In no particular order:

1. a client configuration wizard and dashboard

   • (to create multiple flavors of your current build, to design your next builds, to see what configurations are in situ)

2. a client inventory system

   • (discover and list instances of Skype on your network)

3. network monitoring

   • (see and measure Skype traffic, analyze sources/destinations, detect non-compliant nodes)

4. a client compliance plug-in

   • (to capture Skype call records, to record conversations, and upload them to...)

5. a compliance archive server

   • (to store call records and call recordings in a searchable manner, to destroy those records per corporate policy, to provide controlled access to the records)

6. a rogue client blocking tool

   • (so you can block streams/packets by a given Skype client)

7. malware inspection client for file transfers

   • (so you don't send or receive viruses)

8. proxy service inside the firewall

   • (so you have a chokepoint)

9. superdupernodeplex box in the dmz

   • (running 100 instances of Skype available to become supernodes)

10. Skype account creation/deletion/changes and deployment

    • (triggered by personnel actions)

11. Skype account funding controls

    • (to top up SkypeOut credits, report on costs/activity by corporate cost center)

12. Skype account supervision controls

    • (so some supervisors can see some all of a subordinate's activity)

13. client configuration updater

    • (so you can change policies)

14. client software updater

    • (automatically get the latest from Skype but deploy on demand per the client configuration system)

15. Skype extras filtering

    • (to allow or prohibit some or all Skype plug-ins)

16. contact list LDAP sync

    • (to populate Skype contact lists from the corporate directory)

17. customized in-Skype alerts

    • (like in-house warnings/error messages)

18. custom browser tabs

    • (intranet home page, Skype tech support)

19. enterprise Skypecasts

    • (hosted securely and privately for team meetings and client presentations)

20. enterprise bots

    • (able to inject disclaimers into chat or calls or fetch useful information)

21. Skype enterprise heartbeat

    • (so you can see the current health of the parts you control and the parts you don't)

bonus points!

22. deep integration with Salesforce.com, sap, etc.

    • (triggering useful conversations)

23. datamining tools that run against the compliance archive

    • (to learn from your hive mind)

24. project podcasting/vlogging tools

    • (to improve institutional memory and project communication)

25. private extras gallery

    • (the better to distribute sanctioned home-grown or locally adopted tools)

26. deep integration with attention/routing manager

    • (so your most valuable customers always get through)

Is this feature overload? The kind that kills consumer products? You can design around that problem if the enterprise market is strategic.

Off-topic 1: Corporate in loco parentis behavior always bothers me. Children grow up and seize control of their lives from their parents. Locked-down systems assume employees never grow up.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Mark Evans posted his Communications 101 thoughts and mentioned:

Note: It’s important to be clear there is a difference between having the “gift of the gab” and communicating well. This post is driven, in part, by my personal goal to become a better communicator.

But when it comes to maintaining family relationships, having the "Gift of the Gab" can be important ... and we all know that "gabbing" to the extent appreciated by Mom usually requires lots of time to catch up on the family news and events. This morning Skype and Intel announced their joint "Gift of the Gab" promotion where

Consumers in the U.S. and Canada can take advantage of Internet communications over Skype by placing free SkypeOut calls to any landline or mobile number around the world on Mother's Day (May 13, 2007). Sponsored by Intel, the “Gift of Gab” promotion represents the first time that U.S. and Canadian users will be able to make free SkypeOut calls to anywhere in the world for a period of 24 hours. Calls from one registered Skype user to another remain free. Usually, SkypeOut calls are billed at per-minute fees depending on the location called, with rates beginning at the low Skype global dialing rate of 2.1 cents per minute.

Why Mother's Day? Skype PR has provided some interesting statistics:

• Mother’s Day is the busiest calling holiday of the year, so there’s no better day to make calls for free.
• Sixty-two percent of moms just want a phone call saying I love you on Mother’s Day, yet only 35% actually receive phone calls, according to a new survey commissioned by Skype.
• 42% of adults say they see or talk with a parent (especially Mom) every single day, up 10% since 1989. Now all that chatting won’t cost anything!

Certainly problems have occurred in past years on the PSTN where sometimes you have to wait several minutes to get a long distance connection on Mother's Day (especially for overseas calling). Obviously using Skype not only provides a higher probability of completing a Mother's Day call (due to its peer-to-peer architecture) but also, more importantly, allows you to have conference calls so that not only you can call Mom but you can bring in your remote siblings to join in the conversation and celebration. Of course you can record the call via either of Pamela's Call Recorder or Skylook in Skype Extras.

For those unfamiliar with making SkypeOut calls, Skype has provided some guidance here.

