Today Skype announced the addition of Finland and Israel to their Unlimited subscription offerings. For instance they are now included at no additional charge to the various Skype Unlimited World, Unlimited Europe (20 countries with Finland as the only addition), etc. subscriptions. Finland and Israel are also included in the 36 countries serviced by an Unlimited Country subscription. (Mexico remains a 37th country special case.)

Additionally, administrators of Skype Business Control Panels can now purchase Skype Unlimited subscriptions for any employees, business colleagues and others whose Skype activity they administer.

With the ongoing 10,000 minute per month fair usage cap, I guess I'll have to reduce my time spent making calls to Chile and Estonia via SkypeOut. (10,000 minutes/month represents about five and a half hours/day.)

(Note: Links in this post will probably go to the pages for Canadian users; simply change your pages via the "change region" drop down box on the leading  Skype subscription page for each region.)

Tags: Skype, Skype Unlimited, Finland, Israel, iSkoot, Fring, Skype Business Control Panel

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• Blackberry 8820: read and sent email via both GMail and Blackberry mail, received a Skype call via iSkoot, followed and submitted Twitter messages via Twitter4Skype running as a Skype chat session in iSkoot, checked out and tracked the Blue Jays game, used Google Maps to get to the Nokia event, made a couple of local phone calls.
• Nokia N95 (first model): demonstrated SlingPlayer Mobile and Qik.com to Nokia personnel; made a Truphone call to Minnesota, took photos of the event with 5 MP camera.
• iPhone: lots of high quality web browsing; follow Facebook activity, read GMail.

Each has its own virtues - especially the Blackberry QWERTY keyboard, the N95's video applications and the iPhone's web browsing experience; yet I could not have done all these activities on a single device. Having WiFi on all three devices helped maintain contact while not able to use the carrier's wireless services. Just as important is that I am still getting used to not having to worry about mobile data plan usage with Rogers' new 6GB/month data plan rates as a result of the iPhone launch three weeks ago - at a $30/month lower cost than my plans for 25MB/month two months ago.

But the "convergence" coup d'état of the day was carried out by iotum CEO Alec Saunders. He had to host his daily SquawkBox call from the hotel lobby using iotum's CalliFlower service. He followed the web page activity on his iPhone that had a WiFi connection to his Nokia E71 using JoikuSpot and the Rogers Wireless data service; he made the voice call into the session using his Blackberry over the GSM voice channel. Key here is the need to follow the web page while talking on, and listening to, the call.

Seems like there's still many paths to follow before we see total convergence on a single device.

Tags: Mobile life, Blackberry, Nokia, iPhone, Rogers, Alec Saunders, CalliFlower, SquawkBox, Joiku, twitter4skype, iSkoot, GMail, Facebook, Truphone, Qik.com, SlingPlayer

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1. Accuracy. Anything that purports to be non-fiction should be true. Which means it should be accurate in fact and in context.

2. Labeling and Sourcing. If we are not certain that something is accurate, we should either not publish it, or should make that uncertainty plain by clearly stating the source of this information and its possible limits and pitfalls. To take another example of making the quality of information clear, we believe that that if unnamed sources must be used, they would be labeled in a way that sheds light on the limits and biases of the information they offer.

3. Explicit Conflicts of Interest. The content of anything that sells itself as journalism should be free of any motive other than informing its consumers. In other words, it should not be motivated, for example, by the desire to curry favor with an advertiser or to advance particular political interest. On the other hand, much of the content of this site has at least one point of view. We reserve the right to let our contributors opine, so long as author biases or conflicts are explicit and on record.

4. Accountability. The contributors to this site hold ourselves as accountable as any of the subjects we write about. We are eager to receive complaints about our work, will investigate complaints diligently, and correct mistakes of fact, context, and fairness prominently and clearly.

5. Caveat Lector. Information contained here is from sources believed to be reliable. This information is not necessarily complete.

A note from Jim Courtney about our editorial independence from Skype:

While Skype serves as a primary focus of our coverage, at no time has Skype treated us with any favours or treatment beyond normal courtesies to the press.  Some third party Skype affiliates have done advertising with us but that, in no way, affects our editorial coverage. It is a matter of policy that anything that may be interpreted as a conflict of interest become transparent in a post.

What do you think?

Please let us know when we stray. We read everything sent to editor @ skypejournal.com.

Thanks.

Phil Wolff

Methodology: They surveyed PCmag readers who were also customers of Optimum Voice, Vonage [congratulations on the new CEO gig, Mr. Lefar], AT&T CallVantage, magicJack, Time Warner Cable digital phone, Comcast Digital Voice and Skype. Dashes indicate insufficient data for meaningful results.

Skype's ratings were within 10% of average. A little below on overall satisfaction, sound quality, connection reliability, and support for non-technical issues. A little above on ease of setup.

