Chris Libertelli:

“Skype is encouraged by today’s FCC vote, which is an excellent first step and an endorsement of our Carterfone position for ‘open’ wireless devices and applications.

We appreciate the Commission’s enforcement approach, which places the burden on the carriers to demonstrate they comply with Carterfone. We look forward to working with the Chairman and the Commissioners to make Carterfone a reality for consumers.”

Meg Whitman:

"eBay is encouraged by today’s FCC vote establishing 'openness' principles for wireless services in the context of the upcoming spectrum auction. We believe that ensuring greater choice for wireless devices and applications is a very positive development and we are very pleased that "Carterfone" principles are now part of the Commission’s spectrum policy. We will continue to work with the Commission to make openness a guiding principle throughout the broadband Internet access marketplace."

Full text below...

SKYPE APPLAUDS FCC’S VOTE SUPPORTING WIRELESS INTERNET “OPENNESS”

WASHINGTON, July 31, 2007 – Christopher Libertelli, Skype’s senior director of Government and Regulatory Affairs today backed support of “openness” for the wireless Internet and in a statement said “Skype is encouraged by today’s FCC vote, which is an excellent first step and an endorsement of our Carterfone position for ‘open’ wireless devices and applications.

We appreciate the Commission’s enforcement approach, which places the burden on the carriers to demonstrate they comply with Carterfone. We look forward to working with the Chairman and the Commissioners to make Carterfone a reality for consumers.”

This statement came following today’s Federal Communication Commission’s 700 MHz auction vote, a proceeding in which Skype reiterated its support for ‘open wireless internet services’ based on the landmark 1968 Carterfone decision. The FCC vote today establishes the rules for the upcoming 700 MHz auction scheduled to begin in January of 2008 and marks the culmination of the FCC’s proceeding.

In February of 2007, Skype filed a petition with the FCC to confirm a consumer’s right to use Internet communications software and attach devices to wireless networks. This petition sought to unlock the benefits of wireless price competition and innovation, while ensuring that consumers would retain a right to run the applications of their choosing and attach all non-harmful devices to any wireless network. The petition has subsequently gained support from consumer groups, high-tech industry trade associations, entrepreneurs and more than 4,000 individual consumers.

eBAY SUPPORTS "OPENNESS" PRINCIPLES FOR WIRELESS INTERNET

SAN JOSE, CA, July 31, 2007 – Meg Whitman, President and CEO of eBay Inc. today backed support of "openness" for the wireless Internet and in a statement said, "eBay is encouraged by today’s FCC vote establishing 'openness' principles for wireless services in the context of the upcoming spectrum auction. We believe that ensuring greater choice for wireless devices and applications is a very positive development and we are very pleased that "Carterfone" principles are now part of the Commission’s spectrum policy. We will continue to work with the Commission to make openness a guiding principle throughout the broadband Internet access marketplace."

This statement came following the FCC 700 MHz auction vote today, a proceeding in which Skype reiterated its support for ‘open wireless internet services’ based on the Federal Communication Commission’s landmark 1968 Carterfone decision. The FCC vote today establishes the rules for the upcoming 700 MHz auction scheduled to begin in January of 2008 and marks the culmination of the FCC’s proceeding.

In February of this year, Skype filed a petition with the FCC to confirm a consumer’s right to use Internet communications software and attach devices to wireless networks.

This petition sought to unlock the benefits of wireless price competition and innovation, while ensuring that consumers would retain a right to run the applications of their choosing and attach all non-harmful devices to any wireless network. The petition has subsequently gained support from consumer groups, high-tech industry trade associations, entrepreneurs and more than 4,000 individual consumers.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The FCC votes today.

UPDATE 3: Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge writes: "It voted to require just two of the four open access conditions; open devices and open applications."

UPDATE 2: FCC voted FOR "Open Networks" and enforcement of Carterfone on the C-block part of the spectrum. YES to "Open Applications" (any software) and "Open Devices" (any gadget). NO to "Open Services" (wholesaling of bandwidth). YES on Public Safety provisions.

I've avoided writing about the Google wireless-net-neutrality and Skype Carterfone FCC issues. So much is at stake, today's vote shaping America's wireless communication environment, our civil liberties, public safety, and the competitiveness or our economy. I'm also reluctant since he language of telecom regulation is new to me.

Fact is, it scares my pants off. AT&T and its kin want to control access to Internet content the way cable companies choose what stations you see.

For all you global Skype Journal readers, this is an American story. Our strange politics are never more complicated, intricate or involved than at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC regulates U.S. broadcast television and telecommunication.

So let's put this into two parts:

• a recap of recent events (Skype and Google advocating for consumer freedoms) and
• what we can do (short term support, longer term 'delamination').

The short version of the story so far:

1. The Big Bundle. Nearly all US mobile phone service comes bundled with a phone and a multi-year contract.

   • Because of this the average American must wait for two years to upgrade, unlike Japan and parts of China where many people buy new phones a few times every year.

   • The phones provided are often crippled, removing features.

   • Mobile phone companies don't compete on service and price, but on the bundle of service, price, and subsidized hardware.

2. February 2007 - Skype Carterfone. Skype's Chris Libertelli filed the five page "Carterfone Petition" 20 February 2007. ("Petition to Confirm a Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks, RM-11361" pdf).

   • It asked the FCC to adopt a policy that anyone could attach anything to any mobile/wireless network so long as that thing does not hurt the network. So you can buy your phone and your service separately. So you may keep your phone when you switched services.

   • "Carterfone" was a similar ruling from the 1960s. It allows you to plug any phone into a landline, so long as you do not hurt the network. It worked well, created new technologies, new markets and didn't hurt the phone companies at all.

   • The FCC promptly posted Skype's petition for public comment.