And why Intel? PC's with Core Duo processors enabled Skype to extend free conference calls to ten participants.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A baggle of bloggers (Vecosys, Mashable, Startup Meme, ben barren, Google Blogoscoped, gSpy, Garett Rogers) are jumping on Martin's interpretation of some user interface text for a Google system.

The text: "NAME has joined".

Explanation: System messages when user joined or left a muc conversation"

Their guess: "muc" is short for "multi user chat".

My guess: "multi user call"

Huge value escalating to live talk from chat, from multichat to conference calling. Google is lining up conversational triggers like email, Google documents, calendar events (time to talk with X about Y), videos/photos, even news (join a conference call with other English-speakers about this Google News headline). 

Did I hear someone say monetization? Anyone remember Google's UK "click-to-call" advertising pilot? How would you like to talk with other customers? Or other people who are searching for the same product? Conversation is sticky in the advertising sense. And live talk can multiply the effect of an ad, sometimes helping people move to action.

Constraints to overcome:

1. Voice, firewall traversal, and switching technologies. They have it or can buy it.
2. Metcalfe's Law. Plenty of gmail users make for a satisfyingly humongous network. AOL/AIM interop, coming sooooon, will just add to Google's network's value.

Skype will no doubt be better at conference calling quality and scale this year. Portal power is Google's advantage: you'll find Google Talk in many meaningful contexts. Those opportunities for goal-driven conversation will be attractive, if not downright seductive.

Skype is the only major VoIM player without a portal of its own. It relies on the portals of strangers (pardon my Gone With The Wind reference). That's why a powerful Skype web-service API is strategic. By exposing carefully constructed sockets to access Skype's core services, Skype can let everyone plug any web app, any web site, and most desktop and mobile apps into the Skype network. Skype could have an abundance of contexts greater than the top portals combined.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Several posts have come out of the blogosphere re the Alpha Blogger situation Phil described yesterday. Perhaps the best advice comes from three well known bloggers who understand the intellectual property legalities and business protocol much better than I do:

Alec Saunders in Alpha Blogger silenced himself:

Bloggers reactions to Jan Geirnaert's decision to kill his Skype-Gadgets and Skype-Watch blogs are a little over the top, in my opinion. Jan didn't get a cease-and-desist letter from Skype, or from the firm they use for domain name cases. He got a polite refusal from a lawyer when asked if he could put the Skype name (as part of his domain name) on chopsticks. Moreover, unless Skype was willing to extend him a license for that name, no other reply was possible or should have been expected.

Chilling effect? Not really. Expected reaction? For sure! In fact, it was more like a slap on the hand than a "heavy gun".

Andy proffers in The Right Hand and The Left Hand:

In business this is called protecting the trademark, and while I'm not a trademark and copyright attorney, I can safely say that letters like that go out all the time. Those with understanding simply do what my lawyers once told me to do the first time I received one back in my days at a top ten ad agency. That was after we ran a promotion to give away a JEEP, and had already in the print ad in USA TODAY disclaimed that Jeep was a registered trademark of Chrysler Corporation. I followed the lawyers instruction. I threw the letter in the trash.

And Robert Scoble pipes in with:

Ahh, the lawyers at Skype screwed the pooch. I am actually on their side in this fight, too. I know that they need to protect the trademarks otherwise they’ll lose them. At Microsoft the lawyers would do stuff like this from time-to-time (my friend Robert Mclaws told me recently that the Microsoft lawyers are again going after some community members who’ve taken on trademarks too closely).

And Andy ends the post referenced above with:

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Congratulations, Yahoo! From JD Power's news release [emphasis mine]:  

Among customers who report using IM on a regular or occasional basis, nearly 70 percent report that to some degree, instant messaging has replaced the use of traditional telephones.

“One of the trends we see in the 2006 study is that the percentage of Internet users who use IM on a daily basis is essentially unchanged from 2005 at 36 percent,” said Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications research at J.D. Power and Associates. “This indicates that some of the usage gains we are seeing in text messaging in our wireless studies are coming at the expense of IM usage.”

Ratings Guide. Not reviewed: Skype, QQ (small in the US but huge in the Chinese speaking world), Microsoft Office Communicator, and open source Pidgin (formerly GAIM).  

The numbers from the 2006 Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study - Instant Messaging:

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I first came onto the blogging scene a year ago at VON Canada 2006, one of the veteran bloggers who made me feel most welcome was Mark Evans, whose Mark Evans Tech has become widely cited for his insight into various technology business issues.

Emerging from his career as a reporter, Mark last fall became COO of b5media, a publisher of over 180 weblogs in 14 vertical channels. But, with a very geographically dispersed team (Canada, U.S. and Australia), b5media...

