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?

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