3. Comment came.

   • Lots. I killed my inkjet printing out hundreds of pages pro and con. I still haven't read all the reams. You could tell the citizen comments (a few sentences or paragraphs, often with typos) from the lobbyists for Skype-Carterfone and the Google-Four-Conditions (a few, succinct pages) from the lobbyists representing the status quo (between white paper to novella length, with tables, charts, footnotes, citations of precedent, and a unique blend of FCCish, managementspeak, and dogma).

   • Love it, Hated it.

     • Citizens who want unlocked phones: Freedom to shop, please.

     • Companies that stand to gain: This will be a boon to our free market system, a thousand innovations will bloom, make us competitive in the world, the consumer can only gain.

     • Companies that stand to lose: Don't mess with the cash flow that builds our national telecom infrastructure. Wireless Carterfone will cut spectrum value, costing taxpayers. Some of these were extraordinarily detailed and long, serious money spent on consultants. Many appealed to laissez faire doctrine, essentially telling the FCC that it was incapable of regulating without hurting consumers or industry.

   • Lobbyists too. Complete with astroturf and distortions.

   • You can "vote" for or against Skype's FCC petition. Reference proceeding number RM-11361 here and show your support with your comment. Be sure to sign your comments.

4. Friends showed up to fight the wireless walled garden. Google. Some phone makers. Civil rights, consumer groups, and Net Neutrality groups. The fight moves from D.C. to mainstream media.

• On a recent Forum, a public radio talk show, Skype's Chris Libertelli and Craig Aaron, communications director for Free Press, took on Declan McCullagh, senior writer for news.com on CNET, and Joe Farren, assistant vice president for public affairs at CTIA, The Wireless Association. Download (MP3)
  
  "Farren contended that the upcoming spectrum auction is being rigged to favor Google, calling it "Silicon Valley welfare." Phone calls from listeners to the show uniformly favored upholding net neutrality." - John Dorsey

• Google calls for Four Conditions (reminding me of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms). Eric Schmidt pledges Google to meet the auction's $4.6 billion reserve price if the FCC orders:

1. Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;

2. Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;

3. Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and

4. Open networks: Third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee’s wireless network.

5. Wholesale wireless Internet, please. Google asked for one more thing: compel whoever gets this new spectrum to become a common carrier, letting others buy bandwidth and resell it.

David Weinberger writes that we must take a much bigger step: Delaminate the Bastards! Net Neutrality is necessary but not sufficient.

Peel apart the layers like a piece of rotting plywood.

The first layer will be for companies that want to provide access to the Internet. We'll pay them to let us attach a computer, cell phone or any other device — even a Princess Phone, once we get it all VoIPed up — to the Internet and begin to send and receive bits. As many bits as we want. All bits treated equally. The companies can compete over price, bandwidth, uptime, and other properties of the network.

The upper layer will be for companies that want to provide content and services using the Internet.

The health of these two layers is reciprocal: Customers will use more bits because there are more services and content available to them in the next layer. There will be more services and content because the market now has lots of bandwidth, enough to handle new types of applications.

This is exactly the business architecture our economy, democracy and culture are thirsting for. We want to have companies competing to sell us more, better, faster access to the connected world. We want the services and the content — the things we can do, the ideas we can discuss — to grow like a crazy, bottom-up Renaissance.

This is the business architecture we'd have come up with if we had implemented the Internet from scratch. It mirrors the Internet's own architecture. It is the only one that removes the temptations to turn the Internet into cable TV.

David vs. Goliath? or Henry Ford vs. Buggy Makers?

Skype's news release and Skype's latest filing to Chairman Martin follow.

PRESS STATEMENT:

SKYPE REITERATES SUPPORT FOR “OPENNESS” PRINCIPLES FOR WIRELESS INTERNET

WASHINGTON, July 10, 2007 – In a letter filed with the FCC today, Skype reiterated its support for ‘open wireless internet services’ based on the Federal Communication Commission’s landmark 1968 Carterfone decision. The filing takes place just one day prior to a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet on the subject of ‘Wireless Innovation and Consumer Protection.’

“Skype is encouraged by various reports suggesting that the Chairman of the FCC is seriously considering ‘openness’ principles for wireless services in the context of the upcoming spectrum auction,” said Christopher Libertelli, Skype’s senior director of Government and Regulatory Affairs. “We look forward to working with the Chairman, the other Commissioners and the Commission's staff to ensure that Carterfone principles identified in our Petition become part of the Commission’s final rules.”

In February of this year, Skype filed a petition with the FCC to confirm a consumer’s right to use Internet communications software and attach devices to wireless networks. This petition sought to unlock the benefits of wireless price competition and innovation, while ensuring that consumers would retain a right to run the applications of their choosing and attach all non-harmful devices to any wireless network. The petition has subsequently gained support from consumer groups, high-tech industry trade associations, entrepreneurs and more than 4,000 individual consumers.

About Skype

Skype sets conversations free by providing new and easy ways to stay in touch over the internet. Millions of people every day make free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls and send instant messages using our software. Some pay a little per minute for long-distance and international calls to phones and mobiles and for SMS, voicemail and call forwarding, or they buy subscriptions that give unlimited calls nationwide.

We certify and sell hundreds of hardware products from more than 50 partners and work with third-party developers to create software to extend Skype’s functionality. Skype has been downloaded more than half a billion times and over 196 million people from almost every corner of the globe have registered. Skype is an eBay company (NASDAQ: EBAY), and you can learn more and get Skype at www.skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required for Skype and all Skype Certified devices and accessories. Skype is not a replacement for your traditional telephone service and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Skype, SkypeIn, SkypeOut, Skype Me, Skype Certified, Skypecasts, associated logos and the “S” symbol are trademarks of Skype Limited.