....epitomize[s] the border-less, work-anywhere corporation. We live and breadth of communication tools such as Skype, e-mail, the occasional phone call, and rare (but extremely valuable) physical gatherings of the entire team. As a result, we are - for the most part - a digital communications company.

With this background and Mark's personality as a people-person, he often finds himself challenged to use the appropriate communications mode for a particular business or social activity in context. And Skype, with its voice, IM, video and file transfer tools provides a key piece of their communications infrastructure. As a result he has described, in a benchmark post entitled Communications 10: How to Communicate Better, his approach on how to use different tools to communicate effectively.

Note: It’s important to be clear there is a difference between having the “gift of the gab” and communicating well. This post is driven, in part, by my personal goal to become a better communicator.
Note II: I’m reading a book called “The Simplicity Survival Handbook”, which offers many tools/techniques to communicate better, including a suggestion that the key to writing shorter, better e-mails is a system called CLEAR: connected (how does it impact current projects and workload); list next steps, expectations (set ‘em), ability (how will things get done), return (what’s in it for me).

....

In Person: By far, the most effective and powerful way to communicate. The ability to read body language, facial expressions, intonation, etc. makes person-to-person communications work and work well. It can also change the tone of a relationship. Think about how a long e-mail or phone call relationship took on a new dynamic after you met someone in person for the first time. You may never meet that person again but the relationship will always be warmer, more comfortable…and, well, better.

Phone Calls: Obviously, it’s not possible to meet every single person you do business with given the global nature of today’s working world. But a phone call can also be a very effective tool because voice carries many different messages beyond here’s what I’m saying. Voice conveys happiness, frustration, anger, exasperation, laughter, etc. Like meeting someone in person, a phone call offers an opportunity for people to offer nuances and details that are difficult, if not impossible, to do when you write an e-mail of IM. Phone calls also offer insight into someone’s personality as well as their ability to communicate on the fly. Even though Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone more than 100 years ago, it remains an amazing communications tool.

Video-Conferencing/video phones: The magic tool that could bridge in-person meetings and phone calls. Of course, we’ve been talking about video-conferencing for years without much traction happening but maybe the rise of online video will start to change things.

E-mail: The so-called “killer app” of the Web is an amazing way to communicate but it’s also a challenging medium to use effectively (It doesn’t help that bad grammar, and the use of acronyms and emoticons have become rampant within e-mail) But if if you want to send short messages, documents, photographs, music and videos, there’s no better tool than e-mail, which is why billions of them are sent every day. But there’s a danger of over-using/over-depending on e-mail. For example, there are many companies where people are e-mailing the person in the cubicle beside them!
For many people, e-mail become their default communications tool. Most people now send long e-mails rather than deliver the same message in a minute or two on the phone. Why? I’m not sure whether we’ve become lazy, or they’re far too enamored with the convenience of digital communications, or maybe e-mail lets you say what want you want without having to listen to someone else (which is not always a bad thing).

Instant-Messaging: The bastard-child of e-mail. Good for quick questions and answers but arguably little else from a corporate perspective. For teenagers, SMS is another beast entirely.

Maybe my approach to communications reflects the fact I’m not a digital child under the age of 25. Maybe I’m an analog dinosaur, desperately clinging to antiquated communication tools. But I do think digital communications is far from perfect, and people who rely extensively on e-mail and SMS today aren’t communicating as effectively as they can. Sure, they’re communicating but it’s communications-lite.

I’m certainly not suggesting we abandon e-mail and IM, which would be a big mistake because they can be valuable and extremely useful tools. But I do think that we can communicate better, and that stepping away from the keyboard is a good way to start. So rather than e-mail or IM someone, why not meet them for coffee/beer or, at least, give them a call?

Food for thought as Skype and similar services become part of our everyday personal and business lifestyle. And thanks to Mark for permission to quote his post so extensively.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new banner is a candid shot of Yahoo!'s Caterina Fake and Skype's Niklas Zennström in Munich, shot this January at the Digital, Life, Design 2007 conference. Caterina and Niklas shared a panel on The Future's Future. Photo by Esther Dyson, via Flickr (Creative Commons license).

See our Skype Journal Banner Art blog for more information on the pictures in our banners.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow. Talk about a chilling effect.

Skype lawyer Seema Sharma emailed blogger Jan Geirnaert Friday afternoon. She told him his popular skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com blogs put him in legal jeopardy.

Jan, an independent IT consultant, took the implied threats seriously. He promptly blacked out skype-watch, abandoning two years of intense daily news coverage, product reviews, and wry commentary.

Jan said "I'm not a sadomasochist. Neither am I an idiot. By doing this, Skype sent me the signal not do any of this blogging wise, business wise, in any way."

He's taking his blogging "underground" to VoIP-watch.com. Pretty sure his tone will change. "Maybe they're getting too 'corporate' to tolerate any criticism" he said.

