thinks this could make Skype even more popular, and Skype should integrate Facebook into Skype’s mobile and tablet apps. Skype promotional video for the release (QuickTime).

From my October 2010 Skypebook: 17 More On The Secret Facebook-Skype Roadmap:

Sync contacts. Not just import, but synchronization. Keep my contacts fresh. TO DO.
Sync user profile data. My Skype profile is shallow and often stale. Sync my profile data semi-automatically: “Do you approve this update?” TO DO.
Sync availability. Online, Offline, Busy, In A Call, Do Not Disturb. Facebook has some presence indicators too, from their own chat and from their mobile clients. TO DO.
Sync currency. What’s the exchange rate between Facebook credits and Skype credits? Let me pay for a long distance SkypeOut call with Facebook credits. TO DO.
Facebook updates in the Skype contact list. Give me fresher social objects for talking with my contacts. Make it easier to sort contacts by the last time they updated, not just by alpha or the last time they talked with you. DONE.
Skype history in Facebook’s timeline. Show my friends’ Skype history with me in my Facebook updates. Make it easier to dive back into a Skype conversation from the timeline. TO DO.
Sync personas. Skype is already asking people to create multiple personas, so they log in with one ID for each job and another for home. Facebook will probably offer something similar so you can choose to keep your professional friends from learning too much about your hobbies and dating habits. Skype and Facebook will negotiate the data models and privacy policies that go with it. TO DO.
People search. For all the importance of the Global Index to Skype’s operations, the real value is being able to find the right person to talk with. Both parties could do well to blend their search technologies to improve result relevancy and speed. TO DO.
People recommendations. Skype can’t suggest people you might like or people you might know. Facebook can, so build recommendations into Skype. Skype has very specific data about times of day and places you call from and call to, which Facebook could use to improve recommendations. TO DO.
Events and scheduling. One of the best social objects is an event. Before the call or chat we often plan and invite and schedule our talk. Skype should integrate with personal calendars and with public and semi-public event listings. Facebook’s have taken off as one of the top event directories along with Eventful and Upcoming. TO DO.
Chat interop. My facebook friend chatting with me on facebook while I’m in my Skype chat. We each get the medium we choose. Lots of things to work out including persistence, behavior for adding people to a chat, privacy rules, encryption, archiving policy. STARTED.
Groups sync. Facebook lists and groups should sync up with my Skype contact lists. Define once, update everywhere, always fresh.
Voice enable facebook chat. TO DO.
Video enable facebook chat. STARTED (No group video, no screensharing).
Advertising exchange. Skype has a small but rapidly growing yellow pages business directory, the better for prospects to Skype and SkypeOut your salespeople. Faceskype can cross-sell ads, offer buy-once-and-show-up-everywhere campaigns, improve the sociability and relevance of Skype client ads, offer click-to-call features to Facebook advertisers, etc. TO DO.
Location check-in sync. Start showing my Facebook Places check-ins in my Skype history and offer to let me check into Facebook Places using mobile Skype. TO DO.
Workplace editions. Is Facebook’s Yammer-killer just a rumor? Skype is committing to the enterprise too, so both teams should be imagining together. TO DO.

Comcast briefed GigaOm on their new Skype product (720p@30fps webcam, RF remote control, adapter box with HDMI) and an app designed for television, coming early next year. Some integration with your Comcast account for importing contacts. Skype will only partner with Comcast for the next few years, so too bad if you are one of the 81% of customers served by other ISPs. You’ll have to buy a television with Skype inside or dedicate a computer to running Skype on your television.

Licensed family counseling and psychotherapy over Skype. The BC practice says “the new virtual service removes the factor of geographical proximity, and caters to clients who find traditional settings limiting.” Don’t miss your session because you’re in a small town or far from home.

Why has it taken so many years for AT&T to launch its AT&T Call International iOS VoIP app? Screenshots and details on Apple Insider.

Skype for Mac voice calls use 28% more bandwidth and connections than other Skype clients reports Mu Dynamics. They tested Skype on iPad, iPhone, Android (Sprint Nexus S 4G), MacBook (Mac OS X) and a PC. They score each client for consumer friendliness, less bandwidth is better, and for operator friendliness, fewer connections established. Instant messaging shows similar problems: Mac IM uses 30% more network resources and iPad IM uses 39% more bandwidth than the other Skype clients. “Differences may be due to computing capacity of the devices, auto-throttling based on network conditions, or perhaps the properties of the underlying operating systems when it comes to their networking services.” Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm: “broadband access is essentially a duopoly and ISPs may have an economic interest in making sure certain apps run poorly.” Full report (pdf).

A November 2011 “freshness update” to Google search result ranking favors Skype.com, improving its SEO visibility 9.35% from September.

PCWorld “tested five multiperson video chat services — Google Hangouts, Skype Premium, Tinychat, AV by AIM, and AnyMeeting — to find the best place to conduct a group meeting online.” Google Hangouts and AnyMeeting won the shootout. It’s a good read.

3.4 million North American Skype users were hit by a Level 3 Internet backbone outage, kicking 12% of all Skype users offline for up to 90 minutes on Monday 7 November. In other news, US Government agencies will test the Emergency Alert System nationwide on Wednesday.

Is Nuance the only company to offer effective speech recognition at scale? I think so; they been improving their accuracy and bought up small companies before they could pose a threat to their monopoly. Google thinks so too, saying their hold on natural language processing is such a competitive advantage that Apple’s Siri, which uses Nuance services, should take Google off the hook for antitrust concerns. FairSearch calls balderdash.

Dennis Howlett gives up on Skype premium products since Skype refuses to refund losses due to security breach.

Quora answers Does Skyping with a guy look gay? with flippant answers to a silly question. My favorite answer comes from Suzanne Grub: “1. Peer-to-Peer applications are gay. If we define ‘heterosexual’ as describing a relationship where each party contributes a different sort of functional bits, and ‘homosexual’ as describing a relationship where each party contributes the same sort of functional bits, it’s pretty clear that Skype (where two equipotent computers with the same … err… package establish a relationship) is gay. Incidentally, Spotify and BitTorrent are also gay.”

Skyped job interviews replace flying candidates but have their own problems. Kelly Yang in NYT: “How do you make these tough calls when the connection is unstable, the audio delayed, and looking someone in the eye is impossible?”

