Skype Nomad's a nice mix of reality programming, travel porn, product field test, and marketing stunt. Rebecca Campbell, 26, is in motion for 33 days, going around the world Eastward from London. She's blogging her journey and posting updates flickr (you gotta see her photos), facebook, twitter (via Nokia N95), Dopplr and MySpace.

Skype had a smaller role in last summer's Blue Planet Run, a multi-country athletic event.

Titles worse than Skype Nomad: "Trolling for Outlets", "Bandwidth Tourism", "Around the World 47 Days Faster Than Phileas Fogg", "Eat, Pray, Skype", "Realtime Travel Voyeurism", "Exercises in Sleep Deprivation". 

This is a simple, direct, promotion. It brings Skype into the real world, away from desks and offices.

So far Rebecca's been to Singapore, Beijing, Yi Chang, Chongqing. (Did you know China has more Skype users than any other country?) Coming up:

• Guangzhou on May 12th
• Hong Kong from May 12th to 13th
• Perth on May 14th
• Kalgoorlie on May 15th

More points in Australia. Then California and Alaska. England, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Sweden, ending in Estonia.

I've been resisting this because, after all, it's a corporate publicity gimmick. And I'm no sucker, right?

Right. But this must be what they mean by PR 2.0.

It was very low key. Nobody pitched me. Nomad Ground Control built Skype Nomad's social media persona across multiple networks. Buzz reaches me naturally, through people I know, in contexts I trust.

Because it engages with the real world, the outcomes are unpredictable, so there's suspense, and news. It builds to a climax at the end: will she be able to finish? On time?

The stream of updates lets people identify with Rebecca and meet other fans. This 800-hour-long event also builds up critical mass, as word of mouth spreads.

I've been sucked in to the experience. Ducking security at an airport. Taking a boat up the Yangtze River. Food Porn. People watching. Trouble squatting on a train. It's fun, tiring, gritty, with a host who's ready for the challenge.

See also:

Jan Geirnaert on Rebecca's confused Skypephone presence.

Jim Courtney on Connecting and Enabling the Global Nomad.

No news release from Skype on this. No word from Skype on what they, their suppliers, and their distributors will do to comply with the GPL, or when.

For easy follow along we have reposted the accompanying slides: (Power Point version here).

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Convenos Meeting Center is a complete conference sharing collaborative environment suitable for both ad hoc and scheduled meetings as well as a virtual meeting room for "persistent", project-dedicated business activities such as key account sales strategizing or product management support.

I mentioned, however, that one shortcoming was that its Application Sharing was sluggish and found that Convenos only officially supported Internet Explorer as its platform. Last month Convenos released an upgrade that:

• has "lightning-fast" Application Sharing
• supports Firefox as a browser platform
• is Microsoft Vista tolerant (sessions have been known to run successfully on Vista platforms; they just are not sure they have found all the "gotchas".)
• reduces installation time by about 50%
• provides enhanced Outlook support for scheduling meetings

I did some basic application sharing tests this week and can report that the Application Sharing is very fast -- even transmitting some video (but not audio) from the PGA Tour site. Convenos incorporated a "mirror server" into their collaboration architecture to accomplish this.

As a default Firefox browser user, login to, and operation of, my ongoing "Test" Convenos Meeting Room worked just fine. One of the Convenos support staff, who served as another meeting participant during my trial session mentioned above, related a CMC experience where he did not realize two of the participants were on Vista until they mentioned it well into the session. On the other hand they want to do further testing before claiming full Vista compatibility.

If you are currently a Convenos user the upgrade will be offered automatically when you next log into your Convenos subscription. Should you encounter any difficulties with this route, then simply Uninstall your previous installation, reboot your PC and log back, you will have a successful upgrade. The end result performance is definitely worth taking the time to upgrade.

Convenos can be accessed either as an independent browser-based Windows application or as a Skype Extra as a complement to Skype conversations. The Convenos Meeting Center Extra, which recently received Skype certification, provides a complete "instant meeting" Convenos web conferencing mode which incorporates the upgraded Application Sharing . .

And in the same April Convenos newsletter, they remind of the "Green" benefit of collaboration in addition to the well-known cost and productivity benefits:

Did you know that aviation is the world's fastest growing man-made source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and is a major contributor to global warming? Per PlanetArk, 16,000 commercial airplanes release 600 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. A recent survey conducted by a leading unified communications consultancy group revealed that 70% of organizations surveyed rated "reducing organizational carbon footprints" as a key driver in their decision to invest in web conferencing and collaboration.

In these times of rapidly rising fuel prices, one more consideration for using collaboration tools.