My take: Sharma, co-author of this tutorial on how to threaten people for profit, didn't consult with Skype's PR or marketing communications team before composing her email. If Sharma had, Sharma might have learned Jan's been:

• working on distribution and marketing for dozens of major Skype-affiliated companies, nurturing Skype's ecosystem.
• briefing business and government technology executives on Skype's effect on management, IT, telecom and economic policy.
• covering Skype-related news and issues at international conferences in Europe and Asia, creating unique editorial content.
• contributing to Skype Journal.
• advocating Skype passionately, online and off.

No more.

Skype didn't talk to Geirnaert like a human being, picking up the phone (or Skype) and talking with him, appreciating his business and marketing value in the blogosphere and and his past and ongoing contributions to Skype's ecosystem.

Instead, they brought in heavy guns.

In a few short emails, Skype's blown goodwill and a hard-won media asset.

I'm writing this Friday night, so it's unlikely Skype will respond to this incident until Monday, if at all.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

"At the end of March 2007, we had over 35.5 mn registered TOM-Skype users up from over 31.5 mn at the end of January 2007."

— "TOM Online Reports 1Q 2007 Results" news release.

Not exactly viral, may not even replace users who try Skype and leave.

Why?

4. Great Firewall of China still blocking Skype Journal? (Yes. This is obviously of great distress to the entire Chinese economy.)

3. Competition from Tencent's massively popular QQ?

Total registered Instant Messaging ("IM") user accounts increased to 580.5 million, representing a 1.4% growth QoQ

Peak simultaneous online user accounts for IM services recorded over 24.5 million, a growth of 10.9% QoQ

Active IM user accounts increased 5.1% QoQ to 232.6 million

— Tencent Q4 2006 Quarterly Results

2. Chinese bypassing text-filters built into the TOM-Skype version by downloading from Skype.com instead of Skype.Tom.com?

1. Or a disastrous case of cutey-cute-cute-cute overload?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Garrett Smith today issued a post "No Wonder Skype Dragged Their Feet" where he calls "... Skype's decision to not dive head first into mobile VoIP a smart one". He blames the mobile carriers:

We as consumers can talk about mobile VoIP, how cool it is, how much we want it. Hardware manufacturers can make all of the devices they want. Last mile service providers can come up with the killer app. But until the people who own the network, the cellular carriers, [and] the WiFi network carriers, embrace mobile VoIP and the business economics behind it, we are going to continue to hear, see, and feel the mobile VoIP “ban”.

Based on my (largely North American) experience we have a long road to hoe before we see mobile VoIP take hold. Certainly over 2.xG wireless networks, latency issues work against it; and 3G networks will only be viable when both the economics are right and, as Garrett states, the carriers commit. (At the moment 500MB per month of data plan on Rogers would cost me $1,600 per month.)

The most immediate opportunity should lie with WiFi networks where I have had good "call quality" success with calls placed via Truphone and, more recently, Fring.  But, as of today,. the major Canadian HotSpot network (in Starbucks, other popular coffee shop and restaurant chains, airports, etc.) cost $0.15 per minute; they have a couple of .(600 min., 90 min) monthly subscription plans at $.04-$.05 per minute with a $0.10 per minute overage charge. However, they:

• are very limited geographically
• do not recognize the login window through the browser on my Nokia N-series phones; they do work with the N800 Internet Tablet since it uses the (Linux-based) Opera browser.

I have never been able to get the local Toronto "Muni" WiFi network (Toronto Hydro Telecom) to work beyond getting a SSID on any of these devices. So, in addition to the Canadian Hotspot choices above, I am left with free WiFi on my home network or at free WiFi locations, including some commercial establishments (hotels, a few restaurants and "neighborhood" coffee shops), guest access at businesses and friends' homes.

I made my first VoIP call in early 1996 while working at Quarterdeck where we had developed a VoIP product. It has taken over ten years to build and integrate landline VoIP into an infrastructure that is acceptable to consumers and businesses. A warning to VC's seeing mobile VoIP business plans: the infrastructure is just not there yet for major mobile VoIP market penetration, neither technologically nor economically.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

GSM carriers in North America have always held an edge for trans-oceanic-bound North America-based travelers because their phones will also work in Europe and Asia. The only caveat for Europeans visiting North America was that they needed to have phones that support the 850 MHz band to obtain the most complete coverage while in North America.

So when Verizon and Sprint yesterday introduced a new Blackberry 8830 that provides CDMA support in North America and GSM support elsewhere, why does it get the name "World Edition" or why does Verizon have the right to call their branded version a "Global Blackberry"?