Skype Communications Sarl
15 rue Notre Dame,
L-2240 Luxembourg
www.skype.com

July 10, 2007

ELECTRONIC FILING

Chairman Kevin J. Martin
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554

Re: Service Rules for the 690-746, 747-762, and 777-792 MHz Bands, WC Docket No. 06-150, WC Docket No. 06-129; PS Docket No. 06-229; WT Docket No. 96-86

Ex Parte

Dear Chairman Martin:

The promise of an open, mobile Internet stirs up the entrepreneurial spirit. Skype Communications Sarl (“Skype”), on behalf of its users, believes that this entrepreneurship lies in the hands of a community of developers, consumers and technologists; it is not the exclusive preserve of the network operators. This community is ready to deliver an explosion of new mobile products if the Commission sets its policy correctly. In our view, the best course for the Commission is to adopt 700 MHz auction rules that balance the interests of network operators and innovative software developers like Skype. Such a policy will maximize the value of the 700 MHz spectrum and is in the best interest of consumers. To that end, Skype appreciates the Commission’s willingness to consider issues related to device competition and Internet openness in the context of its upcoming 700 MHz auction – a policy discussion in which Skype has been an active participant.1

This letter follows up on that discussion and further explains Skype’s interest in this proceeding.

As the Commission knows, Skype is a software company, not a telecommunications carrier. Skype does not own or control any telecommunications facilities. Instead, Skype relies upon network partners who themselves are telecommunications carriers, to enable Skype users to communicate over the Internet, share ‘presence’ information online, make video calls, transfer money between users or call ordinary phones.2

Like many other Internet companies, Skype collaborates with an ecosystem of software and hardware partners to maximize the capabilities of our software. At the access layer, for example, Skype has joined forces with wireless operators in Europe and Asia who extend Skype into a mobile environment.3

I. Competition Among Wireless Networks

Consistent with this business model, Skype does not intend to transform itself into a telecommunications carrier by bidding for spectrum in the 700 MHz auction. In our view, consumer benefits are advanced when each ecosystem partner performs a function it does best. Our European and Asian wireless carrier partners specialize in building and operating networks, enabling Skype to focus on what it does best: innovating and building software that enables the world’s conversations. Skype is therefore participating in this proceeding on behalf of our users, who might subscribe to the Internet access services provided in the 700 MHz band.

New technologies enable new applications, and in our experience, new entrants are more likely to deploy new technologies. Skype is a member of the Coalition for 4G in America because we believe that new entry is a necessary but not sufficient precondition to promote innovation and lower prices for consumers.4

We urge the Commission to avoid defining the objectives of the 700 MHz proceeding too narrowly.

Multiple providers of facilities-based wireless services, at least in theory, increase the possibility that competition will spur carriers to innovate with new business models.

However, at present the wireless market is dominated by a few large players, and competition between incumbent network providers — all of whom have mixed incentives to encourage VoIP-based competition — is insufficient to maximize consumer benefits in the mobile market. The Commission’s goal for the 700 MHz proceeding should not be simply to introduce additional competitors who have the same incentives to thwart device and application competition. Seen in this light, an increased number of intermodal competitors is a necessary but not sufficient condition to maximize consumer welfare in wireless.5

A better, more balanced policy outcome is one that encourages a cycle of investment in networks and in applications that consumers use on those networks. This is best achieved through Carterfone principles — permitting consumers to use wireless devices and applications of their choice — and wholesale alternatives throughout the wireless industry. To achieve this qualitative shift in the wireless marketplace, the Commission should design its 700 MHz auction to better balance the interests of carriers, their subscribers and the myriad of device and application enterprises that hold the promise of offering new products and content.

Specifically, the record demonstrates that large license blocks, such as a 22 MHz REAG Block in the Upper 700 MHz band proposed by the Coalition for 4G in America, can facilitate new entry without denying smaller carriers spectrum — if those large spectrum blocks carry appropriate conditions to facilitate competitive bidders. In Skype’s view, the surest way to promote wireless competition would be to ensure that all of the 700 MHz spectrum — or, at minimum, the 22 MHz REAG block — is auctioned under both “open access” rules and the “openness” principles described in the following section. There are also a number of additional steps the Commission can take to prevent the largest incumbents from winning the REAG licenses, thereby promoting network-level competition. These include adoption of anonymous bidding and the application of spectrum caps to the largest licenses. Should the Commission not adopt a spectrum cap, the Commission should opt for a band plan that maximizes the number of potential new-entrant bidders — or face the risk of losing any chance at robust competition resulting from this auction.

II. Competition Among Devices and Applications

Skype recently filed a petition — commonly known as the “Carterfone” Petition — seeking application of the Commission’s Broadband Policy principles to wireless broadband operators in order to bring the full benefit of competition and innovation to consumers of wireless broadband devices and software applications. As we made clear in our Petition, there is a growing list of discriminatory and anticompetitive practices occurring in the wireless world, whereby users are denied the opportunity to use desired applications.6

These carrier practices are stifling innovation by depriving entrepreneurs of incentives to build creative new applications and content. With regard to the 700 MHz auction, however, the Commission has a unique opportunity to inject some needed competition into the wireless market.

That is why Skype has urged the Commission to apply its time-honored Carterfone principles to all wireless networks operating in the CMRS bands.7

Doing so will maximize consumer benefits and unlock new sources of innovation and price competition. A number of parties in this proceeding have submitted comments arguing for various device and application layer “openness” principles. In our view, the Carterfone “openness” principle is captured by the Commission’s Broadband Policy Statement. If the Commission decides to diverge from that Policy Statement, we urge the FCC to adopt an “openness” principle that protects both a consumer’s right to attach unlocked devices and run applications of their choosing.8

An enforceable Broadband Policy Statement applied to wireless networks is a necessary pre-requisite to a wireless Internet ecosystem that maximizes the value of the 700 MHz bands and CMRS services in general.

