Will Skype open to web developers?

Skype's Jonathan Rosenberg is speaking at eComm on Monday (11:15am). He's one of Skype's thought leaders, the company's Chief Technology Strategist. I was really hoping he'd announce how Skype will play in ViPRland. His talk blurb goes in another direction:

Social Sharing 2.0: The Rise of Real-Time.

Social sharing through sites like Facebook and Twitter has seen meteoric rise in the last year. Exciting as that may be, it only scratches the surface of what social sharing can mean on the Web. In this talk, Jonathan Rosenberg will explore the next phase of social sharing - real-time communications using voice and video. Through it, a whole new set of online interaction models open up for Web publishers, going well beyond the mere posting of links on walls and in tweets. Jonathan will detail several potential use cases to see how they can drive increased value for users and content providers alike. [emphasis mine.]

Speculating madly, dear reader, what will Rosenberg announce?

• Skype voice and video conferencing you can embed in web sites (like bloggers embed YouTube videos).
• A Skype platform you can build into mobile, desktop and web apps.
• Live voice/video conversations you can attach to threads of textual conversation in mailing lists and blogs.
• Skype conversations you can trigger through links in social media, a la bit.ly.
• Syndicating your Skype conversations and activities through RSS, Atom, and ActivityStream feeds that can be consumed by sites and news readers.
• Hosting recordings of your Skype conversations for discussion and sharing a la Facebook and YouTube.

Anything less will disappoint.

Frankly, I'd love for Skype to publish user behavior as an activity stream that can be consumed by other systems. Beyond online/offline/availability presence, let me show friend/follow/block, chat room join/leave, conference call join/leave, mood changes, profile updates, contact group updates, and my other in-Skype activity. If you're in San Francisco this weekend, join MySpace, Google, Ericsson, Facebook, Microsoft and me at StreamCamp.

See you at camp and at eComm. @evanwolf, @skypejournal, skype:evanwolf. 

tags: skype, facebook, twitter, jonathanrosenberg, ecomm, activitystreams, streamcamp

Ten Percent Off eComm ticket with "skypejournal" Discount Code.

A 2009 history lesson: Mark Spencer on Skype and Asterisk

Mark Spencer's speech to the Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. His slides on Slideshare. eComm2010a looks hot and may sell out. I'll be speaking, and so will thought leaders from Skype, Google, Cisco, and a host of others.

Cool demo: Google Wave + Skype + Asterisk + Ibook

He's in a wave. Adds a gadget. Passes a Skype name to a gadget. Browser-to-Skype call starts.

They talk. As each person talks for a bit, their bit is encoded and linked-to.

So you have a play-by-play record of a call.

Inside a Google wave.

Under the covers: Jason Goecke said "it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames."

This is cool (like I really had to tell you).

First, it shows what it's like to build Skype calls into other applications. Without a Skype client running. (Pardon my drooling.)

Second, it deconstructs a long talk into directly referenceable snippets. (Still needs permalinks in addition to the playable links). This means you can annotate live calls with transcripts, pictures, etc. So the call's Binary Large Object becomes binary tiny objects.

Third, because the snippets are referred to by a wave, other gadgets and bots can enhance the archive. Add or remove background noise. Translate and provide voiceovers in your language. Highlight statistically improbable phrases. Detect stress in a voice. Visualize the data in a timeline or a relationship scorecard (who talked more?). Add tags to help you find this wave again.

Fourth, no phone numbers were called in the making of this demo. Phone companies weren't bothered. Internet all the way.

Fifth, because this is within the context of a wave, it should be possible to use wave member data to lookup Skype names and bring people into an open conference room.

Am I overstating it?

tags: skype, asterisk, astricon, googlewave, wave, ibook, digium, phonefromhere, demo, video

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Why all telecom companies should follow Free.Fr's example

Why all Telecom Marketing and Product management is wrong

View more presentations from Raindeer.

It's almost therapy for your phone company: be true to yourself. Find joy in simplifying your customer relationships so you can be marvelous at simply helping people talk. Rudolf van der Berg's talk at the Emerging Communications Conference in Amsterdam. Too bad Lee Dryburgh won't stream the high quality video he's paying to record.

tags: free.fr, telco2.0, ecomm

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype SILK codec in the IETF standards process

Congratulations to Skype Stockholm's Koen Vos, Soeren Jensen, and Karsten Soerensen on their submission of the SILK Speech Codec to the Internet Engineering Task Force as an Internet-Draft, the first step on the way to becoming an IETF standard. Thanks to Skype's Jin Kim and Jason Fischl for helping it start the process.

This follows-through on Skype's pledge to make superwideband audio cheap and ubiquitous.

On the business side, the SILK codec eliminates one of Skype's three outside software dependencies: audio codecs from Global IP Solutions (GIPS). The two remaining are Skype's high quality video codec, from On2, and Skype's peer-to-peer directory, the Global Index from Joltid. Skype's commitment to free themselves from dependencies should comfort investors and others worried about the Joltid/Joost litigation.

Here's Jonathan Christensen speaking about the evolution of codecs (the software that turns your voice into bits and back) at the March 2009 Emerging Communications conference (slides, podcast). 