Seems like the "prior rights" for these names should belong to the pure quad-band GSM Blacbkerries, such as the Pearl (8100), 8700 and 8800 supported by Rogers, AT&T (Cingular) and T-Mobile in North America. My 8700 was pretty good at automatically announcing, via a Rogers service SMS message, that I had arrived in the U.S., Germany, Belgium, France and the U.K. last month.

A couple of comments:

• The Blackberry 8830 only supports the non-North American 900 and 1800 MHz bands; thus, they will not work on North American GSM carriers' networks
• The Blackberry 8830 is a good announcement for Bell Canada and at least counters one concern that I had in discussing Bell Canada's dilemma last week. And they don't have to do a North American GSM overlay to accomplish global reach for their customers; strike off one cost for whoever becomes their new owners..

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I reviewed the recently released Nokia N800 Internet Tablet as a mobile Casual Computing device capable of executing many Internet activities.

Ken Camp is currently attending a IT security conference in Minneapolis where he found several attendees who had actually purchased this device. Why were they so keen on it?

I was curious why so many. That penetration rate seems huge to me. So I asked around. And I learned why - Maemo. The N800 is not an S60 device. It doesn't run Symbian. It's viewed as a Linux workstation. Someone showed me Kismet (a very popular wireless sniffer tool) on their N800. They use it for wireless security.

One person described working on getting Metasploit running on the N800. That's a serious security and vulnerability assessment tool. We are not talking casual computing. We are not talking about simple surfing with an Internet tablet. We're talking serious security assessment technology...in your pocket.

Somehow I think we are going to see a lot of Linux addicts writing enterprise class applications that will take advantage of its large screen and the stability normally associated with Linux platforms. And all the more reason to get the previously announced N800 Skype client out there. He goes on:

I'm curious who will be the first company, industry, or vertical sector that will roll out N800s pre-configured with custom apps oriented to very specific use. Truckers who hit WiFi enabled truck stops for fuel, maps and such. Real estate agents and brokers. Insurance adjustors. There are some possibilities that are both broad and deep.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Three events in the next 45 Days in Munich, Santa Clara and Boston.

Munich, Germany. 2-3 May 2007

Entwicklerkonferenz 2007 in München will feature two speakers about Skype on Day 2.  

• Dick Schiferli, CEO, PamConsult.
  "Skype-API: Entwickeln Sie Applikationen für 171 Millionen Skype-Nutzer"
  (Skype-API: develop apps for 171 million skype users) [note: time to update that number!]
• Christoph Bünger, CTO, Scendix.
  "Die eBay-Plattform im Wohnzimmer: eBay und Skype auf dem TV"
  (The eBay platform in the living room: eBay and Skype on the TV)

Lester Madden will be there from Skype London.

Santa Clara, California. 14-17 May 2007

Paul Amery, Skype's top developer relations evangelist, will keynote at TMC's Communications Developer Conference in Silicon Valley on Wednesday, 16 May. The "Voice Service Mashups" session, in the Service Oriented Architecture track (my favorite) will feature Skype. The CDC is probably the biggest gathering of VoIP programmers anywhere in the world and a great opportunity to recruit hands-on geeks.

I'll be there too. We should have a Skype Journal dinner. Call me for an invitation.

Boston, Massachusetts. 11-13 June 2007 

eBay Developers Conference. Skype's info isn't on the event site yet, but last year they had about a dozen Skype engineers leading workshops and talking with eBay/PayPal community. It's only 45 days away - look for hotel space now.

I'm Begging all event organizers: AUDIO AND VIDEO TAPE ALL THE SESSIONS, EVEN THE BREAKOUT SESSIONS, AND POST THEM ON YOUR DEVZONE. Thousands of programmers cannot be there. Sharing multiplies your event's reach for the whole next year. It is cheap if you want it to be: €4000 gets you three consumer grade cameras, three tripods to put them on, memory sticks, and three mp3 recorders. Ask for a volunteer in each breakout session to work the camera and have a staffer upload the videos to Google Video or wherever you like. THIS IS DOCUMENTATION, NOT MARKETING. SHARE THE DOCUMENTATION. Thank you.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps the most demanded feature at last year's Skype Developer Conference was Call Transfer API's. We have seen some activity for Skype to Skype calls recently; however, information on activity related to calls originating or terminating via SkypeIn or SkypeOut (which require significantly more infrastructure) has been negligible.

Today Skype's April Developer newsletter issued a post by Morné van Dalen, Technical Project Manager on the Skype for Windows desktop team, responsible for developing the Call Transfer algorithms.

This feature has been one of the most requested/anticipated features for a long time, so it is important for us to make sure we get it right. We want to be able to offer a feature that not only matches functionality available on your landline or mobile, but be able to deliver an even better experience. That seems like a tall order, so how are we going to do it?