Students Skype for School. Indiana high schoolers mentor second graders. California high school students get feedback on class projects from guest architects. Indiana students talk with Guatemala orphans and missionaries. Entrepreneur lectures on startup business to Hampshire students.

Tango, a Skype video calling rival, found support from HTC (preloaded on Titan and Radar phones in the UK and Singapore), Samsung (Focus, Focus Flash models), and Microsoft (Windows Phone marketplace). via WSJ blog. Stats: 23 million user accounts since September 2010 launch.

NYT: Skype lets love linger. College student Lauren Trefny: “’Skype might be a way to continue the magic of a summer relationship,’ she said, ‘but I am not sure it is the best way to develop one.’”

Skype bought the UK an hour of free hotspot Wi-Fi during Internet Week Europe, 7-11 November. Should be an effective promotion; an hour should be enough to hook you and drive Skype credit sales. via The Drum.

Microsoft killed off some 2010 internal tablet plans to protect Office, Windows and Exchange franchises. Microsoft aborted a potential iPad rival before the iPad had even come to market. Bold UI innovation (“digital Moleskine”) with tweaked Windows under the hood. How long before Skype has to fight those battles?

Phil Wolff consults with Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for effective people. Phil advises the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and is a director of the DataPortability Project. Email editor@skypejournal.com, Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf, G+ or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

Skype: New owners, new customers, new channels

Phil Wolff — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:44:31 +0000

Skype’s stock changes hands. Sometime soon employees may get new badges. Payroll processing and PR firms may change. But, for the most part, Skype’s employees will stay the course, building more Skype in more places.

Skype division President Tony Bates must make good on his promise of synergy to Ballmer.

The first step is to build up the team that treats the rest of Microsoft as major account customers. Each division and many Microsoft product lines will get their own account manager.

They will be responsible for helping the Entertainment division, for example, bring Skype to Xbox Kinect. This is a “Skype inside” approach, building on Skype’s platform products.

Bundling Skype with Microsoft products is the low-hanging fruit. Preinstalled in Windows. An IE toolbar. A home presence on Windows Phone. One more element in Microsoft Office. Low integration cost, low product risk, massive distribution.

These two strategies will change the Skype Division and the Skype products more than the change in owners. Skype will be learning from users and customers indirectly, through the lens of Microsoft’s divisions. So Skype must hold on to end-customer relationships to keep understanding new users. Microsoft will pull Skype in even more directions, with multiple conflicting world views. Skype will learn to hold its own world view and mission.

The coolest things will be the small leaks. Microsoft has great depth of process, experience with scale, reach in the workplace, research on the frontiers of computing. Those will spark deeper insights and innovation at Skype and those will be delightful to watch.

For those still working at Skype, congratulations on the new chapter in the Skype story.

A few useful links:

Tony Bates Weighs in on Microsoft’s Acquisition of Skype blog post announcement and video announcement.
Jim Courtney and Dan York weigh in too, both are upbeat about the announcement.
The most pithy cynicism was on Slashdot: “Embrace.. Extend.. Extinguish..”

A touch of irony as a little bit of Microsoft integration breaks in my browser…

Skype Journal – October 2011 News Roundup

Phil Wolff — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:23:12 +0000

Microsoft finished buying Skype. Ballmer’s PR, Bates’ PR. Courtney, York, Slashdot opine. Most folks thought this happened last April. I thought the EU should have attached strings to the deal, but they didn’t.

Gotta wonder if Microsoft would still have bought Skype if they had to pay US taxes on the deal.

A Mint.com infographic using Forbes data: AT&T got $1.05 Billion in tax rebates on FY2010 $18.2 Billion sales. So the US government paid AT&T more than Skype sold all year.

Skype filed DMCA take down notices against an engineer who reverse engineered part of Skype’s earlier communication protocols, alleging a blog infringed copyright on Skype source code.

Skype started updating the Libyan flag emoticon (flag:ly) from the old solid green one of Muammar Gadhafi to the new flag chosen by Libya’s revolutionaries. Facebook petition to make the change. If you don’t see a “horizontal tricolour of red, black and green with a white crescent and star centered on the black stripe” in your IM now, you should see it in one of the next few downloads. Already updated on the Skype.com web site. Skype rates 30.2¢/minute to landlines plus connection fee.

How do investors follow an $8.5 Billion exit? Former Skype owner Andreessen Horowitz is raising $900 million to buy more skypes.

A security hack could reveal your Skype profile and IP address and what bittorrent files you’re downloading. Read the paper from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, NYU-Poly, and the French research institute INRIA. Your browser gives up your IP address every time you visit a web page so this is most interesting to people avoiding surveillance and actively protecting their privacy. Tip: use a different VPN for Skype and each app you use to avoid the cross-referencing that might lead to blackmail.

The October snowstorms that hit the US Northeast put Skype to work as an alternative when telephony and roads were offline for a few days. A friend in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote “I’m sorta acting as a base for all my relatives and coworkers after this snowstorm. relaying calls and messages and such between people with no power and such. my t-mobile phone has no service. my verizon phone has intermittent failures and dropped calls. skype works beautifully, however if I’m dealing with peoples’ cell phones, they’re the weak end of the call.”

Jim Courtney: “If Skype wants to have a viable developer program we need to see results soon that can bring revenue to the developers.”

Skype renamed the Public API to Desktop API. More accurate.

Several APIs were rebranded as “SkypeKit for Desktop”, still in a restricted public beta.

SkypeKit for Desktop now supports two-party video calls.

A new beta of Trillian for Windows is using SkypeKit. It won’t allow cross-network IM or calling but it will let you turn off your Skype-branded client.

Dan York: “Meanwhile… is this renaming setting the stage for the release of some new client-less APIs? Let’s hope so… ” Dan worries the new realtime communication features (WebRTC/RTCWEB) being built into nextgen browsers will be hidebound to PSTN telephony instead of new over-the-top networks.

Microsoft announced their commercial-use Kinect for Windows SDK will be available early in 2012. Think we’ll see an official Skype for Kinect edition?

Korea’s Pantech will bring Kinnect-style gestural commands to Android mobile phones. A year from now I expect we’ll see this on core Windows, iOS, and Android mobile OSs.

Data Without Borders launched, a data science NGO bringing statisticians to small private sector big data sets. Personal data was the focus of the October Internet Identity Workshop.

VoIP pioneer Alec Saunders joined RIM, leading its Blackberry developer program. See sessions from this month’s BBcon devcon.