We will not repeat the importance of this proceeding to the Commission’s broadband policy and to the interests of innovators such as Skype. We understand that you share this view with us. For our part, we are committed to developing new software applications that delight our users. It is our hope that when the 700 MHz auction concludes and these networks are built, Skype users with have an additional choice for their Internet access services and the applications that run atop increasingly powerful mobile computing devices.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or if Skype can be of any further assistance in this proceeding.

Christopher Libertelli
Senior Director
Government and Regulatory Affairs
Skype Communications Sarl

1. Skype is a member of the Coalition for 4G in America. See Comments of the Coalition for 4G in America, WT Docket No. 06-150 (May 23, 2007). See also Skype Communications S.A.R.L., Petition to Confirm a Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks, RM-11361 (filed Feb. 20, 2007) (“Skype Petition”); Reply Comments of Skype Communications S.A.R.L., RM-11361 (May 15, 2007) (“Skype Reply Comments”).

2. When a Skype user purchases paid services, these carrier partners allow a communication that might remain completely online to terminate to an ordinary mobile or fixed-line telephone.

3. For a description of the mobile collaboration between Skype and Hutchinson “3”, see http://xseries.three.com/index.shtml.

4. Skype Petition at 24-25.

5. See Barbara van Schewick, Toward and Economic Framework for Network Neutrality Regulation, 5 J. on Telecomm. & High Tech. L. 329, 368-78 (2007).

6. Skype Petition at 17-20.

7. Skype Reply Comments at 11-15.

8. Id.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm considering blogging a Dear Jeff letter. Not today as you only get one chance to pitch and I'm going to frame some territory first. I'd need some encouragement to take it forward. Jeff's called for More Innovation in Voice Services and clearly targets his interests at something that's not more of the same. He follows it up with
The Jeff Pulver Blog:

Just to be clear, what I am looking for are new ideas and new innovations. From people NOT involved in a startup yet. Looking for people who have the seed of an idea in their mind that are waiting to take the next step and make their dreams come true...that's where I come in. That's what this challenge is all about.

• We use communications and we are or will be all channel agnostic. We won't care over what transport it goes as long as it is secure.
• We want different mode's of communication. Visual, talk, real-time text, asynchonous connections etc. Simplified it is Talk, Text or Post. Skype, Gtalk, phone number SMS, etc. all irrelevant; just channels for lowest cost.
• We want communications that reflect relationships and context.
• We want communications that are under our own control. The telephone really is obsolete. The caller remains in charge. We require a control paradigm. Tipping access control changes everything.

In Jeff's original post he alludes to an API to Facebook and Twitter. These API's are too basic for our real communications needs. They are the starting point. Presence too is dead. At least presence as we knew it (available, not available etc.) Context we are just beginning to see and respond to. It has to build on these in the beginning.
Facebook could own "communications" its already a better directory service. Still it isn't engineered to really be the People's Directory. However, if I was AT&T I'd be worried. The longer term play is one where "we own it" and we individually are in charge of all communications.

My passion remains in this area as it tips the economics in favor of you and me. In the end this is a play about information, packet control, and beliefs. The next inflection point for communications is the business that will truly empower the individuals role in communications. There's a lot of money ultimately at stake. 

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Naughty avatars and porn videos may provoke Skype to blacklist users, says a Skype rep in South Korea.  

Congrats to Rob Dolin, Windows Live Spaces program manager for taking on Spaces integration with Live Messenger.

Sarah Bacon, Yahoo! Messenger product manager.

"Since I work at Yahoo!, I get to use Yahoo! Messenger all day long without fear of reprisal from my boss but will companies get over their fears of losing control of their employees and embrace IM?

When we released Yahoo! Messenger for the Web back in May, we secretly hoped that millions of office workers everywhere would thumb their nose at the company firewall and IM to their heart’s content."

Wall Street Journal: "Roughly one-third of U.S. employees use instant messaging at work, many without the knowledge of their employers." [Disclosure: I'm an alumnus of Adecco, interviewed in article.]

Tech Untangled: Why Skype is Better than Ooma. Features, privacy, price.

SoonR: if you run SoonR on your PC or Mac...

Skype from the iPhone with SoonR Talk
SoonR users can initiate a Skype call from their iPhone and use their PC or Mac to bridge the call. A SkypeOut call brings the mobile phone into the Skype conference that originated on the desktop computer. SkypeOut calls are not free, but in many cases they are very cost effective for international connections. SoonR Talk also supports Skype’s chat function and shows the user status or presence information.

Andrew Moore tweaks Firefox on Ubuntu so phone numbers turn into Skype links.

Angus Kidman travelled to Tallinn as a guest of Skype where she wrote The gospel according to Niklas Zennström after a press event. No hard news but a good sense of Niklas facing the media.

Skylook promotion: 20% off (with code SKYLOOK4B2007) during August. Outlook integration and call recording.

Messenger MAniaA bot sets your presence with a custom frequency. "I'm online. No, I'm offline. I'm online again. No, I'm offline."   

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest post by Jaanus Kase, Skype alumnus and blogger.

SkypeFind is a feature in Skype. It lets you put listings of businesses in Skype with your review and rating, and review and search what others have put there.

I use the services of great many businesses in great many countries. And I’m fairly opinionated. I haven’t seen quite as many things as some other people, but I’ve seen at least something. I think some people would be interested in my reviews and ratings, and I’m also myself interested in what other people have to say.

Yet I don’t list things in SkypeFind, and I rarely find listings by other people I care about. On the face of it, I use features that I like, and I don’t use features that I don’t like. I don’t put things in SkypeFind because I don’t like it too much. But what does it mean? I tried to qualify this “I don’t like it” a bit more for SkypeFind and here’s what I came up with.