He goes on to outline Functionality, Transfer Methods, Which calls can be transferred and Integrating with existing functionality, including Voice Mail and Call Forwarding.

To clear up one item that is a bit confusing in all this. The Call Tranfer API Skype to Skype API has been available for Skype to Skype calls for a few months; its first implementation in a Skype client was in the recently released Skype for Mac 2.6 beta and it's used in Pamela 3.5. Separate development Infrastructure build out work is required for each of the API's modes liniking Skype to SkypeOut, etc.; the relevant API's modes will apparently become available over the next few weeks.

Note that call transfers to SkypeOut number and transfers of SkypeIn calls will only be available to Skype Pro customers. Hopefully it gets worked in for those of us on the Unlimited North American subscription plan as well. But Phil also asks in the Skype 3.2 Group Chat:

Phil Wolff | Skype Journal | Oakland, Calif |GMT -8 says: "I also think it's weird that you can't xfer calls to groups or skypeout unless you are in a pricing package. Why not just end the call if the account runs out of skype credits?

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Help Stamp Out Voice Mail with Newest iotum Talk-Now Beta

One of the great time wasters of our current communications infrastructure has to be voice mail. The calling party takes a couple of minutes to leave a voice mail; the receiving party needs even more time to recover, listen to, and manage the same voice mail. What if you could simply leave a text message that effectively said "Chris is trying to call you about {insert subject of call here}"? And with a single click you could return the call to Chris? Not to overlook that over 80% of business calls end up in voice mail and require an average of just over 4 attempts to complete a call.

With iotum's release today of a new version of their Talk-Now for Blackberry, they have delivered on a service that basically says "No Voice Mails!". (Well, that would be the dream but someone out there will always dream up a reason they have to leave a long explanation, diatribe, etc.) A key feature of this release is the auto-negotiation of when to have a conversation.

The Talk Now screen continues to be split into two groupings: Conversations and Talk-Now. However, Conversations itself has been split again into a "To Call List" and a "Waiting to Talk to Me" list. The former comprises parties whom you want/attempted to call but are, in some New Presence context, not immediately available. The latter comprises other parties, who are amongst all your Blackberry Contacts, who have attempted to call you. If the other party attempting to call you is also on Talk-Now they can now leave a subject line for the pending call. This is the new feature that is key to minimizing voice mail.

As a Talk-Now caller to a "Not Available" party, you have the opportunity to leave a subject line.This call request ends up under your "To Call List". The called party also receives a notification, which ends up in his/her "Waiting to Talk to Me" list. When both parties are available, there is a "vibration" notification and, on both parties' Blackberries, the appropriate line turns green and includes the subject line.

Effectively, Talk-Now now builds a task list of whom you want/need to call. But it eliminates the average 4.x calls required to actually reach another party along with all the verbiage and button pushing associated with verbal voice mails. It does, to a degree, reflect the contents of your Blackberry phone log; however, it only incorporates calls from Contacts already on your Blackberry and it allows the inclusion of the {subject} line if the caller is on Talk-Now..

Cool? Gardner thinks so. From the citation in their newly announced "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communications" report:

By combining the capabilities of a to-do list and a buddy list, iotum's Talk-Now helps to eliminate phone tag by automating presence management and allowing users to know when the people they need to speak with are available and to see who is waiting to speak with them.

If you want to get a pragmatic New Presence experience and have a Blackberry 8100 (Pearl), 8700 or 8800, I strongly recommend you and your work team colleagues give it a try at this time (Blackberry link: www.iotum.com/blackberry). [Note that Talk-Now is most effective across (a) team(s) of business related contacts.] Especially important for those Skype executives whom I encountered using Blackberries during my visits to various Skype offices during March. One needs to experience New Presence to develop a feel for not only its full value-add but also its subtleties and to develop a feel for how a New Presence service can be integrated into Skype. Did I mention it's a free beta?

And, as a bonus, try the combination of Talk-Now and Blackberry Messenger -- a most effective real time mobile communications tool set.

Alec Saunders, iotum CEO's post with more information on this release on SaundersLog.

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've now had the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet for almost two weeks, wandering about both home and several remote locations including downtown Toronto and local Starbucks, testing it out for both defining what exactly it is and how "mobile" it is.

First what it is not: a wireless mobile phone -- there's only WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. Via Bluetooth you can connect to the Internet through one of Nokia's phones, such as the N80i which I have also been testing out.

Here's where I find it so handy. You're sitting in the family room watching the Buffalo Sabres defeat (a Skype contact's) New York Rangers on a high def TV and want to look up the career record for Tim Connolly, a Sabres player, without missing any game action. Pull out the N800; go to NHL.com and voilà - all the information I want is there -- in my family room -- without having to remove my laptop from its docking station in my home office. As a dedicated platform Internet Appliance the N800 offers practical portable Internet access in a handheld size mobile package; Andy likes to call it a platform for Casual Computing.