Skype is quietly retiring old thin-client services for UK mobile operator 3. Courtney says “I would imagine 3 would have to be working on a strategy to phase out its initial Skype service and transition their customers to newer platforms.” Still available in the UK, Ireland, and Australia for now, it has been discontinued in Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, and Sweden. Andy Abramson: “like so many sideline projects that ‘proved things’ now Skype is back to being just a IM based calling service online with a few hooks to the PSTN.” 4G and smarter phones are relegating Skype thin-client services to developing markets.

Download Skype for Windows 5.6. This update fixes a few bugs, unbundles Google apps (Google is retiring its Desktop which bundled Skype), and gives credit for third-party components. Or get 5.5 (5.5.0.119) which corrects some issues with the Skype home page popping up when in compact mode, fixes memory leaks in Skype Click-to-Call.

30.5 million people signed in to Skype at the same time on Monday, 10 October 2011, a new high-water-mark for Skype dialtone since the end of March. A seasonal thing, fueled by more than a million people downloading Skype desktop apps in the days before. I’m guessing about 180 million active users this week.

Just for comparison, Rafe Needleman reports “Zynga revealed that there are 232 million active monthly users of the network, and 60 million daily users. The company records 2 billion play minutes each day.”

RIP Steve Jobs. All sorts of milestones in my career were directly influenced by Steve. My first job out of college: selling Apple IIs. First well paying job after being down and out: Mac desktop publishing for an artist. First dive into design as a discipline: studying about the anthropology research that lead to the Mac. First usability research: books on the difference between the mac/windows/command line.

I had a poster of the NeXT in my bedroom for years, after I saw Jobs demo one at the Berkeley Mac User Group in the old round Physics lecture hall. the idea that you could engineer hardware to support a Unix operating system AND make it even friendlier for newbies than a Mac was gobsmacking. The whole stand-on-a-stage thing and carefully tell your story was part of my toolkit long before he showed his mastery of that, but Steve added a real appreciation of the subject matter, joy for the value he showed, excitement for the geekery.

The iPhone wasn’t my first mobile phone, or even the first I loved (I miss my N90 sometimes). It was the first that made me use it like a computer, made me want to build apps again, dream the entrepreneurial dream. and keep the internet in my pocket. Damn. Damn. I’m typing this on a MacBook in a pizza joint down the street from the Apple store. And they’re playing sonorous sad music.

Europe approves Microsoft buying Skype without strings, follows the US. Microsoft says it is happy. Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan are weighing in but are unlikely to have a say on the deal. Jim Courtney marks the progress.

Michigan State professors want a law to permit distance weddings. Their proposal. Adam Candeub and Mae Kuykendall support e-marriage and e-ritual in all 50 US states. “States should authorize marriages of those not present within their territorial boundaries. We demonstrate that states have the sovereign power to authorize marriage performed anywhere, and historically have blessed marriages in distant locations.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer takes Skype video call-ins for its live football TV show. Skype clevelanddotcom.

Tango for Windows is out and, from Forbes, Tango To Be Windows Phone/Mango’s First Videocalling Service, Leapfrogging Skype. imho, first doesn’t matter as much as best fit and most used.

IP lobbyists try to hobble the new Hollywood.

Llama stories Skyped.

Skype WiFi coverage of Manhattan may improve thanks to Boingo’s deal with Towerstream.

Florida soldier sees baby daughter before dying in Afghanistan.

Pennsylvania synagogue offers skyped Hebrew school to bar/bat mitzvah students.

I wish I’d seen Janet Vartinen’s talk “Collaboration: Is the Employee in the Driver’s Seat?” at the 7th Annual Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo. “As social and personal collaboration tools are finding their way into the business environment IT departments are being challenged. … It is not just about engineering anymore. This session will discuss successful methods to bridge the collaboration gap…”

Phil Wolff consults with Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for effective people. Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

MicroSkype is too big to slip under EU regulatory radar

Phil Wolff — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:24:21 +0000

UPDATE: WHOOPS! Financial Times says EU Commission will approve deal, no strings. I guess it still managed to slip through. “Competition reviews are still under way in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan.”

Less than 100 hours from Europe ruling on the Microsoft-Skype purchase, Skype’s Jean-Jacques Sahel shared a Plum report on the economic value of an “open Internet.” (pdf). It’s an argument for net neutrality, including mobile net neutrality. Sahel’s post is Skype asking regulators to protect Skype’s access to the Internet from companies with the power to harm that access. I believe in net neutrality too. Skype wants government protection from powerful carriers but is struggling to avoid similar obligations of access, openness, and giving back as it finds its own power.

I wrote Monday that Skype is too big to slip under regulatory radar. With Microsoft, Skype will no longer be a David to telecom Goliaths. They will be a Goliath. Powerful, vast, and fiercely competitive.

Decentralization of power was at the heart of the Internet’s design and architecture so the net would survive a nuclear attack. "Network neutrality" is a way of repeating that principle. It is unhealthy for the Internet when companies further down the IP stack exploit their power and play favorites among users from higher up the stack.

With great power comes great responsibility. The MicroSkype deal concentrates power. Skype hasn’t shown willingness to do any more than what is required by law.

They are willing to disrupt landline and mobile operators, but unwilling to enable public services like e911, fund relay services for the hearing or vision impaired, or contribute to funds for improving Internet access.
They are eager to distribute Skype by bundling software with Microsoft products, but are unwilling to do so in a way that offers a level playing field to rivals.
They are open to API integration with friends of Microsoft like Facebook and, presumably, Microsoft’s divisions, but they burden their developer program and APIs with untenable terms of service, prohibiting use of their network by use, location, and device and requiring prior approval of any app using their network.

A measure of oversight, ensuring responsible use of power, is fully within the mandate of those approving the acquisition.

Some, like my friend Jim Courtney, worry the EU has been ineffective, citing their failure to protect Netscape from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the late 1990s browser wars. Maybe.

Ben Lilienthal suggests switching costs are lower with Skype, so their power may not be as absolute. Sure, but Skype is not a personal data portability champion.

Many want Skype to play fair. Alon Cohen IM’d he’d want Skype to “Support 911, collect and pay taxes like everyone else, or stop offering PSTN phone numbers. (Gov can remove the taxes, which will be just as fine from my perspective). Open up to SIP, provide every Skype with a phone number or URI accessible to other companies..”