TIP: Jonathan will speak next month at eComm Amsterdam. 10% off with discount code "SkypeJournal".

tags: skype, codec, silk, ietf, stockholm, standards, internet-draft, speech, koenvos, soerenjensen, karstensoerensen, ecomm, ecommconf, ecomm.eu

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Dryburgh: What's after Skype? Intent.

eBay is preparing to spin-out Skype, setting it free to steer its own course. Almost six years ago Skype redefined realtime communications and changed the industry. Lee Dryburgh, the man behind the Emerging Communications Conference, shared some thoughts with me about his vision for what comes next. – Phil Wolff

I spent many years thinking about telephony, seven days a week, in a way it “destroyed” my life in a mental health sense during those years trying to ascertain where it was going between 2005-2020. It was clear to me that what had existed for over a century and which today generates revenues that dwarf the Internet, was going to be surpassed and that we had already put one foot on the cliff edge. It’s the big reason I kicked off the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards, because no other event seemed to have enough inherent vision.

Where is it going?

First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it.

Relationships replaces Voice as the substrate in clients. 

However because its substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.

Second, we’ve got the economic model behind it. Even today, well over a hundred years since it’s original inception, we still have the same usage paradigms and economic models put in place at the time of the first electro-mechanical switches.

Now the keyword in all of this is “software.” Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.

Looking forwards, we can consider Skype phase one.

Phase two is emerging on the horizon and it will have deeper impact yet. In fact, played out it will change social governance, market economics, how humans relate to each other and even the nature of geo-politics. It’s likely to have ramifications on all social order. In the long-term view, it will also be the “new” multi-trillion dollar market replacing much of what today is the multi-trillion-telephony market.

Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like.

And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency.

Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.

Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers. Google even has machines reading your emails in order to deduce your possible intentions and desires, which is why you may often find an eerily relevant ad above your Gmail account inbox. The underlying reason for the Android initiative surely has to be to gain access to better intention deriving data in order to sell upstream to advertisers.

Yet telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

To make the situation even worse, telecoms today is still charging downstream to the consumer, ignores money and wishes of upstream parties (like retailers, media companies for example). Because the telecom business model and regulation is pretty much hard nailed like the network itself, the bulk of telecom operators are not likely to be able to transition in time before other entrants move in who appreciate the new economics and who don’t have ball and chain legacy. New entrants and probably a third of telecom operators will transition successfully around phase two.

You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of more communication modalities. Now underpin that with attention and intention based economics.

Now dream a little.

tags: skype, strategy, intent, intention, intentioneconomy, presence, richpresence, privacy

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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A dozen topics I'd love to see at eComm Amsterdam 2009, SFO 2010

The previous formal call for speakers and how to express your interest in speaking or sponsoring. The first Emerging Communications Conference in Amsterdam is slated for sometime in the first two weeks of October 2009. The 2010 eComm San Francisco will be 2-4 March 2010.

A dozen topics I'd love to hear:

1. Digital identity barriers to mobile community. Products that get it and grow, and those that don't and fail the leap to community.
2. Lessons from six months of Skype on the iPhone, three months on Nokia smartphones. What worked, what didn't. What was hot in some markets and not in others. What Skype changed for OS3 and the new model iPhones.
3. Mobile programmers emulating the music business ecosystem. iTunes and the other mobile stores are baiting small teams to form garage bands, craft apps the way musicians make songs, market themselves to followers the way bands do, and trade off publishing/producing themselves or getting signed to a major label. Store optimization changes mobile software design, software engineering practices, and business models.
4. Mobile data portability: the new privacy policy. Can you move, get, sync, and use your data (profile, contacts, conversations, media, and history) among mobile applications? Across phones? Between carriers? Between your PCs, web sites and your mobile? Not likely. Let's look at the technologies and companies working in this area. 
5. Friend Of A Friend: Guanxi and the need for introductions. Instant friending isn't for everyone. Mobile, VoIM, and social apps designed in the West are losing to services where a third-person introduces and guides two people from strangers into relationship.
6. What mobile collaboration learns from war. Emergency medicine improves with each war; so does mobile communications, collaboration, coordination, and control. What have we learned from the last five years?
7. Handicapping the race to talkify the web. Odds-on favorites? Dark horses?
8. From asynch to synch. Blurring voice messaging, voice mail and live talk.
9. Undermining WebEx. Who is disrupting the leading seller of collaboration, conferencing, and other meeting services? Who is cheaper, faster, easier, and more fun? How is Cisco changing WebEx in response?
10. Real world Mobile Net Neutrality. Should your carrier limit citizen access to the Internet based on content? Based on device? Based on carrier's competitive interests? Let's hear from Deutsche Telekom and AT&T, from Skype and Google.
11. Running out of mobile bandwidth. Has demand for mobile data outstripped world and local supplies of capital to build out the data infrastructure? Are there regulatory hurdles? With today's capital markets, where is the money coming from to pay for the buildout?
12. Rural Stimulus. Who got government money to build access to the Internet? Is it being spent wisely?

tags: skype, ecomm, conference, emerging, communications

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Friday reading

me

I'm in the New York Times coverage of Google Voice. Quoted correctly (yay!) but before my own column on the subject came out (d'oh!). Google has some truly delightful advantages in the race to become the world's largest communications company. 

under

Australia's Telestra keeps Nokia N85 inside the walled garden, keeps Skype out. A year without growth leaves them cautious, even when Skype offers to pay.