Tags: Convenos, Convenos Meeting Center, application sharing, Skype Extras, Convenos Meeting Center Extra

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During the same assignment he came across a pair of prescription goggles that swimmers could wear instead of standard eyeglasses. But they were made in Taiwan and not found anywhere when he later returned to North America. According to a story earlier this week in the Globe and Mail Report on Business, he was so impressed that he recognized the geographical market opportunity and, in 2005, founded a distributorship, See Worthy, Inc. based out of Toronto, for importing these glasses into Canada, U.S. and the Caribbean. Combining scenarios of beaches at water's edge, he branded the glasses Sable Water Optics.

Having been an IT consultant, Paul understood the support that technology could provide to his fledgling business. His priorities were on inventory control, sales management, marketing through a website as well as communications. His employees were distributed around North America and Paul was doing a lot of traveling. So the Internet, along with Blackberries, became a key piece of his business infrastructure. An associate modified an inventory management application to provide data access via the Internet; Salesforce.com became his customer relationship management backbone.

With a geographically disbursed sales team and distributor base and a supplier in Taiwan and European expansion plans, he turned to Skype to help cut his long-distance bills. Introducing Skype was a transitional process but it eventually worked its way into becoming a key communications tool. In fact, when I first talked to him yesterday he had just finished a 30 minute Skype conference call with his Sales VP in Osaka, Japan and a financial manager in Michigan. From the story:

Keeping in touch with his far-flung staff is another top priority. See Worthy is a small company, but it's spread out: Lantinga is in Toronto; his vice-president of sales lives in Iowa; most of his sales representatives are in the U.S.; his supplier is located in Taiwan. And the company is looking to expand to Europe. That all adds up to huge long-distance phone bills. To help cut costs, Lantinga turned to Skype, an Internet telephony application that allows him to talk to non-Skype users for pennies a minute.

The system's Internet-based applications sure come in handy when Lantinga needs to talk to his supplier in Taiwan, who speaks only Mandarin. Lantinga Skypes his translator in Lethbridge, Alberta, who then gets the supplier on the line. While the translator is talking to Taiwan, she can send questions and information to Lantinga using Skype's instant-message function, and get immediate replies. Engaged in a three-way global conversation, they discuss orders, deadlines and prices.

Lantinga also regularly uses Skype to talk to an optical-technology company in France and to potential distributors across Europe as See Worthy prepares to expand overseas.

And talking about Skype's most prominent endorser, Oprah; Sable Water Optics hit the O List in Oprah Magazine last month. Going forward Paul is looking at ways of building out his communications infrastructure to further reduced his communications bill while responding to the demands of a growing business.

Tags: Skype, See Worthy Inc., Paul Lantinga, Sable Water Optics

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Jangl powers messaging, presence, and voice for mobile applications. They've been partnering with all the social network folks like facebook, bebo, match.com, friendster, friendfinder, fubar, tagged, and (maybe) MySpace.

This might be a great time for some predatory hiring (the staffing equivalent of vulture investment) at all those Voice 2.0 startups that were funded after eBay bought Skype in 2005.

See more:

• The Rise and Fall of Jangl (Mashable)
• Interview with Michael Cerda (Mashable)
• Rumors of the Death of Jangl Were Greatly Exaggerated (Mashable)
• Jangl Calls the Whole Thing Off; JaJah Reaps the Benefits (Mashable)
• Jangl, VoIP company, may soon be sold (VentureBeat)

Here’s the rub. Today’s rich user directories are held at companies like Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and the Internet. Applications, which are dependent on access to those directories, are being built to be dependent on not a telco network, but Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and the Internet. ....

The biggest asset a telco has today, believe it or not, is their billing system and the billing relationship with their customers. They have become shop keepers who sell voice services.

Let’s posit for a second that they do plan a Skype competitor. To be effective they will have to recruit a user base and a developer community in pretty short order. They’ll have to show developers how they can make money with their platform. And they’ll have to deliver a platform that provides the quality today that competitors like Skype already do.

He then delivers his somewhat challenging prescription for the telcos; in summary:

1. Deliver on a standards based solution
2. Provide a way for applications that require centralized network assets to run effectively
3. Partner with one or more social networks on an open directory solution.
4. Leverage their billing expertise to help developer monetize applications.

He concludes with:

But what do I know? I only predicted that all of this would happen 4 years ago. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

Read the entire post for more details.