So what does Skype’s post, “The open Internet: platform for growth. The open Internet is an essential platform for growth and benefits for all, including telecom operators: it has to be safeguarded” really mean? Regulate Skype and it will cost jobs. Really?

Here’s what the Europe could do:

Have Skype be a fair platform provider, enable third-parties to plug their own software and hardware into the Skype network, preserve consumer choice, support citizen safety like other phone companies, let your users leave with their phone numbers and data, support local and regional consumer rights, tilt the balance toward personal power over state power in this transnational Internet, and collect taxes. Specifically, quoting from my earlier post:

Microsoft must expose to the developer community all those plumbing features that make the Skype network so effective on the same basis that Skype and the Microsoft app developers receive access.
Divide Skype departments between the communications infrastructure and the app layer. Make them operate as two separate businesses.
Compel the Skype Network business to treat all customers at least as well as it treats Microsoft and Skype Apps Division customers.
Mandate “platform network neutrality” where bits from third-party apps travel through Skype’s network as well as bits from Skype’s own apps.
Skype must publish protocols so anyone can connect whatever software or service they like to Skype’s network so long as that end point doesn’t harm the network.
Skype cannot tax, register or otherwise control end users or third-parties connecting to the network.
Require compliance with emergency service access laws and rules, subject to user opt-out and local law.
Promote comparable third-party communication products on Microsoft platforms as least as well as you promote Skype.
Prohibit restrictions on bundling third-party Skype-compatible products with Microsoft products.
Require compliance with emergency service access laws and rules, subject to user opt-out and local law.
Skype must accept the transfer of a customer’s existing phone numbers to Skype’s service.
Skype must enable customers to transfer of a Skype-connected phone number to a competing network.
Skype should not be allowed to take away company phone numbers once in service.
Skype must let third-parties extract all customer created and co-created data on behalf of users.
Forbid Skype from banning “class action” suits by customers in its terms of service.
Compel Skype to report statistics on government requests by type and country of origin, the way Google does.
Compel Skype to promptly notify users when they are being surveilled or requests for information about their activities have been demanded by authorities. This should be subject to the laws of the country where the customer claims citizenship. So a US or Chinese government agency could not order Microsoft to spy on the conversations of a French and German national without the consent of the French and German governments.
Require that Skype APIs and clients disclose to users the jurisdictions of their contacts. You can only make informed choices about whom to talk to or not, what to say or not, if you can assess the consequences.
Compel Skype to collect fees and taxes from its customers as required of telephone operators. At a minimum, contribute to the fund that pays for relay services for the deaf and blind.

It’s time for Skype to step up.

Corporate citizenship comes with benefits. This is a rare moment to review, renew, revise and modernize the duties that come with that privilege. The United States missed its moment. Will Europe seize theirs?

Phil Wolff consults with Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for effective people. Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf or call +1-510-444-8234 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype. Phil’s opinions may not represent the views of Hookflash or Skype.

photo: Occupy Wall Street, 26 September 2011, cc-by-sa by Paul Stein.

Should the US have OK’d Microsoft’s purchase of Skype? Should the EU?

Phil Wolff — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:14:56 +0000

The European Commission will make a statement on the Microsoft-Skype deal on or before this Friday, 7 October 2011.

Skype is too big to slip under regulatory radar.

Skype was all promise in 2003. Now it is achievement. They are no longer the tiny underdog fighting the phone companies. They are a billion dollar a year business with a thousand employees serving nearly two hundred million people 255 billion of minutes of live conversation every year, rounding slightly. They’ve pulled so much hard currency from national phone companies that Russia’s Chamber of Commerce declared Skype an enemy of the state. They’ve changed consumer behavior and become the default way to talk across borders for anyone with Internet access.

When should regulators consider this a threat?

Now, when an ounce of prevention matters most.

Microsoft wants to multiply Skype’s reach and impact. Microsoft seeks to combine Skype with its other communications properties and bring realtime communication to its non-communication products. Skype, along with Nokia, completes Microsoft’s vision for the Windows Phone operating system. We’ll see Skype inside Microsoft games, Lync business phones, Bing click-and-call adverts, Dynamics call center solutions, Office, Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer.

As huge as Skype is, they could be ten times bigger in a few years with Microsoft’s help. $10B in revenue, 2 billion users, trillions of minutes of live conversation. That comes with market power.

US regulators cleared the deal. A decision by EU authorities is days away.

Who is affected?

At least one Italian VoIP company is reported opposing the deal, per EurActiv. Messagenet asked the authorities to require Microsoft not to bundle Skype with Windows and to compel interop with other Internet presence, IM, telephony, and video chat services.

Other stakeholders have similar concerns. Who else in Skypelandia might ask for terms to their advantage?

Messengers. Skype’s IM rivals should fear the federation of Microsoft and Skype, bringing chat market share above 50% in the English speaking world. Will Yahoo!, Tencent, Aol, ICQ and the rest speak up?
Telecoms. People who make telephone systems stand to lose as more power becomes concentrated in Microsoft’s hands. Cisco, Avaya, Asterisk, and others stand to lose if the deal goes through. So do other Over The Top telephony services like Truphone, Fring, Rebtel, and Fone.
Identity. When you combine Microsoft’s userbase with Skype’s, they could offer the world’s largest “sign in with” service. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and Twitter stand to lose authority.
Conferencing. Skype already threatens Citrix’s conference call and meeting services, Cisco’s WebEx, and the other video conferencing services.
Advertising. Skype’s revenue from advertising has been trivial. That can change dramatically once you add Skype Click-to-Call service to Bing adverts. Would other advertisers be able to choose another click-and-call service or will all that Microsoft power lock out competition?
Hollywood and Games. Live team talk is now a feature of many social games. Warcraft proved its importance and teamtalk is now part of the gamers toolkit. Can Microsoft’s entertainment division create an unfair advantage, locking in friends and teams who play together in multiple worlds?
Consumer Electronics. The market has yet to prove people won’t buy a television unless it has Skype inside. Could Skype help Microsoft win the battle for the living room, including the war for set top boxes, TVs, and the remote control?
Platformers. Many companies offer telephony as an API. Will Microskype use its global buying power to undercut Voxeo, Twilio, Jajah and the rest?

What could Europe demand of Microsoft in exchange for permission to buy Skype?

