But, in addition to the software itself, Netralia's other key asset is the customer base of clients, built up over eighteen months. Skylook provides a valuable conversation management and archiving service for sales, marketing and customer service personnel, who use Skype in conjunction with their customer relationship management (CRM) activities. Skylook 2.0 has an annual subscription-based model at a cost of $99.95 per license which includes all upgrades and customer support; a limited feature set Skylook 1.5 is available for $49.95 until the end of 2008. I'm sure several business cases can be made to show the time to recovery of this charge is less than a month..

In a space where the Skype Email Toolbar is free and where there are other competitors who may have some overlapping features. Skylook has succeeded by listening to its customers and building into Skylook 2.0 the feature set requested by their customers. Finally, for the new quarter starting April 2, 2007, Skylook has been listed as a Premium Partner where they are reached simply by clicking "Tools | Do More"; as a result they have seen an uptick in sales activity.

Bottom line: if you provide significant value-add for business operations, yet charge a fair price with a short term ROI for the customer, a business can be built via Skype Extras.

Note: In Skype Extras, you will find a version of the product that is listed as "Free". In fact downloading Skylook will provide you with a fully featured 14-day trial version; however, after 14 days, should you not purchase a full license, it will drop back to providing some basic Outlook integration features such as calling any Outlook Contact via Skype or SkypeOut, as appropriate from within Outlook.

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