Wednesday morning (May 7) Dan York will be guest host of SquawkBox where one of the topics for discussion will be the concept of a "telco-based Skype competitor". Other posts to consider as background:

• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: Skype Competitors Coming from the Telcos?
• Carolyn Shuck, VoIP Princess: Skype-Killer from Telcos. Can Elephants Fly? (Carolyn and I are probably the only VoIP bloggers who can say PL/1 and bring back horror stories. Turns out we're both experienced IBM 7090/7094 operators.)
• Eric Lagerway, SIP That: 3G Skype Killer - Action or Words? "Over the past couple of years I have been approached by some of these incumbents that Om refers to in his story to do just what he is implying."
• PhoneBoy: Voice over IP Weblog: Go Back toYour Roots, Carriers. "Hello, incumbent carriers? 2003 called and wants their idea back."
• Ken Camp: Realtime Unified Communications: Telcos vs Skype - Will There Be a Battle? Or More Talk?

Tags: Skype, Om Malik, GigaOm, Alec Saunders, Voice 2.0, Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch, Carolyn Schuk, VoIP Princess, Eric Lagerway, SIP That, PhoneBoy, Ken Camp

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Well, it seems like the telcos are finally recognizing the prediction of Alec Saunders' Voice 2.0 Manifesto. The meter is going off. The voice revenues are going to zero.

Voice will be free, as the Skypers contend, and the Stupid Network model implies. Short term, all you can eat models, like Vonage, will exist, but long term it’s clear that the metered model is dead. The point-to-point technology called VoIP neither requires, nor facilitates the metering of traffic. Metered access to mediated access networks, like the PSTN, will continue only so long as customers require access to those networks to talk.

Om Malik reports today, in a post Global Telcos Plotting a Skype Rival, on a research report issued by ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman:

AT&T, in conjunction with some 10-15 incumbent telecom carriers — British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and NTT among them — is plotting to launch a Skype competitor,

and goes on to say:

Much the same way as Skype-to-Skype calls are free, incumbents could use their platform to keep calls from each other’s network free. The plan could help them avoid the termination charges and still make money when the calls go off the network to, say, a rival’s phone service or wireless network. “We believe that they will have to use a common client and common software platform in order to make this work,” Wahlman said.

Om then talks about some key points of this proposed Skype killer, such as time frame and carrier technology, and discusses how competition from Skype has rendered voice to become free. But there is another aspect: the telcos are losing fixed-line customers rapidly. (I personally canceled one of my business lines yesterday.) Not only Skype and wireless services but also services such as T-Mobile @ Home, which could eliminate the need for a home phone line are contributing to this attrition.

But, for all this saber rattling, isn't there a much simpler solution that would get the telcos into the P2P voice space much faster, especially since the basic innovation is already in place (and probably protected under intellectual property registrations)? Maybe the telcos should simply license Skype's technology. Nah, but that would cut out the intellectual property and litigation lawyers' fees and investment bankers' commissions that would come from having new players in the P2P voice game. (And maybe even take away the need for research reports.)

For all its faults on the business and operations side, the Skype ecosystem's technology is simply too far advanced for anyone to play catch-up with any long term success. Look at aspects such as Skype's current research and development on voice and video technology (if you haven't installed Skype 3.8 for Windows, do it now) as well as the experience garnered in pioneering communications enhanced business processes by both Skype and its partners.

Yes, all the telcos' efforts are "much ado about nothing" -- especially when it comes to voice revenues. (Hat tip to William Shakespeare)

An afterthought: Alternate suggestion for Skype: license Skype infrastructure to the cablecos and really make the telcos squirm.

Update: Tom Keating thinks the entire thesis is "hogwash". And I have to agree with his follow-on comments.

As I told some fellow TMCers, this is utter hogwash and pure speculation. Skype hasn't been undercutting the incumbents landlines or their business revenue. People have been going to cellphones if anything, which has reduced revenue from traditional landlines. Why make a long-distance call from your landline when you have a free bucket of minutes on your cell phone?

Tags: Voice 2.0, Alec Saunders, Om Malik, Anton Wahlman, ThinkEquity, Skype, AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, NTT

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.... it’s very difficult for me to see another major disruption coming in the short term to impact mobile communications. I’m referring to changing the way people use their mobile phone to communicate. In a nutshell, people are used to performing two simple actions: dial a number on their mobile phone’s keypad and click the green button.

Alternatively, they look for a contact in their address book and, again, they press the green button. How can anyone be so brave as to try to convince customers that they have to change their habits and offer them a different way to do this?