[Caution, I Am Not A Lawyer.}

A. Platform Fairly.

Skype won’t be able to partner with the many divisions at Microsoft without a cloud platform. So Skype will spin up thousands of servers with hundreds of thousands of SkypeKit-like instances and web service APIs. Then non-Skype Microsoft developers will build Skype features into their products.

Later, Skype will likely offer Microsoft’s independent developer network almost the same SDKs as they offer Microsoft’s other divisions. That’s opening up parts of Skype to about one million programmers.

What exactly should Skype expose to third-parties? Under what terms?

A1. Skype should publish specs so third-parties can build their own clients to serve their own customers and users without licensing technology from Skype. These resources would include:

Communication interop. Expose controls for creating and controlling IM, voice, video sessions. Enable use of mood messages, emoticons, and file transfer.
Identity services. This includes account lifecycle management (creating, changing, ending accounts), authentication services, and authorization services.
People Search. Find users by any identifier or descriptor in the Skype directories, subject to privacy controls.
Endpoint identification (what device is a person using)
Location information (which skype is sure to start using)
Presence services. Not just disclosing or controlling a user’s availability for interruption (online or offline) but processing requests for presence based on contexts like strength of relationship (e.g. family vs. stranger).

A2. Conditions.

Now, Skype prohibits third-parties from talking to the Skype network in all sorts of useful ways. Skype’s developer ToS bans applications that might wind up competitive to existing or future Skype products. For example, you may not run a Skype client in a server farm, or put SkypeKit into an enterprise appliance, or include SkypeKit in a product i sell in China.

Skype also offers some services that are explicitly premium or for special partners. For example, Skype offers anonymous access to the Skype network through Facebook’s video chat browser plug-in. Skype also enables group video via servers, and they charge end users for that but not Facebook chat users.

A3. Fairness.

Remember when Microsoft was told to put their own desktop applications at arms’ length from Windows? Regulators argued Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s own browser, had an insurmountable competitive advantage over third-parties because of early, exclusive and/or privileged access to Windows internals and secret APIs.

The same argument could be made about Skype.

Action:

Microsoft must expose to the developer community all those plumbing features that make the Skype network so effective on the same basis that Skype and the Microsoft app developers receive access.
Divide Skype departments between the communications infrastructure and the app layer. Make them operate as two separate businesses.
Compel the Skype Network business to treat all customers at least as well as it treats Microsoft and Skype Apps Division customers.
Mandate “platform network neutrality” where bits from third-party apps travel through Skype’s network as well as bits from Skype’s own apps.

B. Skype Carterphone.

The original Carterphone ruling opened the door for third-parties to compete with phone companies on telephones so long as they didn’t harm the network. Skype argued for a Mobile Carterphone principle in the US, bringing that freedom to compete to wireless networks. Now it is time apply the principle again, this time to Skype’s own network.

Skype has a few hundred developers, roughly half working on infrastructure, half on apps. Skype Carterphone would allow millions of developers to find their own uses for the Skype network and to innovate in the marketplace, building apps for different situations (e.g. first responders and the cognitively impaired need very specific, non-generic apps). Right now Skype is like the phone companies from one hundred years ago, offering exactly the same phone to everyone. EU citizens deserve the benefits the market will bring if Skype is unleashed.

Action:

Skype must publish protocols so anyone can connect whatever software or service they like to Skype’s network so long as that end point doesn’t harm the network.
Skype cannot tax, register or otherwise control end users or third-parties connecting to the network.

C. Consumer Choice.

Is the combination of Skype, Microsoft, and Nokia a threat to consumer choice?

How much will Skype be bundled with mobile phones? With mobile OSs? With Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Xboxes, and other Microsoft products? This may constitute an overwhelming market advantage, stifling innovation and competition.

One remedy may be like what Microsoft did after the IE/Netscape war; they offered links to IE, Netscape and other browsers on their desktops and stopped forbidding OEMs from installing other browsers on Windows PCs.

Action:

Promote comparable third-party communication products on Microsoft platforms as least as well as you promote Skype.
Prohibit restrictions on bundling third-party Skype-compatible products with Microsoft products.

Will that be enough to assure a healthy diversity of products and streams of innovation outside of Microsoft?

D. Citizen Safety.

It’s time for apps to shoulder a new duty.

Is Skype’s popularity and dominance, only growing with Microsoft, reason enough to craft new rules in the public interest for operators of realtime communication over data?

Yes. We’re abandoning landlines and switching from mobile voice to mobile data. Along with this, the responsibility for helping people reach emergency services or be notified of earthquakes and tsunamis should migrate from the landline or wireless operator to the app provider.

Society needs its citizens to use these services. Apps must take up the life-saving responsibility from telcos. First Skype, then others in the application layer, should assume this duty.

Action:

Require compliance with emergency service access laws and rules, subject to user opt-out and local law.

E. Freedom to Leave.

E1. Phone Number and ID Portability.

As Skype becomes dominant as the first realtime social network to achieve global scale, and continues to grow, a Skype name could very well become as vital as your phone number.

Skype offers Online Numbers (formerly called SkypeIn numbers). Skype should interop to the extent that it complies with rules about accepting existing phone numbers and transferring SkypeIn numbers to other services as customers demand. We’ve already seen situations where Online Numbers used by small businesses have been removed at Skype’s convenience, cutting off businesses from customers.

Action:

Skype must accept the transfer of a customer’s existing phone numbers to Skype’s service.
Skype must enable customers to transfer of a Skype-connected phone number to a competing network.
Skype should not be allowed to take away company phone numbers once in service.

E2. Personal Data Portability.

Skype is too much a Hotel California for personal data. You can’t get your profile out, or your history, but you can get a .vcf file listing your contacts.

Action:

Skype must let third-parties extract all customer created and co-created data.

F. Consumer Rights.

Skype has enormous power over its customers. It has wielded that power lightly, but it still has that power. It can ban a user, reassign a user name, seize funds, and apply new terms of service, all without meaningful notice, consent, or an independent and timely means of redress.

So Microsoft should be subject to a regime that provides for meaningful consumer rights and treatment and access to the resources of national and EU telecom dispute resolution services.

Forbid Skype from banning “class action” suits by customers in its terms of service.

G. Clarify Legal Jurisdiction.

Skype cooperates with law enforcement authorities in many countries. Skype is quiet about it but they’ve said they cooperate with authorities in the US, China, and around the world. The acquisition will only increase Skype’s power and the demand by censors, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement authorities for access to personal data, private under EU telephone laws.

Action:

Compel Skype to report statistics on government requests by type and country of origin, the way Google does.
Compel Skype to promptly notify users when they are being surveilled or requests for information about their activities have been demanded by authorities. This should be subject to the laws of the country where the customer claims citizenship. So a US or Chinese government agency could not order Microsoft to spy on the conversations of a French and German national without the consent of the French and German governments.
Require that Skype APIs and clients disclose to users the jurisdictions of their contacts. You can only make informed choices about whom to talk to or not, what to say or not, if you can assess the consequences.

H. Collect Taxes.

Phone companies collect taxes from their customers for governments. As soft networks like Skype take over from landline and mobile operators, Microsoft could take that role.

Action:

Compel Skype to collect fees and taxes from its customers as required of telephone operators. At a minimum, contribute to the fund that pays for relay services for the deaf and blind.

It’s time for Skype to step up.

I’m a huge Skype fan. I use it every day for family and work. It lets me earn my paycheck in a multinational team. The health and success of the Skype network matters to me. So I’m not trying to keep eBay, the founders, and the other investors from getting their payday. Or prevent Microsoft from adding its muscle to Skype’s momentum.

This moment comes once in a lifetime. The Commission will shape Skype’s future and those of every user.

Corporate citizenship comes with benefits. This is a rare moment to review, renew, revise and modernize the duties that come with that privilege. The U.S. Congress, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and Department of Justice missed their moment. Will Europe seize theirs?

September 2011 Roundup

Phil Wolff — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:19:00 +0000

Skype for iPhone 3.0.1 security vulnerabilities will be fixed soon, says Skype. Tom Keating, Jim Courtney and Dan York write up the #XSS (cross-site scripting) exploit that could let a javascript copy your Skype contacts. first reported by Superever. The video. This follows another XSS vulnerability in Skype for Windows, now resolved.

Skype for Windows 5.5 update (5.5.0.117) adds support for Microsoft Windows 8. via Raul Liive. Skype for Windows 5.5.0.119 fixed a few bugs and updated the Click-to-Call feature for new browsers. Get it.

Or jump right to Skype for Windows 5.6 (5.6.0.105) to get a few improvements for new users, for screen sharing, and some UI tweaks, and now “in call advertising.” New, improved distractionware inside.

Skype for iPhone update (3.5.84) includes a new anti-shake technology for the back phone. Nice! The update fixes bugs. Safer! Both apps get Bluetooth support. Convenienter!

Skype for iPad and Skype for iPhone users see ads. “Advertising will be shown to users that do not have Skype Credit, a calling subscription or premium subscription.” #SkypeProtectionMoney. Christian Zibreg writes “As most people don’t use Skype Credit, we imagine rubbing their nose into the upgrade offering will be annoying, to say the least. Instead of up-selling us to a paid service, can we please get an elegant interface instead?” Tim Barribeau thinks “while there are some very useful new features in this version, there’s one big, stinking bad one: ads. … Advertising? Oh hell no.” Tom Keating isn’t worried about mobile ads.

Skype for Mac 5.4 Beta (version 5.4.0.1217) includes Facebook features. More feature parity with Skype for Windows means Mac users now see advertising. via Krishna Panicker. Get it.

Does advertising break Skype’s brand promises? SkypeSedator by eitarosan “automatically closes the Skype Home Popup Window and keeps itself in the Skype Process to continually check and close the popup, whenever it appears” in Skype for Windows. via Stadt-Bremerhaven. Another stab at it is KillSkypeHome by Andrew Worcester. “This script is designed to start with windows, kill the Skype Home window when it finds it, then closes itself so it no longer uses any system resources. For those of you who don’t leave skype running all the time, I’ve added “Persistent mode” which keeps KSH running and watching for Skype Home to pop up.” Instructions for KillSkypeHome. Try at your own risk.

Irish Skypers will get targeted home page take overs (HPTOs), thanks to digital advertising agency AD2ONE.

Skype partner OnStar changed their ToS so they may sell your personal data. Would you still use a (still prototypical) Skype for OnStar if GM was selling your geodata?

Skype published new user activity stats from June 2011. 65 million people sign in to Skype daily. 700 million minutes daily in Skype-to-Skype calls. 30 million minutes of SkypeOut calls daily. 300 million minutes of Skype video calls daily. Ratios (rounded): 42% of Skype-to-Skype calls include video. 4.1% Freemium rate (minutes paid vs. minutes free). This is a snapshot. What are the year-to-year trends?

I celebrated Skype’s 8th birthday with some memories and predictions.

The deal with Canada’s TELUS to preload Skype on mobiles now encourages users to try Skype mobile apps, reports Jim Courtney. Thin clients not included.

Skype’s Qik will come with Japan’s NTT DOCOMO Android tablets. 10.3 million people use Qik.

Europe could have a decision about about Microsoft buying Skype by 7 October 2011. via Jim Courtney.

Microsoft’s instant messaging share could be 70% after buying Skype. Is this is a good reason for EU antitrust regulators to oppose the deal?

Skype’s real value is in the proven identity of its real users says Matt Asay.

DigiNotar hackers also breached Skype SSL certificates. No harm done at Skype, they say.

Skype’s Skype in the Classroom site won a Core77 Design Award. Deserved it! Congrats also to London designers Made By Many.

Skype Support Network (formerly Skype’s forums) added @skypesupport for Twitter users, for problems solved in 140 characters or less. Nicely active and responsive.

Users

Bill McKibben says work from home: Skype is greener than jet fuel. Airlines hope you disagree.

Control a Skype robot with your brain.

David Gewirtz is building a home studio for Skype audio and video calls. via DIY-IT blog.

Marine watches his son born on Skype.

Man asks young teens for sex over Skype, goes to jail.

Woman steals laptop, accidentally skypes, and goes to jail.

Personal trainers make you do pushups over Skype. No jail.

Microsoft Phone’s “Metro” look is showing up in Windows 8. What would a Skype skinned for Metro look like?

Granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth prefers Skype and phone talks to facebook. via Emil Protalinkski.

Time zone challenges when Skyping for a casting interview between Australia and New York, Abbie Cornish and Madonna.

Fake General Patraeus uses Skype video to scam lonely hearts and patriotic souls. via Daily Mail.

Will Microsoft+Skype have 68% desktop IM market share?