First, the tab sometimes just loads too darn slowly. It’s not responsive and this is annoying. But this is not the main point. Instead, the main reason would be:

I don’t like SkypeFind because I don’t feel that it respects me as a user and person. I like features that are a “win-win” situation. I don’t mind helping businesses if it also helps myself or makes my life better somehow.

I can certainly see how my contribution of listings and reviews to SkypeFind helps Skype. The directory grows more powerful and valuable with each contribution and more and more people will find it useful. If this process becomes large beyond a critical point, Skype will also make some money out of this.

Yet, I can’t see how my contributions would help MYSELF. Let’s put the business and directory aspect aside for a while, and look at SkypeFind from a personal perspective. When seeing it this way, you can think of SkypeFind as a “personal trail”, or a part of your life’s story. You’d be able to recall where and when you went and what you thought of the place. Maybe you liked some place a lot, and you retrieve its info and recall “yes, this was nice” and you’ll then go back and become a regular. Or, if you see that your friend regularly goes to surfing hotels in Tarifa, you may just have discovered his passion and hobby and maybe you could then connect about something that you didn’t know your friend was into. And your lives would then be better.

If you’re a verbal diarrheatic like me, you’d also have easy tools to repost, mix and match this trail, or parts of your life story. You could repost them on your blog or link blogs. You could subscribe to listings by other people. You could build cool mashups around this, say, mixing, slicing and dicing with map data (hot restaurants where Skypers have recently been? Worst mountain skiing resorts to avoid?).

From this aspect, current SkypeFind is useless. I can’t use it as my life’s trail. I can’t even see the listings that I have made myself, let alone subscribe to listings of other people, keywords or locations. There’s just one little thing: on the SkypeFind “opening page” (tab), it shows you “New from friends”. This is the kind of thing that I’m talking about and it’s in the right direction, but it’s very little. Too little for me to care and use the feature.

So, in order to fix this, Skype would need to add more community features and openness to SkypeFind. I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t think they are too happy about its performance. SkypeFind currently shows me that it has “208,625 businesses in 231 countries by 178,094 people”. Are these numbers big? If you compare to, say, population of Tonga (July 2005 estimate 102,000) then yes, sure. Yet when you compare to the total “Skype population”, then it’s a tiny tiny number of people adding listings. Furthermore, you can assume that those trying out the feature are generally active people who like to try new things, both in Skype and in life otherwise. So you could also guess that they would have a great number of business/customer experiences to share. Yet the average is 1.17 listings per person, so most people have only entered one listing — and then been disappointed. My speculation is that at least some part of them are disappointed because of the same reasons that I outlined above — that they can’t capture and follow their own trail.

If Skype added the community features to extract data from SkypeFind in more varieties (RSS feeds by Skype Name would be a great start), it wouldn’t hurt any of SkypeFind’s original objectives. People would still generate and find listings and the directory would grow. But there would be more active use and the directory would be more useful, and eventually, people would make more calls through SkypeFind.

I don’t have a firm idea, but I suspect that the reason why these community features don’t exist, and there’s no web presence of SkypeFind (it only exists currently in the Windows client), is that Skype people think of Find only as a vehicle for generating more SkypeOut calls. (This seems also to be the reason behind why you can’t put a Skype Name for a business, only a SkypeOut number.) I don’t think this is very smart. If I were Skype, I would rather have an open directory with good content and risking losing some of the calls to other channels, instead of a closed walled-garden directory where people can, true, make SkypeOut calls, but since the content is shit, no one will come to search for businesses on it anyway. The gross volume of SkypeOut calls would still be larger in the first case than in the second.

Exposing SkypeFind on the web, even if it were in read-only format, would have some interesting implications from SEM (Search Engine Marketing) perspective. If each listing had a permalink and the pages were constructed well, they would be indexed and ranked fairly highly in search traffic. I don’t know a whole lot about SEM and SEO, but I’ve come to think about it recently a bit and the bottom line is that if you’re a business owner (be it Skype itself, or be it a business that’s listed in SkypeFind), you’d want people to find you through search, be it on Google or SkypeFind or wherever. And if you gave business owners good tools to drive further traffic to the directory, it would increase the growth further. Offer buttons to businesses “Had a good experience with us? Let others know and rate us on SkypeFind!” I haven’t seen any yellow pages providers do that — at least I haven’t seen any such links to directory sites anywhere on small business pages. With Skype’s scale and large volume of users, it would be feasible for them to do this because they would see the rationale behind it — people rate and comment them on SkypeFind, they get instant feedback, and Skype hosts a well-constructed listing for them that’s indexed well in search engines.

Many small businesses don’t know/care about SEO, but if they realized that SkypeFind is actually a vehicle to drive more traffic to them, they would join in promoting and spreading the word. (And another instant function of this is that spam people would jump on SkypeFind, as they already have jumped to Skype Chat. So besides generating some upside, a more open SkypeFind would also need more protection and policing from spam perspective. But I think it’s all solvable.)

So, long story short. Let me see history of my own listings, and let me subscribe to them and other people’s listings through RSS. Then I’d perhaps care more about SkypeFind and even use it sometimes.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m moving house, business is booming, we’re running a complex project, and I’m travelling a lot. Oh, and two kids and a wife who are hinting they’d like to see more of me. Plus I can’t live without some occasional time off and fun too. I don’t have any spare time for much right now, but this one is too important not to comment on, so I’ll break my long radio silence.

Susan Crawford, one of the sharpest knives in the telecoms policy drawer, reports on the 700MHz spectrum auctions in the US. (Susan, for some reason Blogware refuses to display pages when the referrer is Bloglines — get ‘em to fix it :) ) — she has several follow-up posts worth reading.