But there's a remarkable statistic at the bottom of the table. 

7% of SkypeOut users needed technical support vs. 2% of PC-to-PC users. This is an order of magnitude lower than the 25% of users from the other services. On SkypeOut that's 360% better, on PC-to-PC that's 1250% better.

Only 1 in 50 PC-to-PC Skype users ever need tech support. 1 in 4 for other other services.

How does Skype score so well with such a small support staff?

Design. Engineering. Testing.

"It just works."

More on Skype's designs to improve "Ease of Setup" soon.

I clicked on the embedded URL and immediately was listening in on a conversation involving not only Stuart Henshall but also David Beckemeyer of Televolution (producer of PhoneGnome - now known as the PhweetGeek), I found I was in for a most interesting conversation experience. Within minutes we had a multi-party call involving as many as eight participants from India, Italy, Ireland (actually, Pat was calling in while on vacation in Spain) as well as others in the U.S. They had all joined "spontaneously" from a Twitter message (in my case initially seen via Twitter4Skype) as Stuart and David launched an Alpha version of Phweet this afternoon.

First thoughts and comments:

"A Phweet is a shortURL that makes conversations and conference calls possible between Twitter friends and across other social networks. Let your friends know you are talking. Invite them to join in. No numbers, no new profiles. Simple, just start Phweet talking!" - the Phweet blog

Notes:

• A pilot project by Stuart Henshall (co-founder of Skype Journal) and David Beckemeyer (ceo of TelEvolution, former cto of Earthlink).
• Send feedback @phweet.
• Turn off flash blockers like AdblockPlus for Firefox .
• This search page lists all public phweets on twitter. 

Ah, the phweeting pwomise of tawoo wuv.

More from Jim Courtney.

Nokia named iSkoot for Skype as a featured Application of the Week earlier this month on both the Nokia site and the S60 site.

iSkoot loads your Skype contact list right onto your S60 device display screen, and with just a quick click of a button, you can call your contacts. With Skype online status information, you get the benefit of Skype’s awareness of user presence. You can see who is available to call or chat, and also change your own online status to let others know that you are free to interact with them. iSkoot allows you to talk to anyone around the world from your S60 device and offers network service in over 40 countries. Calling is as easy as just clicking on a contact on your S60 device.

Two weeks ago, John Halamka – Chief Information Officer at Harvard Medical School and the CareGroup Health System (to name a few)– named iSkoot for Skype as his “Cool Technology of the Week.” Using his Blackberry Curve 8320 he has also figured out how to use "local" pay-as-you-go: SIM cards to reduce or eliminate roaming charges while traveling abroad.

The iSkoot client places a regular local phone call to an iSkoot gateway server, then the gateway server places a Skype call, bypassing all long distance charges. While connected to the iSkoot gateway, the iSkoot client enables you to

* See who is signed in and view their online status
* Manage your own online status
* Click to call a contact
* Click to chat with a contact
* Make low-cost calls to any phone number, anywhere in the world using SkypeOut
* Receive calls from Skype users
* Add or remove friends from your contact list
* Refresh your contact list automatically or on demand

And finally, Alec Saunders of iotum where, amongst other titles he is Chief SquawkBox Officer, recently spent three weeks in Europe traveling with his family. Having been supplied with a 3 Skypephone, he came home saying that he found the 3 Skypephone was the most consistent means for him to maintain the limited degree of connectivity he required while on a family vacation.

Previous iSkoot posts:

• Skype on Mobile: North American Carriers' Backhaul is the Ultimate Bottleneck
• What VoIP on Mobile Can Learn from SS7
• iSkoot - Providing Carrier Friendly Access for Skype Calls.
• eComm 2008: iSkoot Presentation
• Mobile VoIP Services -- The Ergonomics of Making a Call Counts...
• Skypephone 2 at 3 August 18?

Hat tip to the iSkoot blog for pointing us to these recognitions.

Tags: iSkoot, Skype, John Halamka, Nokia, S60, Alec Saunders, SquawkBox, iotum

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How do you discover what people really do with your software? Our behavior often differs from what we think we do. The human-computer interaction research method eye tracking can reveal where a user's attention goes when they use a product.

Two days after Skype launched the Skype for Windows 4.0 Beta in June 2008, Cimex, a British firm with a usability and accessibility lab, spent a day watching people use Skype. Then wrote them up. I'm including the full text of their report below the fold. From their blog:

A usability study by Cimex has revealed Skype’s new Beta release may prove difficult to use, due to weaknesses in presentation, navigation, structure and functionality.

The aim of this study was to capture the users’ expectations, needs and preferences, all of which we believe can be used as a base to create a more engaging, efficient and effective Skype application.