New Zealand's Yellow partners with Skype. Search through the Skype Directory and call most nz companies for free until June 10. 

the future

Foresight Institute gets a new president. Skype me (evanwolf) if you want to come to Dr. Hall's Sunday reception in Palo Alto. We'll all be talking molecular manufacturing, nanotechnology and the singularity.

Nokia shares its vision. Smartphones rising. Death of patience. Rewarding engagement. Personal expression. New learning economy. Clickable world. Personal relevance. A good summary of forces driving the interplay between mobile technology, industry dynamics, and human behavior.

the present

One in four drop landlines in some states according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study. Turning to mobiles, an act of belt-tightening. Q. Of those who switch to mobile, how many have unlimited flat-rate data plans, favorable to Skype?

CRM Over Voice: Using Voice in New Ways for Service Providers to Retain Subscribers and Strengthen Brand. White paper by analyst Jon Arnold for Mobivox. The cool stuff starts on page 4. Speech recognition + VoIP + SaaS = Contextual CRM, creating touch points that add value to the customer journey. Jon explains why it's good and how to build it, using Mobivox as an example.

VoSKY sells Skype trunking to Majorcan hotel chain. Attach a box to your PBX and your staff doesn't even know they are calling through the Skype network at lower rates. 

Larry Dignan shows why mobile developers migrate from Symbian to RIM and Mac OS X. Growth and share favor the Bold. And iPhone.

the past

Transcript of Skype's Jonathan Christensen's talk about speech quality at the Emerging Communications Conference last week. History as prelude to something new?

gig

Benjamin Leviton seeks VoIP help: "I have a Brekeke SIP proxy server. I am looking for someone to remote on to my desktop, log into its interface and config my carriers with the proxy server. Also check the interface of Polycom phone and make sure it is working properly with the SIP proxy server." Contact:  +1-917-273-5808, ben@capitalfinanceusa.com, yahoo IM gcc644@yahoo.com, or skype:levtop.

tags: google, googlevoice, australia, telestra, nokia, N85, New Zealand, nz, yellow, skype, directory, search, foresight, smartphones, landlines, cdc, mobile, crm, mobivox, vosky, majorca, spain, pbx, symbian, rim, apple, blackberry, iphone, jonathanchristensen, ecomm, brekeke, sip, polycom

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Dear Speaker,

Duncan Davidson of Portland, Oregon, was photographer in residence for the eComm conference this week. In a spurt of inspiration, Duncan tweeted these nine tips on conference photogenicity (photogeneity?).

1. Dear speaker: please deliver your speech to the crowd, not the screen.
2. Dear speaker, please pick a spot and stay. Move deliberately to another. Don't pace aimlessly. And please don't turn all the way around.
3. Dear speaker, please take off your name tag.
4. Speaker pro tip: if you find yourself walking _backwards_, you are probably pacing very vigorously. Stop. Breathe.
5. Speaker pro tip: if you don't make eye contact with your audience, you make it that much harder for them to connect to your message.
6. Dear speaker: the corner of the stage that you like to use to feel closer to the crowd is darker than rest of stage. They can see you less there
7. Dear speaker: all of you are being videotaped, what I've just said matters 10x more. Think of viewers watching a rapidly pacing speaker.
8. Rule of thumb for speaker clothing: Dress like you mean it. ~0 to 1 levels above mean "nice" for audience.
9. Speaker Pro Tip: When on a panel, don't look at your shoes. Try to look at who's talking. Otherwise, you look bored, even if you're not.

tags: speech, public speaking, ecomm09, ecommconf09

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SILK performs better

Skype's been saying its SILK audio codec is better than others. They released some data today supporting their claim.

Key measure is Mean Opinion Score, which compares sound as perceived before and after processing. Higher is better, greater fidelity.

In this chart, the codecs are tested at low bitrates (hard, on the left) to high bitrates (easy, on the right). Lots of bandwidth makes it easy to replicate sounds. SILK does better even at dial-up speeds, and SILK climbs in quality with even a little extra freedom. 

That's with clean bandwidth.

SILK does well even with bad connectivity. This chart shows Skype degrades more gracefully than other codecs, twice as well as the popular free open source Speex codec and better than the Adaptive MultiRate WideBand (AMR-WB) speech codec. 

Three things contribute to SILK's attractiveness:

• It's written in fixed point ANSI C, so it will run efficiently nearly anywhere.
• It quickly adapts to changes in sample rate, network quantity/quality, and CPU resources. This minimizes audio artifacts and preserves quality.
• Low delay frees up other parts of a system, cutting latency. SILK only needs 25 ms (20 ms frame size + 5 ms look-ahead). 

SILK does double duty with non-speech media. Skype's codec also works at music quality. Systems that stream music, television, movies, or ambient audio (games) will be able to use SILK.

Signal processing takes up huge overhead on mobile phones. As SILK moves from software to firmware, Skype suddenly takes up less memory, CPU, and power. Users get longer battery life, less heat, less latency. This would be a big win for Skype's mobile strategy. Skype would work on much dumber, cheaper, ubiquitous smartphones: a vastly larger market.

Notes from the data sheet:

MOS (Mean Opinion Score) listening test was performed for Wideband speech signals by Dynastat, an independent 3rd party laboratory. Confidence intervals (95%) are +/- 0.1 MOS. All bitrates are measured and averaged over frames containing active speech. SILK and Speex were run in the highest complexity mode. Packet Loss and Office Noise tests were done with all codecs running at 18.25 kbps.