Phil Wolff — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:46:00 +0000

OPSWAT reported market share of installed Windows instant messenger apps for 2011Q2 (pdf). With Windows Live Messenger at 40.67% and Skype at 27.39%, that would put Microsoft’s post-acquisition share of the desktop side of the market north of 68%. Should this affect the EC’s merger approval? Does this market consolidation justify anti-trust restrictions?

The report is incomplete on a few fronts.

OPSWAT’s data source is specific to Windows desktops. So it leaves out web IM services like Google Talk, Mac clients like iChat, tablet apps like Skype for iPad and mobile IM clients like Skype for Android.
It also wouldn’t register the millions of Facebook chat browser extensions connecting to the Skype network, newly released since the report.
Microsoft’s other IM clients – MSN Messenger and Office Communicator – are not listed at all. Defunct or not reported?
The measurements appear to be biased toward Europe and the Americas since products like Tencent’s QQ, with roughly four times Skype’s active user base, are dramatically undercounted.

Ignore nuance: Just look at that huge block of red. Roughly two out of three IM clients will be Microsoft’s. What does that mean for consumers? To competitors?

Does the desktop IM market still matter? Yes.

Desktop IM has been Skype’s gateway drug for eight years. It was the most straightforward way to bring friends in to your contact list and download the codecs and other software needed for voice and video. Ringing, alerting and other attention-grabbers make realtime desktop apps successful.

That is changing. Standalone desktop IM apps will lose share over the next three years to browser, tablet and mobile apps. HTML5 and WebRTC are becoming real and platform makers are baking live calling into browsers and operating systems.

For now, desktops remain how most people IM most of the time. And Microsoft will soon own that market.

Full chart is below the fold…

Phil Wolff is a consultant to Hookflash, a software company building realtime communication products for the workplace. Skype evanwolf, tweet @evanwolf or call +1-510-316-9773 to talk with Phil. Skype Journal is independent of Skype.

I’m hooked.

Phil Wolff — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:37:00 +0000

For the last few months I’ve been helping Hookflash prepare for launch. We came out of stealth mode Tuesday, announcing Hookflash for iPad at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference (Booth D6, if you’re there). I also showed it yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley. Preview signups are on the home page and following @hookflash on Twitter should keep you in the loop. I won’t go too much into the company or product here but you should check out Jim Courtney’s post, HookFlash: Elevating the Business Video Calling Experience? and Julie Klein’s Demo: Hookflash aims to make phone calls at work more productive.

I believe computing and communication can amplify collective power. Skype’s charter is helping the world to talk. Hookflash has a narrower mandate: to help people with common purpose work together to get things done. That’s exciting and meaningful and I’m glad to advance that vision.

I’ve been blogging here less often as Hookflash turned from vision to reality. My work at Hookflash can only keep Skype Journal editorially independent of Skype. For transparency’s sake, I’ll disclose my relationship with Hookflash with each post.

EU to give first glance decision on $MSFT buying #Skype on 7 October

Phil Wolff — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:53:20 +0000

Jim Courtney has a complete report on the European Commission’s review of the merger. News early next month but Jim works through how they’ll get there. Think the Commish will call for public comment? Is Microskype good for telecoms competition in Europe? What do Europe’s big telcos have to say? Is Skype a bigger threat on its own or with Microsoft’s backing?

New Freetalk adapter makes Skype more like MagicJack

Phil Wolff — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:39:31 +0000

A $39.99 box the size of a coffee mug, the FREETALK Connect.me lets Americans plug your dumb phone into your Ethernet network. Your phone rings when someone Skypes you or calls your SkypeIn phone number. You can call out to phone numbers using your Skype credits or your SkypeOut subscription. And you can call Skype users if you add them to a “speed dial” list. Just don’t try to dial 911 or another emergency phone number; Skype will refuse to pass the call through to avoid regulation.

Phone geeks call this an ATA device, short for analog telephone adapter or analogue terminal adapter, connecting an old style phone with a VoIP service. Previous third-party Skype ATAs all died horrible deaths, languishing in warehouses, returned to retailers, or stuck in my old-electronics-waiting-for-recycling box. What makes the Connect.me different?

A few things. First, this is a smarter ATA, not requiring your desktop computer running Skype except to set things up, assign a Skype name, pay credits, or change your speed dial list. Second, setup may be simple, but Skype didn’t send press test units in advance of today’s announcement, so I won’t be able to attest to that.

Some downsides. Freetalk isn’t worried about sound quality; your home phone’s microphone and speakers won’t do justice to Skype wideband audio anyway (G.722, G.729 and Skype NWC codecs). No emergency dialing. It uses an additional power outlet, and is wide enough to require three outlets on a power strip. It occupies one of your router’s few Ethernet ports; no WiFi. It may ring on non-Skype calls. If you use multiple Connect.mes, you’ll have to install the Safari browser on your PC to configure them. You won’t be sending caller ID but you’ll be able to see incoming IDs.

Clearly Hong Kong’s Freetalk, on behalf of Skype, hopes this smarter ATA (SkypeKit inside?) will sell. Freetalk failed to bring its much more expensive Freetalk Connect•All multiline small business phone system to market at $2000. The Connect.me is more their style, cheaper than many Skype headsets.

Skype investors will appreciate Connect.me too, as it spreads Skype’s dialtone so more people are available to make and take Skype calls 24×7. Skype wants your phone to ring when you are away from your home computer or when your mobile phone is off.

User Tip: Dial ** before a number to force the call to Skype. Dial # first to force the call through your local phone company.

From the Skype store FAQ:

What Skype features are supported on the FREETALK® Connect•Me Phone Adapter?

Free, unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls (up to 99 speed dials/Skype contacts)

Calls to landlines and mobiles domestically as well as internationally.

Can I access my Skype address book?

Yes, once you have completed the set up on your computer, your phone adapter will be automatically synced up with your Skype account. So all your Skype contact details and numbers will be ready to use.

Can I make Skype-to-Skype calls to other devices, such as mobiles and Skype-ready TVs?

Yes, you can contact anyone on Skype regardless of the device they are using.

How do I add credit?

Buy your first credit amount online by clicking on ‘buy credit’ at Skype.com. If you select the ‘auto-recharge’ option, Skype will recharge your account automatically when it falls below $2 so you do not unexpectedly run out of credit.

Can I receive calls?

Yes, if someone calls you, your home phone will ring and you can answer as normal.

My landline and router are not close to each other, can I still use the home phone adapter?