The nub of the issue is whether the auction should mandate some kind of open access regime where users can attach any device of their choosing to the wireless network, not just ones approved by the carrier who supplies the retail connectivity. This is (misleadingly, in my opinion) referred to as a wireless equivalent of the famous Carterfone decision that heralded the break-up of the vertically integrated AT&T landline monopoly (rev 1.0). (Susan’s just reporting the proceedings, not advocating the terminology, so I’m just pointing you that way for the succinct background material.)

I don’t think the Carterfone precedent is an apt one for wireless IP networks. The fixed network provided an end point with metered access to a (then) noticeably capacity-limited circuit-switched network. You could attach a device with a radically different usage profile (e.g. a dial-up modem, fax machine) and you’d automatically carry the cost of that usage yourself. The network also offered a single line speed at the edge — you couldn’t demand more (at least not without a massive price leap to a business-class T1 line or more). Metering based on time alone works well.

Furthermore, the competition between users for scarce capacity was in the switching fabric and the long-distance network, not in the local loop. Yet when you move to an unbundled regime these cease to be bottlenecks as competitive carriers can simply install their own switches and backhaul — at least, it works here in Europe, even if the FCC can’t figure out how to enforce its own rules in a timely manner.

Wireless doesn’t work that way. When you buy an “unlimited” Internet access plan from Sprint or Verizon, they’re calculating the likely usage profile based on the capabilities and form factor of the device and pricing accordingly. Yes, in some cases they even nobble these features to dampen demand. They also use contractual terms to say you can’t use the device as a modem for a PC, for example.

If you can come along with any data-hungry device and expect to demand the same retail pricing plan, you’re going to blow up the business model. The network becomes over-congested, often with low-value file sharing or media download traffic for which there is low user willingness to pay.

Destroying the vertical silo might sound like a good idea to those who feel the telco business deserves some radical change. However, you need to come up with a better idea of creating a market around access to a finite spectrum resource. (And you mesh folk have a lot of technology, economic, policy and usability problems to solve before that changes.) Unlike wireline, there’s contention on the access layer. The scarcity is at the edge, not in the core.

The outcome of a “retail Carterfone” will be a shift to metered or congestion-based pricing. This may result in a loss of consumer welfare, as users highly value flat-rate price plans. Flat rate only works as long as the usage curve has a reasonably large and predictable spike in the middle, and you can manage the fat tail via traffic shaping, fair use terms, and contract enforcement. Allowing any device, software or service drives the network capex tail of heavy users without raising compensating revenue.

We’ve already seen in Korea on their fixed network a move from flat rate to metered, with much consumer resistance. The same has pretty much happened in the UK with BT’s wholesale pricing regime on fixed. Due to over capacity of 3G spectrum and networks from the build-out mania, it’s too early to say if the huge buckets of data offered by folk like T-Mobile with Web’n’Walk will persist. If they got too popular, and people actually started to use what they’ve bought, say to watch unicast video on their iPhones, the networks would clog up quickly.

You could instead opt of a “wholesale Carterfone”, where anyone can come along and buy wholesale connectivity, and then offer retail pricing for locked-down and non-interchangeable devices. Those wholesale contracts can then be extremely complex if need be, with mixes of usage, time, congestion, device class and other factors such as traffic shaping in the backhaul or content caching services. The users never get to see that complexity. However, we’re getting a very long way from the original Carterfone deal where the retail market was opened up to competing device suppliers, and we’re a long way from designing a dynamic marketplace for wireless spectrum.

And it’s all because of the physics. Spray photons in every direction, and you get a different market structure than guiding them down a strand of glass to a concentration point, because the scarce economic resource is in a different place. Hey, go ask KPN, who cunningly are creating a scarce resource by putting all the electronics into street cabinets (with limited physical space) and selling off their exchanges (where it’s easy to put in competing unbundled gear).

My policy recommendation? The incumbents own too much of the backhaul and on-net traffic, which gives them an unfair advantage over new entrants. Do what we did in the UK, and reserve some slices for new entrants (Hutchinson 3G won it), and tilt the field a little in their favour with the interconnect and termination rules. Keep the network auction national so the initial starting condition isn’t fragmented with “missing patch” owners extorting everyone else. Don’t place any rules or license conditions on how the spectrum is used, except to mandate that squatting isn’t allowed. Assume every rule you campaign for will be outweighed by two bought by lobbyists. Allow sub-leasing and resale. Make public safety users pay market price, just like they do for office chairs and other inputs. Even better, make them buy the output safety communications service in the open market, not the input spectrum.

If there’s more value in creating an open wholesale network than vertical integration, someone will conduct that experiment without the need for bureaucratic seers predicting the right market outcome. The future is uncertain, none of us are smarter than the market. There’s no need to mandate any kind of wholesale structure.

Another fallacy is that raw and pure Internet access is the end-user service. It’s not, it’s the things you can do with the device. So if I can use a locked-down browser to access any kind of HTTP-sent site, that’s not the same as a “go anywhere, do anything” Internet ISP plan. Just ask Steve Jobs. Users don’t want to hear “megabyte” once in the store. The YouTube app on the iPhone isn’t a bug in the economic model, it’s a feature. Users will buy the degree of openness and flexibility they need, not pay for option value of the network capacity that they don’t need and others redeem at their expense.

We’ve already seen the first step with MVNOs and alliances like Sprint-Clearwire-Google and AT&T-Apple. Wholesale and alliances are the future. Fine-grained wholesale for mom’n’pop entrepreneurs will arrive some day without external intervention as long as there are enough competing nationwide spectrum owners (my guess is 5-6) and a vibrant backhaul/backbone market. And the users will get the right devices, plans, connectivity and apps packaged up in convenient form.

Less regulation is better regulation. Particularly in Washington DC. Stop trying to make rules to shape the future, let it sort itself out.