Ken Camp, Luca Filigheddu and others have written some fairly extensive reviews of its capabilities so I'll stick to discussing its practicality and where I feel it fits into the webosphere. First what do I use it for:

• Casual browsing away from my primary workstation - around the house, on the backyard patio, in WiFi-enabled coffee houses, other remote but WiFi connected locations where I simply want to look up some information.
• While sitting through a seminar in a WiFi-enabled university building, checking key RSS feeds: keeping up to date not only on key news sites such as Google News and BBC News but also on SaundersLog, VoIPWatch, Mark Evans Tech, Mathew Ingram , Rick Segal, GigaOm and other weblogs that I regularly follow.
• Via GTalk, getting video tours of Andy's travel spots: his hotel rooms, the Virgin Atlantic waiting room at Heathrow, etc.
• Interplatform IM .. at one point I was chatting on the N800 via GTalk with Andy from a WiFi connection at a Starbucks. When I drove way the conversation continued on my Blackberry GTalk client. (Of course I could only respond while waiting for traffic lights).
• Checking GMail (not my primary e-mail account) via the GMail POP service.
• Looking at Howard's double.

But there is the one problem I frequently encounter - the variability of WiFi quality. Om has a lengthy discussion in his post on The Cloud's new London muni-WiFi setup about this issue. I find there are WiFi connections and WiFi disconnections. Of course on my home network there is no problem. The N800 works quite well on the Canadian HotSpot network (@$0.15 per minute on any Canadian wireless account) but does not work with Toronto Hydro Telecom's "free" mesh network in downtown Toronto. Either the system does not have enough bandwidth to handle demand or it's of very limited bandwidth. Can find the SSID but does not bring up web pages. In fact the "free" WiFi at the "Howard's double" location was not able to handle external GTalk connections; there were at least a dozen other laptops going in this coffee shop over what was obviously a bandwidth limited connection.

Here's what I like about it:

• Wide screen: the 800 x 480 touch screen responds to a toggle switch between the N800 "desktop" and a full screen display of, say, web pages or weblog entries. Viewing web pages in 800 pixel full width mode is a handheld Internet device dream; it makes reading them much easier than on any "narrow screen" mobile phone or PDA.
• The Home Desktop provides an instant look at key items. In my case I have selected the Google Search Bar, a summary of most recent RSS feed headlines, GTalk presence for selected GTalk contacts and a clock
• The Status Bar at the upper right provides instant access or notifications related to key operating parameters: Battery status, WiFi connectivity, Audio Volume, my GTalk status, etc.
• Relative ease of finding and establishing WiFi access points: click on an icon in the Status Bar and detection of WiFi networks occurs immediately; select the network you want to connect with, enter any requested network key and you're quickly connected.
• The setup of user buttons, not only a five-way button but also a set of buttons to manage Full Screen display and display magnification.
• The pop-out web camera (although the actual video quality needs some work)
• Just having the RSS Reader
• Google Search Bar on the Home Desktop; how many of us start our browsing sessions with a Google search? But it takes up a minimum amount of desktop real estate.
• The ability to have real time chat, voice and video conversations.
• Two SD-size memory expansions slots: one internal and one removable to expand memory up to 4GB; these memory cards become disks when the N800 is attached to your PC.

Awaiting The Skype Role

Here is the problem that becomes obvious when using GTalk on the N800 -- it's got, for me, the same eight contacts that I've always had with GTalk .. well, it's now actually nine, Phil invited me to join his GTalk contacts over the weekend ... But GTalk has become a teaser for the one missing module for such a device. The N800 Skype client that was announced at CES last January for availability early this summer would turn this into an ideal Internet Appliance. It would allow me to use the N800 for real time conversations with my >100 Skype contacts. Then I'd be using it to razz my Skype contact who is such a devoted Rangers fan while watching the games in this upcoming Stanley Cup (professional ice hockey championship) series. Go Sabres!

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 02:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Rubel points to Forrester Research's Ladder of Participation. It's yet another consumer behavior map. It's buckets are roughly aligned by effort. From least to most: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, creators. It's similar to Ross Mayfield's Power Law of Participation and my own experiences in electoral activism. If you're designing a product or business, you'd better understand your customers.  

It's great but incomplete.

First, I'd like to add an orthogonal Ladder of Disclosure, from those who pay cash and live off the grid to those wearing live streaming webcams who twitter every bowel movement and blog their bank accounts. The Participation Ladder is tightly coupled with doing things in public. Look at digital ID (OpenID), presence streams (twitter, jaiku), relationship brokers (iotum), pseudonymity and faceted authorization (Vox-like access to content) for clues to consumer behavior and tools for engaging about privacy. Strategies that acknowledge and compensate for privacy concerns always do better.