See also:

• Skype will license its superwideband codec for free (Skype Journal)
• Skype for Windows 4.0 Gold: Blog Coverage (Skype Journal)
• SILK: Skype's New Audio Codec Sets New Performance Standards for Voice Conversations (Skype Journal)
• The true beginning of wideband telephony adoption? and Graves On SOHO VoIP » Peace In VoIPland: Bridging the SIP & Skype Kingdoms  (Michigan Telephone, VoIP, and Broadband blog)
• Skype’s SILKen bear hug (Alec Saunders)
• Skype at eComm 2009: Royalty Free Licensing of SILK Codec (VotW)
• Skype Gives Back to VoIP (Voxilla)
• Skype Gives Away SILK Codec - Has Wideband Telephony Finally Arrived? (Tom Keating)
• Skype to let competitors license speech codec for free (Brad Linder)
• Skype To Give Away New SILK Audio Codec (Michael Arrington)

tags: skype, silk, codec, mos, wideband, superwideband, speex, AMR-WB

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Skype-XMPP IM Gateway: open source Karaka demoing at eComm

Vipadia's Karaka open source software is another reason to go to this week's Emerging Communications Conference (20% off with 'skypejournal' discount code).

The Karaka libraries manage Skype farms (many instances of Skype running in a data center) and bridge chat users to the Skype network through XMPP applications.

Skype farming is part of building a gateway. Fring, iSkoot, Eqo, Ribbit, IM+ and anyone else who wants to offer Skype chat, Skype presence, Skype profiles and other Skype data must have a gateway. Karaka helps you build your farm management system.

Neil Stratford, Vipadia's CEO, said "we needed the gateway to support our ClackPoint service - as a building block it seemed that it would be more widely useful, so we decided to release it publicly."

 

Scope of a generic Skype gateway?

• Instance lifecycle management: creating, monitoring, and closing instances of Skype.
• Instance virtualization: running your Skype instances on many servers/blades so you scale to meet demand.
• Multisite hosting: minimizing latency (speeding up round trips) by routing conversations to the closest server with available resources
• Skype client configuration:  streamlining instances to avoid using a computer's memory, cpu and bandwidth, and to avoid memory leaks.
• Session management: mapping outside clients to sessions in your gateway, even when they have flaky connectivity.
• Security: the usual, but more so.
• Modeling: associating Skype's data models for people, groups, chats, calls, to your own software and APIs.

What Karaka does and doesn't do:

• Instance lifecycle management: Yes.
• Instance virtualization: Yes. 
• Multisite hosting: No. You can use DNS SRV record load balancing to different sites. 
• Skype client configuration:  Defaults to a basic config, but you can script your own.
• Session management: Yes.
• Security: Up to you. "We have an API to enable encrypted transmission of credentials, but otherwise we rely on the security of the associated XMPP infrastructure."
• Modeling: Yes for those elements in the XMPP definition, No for SIP call elements.

In English:

Look at Vipadia's GPL'd libraries when you want to build a gateway to Skype, to have Skype inside your product or service.

The news release.

Vipadia is pleased to announce the release under the GPLv2 of Karaka, the open-source XMPP-Skype Gateway.

Existing Skype interconnect solutions focus on bridging voice even though the primary use of Skype is for instant messaging and associated presence data. Interconnecting with Skype messaging and presence has been a major stumbling block for many who wish to offer Skype interconnection to their network. Karaka bridges the XMPP and Skype clouds, removing this stumbling block by converting Skype messaging and presence to the popular XMPP protocol as used by, e.g., Google Talk.

Karaka is a scalable distributed XMPP transport that bridges instant messaging and presence between a user's XMPP and Skype accounts. In addition to full presence and instant messaging exchange, it also automatically detects Skype multi-party conversations, elevating them into XMPP conference rooms.

Karaka implements the XMPP standards XEP-0100 for gateway support, XEP-0045 for multi-user chats and XEP-0144 for roster exchange.

Karaka is licensed under the GPLv2 and is hosted on Google Code at <http://code.google.com/p/karaka/>. For more information visit <http://vipadia.com/products/karaka/>.

Vipadia <http://vipadia.com/> is a Cambridge, UK based startup that creates and innovates in the field of IP communications, specialising in Voice, Video, Messaging and Presence over IP.

Karaka uses the Skype API but is not endorsed or certified by Skype.

tags: skype, vipadia, karaka, code, platform, platforming, xmpp, ecomm09, ecomm, gateway, opensource, bridge

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diagram credit: Vipadia

Skype to announce… something? at eComm09

Skype strategist Julien Decot is off the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference speaker list and Skype GM Jonathan Christensen has an announcement to make. Mr. Christensen's keynote is described as:

Codec Evolution and Industry Proposal (Plus Skype Announcement)

The PSTN has been bandwidth limited from its inception. This was done to keep equipment costs down. But is 3kHz really enough to get your point across? Wideband audio has emerged in services like Skype and with today's low cost, silicon based manufacturing and the move to all IP transmission there is an opportunity to finally break through the POTS bandwidth barrier. Jonathan will discuss the complex audio codec landscape and put forth a proposal for how we [the Industry] can make wideband audio ubiquitous.