Martin Geddes redefines laissez faire at Telepocalypse.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"At the end of June 2007, we have over 42.0 mn TOM-Skype registered users up from over 35.5 mn at the end of March 2007."

 — From the 2007-Q2 TOM Online Inc. quarterly report (Nasdaq: TOMO; Hong Kong GEM: 8282)

TOM Online had a horrible second quarter: net losses and falling revenue. So picking up 70k new users a day (25 million per year) in that context is pretty good. Since Skype doesn't publish the number of active Skype accounts, we're still not sure if these new accounts offset accounts no longer used.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

IP Democracy's Cynthia Brumfield wrote about US cable operator Comcast's Q2-07 quarterly financial report:

Telephony, however, continued to boom for the operator. Comcast added 670,000 or so VoIP or digital voice customers during the quarter, a run-rate more than double the 330,000 net digital voice adds during Q2 06. Comcast ended the quarter with 3.1 million digital voice customers, reflecting an 8.1% penetration rate based on the homes capable of buying the service.

The cash flow from telephony is small, compared to Comcast's overall budget. With average telecom revenue per subscriber at $42.92 per month, Comcast's VoIP runrate is $1.6 billion per year. By contrast, Vonage's annual top line is roughly $800 million and Skype's runrate is $360 million per year gross.

Not only is that a lot of cash for Comcast, but 8.1% is an amazing conversion rate for abandoning your tried-and-true telephone system. Larry Dignan concludes "Comcast is swiping telephone customers from existing carriers among entrenched cable modem customers." 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

New "Skype for mobile" partner offerings come out of their cocoon.

At a local blogger reception last night I was showing two of the "Skype for Blackberry" applications to several Blackberry addicted attendees who requested links to where they could evaluate the various services themselves. So here's an update summary.

About six months ago the only Skype mobile offering on the market was Skype's own Skype for Windows Mobile which would run on any Windows Mobile device but with Skype's own caveats:

• Best recommended for use on devices with WiFi connectivity.
• For GSM/GPRS networks, the recommendation is to use it only on 3G networks, with good reason.

Skype for Smartphone and Skype for Pocket PC are designed to be used with high-speed Wi-Fi or 3G connections. If you are using Skype for Smartphone or Skype for Pocket PC on GPRS, then you will be able to use chat but GPRS does not provide sufficient bandwidth to support voice calling.

The real issue here is that VoIP on a mobile device

1. places excessive demand on the devices resources, including the processor and battery,
2. has an inherent, unacceptable latency when used over 2.x G networks,
3. places significant demands over data networks and
4. is only economically viable over networks that have unlimited data plans.

This is supported not only by the caveats that Skype cautions re using Skype for Mobile but also that Truphone places on using their newly released Truphone 3.0 client and service over a 3G network:

Fantastic if you've got a generous (or 'all-you-can-eat') data tariff, but do note that cost, quality and availability of 3G services vary enormously. While it is possible to talk for free walking down the street, it is also possible to run up a huge bill this way.

Of the two connectivity options, Skype for Mobile and Truphone run most cost effectively over WiFi connections and provide excellent voice quality. Only Skype has full IM chat and presence features; however.

Keeping these caveats in mind, several vendors have recently released Skype-based applications and services for mobile devices that rely on the underlying wireless phone infrastructure for actually handling the voice conversation while using the data service to set up the call (via Skype or SkypeOut) and to handle, where included, the IM activity (presence status and chat) as well as mood messages.

From a platform point of view, Mobivox (in beta) provides Skype/SkypeOut access from any phone, wireless or wireline, provided you have their local access numbers. They use voice recognition as a key element of the user interface but lack any chat or online presence.

For the Blackberry we have seen the recent release of two services that provide both IM and voice services:

• IM+ for Skype Software (Blackberry version), and
• iSkoot (in beta)

and for the Nokia N-Series we have seen:

• Fring
• IM+ for Skype Software (Symbian version) (in beta)
• iSkoot (only N73 and N80 announced)

Bottom line: as I have maintained in the past, Skype on a mobile platform runs best when the IM component runs on the device as a data service but the underlying native wireless voice service is used to make a mobile base station voice connection. With iSkoot and IM+ for Skype Software, we are seeing real world examples of how this can play out while still taking advantage of Skype and SkypeOut services.

In closing, several times the security issue with respect to some of these services has been raised. Suffice it to say, the executives of these companies are very aware of security issues as being fundamental to the integrity of their business. They have taken measures to not compromise security (or leave login/password information otherwise exposed). This will be the subject of a separate post.

Some recent Skype Journal posts about these services:

• IM+ 2.5: Call Your (Skype and Blackberry) Contacts Your Way!
• iSkoot Launches Beta Client and Service for Blackberry
• Skype on the Blackberry - More Experiences (with links to two previous posts).
• Somebody Gets the Skype Mobile Picture Right
• Mobivox Presentation Collateral

If you try out any of these services, please leave your Comments with this post. User experiences are most appreciated.

Tags: Skype, Skype Mobile, SkypeOut, IM+ for Skype Software, iSkoot, Fring, Mobivox, Blackberry, Nokia N-series, Truphone

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Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can you trust a study that leaves out Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft and AOL? Allen Stern says they missed smaller ones like eBuddy.

Table 1: Fastest Growing Instant Messaging Destinations for Aug-06 to Jun-07 (U.S., Home and Work – reflects Web traffic and use of Internet applications)

Site/Application	Aug-06 UA (000)	Jun-07 UA (000)	Percent Change
Meebo	434	1,972	354%
IMVU	491	1,248	154%
Google Talk	904	2,252	149%
paltalk.com	355*	447	26%
Skype Messenger	2,199	2,635	20%

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, July 2007
*Indicates these estimates are calculated on small sample sizes and are subject to increased statistical

Web access to chat is hot. Jon Fort says Meebo is big in internet cafes where web access maintains privacy. Caroline McCarthy thinks cross-network interop is also the attraction.