Caveats:

• Only six users were tested: 25-50 years' old; British, French, Greek; three newbies, three experienced Skypers; three men, three women. This is not representative of Skype's worldwide user community. Skypers come in all ages, speak many languages and bring wildly different cultural norms to software use.
  
  The team said "A larger sample would allow us to perform more detailed quantitative data analysis of the performance rates."  A larger sample would also "allow us to create more targeted scenarios and cover all the range of Skype user profiles."

• The study was relatively shallow since few user goals were tested in the time available, and many product features were unexplored. See the sidebar for four user goals.

Four of the twelve tasks used in the study

Could you please have a look at this welcome screen and tell me what your first impressions are? What would be the first thing you would like to do from here? (Users were allowed to explore the options of the welcome screen and then asked to start using the application.)

What are you impressions by looking at this page of the application? Do you like the way the information is presented?

Let’s have a look at the top menu (Skype, Contacts, Conversation, etc). Are these options meaningful enough to you? Without clicking on them yet, could you please tell me what do you expect to find under each of these menu options?

Imagine now, that you want to invite a friend who hasn’t got a Skype account, to join Skype. How would you do that?

Observing users with eye tracking is best applied iteratively and with a specific problem in mind. Feedback from one round can reveal a problem which, once cleared, reveals other obstacles to people doing what they set out to do.

I'd be curious how these results compare with the 3.8 release; has 4's redesign addressed many of 3.X's problems with complexity and discovery?

Unlike many other products, Skype comes in many flavors, like the mobile edition on the Skypephone or Skype for the Nokia tablets. You might learn a great deal by testing goal success (e.g. "Call this phone number", "IM a friend on your buddy list", "start a video call") across operating systems and devices.

So here's the Skype Journal Daily Question: What are the top three design goals you see in Skype 4b?

See also:

• Skype's videos about the 4.0 beta limited release

• Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 1 -- Call for User Feedback

• Mike Bartlett Discusses Skype 4.0 Beta on Squawk Box

• Mike Bartlett Comments on Skype 4.0 User Feedback

Download the Usability Study of Skype 4.0 in PDF format or read the web version below...

See also:

•  Skype Dance call tutorial (04:25)
•  Skype Dancing (01:29)
•  skype dance (00:22)
•  Skype Dancer (00:33)
•  dance with me. skype serie 1 (01:42)

It may surprise many folks that we also have long established partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Ask.com, Creative, VTEL, Ezonics and others, as well as long-standing relationships with major media companies like Viacom (MTV and Nickelodeon) and Disney (ABC News).

and goes on to talk about how SightSpeed powered, for MTV, the first Internet video and webcam infrastructure that allowed home viewers to participate live on-the-air. More recently we have seen Skype's High Quality Video being used by Oprah to do live interviews from homes and other remote locations.

But more importantly Peter goes on to discuss four key factors in successful partnering:

• You must be best in class period
• You must be flexible, open and standards-based
• You must be built to partner, partnership friendly and partnership proven
• You must have the right team and passion

No argument with the first and last. With respect to the second, while the past decade has opened up new worlds, through technology development, for partnering, the technology business world is still learning the balancing act where it can be open and where it can effectively use proprietary technology. Bottom line to me with any communications service is "can I easily make the connection and have a conversation that is transparent to the technology?"

With respect to the third, I can now talk in retrospect from experience in my Quarterdeck days. QEMM was architected as one interlinked software "blob" such that we missed many OEM opportunities for potential partners who wanted what amounted to an API to only a few individual features. Architecting software for partnership has become a fundamental business development criteria. But partnership is also about building business partnerships where the "rules of the game" are adequately defined and agreed upon, where business standards, in addition to technology standards, are established and met and where successful execution happens almost spontaneously.

Read Peter's post in its entirety; lots of experience and lessons that can help everyone in today's highly interwoven technology businesses.

(Photo taken during a meeting with Peter at CES 2008)

Tags: SightSpeed, Peter Csathy, Skype High Quality Video, QEMM, MTV, Oprah, partnerships, business development

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• Legal barriers. Great projects have been stalled for many quarters because contributions to their work product (designs, sample code, specification, etc.) were not cleared. OWF will host projects where all contributions are cleared up front. So the final product arrives unencumbered by patents, trademarks, and other claims.

• Antisocial parents. It's not enough to reveal your great insight to the world. Throwing your newborn specification over the wall usually results in a stillborn flash in the pan. OpenWeb will help innovators foster community around their ideas. So the new product is "owned" by an open community, so it receives diverse and worldly inputs, and learns, adapts, and flourishes independent of its instigators. Ready to survive in the wild.

• Startup Governance. To incorporate or not? Where? In what form? Who holds our IP? How do we take money? OpenWeb will help with this class of problem by sharing templates for organizing and being a corporate umbrella for select projects.