Let's parse this and madly speculate where Jonathan's going.

The PSTN has been bandwidth limited from its inception. This was done to keep equipment costs down.

The public switched telephone network (PSTN) cuts off your speech's top (high notes) and bottom (low notes). While some microphones and speakers, like those used by musicians, capture everything, most equipment in mobile phones, landline phones, speakerphones, or even Skype phones captures just enough of your sound to be understood.

But is 3kHz really enough to get your point across? Wideband audio has emerged in services like Skype

Wideband audio restores the lifelike quality of sound by capturing and playing more of your sound's natural highs and lows. Skype's new SILK codec, which moves sound between Skype and your computer, and between Skype and other Skype users, is a wideband codec. Incredibly vivid sound.  

and with today's low cost, silicon based manufacturing

Putting software into a chip... SILK codecs as semiconductor "cores"? A core is a readily usable bit of software already rendered in the software language of chip programming. Everything electronic has some sort of chip in it, from radios to cars. Pre-built cores make it fast, cheap, and easy to drop new features into your product. "SILK Inside"?

and the move to all IP transmission

Most mobile and landline phone companies have switched their plumbing from analog to digital to Internet Protocol.

there is an opportunity to finally break through the POTS bandwidth barrier.

POTS (plain old telephone service) is basic phone service, the one with the 3kHz bandwidth limits. Could the breakthrough be offering SILK Inside in the routers PSTN services use? In mobile phones?

Jonathan will discuss the complex audio codec landscape

Ummm. I haven't a clue. But Jonathan should know; he's been working in the codec business for years. 

and put forth a proposal for how we [the Industry] can make wideband audio ubiquitous.

If you want something ubiquitous, you have to take away cost and risk. Sounds like open source to me.

So, again, this is me guessing what Skype will announce and all errors are mine:

1. Skype will release SILK with an open source license.
2. Skype will partner with an ASIC semiconductor manufacturer to release SILK in VHDL (or another chip design language).
3. Skype has partnerships with Cisco, Motorola, Nokia and other companies to use the chips in networking products and mobile handsets.

Let me make another assumption. Skype will announce a public platform in 2009. So people could make their own Skype clients or build Skype into their own products/services. To make that work, Skype needs to share codecs and encryption with developers. Licenses could be for packaged software or for open source libraries. I'm betting on open source for the codecs and shrinkwrapped for the encryption.

What's your wild guess?

So you want an encrypted mobile phone?

Echelon Conspiracy opens today. An untraceable mobile phone shows up in the mail. And then the texting begins...

Echelon will be in some theaters this weekend. If we survive eComm's arduous schedule next week, and you're not going to CeBit in Hannover, maybe we can see it in the Bay Area.

P.S. Skype Lite was not included on this phone.

P.P.S. Can you name the phone used in the production?

tags: skype, mobile, fun, movies, echelon conspiracy, echelon, conspiracy, security, anonymity, privacy

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Phil Wolff's 26 incriminating 2009 Skype Predictions

Last year's Jim Courtney's 2008 predictions and mine. 
In 2009:

1. MacWorld sucks without Steve Jobs.
2. Steve Jobs steps down as Apple CEO.
3. Skype brings back Skypecasts with a new feature: with one click, introduce spammers, con artists, and sexy webcam girls to each other.
4. Skype for Neocortex. Mood based on serotonin levels. Very high quality audio and video by tapping directly into the optic nerve and auditory system. Some side effects.
5. Skype for Lovers. Extension of Skype 4.1. Just one buddy to dial. No interruptions. Ultrasimple UI: click the heart.
6. Skype's new platforms have more active developers than BT Ribbit. More than Google Android. Fewer than Apple iPhone.
7. Litigation. 1530 sleep deprived patients sue Skype for keeping them up late.
8. Google Central will be exciting.
9. Google Video Talk adds multiparty video.
10. The Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) will sell out.
11. Yahoo! fires thousands of people. Decimates the messenger team. Hires a new executive team. Reorganizes. Again.
12. Skype introduces multiparty video. The kids love it. WebEx hates it.
13. Skype for Asterisk gets video call support. Dating sites love it.
14. Skype for WoW builds on Skype for Asterisk. The raiders love it. 
15. Skypephone comes to the Americas via partnership with with US mobile carriers. Wal-Mart will carry it. Nothing for Canada.
16. 3 INQ1 sales will cut into 3 Skypephone sales in the UK.
17. U.S. Mobile Carterfone rules (to free mobile phones from carrier contracts) will be considered by the FCC.
18. VoIP falls from telecom jargon. Even VoIP bloggers stop using the term. The public starts using Skype as a generic name for internet talk.
19. eBay's auction businesses will do well in tough times, better in the second half of the year.
20. Skype will make $630 million in FY2009.
21. Peak Skype usage will top 18 million simultaneous users.
22. Skype will serve 23 billion minutes in 2009Q4.
23. Skype scores product placements in:
    
    
    • Hannah Montana: The Movie, spurring the rise of Skype pajama parties.
    • The Sinatra Club, using the new Skypeoke feature.
    • Star Trek, as ancient technology.
    • Startups will rally to Running Out Of Angels (March 2009).
    • 24 as Cisco cuts ad spending.
    • In My Pocket (2009) is not about mobiles.
24. Skype issues new krypto since its old cryptographic source code escaped from TOM-Skype control
25. Skype Video for Mobile. Skype buys a streaming video service for smart mobile camera phones.
26. China approves SkypeIn and SkypeOut.

tags: skype, predictions, 2009, inq1, skypephone, wal-mart, canada, asterisk, video, ebay, voip, carterfone, WoW, 24, china, tom-skype

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Dryburgh 101: Attention is the post-telecom minute

Lee Dryburgh, mister Emerging Communications Conference, gave a great dinner speech last month. Lee's blogging his talk, leaving out the bawdy bits. Three highlights...

Attention scarcity is overcoming carrier scarcity. Phone companies deliver interruptions. This doesn't work when your time, attention, and concentration are valuable. So... 

Power is shifting from caller to callee. Power tools, rich with context sentience, are emerging from our primordial voicemail and caller ID services. Like social secretaries, these tools assess relevance from the callee's view. One effect is...

Multimodal replaces voice-only communication. Because every conversation needs a different blend of media, tailored to the people, the subject, and the environment.

Lee speaks to the growing irrelevance of phone companies.

Read the whole thing.

tags: skype, ecomm09, telecom

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eComm 2009 Registration Opens: Take Advantage of the Skype Journal Discount

Two weeks ago I wrote about eComm 2009 and the announcement of Skype's participation as a Platinum sponsor. Yesterday registration for eComm 2009 opened with a Super Early Bird Special pricing of $1,190.00 available to those who register prior to December 22, 2008 - a $600 discount from the Regular price that will apply after January 20, 2009..

But, as a Skype Journal reader, you can save even more. If you enter the promotional code "skypejournal", you'll get a 20% discount, taking that Super Early Bird price down to $952.

The speaker list is almost complete and Lee has announced a recently revised schedule.

Also note that eComm has arranged special conference group rates at the San Francisco Airport Marriott, available until February 8, 2009; note that, as has been my own experience at Marriott hotels for several years, all rooms have high speed Internet access included in the room rate.

An excellent deal for anyone who is interested in learning about developments in the rapidly evolving Emerging Communications space where Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto is now turning into reality.

Volunteer Advisory Board member Brough Turner calls eComm 2009 the Best Conference Bet for 2009.

Tags: eComm2009, Lee Dryburgh, Voice 2.0 Manifesto

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Skype Becomes Platinum Sponsor for eComm 2009

Perhaps the most informative event I have attended during my two-and-a-half years of writing for Skype Journal was last spring's eComm 2008. Our of a sense of frustration organizer Lee Dryburgh took it upon himself to risk organizing this event when the former eTel Conference announced it would be no more. The 300 attendees were treated to a buffet of information about various initiatives being undertaken to deploy IP-based communications in innovative ways. From communications enhanced business processes to a garage-based operation to monitor security of abandoned farm houses, we all learned a lot. And the networking opportunity was excellent.

eComm 2009 has been announced; in fact, a call for speakers flooded Lee's email over the past few weeks. He has put together a tentative schedule and been recruiting sponsors. Last year's sponsors included many vendors we have written about since the event including iSkoot (Skypephone), Voxbone (iNum), VAPPS (HiDef Conferencing) and Brough Turner's NMS Communications. Sponsors recruited to date for eComm 2009 include, once again Voxbone, and newcomers Global IP Solutions and Voxeo.

Today we learned that Skype has added its name to the list of sponsors. This is a new initiative for Skype in that they have previously tended to maybe provide speakers but not sponsorship at this type of event. In a statement to Lee Dryburgh this evening, Skype's GM Audio and Video (and a keynote speaker last year) Jonathan Christensen said:

... thinking about why we did it.. We believe that communications is going through a major shift from hardware devices on dedicated networks to software applications. A new paradigm is emerging. As a clear leader in this new age of communications, it makes sense for Skype to sponsor the eComm event as it is all about celebrating this innovation and sharing our vision for the future of communications with those individuals and companies who are most interested in changing the way people around the world communicate.

It's been pretty quiet recently on the Skype scene. But then President Josh Silverman did tell us in our September interview that Skype was undergoing a major restructuring. And we have not heard of any layoffs. So it would only be natural to assume that development efforts (beyond the Skype for Windows 4.0 beta program) are under way and we can assume we'll see new product and service announcements in 2009.

Would any be made at eComm 2009? Speakers from Skype include Jonathan Christensen and Director of Strategy Julien Decot.

Registration for attendees opens December 2, 2008.

Note: Skype Journal editor Phil Wolff, Skype's Jonathan Christensen, Voxeo's Dan York, Brough Turner and Jon Arnold are on the eComm 2009 Advisory Board.

Tags: eComm2009, Skype, Jonathan Christensen, Lee Dryburgh, Julien Decot, Voxbone, GIPS, Voxeo

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November 2008 Events

I'm attending bold events.
Tips @ SkypeJournal.com with suggestions, photos, reportage. Spend your travel dollars while you have them.

2 November. Dreamforce 2008. Salesforce automation becomes an application platform for live talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

3. ARGS: Cross-Platform Entertainment 2.0. People in alternative reality games have strong reasons to talk live in groups. NESTA, London.

3. Defrag. Some of the hardest questions are tackled at this thought leadership event. Among others, Daniela Barbosa of DataPortability.org is speaking. Colorado Convention Center.

3. The Business of APIs - The Web's Industrial Revolution. Platforming as a strategy and survival trait. Brought to you by The Mashery. City Club of San Francisco.

3. Mobile 2.0. Grand Hyatt San Francisco.

3. Widget Summit. Putting some of your verbs into someone else's places. Hotel Nikko San Francisco.

3. ad:tech New York. The people who pay for lots of free. New York Hilton.

3. Future of Web Design. Roseland Ballroom, NYC.

3. VRM Hub London Conference 2008: Unlocking the see-saw. Vendor Relationship Management, putting people back in control of their identities and their relationships with companies. Sun Microsystems London.

4. US Election Day. If your election lasts for more than four hours, call your doctor.

4. Think Global, Drink Local: Think London/Sterling Communications Election Night Party. San Francisco.

4. Mobile Tech For Social Change. A barcamp. San Francisco.

5. Digital Garage New Context Conference. Joi Ito's clan convenes. Shibuya-ku, Tokyo.

5. Web 2.0 Summit. Still hankering for a press pass. Palace Hotel San Francisco.

5. WinHEC 2008. Windows hardware engineering. Los Angeles Convention Center.

5. Design Futures: Deconstructing Networks - Jonah Brucker-Cohen, of Trinity College Dublin, experiments in how we design and think about the social effect places and alert networks. U.C. Berkeley, California. 

6. Edge of the Web 2008. Perth has a growing Web 2.0+ community. Crawley, Western Australia. 

6. Tweets and Dreenks: November Social Drinkup. Mars Bar, San Francisco.

6. Mobile Forum Meeting: Opportunities in Broadband Wireless. San Jose, California.

6. Community Manager Meetup. San Francisco.

7. Unofficial iPhone TechTalk after-drinks. The Apple event at University of Middlesex is full. London.

8. Silicon Valley Code Camp. Hands-on with peer coaching. Los Altos Hills, California.

8. Freebase Hack Day. Build something with massive quantities of creative commons'd data. San Francisco.

10. Mobile Monday London.

10. Internet Identity Workshop. iiw2008b is a must-go event. This is where the digital ID architecture of the next 10 years is conceived, debated, and bought into. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

10. VoiceCon. Enterprise and unified communications. San Francisco.

11. e-Democracy '08. The first post-US election event to explore politics, public participation and digital technology. RIBA, Central London.

11. US Veteran's Day, Canada and UK Remembrance Day. National holiday.

12. Emerging Communications Dinner. Thought leaders who can't wait for eComm2009 March 03-05 will talk over supper. Ping me if you want an invite. (tips at skypejournal.com) San Francisco Airport Marriott.

12. Under the Radar: Mobility. 32 mobile startups less than one year old. Microsoft, Mountain View, California.

12. The Second London Futures Symposium. London.

13. NewTeeVee Live – Television Reinvented. Mission Bay Conference Center.

13. OpenSocial's 1st Birthday Celebration. Day long workshops. And cake. MySpace Offices, San Francisco.

13. IceWeb08. Kathy Sierra keynoting. Reykjavik. 

15. Convergence 08. Focus on long-term technologies, especially Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno. Co-sponsored by Foresight.org. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

15. >play – Berkeley Digital Media. This year's theme is Disruption: Changes in the Digital Media Landscape. Organized by MBA students at Haas, U.C. Berkeley, California.

16. Adobe MAX 2008. Designers and developers imagine the next generation of browser-based talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

16. Fall IETF Meeting. Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.

17. Future of Mobile. Jemima Kiss, James Brody, and folks from Google, Symbian, and Mozilla make this a must attend event. Kensington Town Hall, London.

17. Mashup Camp. Steve Repetti of DataPortability.org is speaking at this mostly un-conference. Mountain View, California.

18. Mobile Content Forum. The event for all those companies who made millions on ringtones and wallpaper. Register from your iPhone, baby. Hilton London Kensington.

19. Open Mobile Summit 08. Discount: Register by Oct 10 with priority code TRL and save $400. agenda. trailer:

Fantastic hallway with Skype's Jonathan Christensen, AT&T, Dean Bubley, Om Malik, Rebtel, BT Design's JP Rangaswami, Truphone's James Body, Orange, O2, The US FCC's Julius Knapp, David Isenberg, Amazon, T-Mobile, AOL, Nokia, Google, Symbian, Intel, TAT, LG, RIM, OpenMoko, Funambol, Qualcomm. San Francisco.

18. Robo Development 2008. Robotics small, large, smart, and social. Santa Clara, California.

19. SOA World and Cloud Computing. The 14th Service Oriented Architecture conference. Now the standard for platforming architectures. I want to hear the session on building real-time SOA systems. The program's big buzzwords: cloud and virtual. The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, California.

21. London Geek Nights: Game Programming. ThoughtWorks UK Office, High Holborn, London.

22. YouTube Live. Concert. Fort Mason, San Francisco.

22. Berkeley beats Stanford. Football. Go Bears.

26. The Media Festival. The session I want: "Case study: Lessons from the adult entertainment industry; learn the secrets of success in mobile entertainment." Always two to five years' ahead in technology and business practices due to intense competition. Manchester.

27. US Thanksgiving. A nation shuts down for a long weekend of American football, turkey, beer. And gratitude.

30. St. Andrew's Day. Scotland's national day.

Sequoia Capital to Companies: Think Cash Flow

I won't add much more to Om Malik's truly scary report, Inside Details of Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting With its Companies.

• Of the hundreds of companies in Skype's ecosystem (termination suppliers, API developers, embedded hardware, IP licensors, mobile, payment), which ones lack a year's cash in the bank and a positive cashflow?
• Of those at risk, can Skype help them survive the tough times?
• As markets get mean, will Skype be able to cheaply buy talent and technology from failing startups and competitors? Who could you look at?
• How fast can Skype turn Prime, Find/Directory, and Skype for Business services into revenue generators that delight and scale?

Many great little communications companies are not safe. I fully expect the dead pool to be filling up by eComm09 in March as cash flows dry up and founders call it quits.

tags: skype, sequoia, sequoia capital, doomsday, economy, cash, cashflow

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eComm 2009 Call for Speakers

Perhaps the most informative event I have attended on behalf of Skype Journal was last spring's Emerging Communications (eComm) 2008, held in Mountain View's Computer Museum. Three days of speakers who covered a wide range of subjects on the Emerging Communications Space.Organizer Lee Dryburgh has been putting together a repeat for next March, In order that participants can intermingle more often outside the event itself, Lee has moved the location to the San Francisco Airport Marriott. And he has just issued a "Call for Speakers".

This isn't a traditional telecom conference. The eComm audience has very high expectations of speakers. They are both seizing opportunities of the post- telecom era (or re-inventing traditional products and services) and can engage the audience. Rules include a ban on "brochure speak" from stage (overt marketing pitches) and a strict enforcement of the clock.

To keep informed on eComm 2009 program developments, join the eComm 2009 Facebook group. For more information visit the eComm 2009 website.

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Jon Arnold: Is VoIP Dead?

TMCNet Editor Michael Dinan has reported on Jonathan Christensen's keynote two weeks ago at TMCNet's IT Expo in Los Angeles. While many of us in the Skype world have heard pieces of this story previously, Jonathan was addressing an audience of enterprise and business telephony professionals who are dealing with VoIP implementation issues.. Jonathan's basic thesis was that VoIP has become a commodity feature but the innovation starts by going beyond low cost voice conversations:

Now, Christensen said, are emerging three pillars of a generation “beyond VoIP.”
The first pillar, he said, includes different facets, including the fact that – unlike analog telephone conversations – services such as Skype are marked by an “explicit handshake model,” or agreed relationship, where both or all parties have agreed to communicate (a nice idea although this presidential election year will feature no robocalls, courtesy of Congress). Secondly, he said, there’s a new band of audio, including wideband audio, improving communications, in part, by allowing participants to distinguish among different speakers. Finally, higher resolution video makes video conferencing such as that offered by Skype, more real.

Three pillars that set the bar for fully equipped IP-based conversation services from the performance aspect.
Yesterday analyst Jon Arnold, who also attended the conference, wrote in his weekly Service Provider Views column: Is VoIP Dead?

Skype has an important message to deliver, not just for the consumer market, but for the business world too. It’s really a matter of how far ahead you’re prepared to look. While most service providers are just catching up to the realities and potential of VoIP, pioneers like Skype are way past that, and for them, VoIP is so old, it’s dead for them.

Jon goes on to point out:

The vision Jonathan paints, of course, is based in the world of IP, not TDM. VoIP can readily replicate the PSTN feature set today, but not much more. With end-to-end IP, not only can VoIP deliver an added layer of new services, and integrate seamlessly with Web services, but it can also deliver superior voice quality to what we’re experiencing today. Under these conditions, VoIP is actually a better product than TDM, and that’s where things get interesting. VoIP is still widely perceived as an inferior service, which explains why it is primarily sold on the basis of price rather than quality. Think of the possibilities for service providers when VoIP could actually be marketed as a premium service, and one that does not have to be sold as a way to lower your long-distance costs.
Well, by the time the incumbent telcos come around, Skype will be long past them. Skype has built up a sprawling international customer base that has embraced a communications platform that goes well beyond VoIP. PC-based VoIP and IM have been the backbone of their success, but Jonathan sees a richer experience emerging, and one that is much more than everyday VoIP. In the keynote, he talked about three pillars that will support this new mode of communications – presence, wideband audio and high resolution video.

And, after discussing the three pillars mentioned above, Jon concludes:

Taking all of this into account, one of Christensen’s key messages was that innovation is happening today at the network edge, not the core. Furthermore, it is not coming from the telcos, but from the disrupters from outside the voice world, such as Skype, Google and the whole Open Source movement. Telecom, as we know it, is now software, and rapidly moving into the cloud and the world of Web 2.0. In this environment, voice becomes another data application, and telcos will no longer be able to build their business around it. This means walled gardens cannot last – and this includes Skype, by the way – and the end user will ultimately define what the optimal experience is, as well as where they choose to get it from.
This is the world Skype is building its future around, and to the extent that VoIP is offered as a standalone service, it will not have much of a future here. Service providers are certainly welcome to try doing so, but in my books, the voice of tomorrow will look a lot more like what Skype is talking about today. What does it look like to you?

It's not about VoIP; it's about the potential of multi-modal IP-based conversations. Read Michael's and Jon's complete posts for more insight.

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