The wrong metrics: Nielsen is still reporting "eyeballs," so pre-cluetrain. Wouldn't you rather know the size of the loyal following? Or how many message units were passed via IM? Or the frequency distribution of time spent in voice or video calls?   

Apples and Oranges? or Fruit Salad? IMVU is a 3D avatar chat service. Meebo hosts chats from other networks. GTalk is straight IM and voice. Paltalk is a video chat service that launches from IM networks. And Skype is a little of everything on clients.

Should you bother comparing apples and oranges?

Or are messaging services converging?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Downloads are still rising spectacularly. Sometimes at speeds of about 2500/minute!

Strange, while I've been on Holidays, I didn’t check the concurrent users online neither the downloads. Some minutes ago I made an update of my numbers and...

Downloads have gone up dramatically as shown on the graph below.

Indeed, the number of downloads were 500 per minute in June. Now, since about July 14 (French National Day?) it is around 1750 downloads per minute!

The only sensible explanation I see is the "Pakistan and India campaign" Skype launched in July, cutting SkypeOut prices in half!

Will this be the next Skype boost?

If it were all new users interested in the promotion concerning Pakistan and India (see my previous post below), then I would have expected also an increase in the number of SkypeOut purchases.

The graph below shows this isn’t the case.

The temporary increase in the number of purchases at the end of June could be due to Europeans leaving for Holidays and putting some more amounts on their account (this is pure speculation on my behalf!). But, no sensible increase in purchase orders due to the mentioned campaign can be seen on the graph in July.

Then on one of the download pages I saw this:

And on the lower part of the page:

So, could it be that a lot of Americans and Canadians download the Skype application and register new usernames just to be able to make some free calls?

Or could it be that a lot of people in other countries are tempted by the free offer, and don't read the small grayed out letters on the bottom of the web page?

Again, pure speculation, but I am still wondering what the real reason is of the increased number of downloads! In the past it always had something to do with promotions or really innovating new features. And I don't see anything like that now ... unless it really is the free minutes!

Posted by Jean Mercier at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The facebook application layer is creating a zillion more connections among facebookers by the hour.  

So what happens when someone deletes their own facebook account?

You leave a hole in reality as your record is expunged.

Deleting accounts in a social network service causes a ripple effect of "disappearing" someone.

• Threads are disrupted, orphaned messages replying to someone that no longer exists.

• Friends and contacts suddenly discover you are no longer in their buddy lists.

• Groups you created no longer have a founder.

We model our relationships, we archive our histories.

Deleting an account disrupts the models, the archives and perhaps those very relationships.

That's why it is more common to keep an account working but fallow.

It may also be cause to develop "redirection" specs for social networks: I used to be active here but now I'm active over in this other space.

Question of the Day:

Is Skype a social network in the MySpace, Ecademy, and facebook sense of the term? Skype has social network graphs (millions of buddy lists) and behavior that runs on top of it.

Thanks to Lazy_Lightning for the original photo.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Business solutions from Skype partners demonstrate innovation and disruption built around Skype's unique infrastructure.

This past Monday a very frustrated Jeff Pulver put out a Call for More Innovation in Voice Services. A widely acclaimed VoIP industry pioneer, Jeff has long recognized that VoIP and associated IP-based services provide a platform for offering value-add to facilitate both business services and build social networks through voice-enhanced applications. At a panel discussion last Friday called :"Where are the VoIP Services?" Jeff reports:

"... From my perspective, I didn’t want to hear about a service that was simply a variation on Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail. What I what I was looking for was something different. Something cool. Something that truly helped to redefine communications. But I didn’t hear about anything remotely interesting. So, I answered the question by suggesting to my fellow panelists and to the delegates in attendance that "they had no guts". That they failed in taking advantage of the IP based platform presented to them to deliver innovative services and instead chose to take the easy way out and simply use their platform to replicate the same services that TDM based systems gave us. That they decided to build equipment for the telcos where the money was and in the process sacrificed empowering the communications revolution and our ability to deliver services never before possible without the advent of IP. [my italics, underliine and typo edits].

I say that the outcome of this panel discussion that Jeff decries happened because nobody looked at the Skype ecosystem for examples of VoIP Services . In the Skype ecosystem we can see the recipe for a foundation for innovative IP-based services:

• Start with a full real time conversation platform that combines voice, presence and text messaging.
• Start with a real time conversation platform that is enhanced with conferencing, video, call transfer, call forwarding, voice messaging and file transfer.
• Start with an IP-based ecosystem that has a set of API's to facilitate application development and mashups
• Start with a platform for which hardware has been developed to take advantage of many features of the platform.
• Start with a platform that can be accessed via not only Windows, Mac and Linux PC's but also USB phones, PC-free phone sets, mobile phones, Blackberries (here and here) and the Nokia N800 Internet tablets.

Alec Saunders, in his Voice 2.0 Manifesto, points out that the value-add in voice will be the applications that embed voice. And we are seeing the outcome of this Manifesto in the Skype partner applications that are evolving based on the Skype platform:

• Evoca provides a service that captures voice and makes it available for individual listening, podcasts, transcription, weblogs and other voice-enhanced services..
• Unyte provides a means to escalate the real time conversation beyond text and voice to incorporate desktop sharing
• Convenos provides a collaborative platform for managing communications across geographically-disbursed business operations (and is becoming a Webex-killer in the process).
• OnState provides a most disruptive ACD platform that makes call center operations affordable for small businesses by eliminating the need for call center PBX's that can have six figure costs otherwise.
• Skype for Salesforce.com builds real time conversation functionality into any business's customer relationship management activities supported by Salesforce.com.
• Skylook transforms Outlook from its role as an email, contact management and calendaring system into a customer relationship management system through its management an