Active customer service discussions in Open Web Foundation

• Can't sign in with OpenID17 minutes ago
• What about autonomo.us?about 2 hours ago
• Open in name but not in spirit?about 2 hours ago
• What are the requirements for participating as an individual?about 2 hours ago
• What is the Open Web Foundation?about 3 hours ago

Get Satisfaction support network

Implicit in all this is the shared belief that the Internet's plumbing is best served by public protocols and the culture of open source. Skype and other companies with software/web platforms may benefit from OWF's resources, peer experience, and processes to rehabilitate their developer relations programs.

Conceived in May 2008, OWF is a seed today. It needs work to build those resources. Get started by joining the Open Web Foundation discussion group. Ask questions on OpenWeb's Get Satisfaction Q&A service.

P.S. I'm spending today at the World Open Space on Open Space 2008 event with Kaliya Hamlin, who's done her bit to promote the dialog that led to OWF. Like the OWF, OSoOS is all about the human side of getting things done, specifically designing rich face to face experiences.

P.P.S. One last thought. I recently joined the first DataPortability.org Steering Group [note to self: be careful what you wish for], taking on some responsibility for achieving a data portable world ("Your Onlife, Everywhere!" TM pending). While we haven't voted on it, the sense of the Data Portability community is the Open Web Foundation is a milestone in Internet history. I expect the breadth, depth, and creativity of technology innovation to widen, deepen, and accelerate under OWF's auspices. More great ideas will survive on their merits, not die on the shoals of bureaucracy, open culture naiveté, or cash flow. The web needs this, the world needs this.

The Open Web Foundation begins today.

Congratulations to all of you who've worked to get us here. 

Now the work begins.

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Slides from David Recordon's OSCON announcement in Portland, Oregon, this morning.

streams video and IMs

Toolkit: a laptop, the Gateway Notebook Model: MT6728. A CabCam visor facing the driver's seat and a visor mount looking forward through the front windscreen are dual Logitech QuickCam Communicate STXs. Garmin USB 18 GPS Cable with GpsGate Installed. Connectivity via an AT&T PCMCIA Laptop Connect Card (Sierra Wireless Aircard 875) and USB Connect (Sierra Wireless USBConnect 881) 3G Wireless Broadband. Justin.tv for streaming the audio and video.

You can also follow Joel on twitter for his presence ("I'm broadcasting live to my Justin.tv channel! Check me out at www.justin.tv/joelmoye?59").

Others roadcast too. Patriot Certified Pilot Cars, New England, and Certified Pilot Cars ("The Master Roadcaster™"), Florida, stream video so clients can see how they safely escort oversize and wide load trucks down the road. 

• 3G mobile broadband supporting HSDPA
• a 3.2 Mpixel camera (vs the current 2.0 Mpixel)
• integration of Skype contacts into the phone's address book
• support for email (post-launch date)
• software to allow the Skypephone to be used as a modem when plugged into a PC (tethering)
• slightly larger screen (2.2 inch QVGA)
• RSS feed support
• a built-in Facebook application
• pricing of £69.95 on Pay-As-You-Go or free for contract customers

Chris Dawson at TameBay saw one yesterday:

The Skypephone however is the only handset in the world that has Skype built-in as an “always on” embedded tool rather than as an add-on application. That means it doesn’t eat into your data allowance and 3 allows a generous 4,000 Skype minutes and 10,000 Skype chat messages a month for free on the Skypephone.

At this same event it was also confirmed that 3 will be carrying the Blackberry Bold (where you have a full QWERTY keyboard for handling email and other keyboard-intensive activities).

Not exactly a quiet summer for smartphone introductions!

Tags: Skype, Skypephone, 3

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Blackberry Cool is floating a rumor that the U.K's 3 network,  the only carrier currently selling Skypephone - a hit in the youth market, will be selling the Blackberry Bold with a Skype client.

First problem, it is known that VoIP over 3G networks still has quality, robustness and latency issues that make them unsuitable for running a native Skype client. Can we ever convince the media that VoIP over any current wireless data protocol is a non-starter?

This issue was confirmed when Truphone, after months of researching a native VoIP client over 3G, recently launched their Truphone Anywhere service that allows you to make Truphone calls over a GSM/EDGE/3G network using the data channel for text messaging and call signaling while using the robust, scalable inherent voice channel for the voice conversation. As a result you have two wireless options for Truphone: (i) VoIP over WiFi or (ii) Truphone Anywhere over 3G (and, from personal experience, I can confirm it works on 2.5G/EDGE as well). I have had several occasions to make calls using Truphone over WiFi - on my evaluation Nokia N95 - resulting in low cost or free calls from WiFi access points, especially when in the U.S.where my Rogers roaming charges would be $0.95 per minute.

So let's stop all talk of having a full Skype VoIP client running over any 3G wireless service.