Second and Third, the participation ladder views the web as the whole Internet. It's missing (a) The Mobile Net, with SMS, mobile web apps services that people whip out of their purses/pockets and (b) Live Communication like Windows Live Messenger, Skype, IRC. People are spending billions of hours in these two sectors and models that ignore these sides of their lives may miss where their passions live and who they trust.

Fourth, the ladder seems to miss the offline. Effective mapping could lead to strategies that use the online to affect the offline. We've seen that in US electoral campaigning where blogs and mailing lists were used to recruit online citizens and drive them into activities that both brought them up a ladder of political participation (from minutes per year to weeks) and applying volunteers to reach out over the phone and in street action to those who live mostly or completely offline. Ten volunteers in the San Francisco East Bay recruited 5000 volunteers for offline action including a million phone calls to 2004 swing states.

Fifth, the ladder doesn't seem to model participatory mobility. 200 million people tried Skype in the last three years, 100 million people became bloggers in the last ten years, a billion started using email, more using mobile phones. People adopt new behaviors all the time, often en masse. The participation ladder is static, so 2007.

See also: Geoffrey Burling who votes down the report itself.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Gillin featured VoIP Watch blogger Andy Abramson's Comunicano PR agency and a client in a column for Advertising Age on social media. AdAge is a big deal; congrats, Andy.

It's about building buzz. Andy runs "blogger relations" programs for companies like Nokia. He seeds product hoping for meaningful coverage. [disclosure: I'm using a Nokia N80 phone provided through that program; Jim Courtney is using a N800.] With luck, Andy's clients get a conversation going among bloggers, building Googlejuice and blog cred. 

Word spreads via blogs fast compared to other channels, like print media or the average corporate web site.

Skype is faster.

• Andy triggered this post when he shared the news with me in a 1-to-1 Skype chat message.
• Other SJ posts were triggered by ideas and links in private and public group chats.
• One blogger I know uses a skype-merge bot to broadcast updates to colleagues and friends.
• And a well planned and moderated conference call can seed more conversation and action than any news release.

I'll argue that Skypeland is as connected, with more trusted social ties, than the blogosphere. And ideas flow more freely because Skypeland blends the best of real-time and asynch communication across many talk modes (text, audio, video, desktop, mobile).  

p.s. Andy, the N80's compass rose catches on my beard. A known problem, per staff at the Nokia booth at web2expo.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RAND Europe's report: Security Challenges to the Use and Deployment of Disruptive Technologies. Most of the chapter explains VoIP basics and follows a case study of an enterprise VoIP deployment at HSBC.

Chapter 2 (page 20 in the pdf file) lists risks from the PSTN-to-VoIP transition. They cite technical risks per VOIPSA:

• social threats,
• eavesdropping,
• interception and modification,
• intentional interruption of service includes denial of service and physical intrusion,
• unintentional interruption of service.

Their strategic concern was telecom industry disruption. They worry for the titans of telephony losing revenue and market share to VoIP disrupters like Skype. Until a transition to an all VoIP industry is complete, there is a risk of telco company failures and infrastructure abandonment.

RAND interviewed Skype's Melanie Libraro for their report.

My take: The biggest telcos are more likely to co-opt and squelch disruptive technologies than be threatened by them. For example, mobile telephony threatened local carriers; now local carriers like AT&T own mobile carriers. Why wouldn't they serve their customers if VoIP is what they want? So look to worldwide bigtels driving consumer VoIP regulation, retaliatory pricing, litigation, and M&A in 2008. I can almost smell the blood in the water.

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

Virginia Tech killer had a 98.5 percent eBay rating. As if we didn't know that "commerce trust" is different than trusting someone with your children. (AP)

Skype not in the new Sidekick iD. AIM, Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger built in to this $99 IM gadget. Isn't Skype a fit for this demographic?

Skype cheaper than Vonage if you can program a VCR. Side-by-side price breakdown.

My Mother Uses Skype - Why Bother With Standards? Video of panel discussion at Spring VON 2007 with Jonathan Christensen, Skype R&D executive. A frank discussion on standards where, surprisingly, the open sourcerers rallied behind Skype's closed solutions.

Google buys Skype-like features. Continuing to triangulate on the workplace, the GTalk team bought Swedish Marratech's VoIP voice conferencing, multi-party video, and whiteboard. Will scaling to Google-sized userbases be a challenge? 

London PowerPoint Karaoke Night. "Five or more brave people get to present slides they have never seen and hopefully have no clue about." Wish I could be there.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)