Your landline socket and router do need to be near each other as they both connect to the home phone adapter. However, you can purchase a ‘Powerline Adapter kit’ which extends an ethernet network connection to any electrical outlet.

I only want to use my home phone adapter for Skype calls, must I connect my landline?

A landline is not required to use the home phone adapter for Skype. However Skype should not be considered as a replacement landline service.

CORRECTION: eBuyNow Ltd. is in Hong Kong, not Spain.

Happy 8th Birthday, Skype! Many happy returns.

Phil Wolff — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:32:11 +0000

Wow, It’s been eight years since Skype launched. 2003 to 2011. I’ve been writing about Skype on my own blogs or on Skype Journal from the start. SJ alum Jim Courtney salutes Skype today and Skype pats itself on the back.

Looking back…

The company has been bought and sold, and sold, and sold. And soon to be sold again.

The founders were in, kicked out, then held key technology for ransom to get back on the board for their big payout from Microsoft.

Skype averaged a new leader a year.

Skype disrupted international telephone companies, displacing billions of dollars of hard currency with free or very cheap services. Their success has them banned in some countries and declared “an enemy of the state” in others. Didn’t stop them from partnerships with mobile operators from Hong Kong to Italy.

Roughly half the Internet has tried Skype on a personal computer, a mobile phone, or in a device. Skype isn’t ubiquitous but its brand is. And Skype continues to grow.

Why? What does the future hold?

As for why Skype’s been successful…

Skype’s timing was great, several times. Just in time for broadband to make consumer VoIP practical for millions. A few years’ later, just in time for a lift by eBay’s brand (did you know Skype was an eBay company for half its life?), Skype was able to hire GIPS expats and ready itself for the webcam explosion. And when the world economy imploded in 2008, Skype was a large enough network that people turned to video calling as an alternative to travel (airlines hate Skype).

Skype partnered intensely. If you could bring a million new users to Skype, Skype cut a deal. Large national web portals have Skype sub-sites, laptop manufacturers preinstall Skype on Windows, mobile operators install Skype on Android phones, and you can find Skype on TVs and soon on game stations.

Skype focused on customer acquisition. During its eBay years, Skype pursued new users at the expense of product innovation.

Skype gets the viral business. It takes two to talk and Skype made sure you had every reason to drag your friends and family into the network. Skype keeps removing roadblocks to onramping and adding reasons to subscribe. This could be Skype’s first billion dollar year.

Skype delivered real value, consistently, affordably, to millions of people.

So, a few longer-term Skype predictions:

In 2011:

Microsoft will close the deal.

Skype will have more than 1000 employees.

Luxembourg will become Skype’s HQ in name only. Palo Alto is the new Luxembourg.

Microsoft Watch starts covering Skype closely.

In 2012:

Microsoft’s Skype division will absorb the Lync business unit.

Lync will be rebranded Skype.

Skype will launch its cloud products.

Skype will hit its Q1 peak of 35 million concurrent users, 220 million active users.

Victims sue Skype for not offering emergency dialing after a family dies.

Skype’s new cloud loses the US Presidential campaigns to Twilio, powering team and phonebanking apps.

A Skype toolbar and skinny-client comes with a new release of Internet Explorer.

Skype fuels LinkedIn chat.

Hackers reverse engineer Skype’s p2p network, make it public. Vulnerabilities and prior hacks exposed.

In 2013:

Skype for Mac catches up with Skype for Windows.

Skype for Windows Phone has cooler features than Skype for Mac.

Skype ships on the next Windows, in the next Office.

Skype becomes just one of thousands of products using in-browser WebRTC for calls, presence and IM.

SkypeKit becomes a standard component of Windows.

Skype kills the former Lync product family as PSTN hardware sales drop sharply. Lync becomes a Sharepoint feature, phone stations are all mobile, tablet or PCs.

Skype works with with Windows Live Messenger IM and voice.

In 2014:

Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue through Microsoft internal customers. Bing ads, Xbox subscriptions, Office, Windows.

Leaks reveal Skype cooperated with law enforcement in a totalitarian regime to shut down resistance. Leaks prove false.

Facebook drops Skype as a partner, as their internal pendulum swings to owning.

The Vatican IT department picks Skype as its telecom standard.

Skype for Layar brings talk to augmented reality RayBans.

In 2015:

Skype will deliver one billion minutes of live talk through developers using its cloud platform services.

Skype will generate one quarter of its revenue from platform services.

Skype and Bing launch YouTube competitor.

Skype is banned on student tablets in 903 school districts as a distraction.

Half of all televisions come with Skype inside or in an attached box.

Mass exodus as pre-Microsoft Skype employees fully vest and leave.

In 2016:

Phone banks using Skype for Web prove decisive in Get Out The Vote campaigns.

Facial recognition plug-ins reveal micro expressions and give live commentary.

Stallone Skype’s fighting instructions to his son in Rocky Junior.

In 2017

Platform products deliver half of Skype’s revenue.

Tony Bates named as Ballmer’s successor.

Photo credit: 8th Birthday Cake by Jim Capaldi for Emily’s 8th Birthday Party.

Thanks for all the Skype.

Skype to buy GroupMe texting service

Phil Wolff — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:15:05 +0000

I agree on nearly all points with Om’s analysis of why Skype is buying GroupMe, why GroupMe picked Skype, and why it isn’t enough for Skype.

For Skype management, more for the Skype everywhere strategy, it fills a gaping user interaction hole, and brings very active young users in many international markets. Skype’s owners don’t mind; this is equity neutral (Skype cash for GroupMe assets).

For GroupMe investors, this is their liquidity event when markets and economies are as uncertain in the long term as they are volatile day by day. For GroupMe management, they get Microskype marketing power and future replacement of Twilio SMS backend with a cheaper Skype texting/voice/video backend [take that, Twilio!]

Om, I disagree on Skype having a consumer vs. enterprise conflict. They believe technology consumerization will continue smuggling Skype into the workplace.

Skype’s does have two other identity crises. First, are Skype a communications company or will they take a leap into helping people be productive? I don’t think Skype can or will take that leap. The second crisis, are Skype willing to compete as a platform or must Skype control all elements of user experience? This struggle is in play now, as the new managers brought on by the Private Equity partners successfully contained and crippled SkypeKit, Skype’s first platform product in years.

Tony Bates’ blog post, Skype news release, GroupMe announcement.