Sorry for being the last one to post this. Here it is from the Skype news release:

Skype general manager Don Albert "With more than 100 million cows in the United States alone, it is a market opportunity we could no longer ignore. One in four Americans is a cow and now they can use Skype."

Features:

• User experience tailored for cows
• Localization for cows from different countries
• Reference design and APIs for developers hardware/embedded manufacturers

Screenshot of the Skype home page featuring Skype for Cows.

We're not surprised: clearly Skype's been working up to this for a while. When you look in Skype's personalization options, Skype's already seeded "moo" (Holstein) and "moo-food" (grass) wallpaper patterns. They built a cow's favorite flower, the daisy, into the Skype Find logo. They partnered with Moo, a business card maker nearly a year ago. We just couldn't take a hint.

Herdware: "Social Software for Social Animals™."

The software is tailored for our 1.4 billion bovine neighbors. Controls are simplified, more visual.

With illiteracy such a problem among cows, Skype is partnering with IBM for moo recognition of Skype commands. Students at the Open University in London are developing moo-to-text conversion. The Universal Chat Translator should be able to translate between different cow dialects and most major human languages.

"We're one big herd."

Skype's certification team is recruiting testers for their new, much larger Tallinn offices. I'm sure they are glad of the ventilation.

Cows are intensely social animals. Herd behavior is different from pack behavior: no hierarchy. But members of a herd stay aware of each other and aware of threats from outside.

"Communicating is fundamental to all of us," blogged Jaanus Kase of Skype community fame. "Skype aims to bridge herding barriers, increasing the connections among cows around the world. We're one big herd in the big scheme of things."

The Skype for Cows Hardware Story

Skype's partners are jumping on the wagon, said hardware alliance director Stefan Mööberg. "We've been calling it Hardware for Herdware."

The biggest technical advance seems to be the Mootooth reference platform. Mootooth equipped gear automatically creates a wireless Ethernet subnet among members of a herd within 100 meters. This improves wireless range, cuts power consumption, and reduces latency. Mootooth nets can combine to form Mootooth mesh networks with thousands of users, all operating locally.

• VoIP Voice: "Barleyphone" RFID tag and Mootooth earphone (pictured above).

• Ipevo: Xing.cow speakerphones. Runs on batteries powered by methane, weatherproofed to work outdoors, with built in Wi-Fi. A dairy cow can belch up to two tons of methane a month. Pilot programs showed great success when mounting the Xing.cow on a salt lick.

• RTX: Mootooth earphones with medical sensors. They collect body temp, pulse, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels. This biotelemetry is reported wirelessly to a service for monitoring via Skype's data channel. This will wake up the vet before a cow gets too sick. You may optionally auto-adjust a cow's feed based on general health.

• Fon: Home On The Range Mootooth base stations. Connecting your Mootooth wireless network to the Internet. Strange cows may have to sign in or pay to use HOTR spots. Due next quarter.

Building community

Bovine Americans have had a rough time of it. Cow tipping (how to) comes to mind. As cattle adopt Skype, expect them to organize for better living conditions and civil rights.

Good for Skype's business?

Active users are great for the Skype network. However Skype for Cows doesn't follow the usual business model since few cows have PayPal accounts or credit cards. So revenue is expected from cowboys, ranchers, and the whole husbandry ecosystem.

I think the big money will be in Herdcasting (Joost for Cows) and Herdsourcing (Skype Prime for Cows), but more on that later.

If you need outside confirmation of this strategy, Yahoo!'s been working on Messenger for Cows with Voice for more than a year now.  

The only critic I've heard from is Tux, spokespenguin for the Linux community. Tux griped that Skype is still not open source, and that Skype was playing favorites with cows. "Penguins are so much more fun than cows, if you need a dumb reason. The practical reasons is we need move our population off Antarctica." Skype is the only communication network serving both the ice shelf and Argentina.