This is what I like about Truphone on the Nokia N95 (aside from the call quality itself); you simply look up a contact in your address book, select which phone number, press the green button and my connection to the contact is completed over a VoIP service. Of course the one drawback is that I can only do this currently from a WiFi connection but I have had non-technical people use Truphone this way.

iSkoot is almost there. On the Skypephone simply look up a Skype contact, press the green button and a call is started (even when calling a Skype contact). Using iSkoot on my Blackberry is just as easy for reaching Skype and SkypeOut contacts in your Skype contact list - select the contact, press the green button and the call is completed. The secret here is that, even though there is a "call back" in the iSkoot algorithm, you do not have to answer the call back ... the connection is handled automatically. One improvement for iSkoot would be to access my Blackberry address book and be able to call any number directly from the Blackberry address book. The advantage of iSkoot is that I can effectively make the call from any location with GSM wireless voice and data access for the cost of a "local" wireless call when I am in my "Home" territory. Hopefully, multi-country SIM cards, such as Truphone's recently acquired Sim4Travel or Cubic Telecom's MaxRoam services will resolve the roaming charges issue in the near future. To return to Luca's post:

The promise behind mobile VoIP is surely challenging. There are many innovations and valuable services brought by different players like Rebtel, Truphone, Mobivox or Jajah, just to name a few, but I don’t believe consumers will embrace every new functionality they make available to users.

Bottom line: as Luca so eloquently points out, users are familiar with the legacy process for placing a call; changing behavior patterns -- such as required by call back services such as Jajah, Rebtel or even Mobivox -- will take second priority in broad user adoption. Mobile VoIP calling does not need to be a "disruptive innovation" from the user perspective.

Tags: Luca Filigheddu, Abbeynet, IPConvergence.TV, Mobile VoIP, Truphone, Skype, iSkoot, SIM4Travel, MaxRoam, Cubic Telecom, Jajah, Mobivox, Rebtel, Skypephone, Nokia N95, Blackberry

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• iSkoot uses the robust circuit switched voice channel to connect to an iSkoot server running a Skype session -- generating at a minimum "local" minutes revenue for the carrier
• since calls terminate on Skype there are no termination charges to the carrier
• for the Skypephone service (currently on 3 in 9 countries), customer recruitment costs are minimized since no device subsidy is required.
• long distance
  • iSkoot on the Blackberry, Nokia N-series and E-series, Palm and about 40 other devices can make SkypeOut calls, still providing the carrier with "local" calling revenues while iSkoot receives a share of SkypeOut revenue
  • to faciliate adoption of the Skypephone by carriers, one can only make Skype calls (at no charge), but not SkypeOut calls, thereby leaving the carriers' long distance plans in tact.

Two parts to this presentation: the SD video is below: (alternative HD video)

... and the slides: (alternative PowerPoint version)

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Additional references:

• Skype on Mobile: North American Backhaul is the Ultimate Bottleneck
• What VoIP on Mobile Can Learn from SS7
• 3 Skypephone: It's All About the User Experience

Tags: iSkoot, eComm2008, Mark Jacobstein, Skype, SkypeOut, 3, Skypephone, Blackberry, Nokia

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• Apple, with its iPhone which requires GSM
• RIM, whose WiFi -enabled 8x20 Blackberries require GSM to be able to use the UMA/GAN feature
• Nokia, who basically only builds GSM-compatible devices
• iSkoot with their Skypephone which requires GSM

Last fall I posted about the picture as Rogers was seeing it, pointing out that it was not simply a case of supporting the iPhone but rather looking at the other smartphone vendors as well when considering how Rogers would react to the availability of the iPhone. In essence providing an "unlimited" data plan would only be viable if Rogers' other vendors also had similar opportunities for unlimited data plans. Several developments this week:

As an initial target market, they have built a full service solution for technical support operations such as that operated by B4 Consulting, a SAP Channel Partner. B4 Consulting needs to provide 24/7 support as they are involved in SAP Business One installations across enterprises with worldwide operations. As a result they have implemented OnState's Call Center for Skype to deliver real-time customer support. From the press release:

The OnState CallCenter for Skype™ is integral to B4 Consulting’s delivery of its global Application Management Services for the SAP Business One application, SAP’s affordable business management solution for growing businesses. B4 Consulting’s Web-integrated call center capitalizes on the full range of OnState’s multiple communications modes and customer contact options. This includes concurrent Skype chat and voice, Skype voicemail, dynamic call recording, and callbacks. Customers can initiate contact with agents via live chat, free inbound Skype calls, toll-free inbound lines, as well as non-Skype traditional landline and email. Additionally, the OnState CallCenter is integrated with B4 Consulting’s customer relationship management system.

It is interesting to note B4's observation that "most customer conversations begin with voice and evolve to other communication modes, principally chat." And once communications with their customers have commenced, live chat is the favored communications mode. All customer contact, conversations, email, and chat exchanges are easily recorded in B4 Consulting’s CRM system for historical reference.

Two quotes from the press release help to put this into perspective: