You may have seen this screenshot of Joost in the Skype Journal banner art for the last few weeks. I love the juxtaposition of someone interviewing Beyonce in a video (a stream of a stored conversation), channel chat where I share my presence with others also watching this show, and Gtalk IM.

The channel chat context is very focused:

Compared to Channel Chat, Gtalk only signals one of the four elements (vector connectedness). But Gtalk is still valuable in this context. It is great for going outside the circle of this Channel Chat and bringing your friends from other contexts into this conversation. Gtalk is also good for opening a voice channel so you can either report out to someone who isn't watching, or talk in sync about the same show.

Too many discussion of presence conflates these ideas. I'm sure we can decompose it further.

Technorati tags: skype, skypejournal, presence, joost, context, gtalk, channel, channelchat, beyonce, im, messaging, messenger

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week iotum's Alec Saunders brought to our attention, in a post appropriately entitled "Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself", to a benchmark list of ten essential attributes of mobile presence complied by Jared Benson in the idlemode blog, Voices for a Better Mobile Experience. Jared aptly articulates the customer pain as:

My mobile lets me reach others and be reached anywhere I go. But I’m not satisfied. I want to know whether the people I’m trying to reach are reachable. I want to let people know when I’m not reachable, and what form of communication I prefer when they’re trying to reach me.

Tying them into my previous posts on presence (An Interruption 2.0 Manifesto and Getting Presence Right) where I talked about the power of combining iotum's Talk Now with Blackberry Messenger:

1. Presence should not be interruptive. The Blackberry Messenger/Talk Now combination is largely passive in that you have to view your Talk Now screen, at your discretion, to see the latest state of your Talk Now Contacts in context. In effect, you control your interruptions by determining when you will view the screen and identifying those particular events for which you want to receive audio notifications. (For an experience with overwhelming interruptions check out my post on Fring and its "Fringing pinging".Late update: Andy has just given up on Sitofono because he suffered from overbearing "disruptus interruptus" .)

2. Users must set/maintain their own presence information. Already discussed in the Interruption 2.0 Manifesto. And the presence information needs to be used not only for voice but also for IM/text chat sessions. The fact that Blackberry Messenger requires a correspondent's PIN number puts a "permission-based" limit on the number of IM contacts you will interact with and messages you will receive. If integrated into Talk Now's back end this could be fully managed.

3. Setting presence should be quick, simple, and easy. The UI needs to be intuitive and a no-brainer to garner rapid adoption. Simply look at how "ease-of-implementation" and "ease-of-use" has been a major factor in driving Skype adoption.

4. Presence should accommodate for a contact’s different phones. The biggest challenge here going forward will be how to combine mobile and VoIP phone services (such as Skype) such that they all have synchronized information. I want mobile for geographical flexibility but Skype for all the auxiliary real time conversation services it provides.

5. Presence should allow users to display different statuses to different groups. Self-evident truth that needed to be brought out; iotum's Relevance Engine understands groups and communities -- in context.

6. Mobile presence should include communication preference. Will that be GSM (wireless), Skype/VoIP (wireless or braodband) or fixed (PSTN or Skype PC Free) landline? Will it be voice or text chat?

7. Presence should include a universal visual/icon system for quick reference. Try Talk Now to experience this concept in action.

8. Presence should allow connections to other mobile services. Linking Talk Now to Blackberry Messenger would be a start. But, as mentioned above, how can this also be linked to forthcoming location based services or even any forthcoming mobile Skype infrastructure.

9. Presence information should be seen anywhere a contact is referenced in the mobile UI. Talk Now needs to extend its presence information into the Blackberry's Address book and also the contacts available on Blackberry Messenger. But not only referenced in the mobile UI; reference should also be extended to availability in my Skype Contacts on my PC (or other web-based IM services with contacts).

10. Presence should be maintained by a non-carrier third party. iotum has the architecture, databases and server infrastructure required to make this a carrier independent service.

One of the issues not addressed here is how do you extend presence information when your laptop PC is not connected to the Internet or your mobile wireless device is not connected to the wireless network (GSM or WiFi)? We all drive into underground garages or tunnels without radio connections at some time. (There was definitely no GSM or WiFi when I went through the Chunnel last week.) So a "last known status" "off-the-air" indicator is also needed.

And finally, the productivity benefit of getting presence right: we will all know that we have got presence right when there is no need to make speculative phone calls that go unanswered and to leave voice mails with their perfunctory but etiquettely correct introductions and all the access time involved in both leaving and retrieving voice mails. Blackberrry Messenger, Talk Now and mobile email à la Blackberry should resolve these issues for both synchronous and asynchronous real time communications. Recall Alec's post, What is the Real Impact of New Presence?, on the financial and ARPU implications of having 82% of all business calls end up in voice mail demonstrating, for example, that "an increase of 7% in connection probability represents an increase of 10% in minutes used".

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Over the past several years I have used TechSmith's SnagIt to capture images from my desktop, insert them into my Office documents or even send them to Skype correspondents incorporating a two-click process. We have also seen the number of methods for File Transfer within Skype increase beyond eight.

With the release of SnagIt's Skype Output plug-in for Skype, Skype now gets Toolbar Icon status on a peer level with Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Flickr. The one catch is that you need to upgrade to SnagIt 8.2.2 (free for anyone already licensed for any version 8).. Capture your image, single click on the Skype icon, select the Skype Contacts to whom you wish to send it (full instructions here) and a jpg (or other pre-designated graphics file type) is on its way.

You do need to install the Skype Output accessory once you have installed SnagIt 8.2.2. Just click on the icon on the left to go to the web page to locate and install it. Then when you have captured a new image, simply click on the Skype icon to continue as described above.

SnagIt has added a second output mode that basically allows you to place your SnagIt captures as Sticky Notes on your desktop; You can then minimize, edit, enter a title, hide/restore these notes via a System Tray icon. Amazing for capturing those items you need temporarily on your desktop; works especially well for setups with dual screens where the Sticky (aka Post-It) Notes can be placed on the second (extended) screen.

And, with this upgrade to SnagIt, Skype has one more small, but nifty feature associated with my daily PC and real time communications activities.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As indicated in previous posts (here and here) I recently completed a ten day European trip to Hanover, Germany for CeBit and returned via London where I visited the Skype offices. But Skype was not the only communications play I explored and employed during this trip. There are other players out there having their own successes. Besides using Skype for many calls back home and to others amongst my contacts, I also had the opportunity to try out other technologies and services using my Blackberry 8700, my Nokia N80i, my SlingBox Pro, a rental car GPS system and high speed European trains.

First the most underpromoted feature of the Blackberry has to be Blackberry Messenger. This is basically an Instant Messaging service that operates, not via the standard GSM data channel and Internet, but rather via a direct (PIN to PIN) messaging channel that instantaneously transmits messages to other Blackberry Messenger contacts. As a result there is no latency between sending and receiving a message. It allowed me to keep in tight contact with the person who accompanied me on this trip but had a different agenda of meetings at CeBit. It also allowed me to keep in instantaneous contact with a key contact back in Canada re some business issues. It has become a most valuable tool for text chat with those I work most closely with, letting them know of say, delays as we link up for a meeting or just getting simple answers to short but important questions. I have written more about the power of combining Blackberry Messenger and iotum's Talk Now in my Getting Presence Right post last week. (For communicating with my German hosts who had Sony Ericsson phones I found myself using SMS messaging more than I would in North America but there are charges associated with SMS messages.)

One evening after the show one member of our group had to make a call back to her family in Canada. She had attempted to make a call via one of our host's wireless GSM phones but the battery died after a few minutes. Since I had packed up my laptop for the day, I checked on my Nokia N80i and found there was an open WiFi connection available. I ran the Truphone wizard, entered her home phone number into the N80i Contacts directory and called via Truphone. She had an excellent quality, uninterrupted call with her family that lasted well over 20 minutes -- much better quality than she had been experiencing with a wireless phone. And, at this point in time, at no cost.

Beyond the call quality, another feature I like about Truphone is its integration into the Nokia Contacts directory: select a name and the phone number you want to call -- you then have the option to make a Voice (GSM) or Internet (Truphone) call. (Never encountered an opportunity to try out the Video call feature!)

Full circle television is defined as when you are watching Deutsche Welle in Germany or BBC World in London on your laptop but using your home cable box in Canada as your video source. (These services are included in my cable subscription but talk about a bandwidth waster!) My SlingBox Pro came through with marvelous quality video even when full screen on my 1680 x 1050 display. Friday morning I was able to provide some hockey coverage to my hosts at Skype; we were watching my neighbour's son play in a Minnesota Wild - St Louis Blues game for which I had set up recording on the PVR in my cable box via SlingBox Pro the previous evening. Hockey, with its inherent speed, has to be one of the best tests for the SlingBox quality and it came through with flying colours. Both while in California the previous week and during my European trip I was able to take advantage of my NHL Centre Ice cable TV subscription. The ultimate test is that you are watching a game full screen on the laptop and get into the game to the point where you forget about the technology involved.

As a further test after the CeBit show had closed on Saturday, I hooked up the S-Video output on my laptop into a 42" LCD TV display used in my host's booth and connected back to my SlingBox Pro in Canada. Turns out Canadian TV network CBC was broadcasting a curling championship in high definition; had it going live and full screen in the CeBit show's digital lifestyle booth. I have to admit that it did stretch the quality issue a bit; you probably would not have wanted to watch it for very long on this size of display but it still came up quite clearly with no pixelating in full motion.

Talking about viewing television on laptops, my host, Dick, showed me his way of bringing German (Digital) TV to his laptop. With smply a USB dongle and a short (<20cm) antenna.he is able to pick up all the German channels via German television's digital technology and a player on the laptop. Can we look forward to such a compact technology in North America when US/Canadian television goes all digital in February, 2009. This concept only works when physically in Germany and complements but by no means replaces the functionality of SlingBox.

As mentioned in a previous post, we used a GPS system in a rental car to locate two excellent, yet inexpensive, restaurants near the Hanover Messe site for our evening meals. (Check out 'restaurants' in "Hanover" on SkypeFind.) I also got to use one in the rental car I had for a day; however, the user interface needs some work for simplicity of operation. It did, however, eventually get me back to the Hanover rail station early one morning. But the associated technology I did appreciate is that Sixt gave me a new BMW Z4 Cabrero when I had ordered a VW Passat - at no extra charge. Unfortunately I did not have enough time to try it on the Autobahn.

Finally my trip from Hannover to London involved three European high speed trains. While the German ICE train was the slowest (maxed out at 160 km/h according to the display screen at the end of each car), it had actually provided the most onboard services: internal display screens telling you about speed, location, upcoming stops, etc; full airline type audio system, food and beverage service at your seat, etc. I took a Thalys TGV train from Cologne to Brussels - while they were still building the high speed road bed between Cologne and Liège, Belgium the ride at 300km/h between Liège and Brussels was something else - smooth, no sway, no clickety-clack, just a Nike swoosh! My final train, Brussels to London, was the Eurostar through the Chunnel to London Waterloo. A most interesting day experiencing advanced European rail technology and engineering. One key recommendation for anyone from North America contemplating European rail travel: buy your tickets in advance at the Rail Europe North American sites (US, Canada) and effectively get first class seating at second class pricing. My one disappointment: no WiFi on the trains such as Via Rail provides between Toronto and Ottawa/Montreal.

In fact, talking about WiFi, the one major disappointment on this trip was the unreliability of getting WiFi connections to my PC, to my Dell Axim and to my N80i. Not a case of their availability but rather their connectibility. Some worked, some did not but never in a manner such that I could always count on as a business critical service. Even attempts to use T-Mobile as a commercial service faltered. This standardization and ease-of-connection issues must be resolved if services such as Truphone are to succeed in the business and/or consumer marketplace. When it works, it's great but.....

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Clear consumer labeling by June 2007. That's the latest directive to UK VoIP providers from the Office of Communications. The announcement and the directive. High points:

• whether or not the service includes access to emergency services;
• the extent to which the service depends on the user's home power supply;
• whether directory assistance, directory listings, access to the operator or the itemisation of calls are available; and
• whether consumers will be able to keep their telephone number if they choose to switch providers at a later date.

Seems like a great idea. Not clear whether Skype softphones or Skype-embedded phones will be subject to such a requirement.

Next, Ofcom is considering, at the request of "a number of stakeholders," whether to require emergency services. I wonder how they' are influenced by their own Communications - The Next Decade book.

Full text of the announcement below...

Regulation of Voice over IP services

Ofcom today announced a new regulatory code for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service providers that will ensure that consumers have access to important information about the capabilities of their service. All VoIP providers will be required to comply with the code from June 2007.

VoIP services offer consumers the prospect of cheaper calls - especially for calls from one VoIP service to another - and valuable new services such as call handling and unified messaging.

Over the last twelve months a range of new VoIP services have been launched and demand continues to grow. Industry forecasts predict that there could be as many as three million users in the UK by the end of this year.

Following public consultation in 2006, Ofcom has decided to put in place measures to ensure that consumers have access to information which helps them make informed purchasing decisions. The new code of practice requires VoIP providers to make clear:

• whether or not the service includes access to emergency services;
• the extent to which the service depends on the user's home power supply;
• whether directory assistance, directory listings, access to the operator or the itemisation of calls are available; and
• whether consumers will be able to keep their telephone number if they choose to switch providers at a later date.

If consumers choose to take up a service that does not offer access to emergency services or which depends on an external power supply, the code also requires VoIP providers to:

• secure the customer's positive acknowledgement of this at point of sale (by ticking a box, for example);
• label the capability of the service, either in the form of a physical label for equipment or via information on the computer screen; and
• play an announcement each time a call to emergency services is attempted, reminding the caller that access is unavailable.

As usage in the UK continues to grow, and the market develops further, Ofcom will continue to review and develop its approach to regulation to ensure that consumers gain the full benefits of VoIP services.

A number of respondents to Ofcom’s consultation expressed concern that a lack of access to emergency services via VoIP services might result in consumer detriment.

For that reason, Ofcom intends to consult later this year on whether, and if so how, certain VoIP services might be required to offer access to emergency services.

The document can be found at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/voipregulation/voipstatement/

Ends.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

First Look

The people from Ipevo were so friendly to provide me with proper samples for their new Ipevo Free.2 phones. It's one of the few modern companies in this arena of usb-device that has a high cute factor and keeps coming back with new steady releases.

Specifications

• Fully integrated with Skype
• USB Plug and Play technology
• High resolution LCD with white LED
• Audio recording format: WAV
• Multi-language LCD Display
• Size: 165x38x18mm (LxWxH)
• Weight: 110g
• Cable length: 250cm

Requires:

• Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.4 up
• 400 MHz Pentium II or higher, 128MB free RAM an d40MB free hard disk space
• Broadband internet connection
• Available USB port
• CD-ROM drive

I have been playing with it. It works well. Of all the Skype enabled USB-phones I find this one most complete. I don't see anything wrong with it and they really listen to customer feedback it seems.

Excellent sound quality, good echo cancellation, high cute factor, highly marketable lifestyle device.

Hands On

Here are the mugshots of the reality. Like I said; what you see advertised on the website of Ipevo is exactly what you get. They even added the little holder for the phone to the package. Great stuff. at least the phone is not laying around in a sloppy way on your desk. Everybody can see it. It comes in a nice package too. See the video...

I installed the device Ipevo Free.2 (there is really nothing to it, simple), I got an update for the software, the drivers loaded in Windows XP home and XP pro properly. No problems at all. The way it should be.

It's nice that it comes with a recording button and software too. The software records conversation in .WAV format. Maybe in the next version they can add mp3 format. And it is so simple. Far the simplest recorder in the whole Skype business.

Contents of the package:

• device
• cdrom
• holder for the phone (hang or stand)
• sticker
• data cd with drivers and software
• manual
• quick installation guide.

And they even do online support at Ipevo, via Skype and via email. These people really believe in their product, which is exactly why they will still be around years from now and others not. Quality, not only quantity. Nobody wants to buy a bad device or talk to bad people and Ipevo is exactly the opposite. Buy one before they run out of stock.

Here are the marketing mugshots. I like that they reflect reality. Judge for yourself:

Disclaimer: Ipevo advertises on Jan Geirnaert's Skype-Watch site.

Posted by Jan Geirnaert at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

When Skype Vice President Stefan Oberg spoke at VON Canada last year his theme was how Skype's goal was to be "Better Than a Phone". To make his point he mentioned how even the simple task of plugging in a headset (often on the rear of a desktop PC or in a laptop docking station) still frustrated Skype product managers and engineers as an "ease of use" issue. Otherwise background noise and echo effects made conversation difficult at best, if not impossible, when using the basic speakers and microphone supplied with a PC.

Today, with the release of Skype 3.2 beta, you no longer need to have that headset (or handset) to achieve top-notch voice quality in your Skype voice conversations. You can make excellent quality Skype calls using your basic PC speakers and microphone.

While not mentioned in the Skype Beta blog post, if you look at the Release Notes for Skype 3.2 beta 53, you will find:

• feature: Skype's own audio codec

• feature: Skype improved conference mixer

• feature: Skype Jitter Buffer and concealment

• feature: Skype audio preprocessing components

What this all adds up to is a new standard for voice quality in VoIP calls. Skype has internally developed its own codecs, based, I suspect, on the Camino Networks technology Skype acquired last April, such that calls to/from a Skype 3.2 client can be made simply using the microphone and speakers that come with any laptop or desktop PC. Echo cancellation and noise cancellation capabilities in these codecs make your Skype calls sound like a call with headsets or phone handset but without the hardware.

As a result you can have handsfree operation of your Skype calling while not cluttering up your physical desktop with additional hardware. The sole reason for using traditional USB handsets will be privacy; speaker phones may still have some application in board room environments. PC Free phones will continue to have their role in getting Skype available throughout the home or small office.

I first heard about this new capability from a beta tester a couple of weeks ago. He had to make a call from a booth conference room on the floor at CeBit 2007. While surrounded by four walls, with no ceiling, sound from the conference came in over the top. Yet, using the Skype 3.2 client he successfully made a business critical call using Skype back to parties in North America simply using the mic and speakers inherent to his laptop.

This morning I tested out the Skype 3.2 client using simply my laptop (actually my Altec Lansing USB speakers to enhance sound power that could create echoes) and the microphone from my headset. (Need to call Dell for a service call on my laptop's built-in microphone.) I placed the mic about midway between the speakers and made five different calls -- four using Skype at the other end while the fifth was on a mobile phone via SkypeOut. All four Skype parties found the call quality superb while the call to the mobile phone had poorer but quite acceptable quality -- probably due to the terminating mobile phone infrastructure. One of the called Skype parties found it "eerie" that this all worked when he thought about the consequences; he said it was the biggest feature to come out since the release of Skype itself.

Find out for yourself, download the Skype 3.2 beta, install it and call your friends and colleagues without any headset or handset. Put your feedback into the comments.

Bottom line: the new Skype codecs set a new baseline for call quality on any VoIP service. Skype appears to have built a significant differentiator with these new codecs; with them Skype becomes significantly "Better Than a Phone", especially when combined with all of Skype's other real time conversation features.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

New in Skype for Windows 3.2 is an account control panel. Let's step through it.

First, open it up either from the new Account menu...

or from the account bar above the tabs.

Either of these will open up the control panel's Overview tab.

Overview

SkypeOut, SkypeIn, and Skype Voicemail status. And links to further action.

Missing: Skype Prime and SkypeFind tabs.

Note the advertising at the bottom of the page.

The Calls and SMS panel

Lists your paid calls with some call detail. If you forward Skype calls to your mobile or landline phone number, here's where you'll see the cost of each call.

Missing: Summary data by period (e.g. number of calls, minutes, money spent this month/week/year). Might also be nice to break out what might otherwise be "local", "long distance" and "international" calls. Bonus points for comparing my savings vs. another carrier.

The Purchases Tab

Ooh, forgot I bought a Klonie.

The Settings tab

Settings for your account and payments.

Missing: You cannot be a member of more than one "Skype for Business" account group. You cannot have multiple or alternate email addresses.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype for Windows 3.2 lets you send money to another Skype user with via PayPal.

The recipient should have Skype 3.2 or higher too. If they don't, Send Money will offer to route the money via email address, something PayPal has done for years.

You launch the Send Money wizard from the Tools menu or by right-clicking on a contact name or profile.

This will launch a wizard. It may take a few moments to load.  

When it comes up, it explains the three steps of sending money to your Skype contacts.

1. Set up your PayPal account.
2. Send money.
3. Your contact is notified in Skype.

Setting up PayPal

Click the "Get Started" button.

New to PayPal? Create a PayPal account here.

If you've already created one that Skype knows of, you'll have a chance to log in to PayPal here.

Fill out the form.

Payment may only be in one of Skype's currencies. At the moment they are:

• U.S. Dollars
• Australian Dollars
• Canadian Dollars
• Czech Koruna
• Danish Kroner
• Euros
• Hong Kong Dollars
• Hungarian Forint
• New Zealand Dollars
• Norwegian Kroner
• Polish Zlotych
• Pounds Sterling
• Singapore Dollars
• Swedish Kronor
• Swiss Francs
• Yen

Fill out the form...

and press the Next button...

This previews your transaction. The payment methods are from your PayPal account: bank or credit card accounts.

Press the Send Money Now button.

And see your confirmation screen. The transaction is over, so press the "Done" button.

Missing: A "Send Money to Another Person" button.

What happens when someone sends you money?

You're alerted with a "Payment received (pending)" message.

You'll sign in to Skype and PayPal and finish your transaction on the PayPal web site.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Congrats! It's been a year of innovation, experimentation, and growth. Here's Markus Rumler and Stephan Skrobar Jajah's sponsor presentation at the Blogtalk conference in Wien from October 2006.

Two demos in under six minutes.

Just to be clear, the technology is pretty straightforward for a VoIP geek. Jajah's innovation is in great user experience, simple embedding into web sites, and making it very easy for businesses to manage multiple accounts. Lots of extensions in one year: plug-ins for Outlook, Plaxo, OS X address book, Firefox, Google homepage, and mobile devices.

Jajah can do this quickly with lightweight code because all of the telecom stuff is centralized, running on servers. Skype must deliver lots of plumbing (p2p directory, audio and video, messaging, etc.) to each user. Jajah, on the other hand, just needs to get your phone number and the number of the person you're calling; their servers do the rest and the call goes over your regular phones.

Happy Birthday, Jajah!

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As mentioned in a previous post I spent three days last week visiting Skype's London office meeting with both Skype managers and a Skype partner. Out of all these meetings there was one overriding theme I came away with: Skype is "Open for Business".

Recall Andy's VoIP Watch post last week where he questioned voice's place within portals; he goes into some detail describing how Yahoo, AT&T, AOL and, yes, even Microsoft are struggling with how to derive a business model that works using voice and presence.

.... What’s funny is the IM players know all about presence, but one has to wonder who is Present and Accounted for when the decisions on how to make money are being discussed by those portal players. Surely no cash is being rung up that matters.

Rest assured there is no wondering about who is present and accounted for at Skype when the decisions on how to make money are being discussed. It was obvious to me that one of the outcomes of last fall's reorganization is that every sales, marketing and business development manager at Skype has become very focused on meeting revenue and expense goals while accomplishing a defined mission such as to build a portfolio of business critical partnerships.

Partially based on my own past experience as a member of a management team executing the restructuring of a NASDAQ-listed company, I have the distinct feeling that, setting aside any future performance bonus for the Skype's founders, Skype management's immediate goal is simply to become a profit contributor to eBay. As my interim CEO of that past (and successful) experience would repeatedly state: "the bleeding has to stop now" if we wanted to have a sustainable, ongoing business.

Fundamentally in the foreseeable future we will see four Skype revenue streams:

• Telecom Services: SkypeIn, SkypeOut and extensions of traditional telephony interconnections.
• Extras Gallery: where Skype and the publishers of Skype Extras share revenues while each have defined responsibilities with respect to the marketing and promotion of Skype Extras.
• e-Commerce: built around engines such as Skype Find and Skype Prime
• Hardware: royalties on Skype hardware that meets Skype's Certification standards.

No surprises here in that all these programs are described within the Skype website. (Of course, Skype's viral driver, free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls worldwide, will not change.)

The real challenge here for each member of the Skype Management team is to become a visionary and "super salesperson" who can encourage partner innovation while articulating clearly what Skype is providing in return for these various revenue streams. The partnerships behind these revenue streams are critical to Skype's success; assessing risk vs reward in establishing business partnerships will become a major management skill required to ensure achievement of their respective goals.

On the other hand they recognize that the partner's business success itself is also critical to their success. To this end, partners must be entrepreneurs who do more than simply provide some "cool" technology. Accompanying the technology is the need to define a customer pain that the technology can address. This leads into building a full business plan, incorporating a marketing and business development strategy built around how the technology results in a value-added service for their prospective customers. And the business itself needs to have a potential to quickly ramp up to six figure annual revenue numbers.

I make these comments because, in my business planning and business development consulting work over the past 15 years, I have seen many marvelous technologies. But, in many cases, I have seen many of them falter because the entrepreneur did not recognize the need for, and role of, marketing and business development activity to achieve market awareness and business success. As I said in my presentation to Skype personnel last week:

Skype needs to:

• build Skype brand awareness
• provide marketing infrastructure which can contribute to the partner's marketing activities
• define both Skype's responsibilities and their partner's expected responsibilities
• build case studies of success stories

Skype's partners need to:

• define the customer pain they address and the resulting vertical markets
• define the market size to ensure they can build, over time, a reasonable size business
• build and critique a business plan - even if it only initially covers the first year's evolution
• view marketing as an activity where not only Skype can contribute to building product or service awareness but also the entrepreneur can find additional avenues to promote there business and address their chosen market.

It will be an interesting ride to follow how the Skype ecosystem evolves. More detailed commentary to follow in subsequent posts.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy

• Gus is pleased with the AIM 6.1 Beta 3 (Version 6.1.31.1) release. Bug fixes, full screen video. The net installer, the full installer.

Integrated

• The Microsoft Open Communication Server 2007 beta is now available for general download. via Irwin Lazar. 

Surprised

• The VoIP Girl hears back from Skype customer service after two weeks and is surprised. "Better late than never I guess. Honestly, whenever I fill in one of those web forms, I'm sure I'm sending my question into a black hole. I didn't expect Skype to get back to me, but they did. So, if you're not in any kind of hurry, go ahead and ask away." Skype is just part of Leanne Tremblay's VoIP toolkit.

Curious

• Johannes Ernst: Call for Papers for the November 2007 ACM CCS2007 Workshop on Digital Identity Management: "Usability Issues for Identity Management." The questions raised should make for a great workshop.  

Experienced

• Chad Danylko asks Does Instant Messaging Really Keep Us in Touch? Loving the small stuff of life with close friends; not so much for mere acquaintances and strangers. Good thing Chad hasn't tried twitter. via the great iMessenger blog.

Worldly

• Globalization - the Killer App for VoIP. "The ability to facilitate an easier transition to a coherent global telephony environment may be one of the hidden benefits of VoIP that makes a real difference to companies." on TelecomVistas 

Annoyed

• Alec Saunders doesn't like interruptions to his flow state, despite Stowe Boyd's defense of continuous partial attention. I'll have to get back to reading that sometime, but first... Alec also argues for one world price for software. Not even a sliding scale for developing countries?

Activated

• Ken Camp calls for Americans to join Free Conferencing Corp's class action suit against big telcos. "If you're concerned about your carrier dictating to whom you may place calls, in essence censoring your ability to use the PSTN, I encourage you to follow the link and get more information"

Tired

• Jon Arnold gives 8 reasons VoIP has peaked. And he's not speaking of Skype.

Cute

• Jon also walks through DiamondWare's 3D audio. I'm less sure their spatialization (placing sounds around the user to match up with a virtual world) will scale well given the complex acoustics and number of rapidly changing sources in gamespaces. The proof will be in the gameware and alliances.

Cuter

• Bluedude shows the Shotcode demo that embeds an url into a picture. Snap the pic with your mobile camera and it takes you to the site.

Cutest

• James Seng defines an IM Phone product spec. Email is to Blackberry as IM is to... A phone designed for VoIM would have more heat, but would cost more.

Confused

• FierceVoIP: Skype/PayPal tie-up a recipe for disaster.

  "My gut reaction to this news is that it's something bad just waiting to blow up, but I can't honestly say why. ... I'm not sure that being able to send quantities of money to points unknown with a single mouse click--let alone from an online account with links to my credit cards and bank accounts--is a good thing. And with the terrible reputation for arrogant and non-responsive customer service that eBay, Skype, and PayPal have all earned, I've got to believe that linking Skype and PayPal accounts is like putting a match to a dangerous fuse."

Sellable

• Rich Tehrani on the Asterisk Appliance. I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing Jan Geirnaert wants from Skype. Something tangible, simple to understand, with enough margins that local resellers can both rep it and support it.

Paranoid

• Skype's current Extras Manager, used to download, licence, launch, and update Skype Extras, can use more than 20MB of memory. Skype licensed it from a third party, so you not only trust Skype, you trust its licenser and each plug-in developer. At this time, Skype only warrants that its own software is free of viruses, spyware, and malware; not the extras in its gallery. If this freaks you out (it doesn't keep me up at night) what can you do?
  
  Skype loads the Extras Manager automatically, but you can always turn off its skypePM.exe process in Windows' Task Manager. If that's too hard, Jan Geirnaert's friend wrote a utility to kill the Extras Manager process. Then again, who knows if that utility has viruses, spyware or malware?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

First, past deliverables: 

2003

• Skype launched

2004

• Skype Out launched

2005

• Skype In
• Central Buddy List
• Import contact wizard
• Voicemail to anyone
• Call Forwarding
• Ring-tones, avatars
• Web & E-mail Toolbars

2006

• Skype Extras
• Click to call SO from any website
• Public chats
• Enterprise compatibility
• Skype Video
• Web Presence
• Mood messages
• Contacts: Import, Tag, Quick Filtering
• Redesigned UI
• PayPal Auto Top-up
• 14 local currencies
• Bank transfers in 50 countries
• Online & offline payment methods
• Administer multiple accounts
• 10-Way Conference Call
• Pocket PC Client
• Wi-Fi phones
• Various Bluetooth, cordless, USB devices
• SMS messages
• Shared Groups
• Skypecasts

Skype's points are (a) they've been doing more over time, (b) there's more to come.

Our expectations are enormous. What's on your Skype wishlist?

Nine from mine:

1. Simultaneous release. Mac, Linux and Mobile software released within 30 days of the Windows versions. So those users don't feel like abandoned stepchildren.

2. Multiparty video conferencing. Look at the work of the Open University on creating a palette of live video thumbnails that bring the people talking to the fore, to the center. Let's make it easy to:
   • support 10 or 1000 people in a video conference call
   • save the collective and individual video streams.
   • annotate video (turn text chat into closed captions) 
3. Video/Audio Mixing and Editing. Live and in post production. The better to blog/podcast/vlog your conversations.

4. Smooth transitions. One click to shift a p2p voice conference (10 people in a conference call) to a live hosted conference bridge (like Skypecasts). One click to launch from text or voice group chats into a group video chat. One click to launch a text-chat backchannel to a voice or video conference.

5. Spatialized audio. 3-D and stereo. Improving the usability of conference calls (keeping voices distinct, matching voices to visuals). And the better to navigate World of Warcraft.

6. Searchable chat, voice, video archives. So Google desktop can find that cute girl's Skype name.

7. IM machine language interpreting. You type in Thai, I read in English. Bridging communication gaps, opening new markets.

8. Carterfone for Skype.
   • So anyone can connect any software or device to the Skype network without licensing Skype products so long as they don't harm the network.
   • Web services to access the Skype cloud for calling, IM, profiles and presence, voice messaging, account information.
   • Web services for SkypeFind, Prime, Send Money, Skype for Business Control Panel.
9. Rich Digital ID.
   • Multiple personas and identities per person. Fundamental to keeping people using Skype at work. So their job identity can belong to their employer, staying when they change jobs and leave the company, while personal identity and their social relationships belong to them.
   • Open authentication and profile enhancement by third-parties. So people can know that I'm the same person they know from my blogs, eBay, and my LinkedIn and Ecademy accounts. So I share my Skype profile with my contacts and, selectively, my profiles from other services.
   • Authentication to other services. So I can use my Skype name and password to log in to other services. Perhaps OpenID?

What's on your wishlist? 

Acknowledgements: Thanks to alpha blawger Denise Howell for the snapshot. The table text is from a generic chart Niklas Zennstrom used at Spring VON 2007. 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Communications Workers of America is a labor union representing 700,000 people, mostly working for the largest US telcos. The CWA Legislative and Political Conference starts today in Washington, D.C. CWA has open platforms on Telecommunications Reform, Speed Matters (ubiquitous very high speed access for all) and a Consumers Right to Know in addition to the usual union issues.

Democrats bidding for CWA support (endorsements, votes, money, and volunteers) include:

• Senator and Presidential Candidate Joseph Biden (D-Del.)
• Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean  
• Representative and Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
• Senator Sherrod Brown
• Senator and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama (D-Ill.)
• Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)
• Representative George Miller (D-Calif.)
• Representative Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus
• Presidential Candidate John Edwards
• Representative and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC)
• Senator and Presidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi  

No Republicans, apparently.

If you're live blogging, shooting video, or recording, please drop a link. The next president of the US may actually promise something interesting! 

Technorati tags: skype, skypejournal, cwa, politics, policy, usa, unitedstates, communicationsworkersofamerica, dnc, dean, howardean, denniskucinich, sherrodbrown, barackobama, barack, obama, clairemccaskill, mccaskill, georgemiller, carolynkilpatrick, johnedwards, edwards, jamesclyburn, clyburn, hillary, clinton, hillaryrodhamclinton, nancy, pelosi, nancypelosi

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Contactivity. Technology helping you to be a social animal while on the move. Staying connected to your existing relationships and being able to spot the opportunities for new ones. Who is near you, in your proximity, who is in your general location, and how can I share with them and my relationships at home and elsewhere. Plazes and Imity are examples of aspects of this. Contactivity is social connectivity. It needs technological connectivity but is a totally different beast.

by KM expert Ton Zijlstra in his Reboot 8 Themes V: Relationships, Visualization, Contactivity post.

The location, geopresence aspect of social capital.

While the desktop editions of Skype let you "hardwire" your time zone in your user profile, this is less helpful to laptop users and no help to mobile users. Wouldn't it be lovely if:

• Your mobile phone's GPS shares lat/long data with selected Skype contacts?
• Skype alerted you when some contacts are newly near you?

This might show up as services or features like:

• Contact groups sorted by distance
  • Who is near?

• Contact group of people far away from their home base (e.g. more than 100km)
  • Who is traveling?

• Contacts newly near you (location changed) that you haven't spoken with in a long time.
  • Which relationships should I renew over lunch or coffee?

• SkypeFind lists visited by contacts (even if they never post or comment)
  • Voting with your feet, even if you never use SkypeFind

• SkypeFind auto-prompt for reviews
  • What do you think of the 10 places you visited this week? Just rate them, please.

• Public Chat Directory
  • Most public chats won't have a geographic focus, but some will. Neighborhood chats. Apartment building chats. Local businesses, city offices, clubs and associations. Find and join them.

• First Life Event Lists
  • Blend your Skypecast directory with offline events. Bring in geocoded listings from Eventful and Upcoming or other iCalendar and hCalendar services. Music, lectures, business meetings, conferences, parties. Discover, call and go.

Technorati tags: skype, contactivity, plazes, gps, geocoding, skypecast, skypecasts, proximity, mobile, imity, tonzijlstra, ton, reboot8, geopresence

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just read about China's new Property Law, adopted 16 March by the People's Congress and going into effect 1 October 2007. Does anyone know if its definitions of ownership, use, and security rights extends to virtual/intellectual property, names (like Skype names, domain names, or trademarks), or artifacts of conversation (like chat archives or audio/video recordings)?

Articles 50 and 52 say radio spectrum and telecommunications infrastructure belong to the state. How does the Internet fit?

How long does it takes new law to percolate into common practice?

• Text of the law (Simplified Chinese) on Law Lib.
• UPDATE: Text of the law (English, pdf), translation courtesy of the law firm of Lehman, Lee, and Xu, a PRC law firm. Thanks to Will Fung for the tip.
• Xinhua: President Hu stresses importance of property law in protecting people's interests.
• Adam Wolfe on Property Rites affecting coastal cities first.
• TCS Daily's Philip Levy sees this as formalizing property rights already informally applied.

Technorati tags: skypevideo, skypejournal, skype, property, law, china, regulation

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have had the fortunate opportunity to stop over in London on my return from CeBit 2007 and spend a few days meeting various Skype personnel especially in the Skype Development Program group. Paul Amery, Director (center) and Lester Madden (left), responsible for Partner and Developer Relations, have been great hosts, helping to arrange various meetings and providing me with an Internet connection (where the local hotel wanted £15 per 24 hours for high speed Internet).

On my arrival Wednesday I was provided with an opportunity to make a lunch hour presentation on "An External View of the Skype World" to about 50 or 60 staff members in the Chill-Out Lounge; lots of interest, good questions and, based on feedback, I definitely hit some hot spots. I will follow up with more detailed reports on some of the follow up meetings in separate posts.

I also had the good fortune to be here when Skype Developer Program Partner Jeremy Hague of Netralia was visiting; he made a presentation to Skype staff Thursday on Skylook 2.0 -- an Outlook extension that has become one of the Skype Extras Gallery success stories.

But the most interesting story about visiting Skype London is the people I have had the opportunity to meet. First it is truly an international company; within one department of about 20 employees, eleven countries are represented, from as far away as Australia. Yet they have figured out a way to all work together, overcoming any potential cultural and language barriers, to build what is truly becoming the international "Uber-Telecom" company. The enthusiasm, positive attitude and high energy level they bring is a key to Skype's success. I thank them all for making my visit not only a success but thoroughly enjoyable.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Would you like people to call you with a job offer? Thousands of people? One of the projects I proposed when I was at Adecco was a personal career availability broker, so you could signal your career presence.

Let's filter this so only certain kinds of employers, recruiters, or jobs find me. Maybe my family or my boss don't need to know I'm looking. And maybe I only want jobs that pay more than I make now or that will cover a health benefit. And maybe I'm not available for the same kind of job I have now, but I've always wanted to be a chef. So my career presence must include my goals, selection criteria, and at least some of what I have to offer.

The Architecture of Rich Presence

Simply signaling I'm online won't wash. Generic presence wastes my time and companies selling jobs I'll never even consider. Bad presence drives us to lie about ourselves to protect our time and privacy. Good presence understands and supports specific types of conversation. Each type of conversation has characteristic:

• signals
• triggers
• conversation flows
• privacy expectations
• measures of success.  

In the career context, workers need to signal their career availability, often with great discretion. Each worker has many career presence "rules," for want of a better term, to indicate their complex career interests. For example, "Actively seeking a job as a butcher but only in a kosher shop". 

It's not enough to share your availability: good presence indicates how others may act on this information. For example, "call me any time if you have a management job in life insurance; contact me through my LinkedIn form for insurance sales jobs; or call my agent if you think I'd be a good fit for your next movie). 

Some presence won't be shared unless people qualify. I may not want my career search seen by anyone at my current workplace. I may share my geopresence and travel plans with family, friends, and colleagues, but not with strangers or clients. You may be asked to fill out a questionnaire before my agent discloses more of my romantic availability.

MOS? ROI? Skype Moodies, Twitter and Plazes presence are small talk, social lubricants that help friends keep in touch and strangers start to learn the kinds of things we might say at a party or over lunch. While music presence should build my music cred with those who share my tastes.

Presence Flavors Serve Many Needs

We have many contexts for presence:

• Political. From "don't bother me" to "looking for a full time cause."
• Romantic. "Love Stinks" to "Do Me Now."
• Marital (not to be confused with Romantic).
• Musical. "I'm listening to..." and "I like to listen to..." 
• Clinical. "I'm fine, focusing on prevention" to "I'm flatlining, send a crashcart" 

We also have Associative Presence and Proximity Presence. I'm at Moscone Center. I'm a member of the Berkeley Communist Party. Jeremy Pepper: "Rocking out at BlogHer - the LLCoolJ (ladies love cool Jeremy)". The better to help you mingle and help relevant others to discover you.

Gendered Presence leads to Conversation Markets

You'll notice markets forming when both buyers and sellers signal their presence. In this light, eBay and Craigslist start to look like weak presence signals for the commerce context.

Like job seekers, employers have career contexts too. Contracts listed and awarded. Job listings to be placed. Jobs no longer available. Future job openings. Presence signals from both service providers (have capabilities, want compensation) and service consumers (have work to be done, offer compensation) are feed job boards and trigger career conversations.

Matching engines, like those used by some dating sites, find a mutual fit. While you might find a dinner with Oscar recipient Al Gore interesting, would Al Gore find you interesting? More interesting than his other choices? Trusted relationship brokers will trigger an introduction, perhaps even a conversation, when a mutual interest index is comes up.   

So, back to Skype.

Skype Prime better drive Skype to reassess presence. I may be "online" to my friends but "not available" to my paying clients. Or the other way around.  

The Skype clients also need to allow the mashup of availability presence (like Iotum's) with other types of presence. More importantly, Skype needs to open this architecture so each user can "subscribe" to many independent and trusted presence services and share this information through their Skype connections.

Let's leave the technical architecture of an open presence mesh network for another day.  

See also:

• Getting Presence Right. Getting back control of real-time communications.
• Skype and Trust. What obligations does your presence-host have?
• Location, location, location! Plazes comes to Skypeland. On the value of geopresence.
• Are you lying about your presence? Sure, when it takes too much effort or is the same for the whole world.
• What's Your Presence Strategy? Stuart Henshall's address to the Ecademy.
• Skype's three-stages to Presence Revenue. Adding faceted identity controls (who sees what and when and where) to SkypeWeb presence. Then licensing presence service to hosts and enterprises.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Andy at VoIP Watch has a "must read" post on the role of, and lack of business models for, voice in portals. He goes into how Yahoo, AT&T, AOL and, yes, even Microsoft are struggling with how to derive a business model that works using voice and presence.

Enabling phone service with presence is one of the first steps towards creating higher levels of utility, and in turn higher volume levels of communications. What’s funny is the IM players know all about presence, but one has to wonder who is Present and Accounted for when the decisions on how to make money are being discussed by those portal players. Surely no cash is being rung up that matters.

Just this past weekend we heard about the demise of a blue ribbon funded VoIP service, Tello; Om's initial report lead to a report of a second closing at GloPhone. But today it is not simply about having VoIP and IM technology; it's about the socialization of the service. Who's on "my" network? How many are on? What's their availability for taking a phone call? How easy is it to start, expand and extend a conversation? How can I manage my publicly displayed availability? It's all about getting presence right.

The IM 1.0 players, usually operating as portals, have still not learned how to deliver true presence We can never rely fully on the terms "Online, Away, Out To Lunch, Busy, Not Available, etc" as a true indicator of your real time availability. "Offline" often just means your not connected to the Internet. And, in my case, because of firewall, NAT and my own PC setup checking Outlook every 5 minutes, my Skype and Windows Live Messenger indications never go away from Online when I don't hit the keyboard for 10 minutes. What true presence needs is a service that truly indicates availability in real time, whether online or offline. There is no value in a service that provides a high level of false positives information.

Over the past few weeks I have been a beta tester for iotum's Talk Now, an initial "New Presence" service that is getting closer to providing true real time availability. This experience has provided more insight into what is needed for a value-added true presence service. But let's get back to the basics:

• True real time availability requires that your status be known whether your PC is online or offline.
• Real time availability information must be implemented such that you can take back control of all your real time communications.
• Effective Presence systems must inherently bring increased productivity
  • Availability information systems would lead to minimal use of "asynchronous" intermediaries such as voice mail.
  • Availability information must be integrated into a platform where short informal "synchronous" interactive conversations can be totally ad hoc and impulsive => instantaneous text chat.

New Presence talks about intelligent presence which understands your social relationships (family, friends, community, work colleagues, suppliers, customers, etc.), your calendar (upcoming meetings, travel schedule), your location (home, office, mobile), your communications history and your profile. New Presence continuously computes your availability in real time based on these criteria as well as the day and time of day. But this is simply the beginning. You need to have flexibility to adapt; you need an override capability; you need short, but efficient, conversations to exchange information that could quickly alter your availability. Talk Now combines computed availability with the override flexibility. But you also need an text messaging environment to facilitate those short conversations.

The Blackberry provides an ideal platform for this complete solution. The combination of Blackberry's inherent always-on mobility, Talk Now and Blackberry Messenger (instant PIN to PIN messaging) has proven potential to become a powerful real time New Presence service. (Note that the link above only works in MSIE 6.0 or later or in an Firefox tab that uses the IETab Firefox extension.)

I have been using this combination while at CeBit 2007 to establish availability with both colleagues at the show as well as key contacts back home. With Talk Now's. three levels of availability (available, interruptible and not available) I can avoid leaving voice mails (and the associated the cost of a fruitless call when my cell phone charges go through the roof while "roaming" in Europe). With its "Notify Me" feature I can notify key contacts of a desire to talk, along with a brief conversation subject. With Blackberry Messenger's real time messaging I can interactively and instantaneously keep up to date on contacts' changes in location or needs.

At the same time I have shown this combination to several of my contacts at the show; it's a simple sell -- they get it quickly and see its value. The marketing can become viral - an important factor in today's service cluttered world.

If you and your team of work colleagues have a Blackberry 8700, 8800 and/or Pearl (8100) (or have Blackberry 4.1or later installed) I would recommend that you sign up now for the alpha program. If you do not have Blackberry Messenger on your carrier's service, get it from the Blackberry site. iotum needs your feedback to refine the service and to work out finer details across a wide range of practical cases. It does require a wide range of work experiences to build up the context engine and call handling rules requirements.

In the end it is only by getting presence right with this level of service, intelligence and credibility that any presence service can provide value-add and become a revenue generator. It's Voice 2.0 and New Presence in action.

(Note: such a service does not eliminate the need for presence services on the PC with, say, Skype. However, the two must work in complement with each other to provide a fully viable and credible service. More on that subject to follow but trialing the Talk Now service on Blackberry will provide some context for using a similar service on Skype -- especially when it comes to keeping in touch via any future Skype mobile platform.)

(Note: Blackberry Messenger's instant messaging service is unique to the Blackberry in that messages are sent directly to the other party(ies) over the wireless network and do not go out via the Internet with its inherent latencies.Also while the 15-month-old web page linked above to the Blackberry download mentions that Cingular does not support Blackberry Messenger, I have confirmed Cingular subscribers are using it successfully.)

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 12:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past few days I have encountered some interesting technology while visiting CeBit 2007 in Hanover Germany and it's not all VoIP related.

ATM's: I just went through the smoothest ATM experience ever. Asked only the basic questions and then spewed out my bills in different denominations. For instance, €100 would come as 2 x €5, 2 x €10, 1x €20 and 1 x €50. Very practical instead of one or two high value bills. Someone thought about the basic user requirement here.

GPS Navigation: My host's GPS navigation system has taken us over the past two evenings to two excellent restaurants near the Hanover Messe site. These are slightly "off the beaten track" places with local fare and gemutlichkeit that we would never have experienced in a pre-GPS navigation world. But the data base needs updating as the Indonesian restaurant we thought we were going to actually turned out to be a Greek restaurant after a recent ownership change; however, but both the food and hospitality were quite memorable.

Talk about going full circle: we are sitting here in Germany watching Deutsche Welle Television originating in Germany -- but picked up via my home Rogers cable service back near Toronto, Canada and coming back to Germany via my SlingBox Pro at home. But again, as the user I get to select my choice of channel, whether Deutsche Welle, CBC Newsword, CNN or NHL Centre Ice from a service I am already paying for.

Downtown Parking: Around Hanover Zentrum, especially as you enter the downtown area, are electronic signs that not only direct you towards municipal parking buildings but also tell you how many spots are currently open in each. Once you enter a building you are directed to the various levels based on current occupancy. This is a great idea for the "Green" movement as it must save on fuel required to look around for vacant parking spots.

I had occasion to ride Deutsche Bahn on a couple of trips within Germany. Once again a German service is using display technology to the fullest. Each car has an LED display on the exterior showing complete train information for that individual car. Within the car is an active overhead display providing speed, location, schedule and promotional information as you travel. Eliminates much of the aggravation and tension associated with travel on unfamiliar networks.

Bottom line: the Germans are certainly making efforts to use information and modern display technology to deliver real time information focused on the individual and relieving much of the anxiety associated with travel and driving. And they make it simple for the average user to grasp and understand. Now, as one who is allergic to cigarette smoke, if the Germans could just get their heads around the need to limit public smoking as done in California and most of Canada (update -- I just learned that London, UK goes "no smoking in public" July 1). I guess the Germans still need to get IT services built to figure out the smoking-enhanced cost to both their healthcare system and tourism industry.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype's Niklas Zennstrom is speaking at the Spring VON conference right now. (video) So far he hasn't broken any news but nicely recapped Skype's general stats, the developer program, Skype Extras ecosystem, Skype Find directory, the PayPal Send Money service (coming soon) and the Skype Prime labor market. Questions about open source ("you'd see lots of nasty things you see on email"), is Skype chat cannibalizing voice ("no."), Joost (big opportunity to monetize through "advertisement").

Technorati tags: von07, skypejournal, skype

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Trolltech keeps winning converts, this time Skype. Skype's now telling developers who want to put Skype into their devices to use Trolltech's Qtopia. A short Skype Journal interview with cto Benoit Schillings.  

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a few minutes with Vivox co-founder Monty Sharma at the Spring VON 2007 in San Jose.

Among other things, Vivox will make 2L's person-to-person voice services:

• Scale to hundreds of people in a space
• Sync with gestures (maybe even mouths) as people talk
• Spatialize from left to right. (What about distance before and behind you, and above and below for those in-flight conversations?) Diamondware may get this business if it can efficiently architect a highly scalable set of spatialization components for the server and client.
• Terminate to landline and mobile phones.

Heading into closed beta now, open beta in a few weeks and live around June 2007. The announcement is three weeks old but still good news.  

Rival 2L VoIM provider Centric's Second Talk drives calls through Skype, and will continue to offer their service because:

1. Linden Labs’ integrated voice won’t work everywhere. Second Life landowners determine whether or not voice is enabled on their property, so it’ll be entirely possible to cross from one region where voice works to another where it does not.
2. Linden Labs’ system isn’t free. Second Life landowners must upgrade to the current $295/month land tier in order to use Linden Labs’ system on their regions. Although this is a small investment, we understand that a lot of landowners won’t want to make it.
3. We’ve been asked to continue support. Even in light of Linden Labs’ announcement, many Second Talk users have asked us to continue support for Second Talk. Many people want a system that simply facilitates connection to an impartial third-party voice system, rather than routing through a captive system.

Technorati tags: skype, video, skypejournal, secondtalk, secondlife, 2l, centric, montysharma, vivox, von, 2007, spring, voip, philwolff, im, chat

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

E-Ten's Glofiish X800 may have Skype on it when it ships. via Engadget. Love that big screen.

Om asks if Vodafone's Starfish, a concept mobile Skype/VoIM client, will run iSkoot. Vodafone's not telling.

Qool Labs announced SkyQube Squared, The new generation of SkyQube. The Crave blog walks through how this Skype gateway saves you a fortune by routing your mobile calls through Skype when you roam. Avoid those thousand dollar roaming charges next time you cross a border. SkyQube2 adds GSM to the previous model.

Ipevo was showing their Skype phones at CeBIT too. Royce YC Hong, Ipevo CEO, gave a talk on "experience over IP."

Jim Courtney should be out of Hanover by now.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of weeks I have discovered a couple of "changes" that did not show up in the Release Notes for all the recent Skype 3.0 and Skype 3.1 for Windows upgrades.

Conference Calls: a year ago Skype announced that, if you had the then new Intel Core Duo processor, the Skype client would support conference calls with up to 10 participants instead of the originally supported five participant limit. With the release of Skype 3.0 last December the processor restriction has been lifted. However, one would advise using PC's with either Core Duo or other fast (say, >1.5MHz) processors should you wish to host a conference call with more than five participants. For conference calls involving between 10 and 500 participants check out HighSpeedConferencing.com.

Video out of beta: with the release of Skype 3.1 for Windows, video calling is no longer in beta. Check Tools | Options | Video and you will find the word "beta" omitted. We have certainly been experiencing excellent quality Skype video during some demonstrations here at CeBit 2007.

Bottom line: upgrading to Skype 3.1 will ensure you are able to take full advantage of these changes.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of days I have had the chance to tour the Communications Halls at CeBit (that's 2 out of 24) and found several displays involving Skype hardware. Of note

• Think Xtra is displaying their new line of not only Skype hardware (headsets, web cameras, USB phones and starter kits) but also the retail display stands that will help draw traffic in retail stores.
• VoSKY is talking about their 9xx0 Exchange Series PBX Skype Gateways.
• Contrel has introduced their complete SKYGO! Skype PBX system designed for small businesses.
• RTX is featuring not only their PC Free 3088 DualPhone but also new forthcoming models of their traditional Skype Dualphone.
• Polycom is demonstrating their well received Skype speakerphone. While in front of their new video conferencing system, it is not a part of this system.
• NetGear introduced their SPH200D PC Free Skype DECT Dualphone.
• TOPCOM is showing their Skype Desktop phone as well as a new WebT@alker 6000 PC Free Skype DECT cordless phone.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two announcements this week tell of changes to Skype's retail distribution strategy as they bring on new, but experienced, channel partners to assist with getting Skype hardware moving through more traditional retail channels.

First, here at CeBit 2007 in Hannover, Skype hardware vendor In Store Solutions announced a partnership with distributor Think Extra of Milan, Italy with representation in all major European countries. This partnership will bring Skype products to over 700 retailers in 26 European countries. From the press release:

“Our retail channels are selling vast amounts of Skype Certified products, but there is a clear need to further developing the channel,” said Riccardo Bologna, General Manager, TX - Think Xtra. “This joint initiative enables retailers to implement a rich portfolio of Skype Certified products quickly, and Skype‘s brand recognition will certainly attract shoppers. It’s exactly what our customers are looking for.”

Think Xtra and In Store Solutions are exhibiting a complete range of Skype branded products here at CeBit 2007 with significant amount of traffic and interest. The key to their offering is a range of starter kits which provide the Skype beginner with all the hardware required to get started with Skype, including ear buds with microphone and a basic 640 x 480 webcam for €29.99. Three keys to getting started such that new Skypers are recruited through a store display:

• Skype is easy to install
• Have all the hardware in one kit.
• Position the product as a Skype starter kit at a "no brainer" price.

Think Xtra is focusing on not only selling complete Skype solutions for end users but also providing all the tools for retailers to display and promote Skype products at their individual retail locations. These displays have been designed to generate Skype awareness directly at the retail site; using the packaging and display stands as a "sell piece" is critical to their success in this marketplace. It is felt that once users have experienced Skype through these starter kits, they will come back for premium products such as higher resolution webcams and stereo headsets.

In a second announcement, Skype North America has announced a relaunch of the Skype U.S. Store, using Digital River as the e-commerce provider and fulfillment house. From the press release:

Skype has teamed up with Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), a global leader in e-commerce outsourcing, to create a fresh new look and feel for the Skype Shop, which now features the ability to search by product or to browse by category. Digital River is also providing order management and fulfillment and 24x7 customer service for the new online store.

Skype and Digital River are banking on providing a broader range of Skype Certified hardware products, free shipping for orders over $80 and some initial special offerings to build sales volumes. However, the final results will probably be determined by how well Skype awareness is built up within North America. (Canadians beware - the pricing is all in US$, so add 20% to 25% for C$ pricing.)

Two different approaches to building Skype's retail presence: one involving physical retail locations, the other a virtual store via an e-commerce solution. One solution supported by a team of distribution channel account managers interacting daily with the channel, the other relying largely on direct promotion of Skype at largely a viral level. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of these approaches.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The good folks at Botanicalls let you talk to your plants. Over the phone. The photo at the right is from their table at ETel07.

Sensors placed in a pot give up information about the plant's light and soil moisture. Ambient sensors pick up humidity, temperature, CO2/Oxygen and light. The sensors pass this to an app that stores, analyzes and presents the data.

An Asterisk server provides the phone interface. You can call or SkypeOut +1.212.202.8348 to hear ten plants speak their care and health. The plants call a local phone when they want to:

• request water
• confirm & thank for water
• request more water if first watering was not enough
• notify of unnecessary watering
• notify of extreme need for water when plant is too dry

It's an architecture, not a novelty.

It's Moore's Law driving down the cost of sensors, processing and communication. Right now it's feasible to meld the Real World with metadata and our cyberspaces. We're seeing telephony apps layered on medical, supply chain and other high value systems.

It's quickly becoming convenience cheap, leading to ubiquity. Then disposable cheap, so fashion and whim rule. "Hi, this is your Adidas calling. Your feet are hot and smelly and you need to buy me some new inserts." "This is Huggies calling for your baby. Time to change the diaper."

Plants are a great case study because they are alive and interact in complex ways with their environment.

I have a gray thumb and have doomed my share of house plants. Botanicalls gives me hope.

Technorati tags: skype, voip, asterisk, skypejournal, botanicalls, botany, plants, sensors, mooreslaw

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Download Version: 3.1.0.144. Includes the Skype Prime Beta and SkypeFind services. If you didn't upgrade when they came out last week (build 134), now's the time.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Promote your phone service with their new Skype Prime snippet generator.

What's your idea of a service that won't violate Skype Prime's terms and conditions?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Let's ignore if 30% is "too high" for a moment: Skype is just getting its feet wet and wants zero risk for this pilot project.

Better to ask: what are other options for Prime's rate?

Quality. Discounts offered for high buyer feedback ratings weighted by dollars spent. Payout delays (120 days) drop to zero with a Gold consumer rating over 100 billed hours, for example.

Volume. Rates get better as you have more experience. e.g 30% for your first hundred euros, 20% for your first 1000 euros, 10% above that. 

Pooling. Rates get better for services offered through a "guild", a "gang", a "tribe", a "school", or a "company." This creates some consistency, maybe even quality, and collective volume. Each group:

• Establishes membership criteria. So all members of the Gnarly Wood Workers guild are carpenter union members with two years' professional experience.
• Standardizes services delivered. So members of The Food Network Academy agree to upload all recipes they share in a session to a private web page the caller can see.  
• Gets collective feedback. So members can see statistics for the group a whole, for the group vs. averages for the category, and for the individual vs. the group.  
• Governs itself.  

Liability/Insurance by Category and Country. Litigation risk is lower for music advice than medical advice. Litigation risk is much higher in the United States than in Japan. Skype can vary rates based on those odds and exposure.

Business Services. Maybe lower rate overall but a flat fee per year for collecting and reporting your national, provincial, local taxes.

Banking. Paying interest if you keep your money in your Skype account. Giving you a discount if you link your account to a PayPal/Skype credit card.

Recruiting. One month free for each seller you bring into the network who successfully bills 100 euro without customer complaint.

Mentoring. Lower rates when you help a less experienced seller by joining in a call.

Prime's cost structure is a social engineering tool. It promotes supplier behavior that nourishes your marketplace when done well. It also discourages behavior that hurts it.

Complexity and nuance drive suppliers to game their compensation, sometimes with more effort than building new business. The virtue of today's blunt one-size-fits-all rate is simplicity: everyone understands it and can easily choose to opt-in or opt-out and to set their prices. Now is the time for Skype to master the art of tuning the fee plan, perhaps by apprenticing with eBay?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 12:08 PM | Permalink

Skype's well-traveled Stephanie Robesky pointed to a BBC site's factoid: "The premium rate phone services market in the UK is the biggest in the world, worth £1.2bn a year - that's £20 each for every man, woman and child." (Stephanie, does that make the UK the most psychically informed nation on Earth? And does that number include directory assistance?)

Skype Prime, the infant service launched last week, might play a little in that space. During this testing stage, Skype holds Prime earnings for 120 days and keeps 30%.

Do you think Prime is in the premium phone service market?

Voice service providers supporting today's premium rate phone service market (call a psychic) routinely take 30% or more. That's partly why you might pay many dollars/euros/pounds per minute. The person talking to you on the phone actually gets around 10%-20% after the phone company, the voice service providers, the credit card company, VAT, and their employer take their cuts.

Disruptive is when you:

• cut out middlemen,

• make the current rate structure obsolete,

• drastically improve the ability of customers to discover services and to afford them.

As a fortuneteller, could you:

1. talk more hours per week (with directories, referrals, and other marketing driving traffic to me),

2. take home substantially more money per hour (with lower costs per call, despite having lower prices than service delivered on the old model),

3. boost cash flow (with fast payouts on, say, return customers),

4. more return customers (because the experience is so much better),

5. more viral customers (because it is easy and there are rewards for sharing your opinion on a service),

6. better tools to avoid bad people (because there are some schmucks whose cannot pay you enough to take their calls),

7. easily band together with others to offer a service together as a pool (so you can offer a service which is always answered),

8. make money by sending customers to other sellers (so you can easily pass clients to people better suited to meet their needs without dropping the call, and maybe collect referral income or share your own)

9. protect your personal pseudonymity while promoting your business identity (so callers see they are talking to Andalusian Atmospherics although Skype knows you as Catherine Deane of Elsinby) 

10. have more control over your destiny as a free-agent instead of as an employee?

As a buyer, can you:

1. Spend less on bad services (by seeing reputation before the call)

2. Have more confidence you can get money back (with a straightforward dispute resolution service)

3. Collaborate with other buyers to share a service (four of us tossing in five quid to Rent-A-Prayer to bless Denilson before a match) 

4. Join in to fee-based Skypecasts (paying a pound for two hours of poker instruction)

5. Watch a macarena dance instructor's lesson [note to self: don't offer this service, Phil]

6. Get critiqued by three experts on your bellydancing performance by turning on your own webcam

7. Get an mp3, QuickTime video, or text transcript of the call (so you can review what you might have missed in the excitement of the moment)

8. Easily re-use those records in Bebo, MySpace, YouTube or a blog; or route privately to friends.

9. Join a club of other customers interested in a topic where you all can chat amongst yourselves, independent of a transaction or a service provider

10. Start a fan club for a service (she prayed, we scored)

To win, you have to change the game. You have to be so much different and better for callers and sellers that nobody wants to use the old services if they can help it. So when they think of just "calling" a psychic, they think "ah, I'd rather Skype a psychic. Calling is so 20th century."

Prime is a year or two away from playing competitively in this space, imho. But is this the space where you want to hang your hat?

Technorati tags: skypevideo, skypeprime

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:42 AM | Permalink

A little rant on US regulatory politics.

"Cheese Doodle-Eating Surrender Monkeys?" is how Hands Off The Internet slams Skype's bit of consumer advocacy. Skype proposes anyone can connect a phone to the mobile phone network so long as they don't hurt it. Basically, you shouldn't have to buy your phone from your mobile carrier any more than you buy a home phone or PBX from your landline phone company. HOTI's unsigned blog poster [how cowardly and deceptive, considering how much they get paid] wrote:

"what the companies pushing hardest — Google, eBay and Amazon — really want to do is freeze the market where it is now, with each at the top of their own game."

Distortions and off-point.

If the dinosaurs innovated and delivered on their promises, the whole US would have fiber to the home by now; standard devices could connect to mobile networks the way home phones connect to the Internet and standard devices can plug-in to telephone jacks and just work.

Is this truly a level playing field? Has hands-off regulation worked? No and No. Whole regions of the United States don't have access to broadband and where people do, not to more than one or two providers. This highly consolidated oligopoly spends more fortunes on underhanded crap artists like handsoff.org than R&D. And they are doing whatever they can to encumber innovators.

I'm not going to give any Google n. liar. A lawyer with a roving commission.
 - Ambrose Biercejuice to Hands Off The Internet by linking to them. It's an astroturf (fake grassroots) site run for AT&T by lobbyist Public Strategies Washington. Complain to Mike McCurry at (202) 783-2596 about lying for a client. Tell him I said hello and thanks for selling out to the wrong guys after a career of public service.

P.S. I can't believe long time Skype partner, Actiontec Electronics, makers of the VoSKY family of Skype-to-PBX gateways, lent their good name to this vile project.

P.P.S. By the way, if you think I'm wrong, speak up. We gladly publish contrary views so long as unsubstantiated ad-hominem attacks are avoided.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

New enhancements to Skype Web Toolbar add three new cool features.

As mentioned in a previous post, I never dial phone numbers; one of my key tools is use of the Skype Web Toolbar for Firefox. (Firefox 2 is my default browser; MSIE 7 just does not cut the mustard!) With a couple of clicks I can SkypeOut to any phone number detected on a web page. Great for Canada411 lookups.

Now Skype has enhanced its Web Toolbar to version 2.3 with three new features:

• Highlighting PayPal merchants found in a Google, Live/MSN or Ask! search. Uses an algorithm guaranteed not to slow down your searches.
• Saving images to Skype: select an image, right click on it and select "Share with a Friend". The image is sent as a file to the designated Skype contact. Or select "Set as my Skype Avatar". One more nifty file transfer feature that complements previously reported file transfer features.
• But here is the most powerful feature: Call from home with Skype. Right click on a phone number, select "Call with home phone". Skype will then call your home phone, followed by calling the designated phone number on the web page and drops out of the picture once the connection is made. It is charged as two SkypeOut calls (including two connection charges). Is this the start of Skype's response to what Andy calls "minute stealers" such as Jajah?

Peter Kalmstrom, Skype's Toolbars team leader, has posted details here. When updating your Firefox Skype Toolbar to version 2.3, note that you must first uninstall any previous versions. (Uninstall is one of the Options available in the Skype Web Toolbar.)

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

20 so far.

I mean Niklas Zennström has his own VC firm. He's disrupted the music, phone, and television industries. He's on eBay's executive leadership team and has a stake in blog search engine Technorati. And Skype, under his leadership, launched search, advertising, and temp-work pilot projects, each of which could spin off into businesses of their own. Lawsuits kept him out of the US for years (what did he miss?). He uses Skype's lawyers to advocate for Internet liberties. When (if?) Skype makes its key numbers this year, he might be gobsmacking rich. And he's starting to become famous outside of tech.

Room for 80 more questions. Ask great ones, please.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you find your PC, laptop or cell phone confused by the new Daylight Savings Time change today?

• Windows XP, 2000 Update (should have been automatic if you're on automatic updates)
• Windows Mobile and PocketPC devices
• MS Outlook
• Blackberry
• and some Nokia phones.

This change only applies to U.S.; Canada had to follow to allow business to be carried on in a synchronous manner. European time changes remain the same: they in two weeks on March 25.

Why some Nokia phones? Because I found my Nokia N80i updated without any additional software. Given the last release of software is dated November, 2006, it seems like they had already taken the changes into account.

And the implications for Skype? You want to be displaying your correct local time in your Contacts' Skype clients.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati tags: pizzaceo, bpo, businessprocessoutsourcing, sex, phonesex, videosex, sexvideo, 900, cam-girl, km,

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:47 PM | Permalink

BlueNow's Moodvideo creates video mail you send to your Skype contacts. Parts run on videoegg, saving user bandwidth. Congrats, Hans Blaauw.

Five security misconceptions about Skype listed by Michael Gough of SkypeTips.com

Video comparing Apple's .mac AIM service via iChat vs. Skype. Looks like Skype wins by a connection. via Kevin Smith.

Panasonic launches their Skype PC-free, Wi-Fi phone. The news release.

PowerGramo for Skype launches big upgrade. Skype 3.0 fully supported, record Skypecasts and lots of other features. Haven't tried this version yet.

AMEX DIGITAL launches their TSP-VS501 intelligent USB Skype phone.

Skype took a disgruntled user's money from the bank but no Skype credit or confirmation letter in 48 hours. "I soon realize that I am not only victim here! along with other 100+ ppl (approx.) who posted on forum regarding same issue as I have." 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lost in all the blog posts on Skype Prime amid the speculation about how it could be used for a wide range of knowledge exchange and services is the prospect for conflict between Skype and its Extras Gallery partners, BitWine and Jyve. But first to put the motivation for using these services in perspective, I want to repeat the excellent Comment that Alon Cohen of BitWine put on Luca Filigheddu's post:

A large portion of the world economy is based on paid services. In our days many of those services may be delivered over the Internet.

Premium services are similar to a Blog, the better marketing you have, the better content you provide the more readers you will have and higher monetization.

Information is free, knowledge is not. Customization of the flood of information to a nice answer for an urgent unique problem worth money to people who don't have the time or the skill on a particular subject matter. They are the people paying for the services.

If you have the time and skills get the knowledge you need for free. No premium call system will change that.

Skype Prime is in a beta phase, initially putting out an incomplete offering while seeking feedback and information about:

• what Skypers may want to offer as services,
• the psychology behind the dialog between customer and service provider to establish credibility and value prior to delivering the knowledge,
• how to build a network of trusted service providers
• payment terms and refund logistics to ensure a "fair trade" for value

Some key questions:

• How will Skype Prime differentiate itself from services already offered through "Extras Gallery" Partners Bitwine and Jyve?
• What is the balance between Skype's marketing of Extras Gallery products and services and the need for each service to do its own marketing to gain customers?
• If Skype feels this is a key revenue generator, why did they take the "development" as opposed to the "acquisition" route to gain experience with these types of services and transactions.
• How are the Extras Gallery partners reacting to this announcement?
• How will Skype use this as an example of working with their partners to encourage both new and ongoing independent investment in Extras Gallery Partners businesses?
• What logistics exist to ensure a "fair trade"? This includes how does the service establish credibility between provider and customer, what mechanism is in place to provide refunds if a customer is unsatisfied? How will Skype monitor and police service providers?

While all this speculation has been going on, I have been registering for all three services and had discussions with principals at all three. First let's look briefly at the services:

• Jyve, in its most simplistic description, provides a "Search" service that's built around "live" human knowledge which, in turn, requires a significant volume of participants covering a very broad range of topics. Jyve executives have focused on developing the user experience. Fundamentally you can pose a question (much like a Google entry) and wait to see what responses come back from their resource base. Keys to their success are a huge user base of knowledge resources, a simple process for rapid notification and distribution of questions and relatively rapid response to queries. They rely on a database of information from their service provider resources which become "tags" used to identify participants who may have an answer to the relevant question; in effect this database becomes an "internal" directory. It does require a browser and/or a downloaded client (which is active in the System Tray). Their primary payment mechanism is via a "tip jar" but this can be extended to delivery of a service at either a metered or fixed rate. Jyve takes in 10% of the revenues.
• BitWine is building a directory of knowledge resources which, in turn, is built around "marketing" information gleaned from each service provider, called Advisor, in establishing an account. This marketing information allows the Advisor to: describe (briefly), in text, their service and experience , list degrees and other qualifications, produce a short YouTube video, make a special offer and other information about the service. The Advisor must also register with PayPal (via Bitwine's setup wizard). A prospective Client is presented with the information and a conversation can be initiated. This is where Bitwine's patent pending payment system comes into play: the customer and service provider can enter into a brief dialog, establish a payment agreement, agree to turn on the meter or pay the fixed fee, and -- at the end -- the customer has the option to request a refund which is effectively provided instantly. The service provider is paid (via PayPal) almost immediately (<15 minutes). During their beta period, BitWine collects no fee; however, they expect to collect 10% to 15% when the service launches. Their payment algorithm all but eliminates the need for conflict resolution. They also have a feedback system that becomes part of the service provider's "marketing" information described above. Bitwine operates through a client that either is accessed from the System Tray or can sit as a Toolbar on your desktop. You can promote your service via Skype's mood message or via widgets that can be placed on a weblog or website.
• Skype Prime (alpha) involves a registration process from within the Skype client; however, initially this registration process basically takes your name, contact and PayPal information and a very limited one-line service description. There is no directory (at this time); you promote your service via a (forthcoming) widget that can be placed on a weblog or website. When anyone calls you the "Caller" tab in your Skype client adds a "Charge" option which you then click on to request acknowledgement of becoming a "paid" call with either metering or a fixed rate; the metering can only be stopped by ending the call. Callers use up Skype Credits to pay; service providers receive payment via their PayPal account. Skype takes 30% of the fee and payment terms are four months. See Phil's post on 30.120.0.30.15 for more information on rates and permitted charges. There are no mechanisms at this point for building a trust network or handling conflict resolution.

So we can start to see differentiation around:

• Marketing and promotion of service providers
• Service provider background information available to prospective clients
• Query notification protocols
• The user experience:
  • registration, making queries, obtaining responses, transaction processing
• Payment methods and terms
• Service provider fees
• Limitations on fees charged
• Establishment of trust between the client and the Advisor
• Building trust networks
• Feedback and rating logistics
• Monitoring and policing of service providers.

If you are interested in becoming a service provider I would recommend going through the registration process for all three providers and experiencing the various aspects of a service listed above. You can access Jyve and BitWine via the Extras Gallery (Tools | Do More | Get Extras); you can access Skype Prime via Tools | "Earn Money with Skype Prime".

And if you are looking for premium information or services focused on your individual needs try one or more of these services. The bottom line for value creations is gong to be whether clients can be attracted to and satisfied by these services and in establishing how much demand exists for such services.

And put your feedback in the Comments for this post or post feedback on the Skype Prime public chat.

These are the questions to which we need answers as Skype works out how to maintain positive Extras Gallery Partner relationships. At the same time these betas will help to establish demand levels for such services. If it's a multi-billion dollar market, there's probably room for three players; if it's weak the whole concept may be a fad and go the way of some other Internet-initiated services such as PointCast.

Note: the various service descriptions are only intended to provide a summary overview based on my discussions and experiences; please visit the services' websites for more complete descriptions and to experience the services themselves.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Per Great Firewall of China.org testing service, "Your URL is Blocked!" Still.

Are any other VoIP or Skype bloggers being blocked?

There is an administrative appeals process, but you have to survive multiple departments within each of China's telecom agencies. 

del.icio.us tags: skype, skypejournal, china, blocking, blocked, block, censorship, freedom, censor, censored, filter, press, bloggers, blogs

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ike Roelfsema, a volunteer Skype forum moderator, recapped consumer problems with SkypePro: people are unclear which SkypeOut calls are free and which cost money. If a Brit with a SkypePro account calls from France to Germany, does he pay? From France to France? From England to France?

The correct answer: in-country calls are free (except for Skype's connection fee) as long as you are in one of the SkypePro-supported countries.

SkypePro should mirror unlimited, flat-rate landline service in its simplicity. It's not quite there yet. 

Do you think there's a market for a SkypeProPlus? Free SkypeOut within a region?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dan York: 1. "This is a global service, whereas traditional pay-per-call services are limited to the local nation in which you live.  Hmmm... think the regulators in various countries might not be entirely thrilled about this?  (Since they're conceivably losing their tax revenue to Skype?) Interesting to note that if you are an EU resident, you'll also be charged a 15% VAT tax." 2. "This allows pay-per-call video calls... and the security guy in me immediately has to wonder about the usage of this for the sex/porn trade.  Calls to 900-number-type-of-services - with video - from the privacy of your PC... and all encrypted across the Internet.  Seems like a rather obvious use for that industry." [Dan gets the first-to-blog-it prize.]

TDavid: "As Yogi Berra might say, 'it’s BitWine deja vu all over again.'"

Amit Agarwal compares Skype Prime to "the Ether service that makes it easy for you to bill clients who want your expert advice over phone." Ether 's commission is 15%.

Pete Cashmore: "The percentage taken by Skype, however, is hefty: 30%. Last time I checked, Ether only took 15%. That high fee will probably console Ether: Skype may be on every desktop, but are serious consultants really going to accept an extra 15% off their wages for routing the calls through Skype rather than a phone?"

Tom Evslin: "Many people will set up Skype Prime based call services. They’ll put information in their profiles which attracts telemarketers. Telemarketers will learn who the best prospects are both from the profiles (some of which will be lying) and by accumulating lists. You’ll adjust the rate so that you’re pleased, not annoyed when you get a telemarketing call." [Editor: New term: SPITbait!]

Stowe Boyd: "I bet it will rapidly become phone sex for fee. Which is a huge market, after all."

Luca Filigheddu: "It won't be successful. Over the internet, people are used to communicate for free, they can barely tolerate a few cents for a PSTN call. Or, they are used to use emails. Unfortunately It's not always possible to take something which works for traditional telephony and make it work over the internet."

Dameon Welch-Abernathy: "In addition to offering another telco-like service, they are charging rates for it that remind me of what a telco would charge. And they appear to be providing even less value for that money than the telcos of old."

Darren Rowe: "Looks like a product with real potential for bloggers wanting to offer consulting in their area of expertise."

Bryan Bartow: "The next logical step is for eBay to provide sellers with dedicated virtual stores from which services and/or goods can be provided. This seems to be the most logical implementation of the "power of three" integration. The question is, will people use this and will the average user be as apt to buy a conversation online as they are a good or product. I hate to toot my own horn, but I predicted this some time ago."

Dave Taylor: "I have long since learned the value of not keeping track of time. ... I believe that the 'non-business chat' that accompanies any consulting call is critical to the success of the coaching, because it establishes trust and creates a human connection, a bond, between the client and consultant. If the meter's ticking, however, then you'll skip all of that to ensure that every minute counts! This is, at least in my opinion, a high price to pay for what is at best a quasi-efficient call system."

Pat Phelan: "I saw this on Phil’s blog and thought my eyes had deceived me. This is a 1990’s technology which is probably the cause of 90% of all calls to the telecoms regulator in any country. I cant see where this could possibly come into any business plan and I cant for the life of me remember the company that launched this a few years ago and had a huge belly up.
$30 minimum, time to practice my heavy breathing I think."

Absoblogginlutely: "I think i'd spend more time talking someone through setting up a beta version of skype than I would solving their problem - although it would stop people asking me for free support"

Peter Cooper: "The sad thing about that is that Skype, like most communications programs, doesn’t make it particularly easy to maintain multiple profiles or accept communications on two different profiles at once (I don’t think you can run two copies of Skype at once?). I don’t think grandma or mom and pop will be too impressed with their daughter’s profile"

Bitwine's Alon Cohen, in a comment to Luca's post:

Dear Friend

A large portion of the world economy is based on paid services. In our days many of those services may be delivered over the Internet.

Premium services are similar to a Blog, the better marketing you have, the better content you provide the more readers you will have and higher monetization.

Information is free, knowledge is not. Customization of the flood of information to a nice answer for an urgent unique problem worth money to people who don't have the time or the skill on a particular subject matter. They are the people paying for the services.

If you have the time and skills get the knowledge you need for free. No premium call system will change that. To save time, use BitWine.

Try using the BitWine Widget on your Blog.

Thanks
AC

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

30. 120. 0. 30. 15.

Those are the big numbers Skype Prime sellers need to know.

30% is Skype's cut of what you earn. 30% is the kind of rate they've been able to get from Voxeo, where people call a phone number and talk to a psychic for 10 minutes at $7.00 a minute. When you make your living by consulting and offering professional services, 30% is a huge amount to pay for credit card processing and telephone service.

120 days is how long Skype will hold your money before paying you. They don't know how much money they'll need to refund due to fraud, user error, software glitches, etc. So this is their contingency fund. They are mostly managing two risks. Credit card fraud (not getting paid by buyers) and refund risk (having to give money back to buyers).

Buyers are paying for service with pre-paid, pre-cleared Skype credits. Unlike companies that process credit cards, Skype already has the buyer's cash in hand. So there is no risk of credit card fraud.

That leaves refunds. What percent of transactions will be refunded? How much money does that represent? What can be done to avoid those situations? What can be done to keep those costs down? Skype doesn't know. They hope to get hard figures and adjust both the duration and percent of the payout to better match real world losses and adjustments. But it will take time. At least 120 days.

By the way, could you wait 4 months for your paychecks to resume?

0.00% interest is what Skype pays you while they bank your money.

"Skype to Skype minutes in Q4 2006 alone totaled 7.6 billion minutes" - Skype PR

30 dollars per hour is the minimum bill rate. This cuts out tens of millions of Skypers from developing nations.

"Six people download Skype every second" - Skype PR

$15 million revenue from Skype Prime. Just a back of the envelope calculation. Skype is running at 30 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes a year; more with growth. Let's guess one tenth of a percent of those minutes go through Prime. The minimum charge is $0.50 per minute. That's the minimum.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm driving down the road and my old officemate calls me, whining about his new boss. I listen for 4 minutes then tell him I'm turning on Skype Prime, hit a few numbers on my mobile, and starting billing him at $60/hour. Five minutes later he starts whining about his love life; I turn up the rate to $120/hour. He started telling me how much he missed working with me, how great I am and that he knows a great girl for me, so I rebated half his fee. Then I hit a tunnel and lost my connection.

So I called my wife and told her all this.

She charged me $500.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype launched Skype Prime, the beginnings of a fractional labor market, this morning. Download Skype for Windows Beta release Version: 3.1.0.134. It's a big deal for Skype, entry into a billion dollar market. Skype only launched the meter and payment parts of the service today. Stuff that comes before a call (discovery, negotiation) and after a call (feedback, tipping, payment corrections) aren't built yet and will come later. Let's walk through setting up as a service provider, a call, checking your balances and canceling your your account.

Setup Walkthrough

Go to the "Tools | Earn money with Skype Prime" command.

Skype will launch a setup wizard in a new window.

Click the "Get Started" button. This brings up the "Contact Details Set Up" form.

Wow, they want a lot of information. So I put in my name and pressed "Next".

OK, everything but Tax ID is mandatory.

This would be a good place to explain how the information will be used, who gets to see it (everybody, according to the terms of use), and links to Skype's general and Prime privacy policies.

I fill it out.

Then set up your services. You may offer many services. Only one per-minute and one per-call service in each call.

So I have lower rates for unsexy talk (the minimum of $30/hour) and higher rates for very sexy talk (the maximum of $150/hour).

IMHO, the minimum is too high. They should encourage micro transactions and longer calls, building behavior that's good for the marketplace and flexible enough for developing cultures.

I also set a bad joke at the minimum $0.50 per call and rolling on the floor laughing my ass off jokes at the max of $12.00 per call.

Next, how do you want to be listed and paid?

Did I mention you need a PayPal account? And if you want to get money out of PayPal, it helps to either live in a country where PayPal will let you, or have a service that will get it out for you (quite popular in Brazil, for example).

Pick one of the 8 categories. It's not clear how these will be used in the future, but they're not used now.

And pick your currency.

Not clear to me why you can only have one payment method per Skype user account. People have multiple jobs, different small businesses they are part of, personal vs. savings accounts, etc.

Next...

Next, take a call...

Call Walkthrough

Someone has to call you. You can't charge if you're calling someone.

And they must use a version of Skype that supports Skype Prime. Version: 3.1.0.134 or later on Windows.

See the "Charge" button?

Talk to the person, negotiate your rates, and press the "Charge" button.

The little blue circles will spin while you wait for for the payer to agree.

The payer sees your offer like this:

They can't start paying until they check Skype's Skype Prime terms and conditions. Having accepted...

The "Pay" and "Reject" buttons are both available.

If they take too long, they'll see...

You'll have to make your offer again. Once the payer accepts the conditions and clicks "Pay", you'll see status like this.

It only shows your rate.

Missing:

• How long you've been talking
• How much has been spent
• Changing the rate/service
• Pausing / resuming billing (so either party can go to the bathroom, take another call, take care of a sneezing fit)
• Stopping billing but continuing to talk
• Feedback

Tax questions:

I'm not sure why Jim and I are subject to EU value added taxes (Jim's Canadian and I'm American and the call was made while both of us were in California).

• Will Skype refund improperly applied and collected taxes?
• Is VAT applied before or after Skype takes its 30% share?
• When does VAT apply? If either party is located in the EU at the time of the call? If the service provider is based in the EU?
• Is Skype collecting VAT for the 5000 different taxing authorities in the United States and Canada?

The only way to stop charging is to abort the call.

Check your Money

As a Prime service provider, Skype will show you two web reports.

First, your transaction record...

It appears you are billed to the nearest second.

Checking your balance...

Wishlist: aging reports. If I'm not seeing my money for 120 days, at least show me when my March moneys will result in a PayPal credit.

Cancel Skype Prime

So you're not going to predict eBay's stock prices for a living? Run the "Earn more money with Skype Prime" menu command. See a menu in the bottom-left of the Contact Details Set Up box?

Pick "Cancel your service".

Cancel or don't cancel. If you cancel, you forfeit all payments.

So I can't opt-out of being available as a service provider without throwing away the last four months of service revenue Skype still owes me.

So, there you have it. Sign up, get people to call you, make money, and buy me lunch in a few months.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Jaanus Kase must be sipping a lot of wine these days passing his time at Skype's business headquarters in Luxembourg. How else would someone come up with (and have the time for) making Skype work in four different OS's on one PC?

Is this Skype for "Talking to Yourself"!

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh to be young, rich and in love. Valleywag and The Mail On Sunday name a club Skype co-founder Janus Friis and his girlfriend joined early in a transatlantic flight.  

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How often do you get those Skype chat requests from a previously unknown person with simply a "Hi"? But you know that someone out there wants to learn English. When I worked with a German scientific instrument manufacturer a few decades ago, all the employees wanted to practice their English with my English speaking colleagues and me but it was impacting our ability to get ahead with our own work. We finally agreed that on Friday afternoons the primary language for work would be English; otherwise we stuck to German. Learning English in today's business, academic and government enterprises has become a key to anyone desiring career success in an international environment. But how to practice it? How can one encounter and learn all the grammatical subtleties and vocabulary innuendos associated with use of English to the point where you confidently can discuss business issues? Enter KanTalk - a Skypecast-based learning environment.

KanTalk's' founder immigrated to the U.S. from China and found he was having significant frustration with understanding the subtleties and innuendos of English. He found difficulty especially when participants in a group session were talking too quickly. Often workplace colleagues would not have the time or patience to help explain details and correct his errors. When Skypecast appeared last summer, he started setting up Skypecast sessions purely to find others who wanted to learn English in a more public yet less stressful forum. He found two key factors about group sessions where the other participants were going through a similar learning experience and shared the same motivations:

• Non-English speakers quickly became nervous or intimidated when speaking to "native" English speakers. Starting from simple grammar and vocabulary, and talking with others who had the same language learning issues, they could gradually build up to understanding more sophisticated comprehension and use of English through the self-reinforcement that this approach provided.
• Participants, considered as peers in this forum, were much more accepting of mistakes and ready to help correct them.

The experience generated by these earlier Skypecast sessions then incented the development of a full infrastructure site for language practice: KanTalk. A key feature is that Skypecasts have been integrated into their site with no need to leave the site during a session. (They consulted with Skype to ensure there were no copyright or other intellectual property infringements involved.) Since its launch in early January, 2007 over 1,500 2,000 (update March 6, 07) users from over 40 countries have subscribed to what is currently a free service.

So how can KanTalk move forward into a sustainable business model? They see two possibilities: (i) as a social network for those interested in learning new languages and (ii) as an infrastructure platform from which (local) independent language teachers can build their own businesses worldwide (possibly incorporating e-commerce and other infrastructure). However, it is still at an early stage; the KanTalk team is observing the response to their current offering to determine where it is most readily accepted and how to improve the details to make a more effective service.

What features would they like to see in Skypecasts? While moderators have control to some degree over who is talking, it needs fine tuning to appropriately manage participants who enter a session during a Skypecast -- otherwise background noise, etc. can interfere and/or interrupt the discussion. A second suggestion is an ability to reassign who is host for a session permitting a smooth transition when, for some reason, the initial host cannot stay on.

But next time you get that ubiquitous "Hi!", refer the chat originator to KanTalk.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

With the release of SightSpeed 6 Garrett Smith (Smith on VoIP) has made what I would call a positioning post: "Ten Reasons to Use SightSpeed". Last week I had a post about future business models for SlingMedia. And Skype has been continuously upgrading its video quality and capability (such as by adding Mac support).

But they each have their technology and feature strengths; yet, in many ways, the relative positioning of each has become a case of "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (the more things change the more they remain the same). To review briefly:

• SightSpeed's strength, as confirmed by Garrett's post, is personal video messaging - create your own video messages, host multi-party (<=4) video conference calls,. video blogging; to cut to the chase, SightSpeed is the epitome of user-produced and user-managed personal communications video. And, with SightSpeed 6, even better video quality along with some new video recording features and enhanced IM functionality. But their remote television viewing feature requires that you involve a full (usually Media Center) PC at the source with all the associated overhead. And it does not have the simple "ad hoc" ease of use and full feature set for informal conversations involving voice and/or IM associated with Skype
• SlingMedia's strength is bringing your cable subscription to your PC anywhere on the Internet. A great example of a dedicated "PC" with one major function. With its new SlingBox Pro, I am getting amazing quality at TV resolutions. But when I go to a full screen 1680 x 1050 display, even for the fast action of a hockey game, my major problem is sitting back from the PC screen far enough to accommodate my progressive lenses - no pixelating, no abrupt jumpiness . All the SlingMedia infrastructure is designed to bring very user-friendly implementation and operational processes to this one major function. Handles HD channels, a wide variety of screen aspect ratios, complete simulation of your remote control, remote set up for recording of TV shows and, with SlingBox Pro's HD Connect Cable, can remotely control up to four video devices (TV's, DVD players, PVR's, etc.)
• Skype's strength lies in two key aspects: (i) a full suite of "private" real time communications modes: voice, IM (presence and chat), voice mail, SMS, two party video and file transfer and (ii) over 170 million registered accounts with up to 9 million users online at peak times. Add in Skypecasts and Group Chats that facilitate "public" conversations. All my Contacts are "in the office next door" when using Skype. And I can simply "knock on their door" when I want to talk/chat, etc.

So I expect to be keeping all three on my PC for the foreseeable future. And use each when my activities requires the key features of the individual service. Now what new primary functionality and feature set will we find with Joost?

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of years, there have been lots of requests, rumors, speculation, etc. about why Skype needs a client for the Symbian platform, for which Nokia is the primary device vendor. Through Andy Abramson's Nokia Blogger Program I have been able to evaluate several Nokia N Series phones including the Nokia N80i which supports both GSM/EDGE/UMTS and WiFi (and, on which, I have used the Truphone service over WiFi).

Alec Saunders recently pointed to a Business Week report on 2006 smartphone sales which states:

During the year, Nokia remained top converged device vendor with market share of 48 per cent and 38 million devices shipped, despite underperforming in North America and the enterprise market, which the company hopes to counter with a number of fresh devices which debuted earlier this year.

The report goes on to state that RIM was [a distant] number two at 7.5 million while Motorola rose to number 3 with its new Windows Mobile devices at 4.9 million.

Recall the primary issues with Skype on any 2.xG GSM platform are (i) the (unacceptable) inherent latency of VoIP on a 2.xG service and (ii) the economics of current data plan pricing, especially in North America. (And we are not going to see the level of carrier support for WiFi networks in North America that is being witnessed in Europe and Asia in any near future scenario.) The only offering currently available to wireless customers at this point is 3 Group's X-Series service where there is a Skype client for Nokia's N73 and the subscriber plan allows unlimited usage.

Going forward start with Stowe Boyd's statement in his presentation at eTel earlier this week:

In the second half he begins by saying that the buddy list is the center of the new universe. Social networks are key -- the individual is the new group, and the value is not in the number of people in the network, but rather the number of connections. Bingo! It's the same logic Google uses to rank web pages. More links equate to more authority.

With over 170 million accounts, one could say Skype has a lot of "authority". So here is my suggestion for a roadmap for both Nokia and Blackberry platforms:

1. Develop a Skype client that simply centers around IM but does not include voice.
   • It allows you to keep in touch with your Skype "buddies".
   • Default to the underlying phone service for actual voice calls.
   • Low bandwidth but actually helps drive up usage (and, maybe, ARPU).
2. When 3G networks become more readily available (especially in North America), develop a Skype client that has all the standard Skype features.
   • This could require working with the carriers to offer an unlimited usage plan but needs other competitive factors, such as other services that need significant data transfer volumes, to accelerate the process.

With 48% market share worldwide and 3 million devices, the demand for a Skype for Symbian solution becomes ever stronger, even if it initially only uses Skype's IM capabilities.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you a Skype programmer? A bizdev person for a Skype partner? Skype's DevZone manager Antoine "Ants" Bertout asks you to spend three minutes filling out a survey. It's their annual survey so speak up. And tell Skype more about yourself and what you want from their Skype Developer Program team. Jan Geirnaert thinks it might even affect Skype's direction.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)