Skype Partners Answer Jeff's Call for Innovation in Voice Services
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 and archiving of real time conversation activities.
On the social networking, personalization and amusement front:
- Pamela provides utilities that can enhance Skype activities through its rich mood editor, audio emoticons, call recording, personalization, podcasting and call transfer features
- CrazyTalk, by far the most popular Skype Extra as measured by downloads, can literally visually animate your conversations.
To paraphrase a portion of Jeff's call I say:
... the Skype ecosystem is already demonstrating the great opportunity to disrupt the communications industry, bypassing the business processes in place at Verizon and other incumbent telcos. Skype can eliminate lots of the time it takes for the financial analysts to work out operating budgets because Skype has already eliminated many of the "risks" in deploying an IP voice solution. Skype is sowing the seeds of a communications revolution. Skype's partners already recognize they can change the way we communicate and have had the guts to take on the status-quo. They have rebooted and restarted the Internet Communications revolution.
I think the real problem is that Jeff's co-panelists from the telcos are having trouble separating the pipe from the services and content. At a fundamental level they need to stop thinking switched networks and recognize that IP packets are taking over as the delivery infrastructure. And that it is not just the walled garden of the telco world that can come up with innovation in delivering real time conversation services but rather a world that recognizes an open platform and its potential for innovation delivered over IP packets.
While Skype is not perfect and still has challenges ahead in terms of marketing their programs, building new partnerships and developing channels, their platform provides a unique infrastructure that is making VoIP Services happen today.
So let's make a slight change in your challenge, Jeff, (especially since there is already a Twitter4Skype and SkypeMe for Facebook, using their API's combined with the Skype API's). I say to those interested in Jeff's challenge: Take a look at the Skype API's and pitch Jeff on the service you want to create; hopefully Jeff will consider them as candidates for his early-early seed capital. And, in this case, there are some case studies (see above) that provide real world experience.
P.S. - There is also a Skype Mashup competition going on until the end of August. Skype Mashup Wiki.
Full disclosure: nobody paid me to write this; I just think Skype got overlooked somewhere along the line. OnState is a client for my professional services. And my first acquaintance with Jeff Pulver was when he was an independent DESQview developer while I worked at Quarterdeck in the early 90's.
Tags: Jeff Pulver, Skype, Skype Extras, Skype Partners, Evoca, Unyte, Convenos, Skylook, OnState, Skype for Salesforce.com, Pamela, CrazyTalk, Alec Saunders, Voice 2.0 Manifesto
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Comments
Look no further than Microsoft. According to Rich at TMC, they've got game. They've got the resources to get the game. In fact, MS is a game-changer.
Posted by: Rick | July 25, 2007 01:27 PM
We use Skype at our business to communicate among co-workers, especially when one of them is out of the country. It works really well. I am surprised Jeff Pulver did not consider Skype when answering his question.
Posted by: Julia | July 26, 2007 07:59 AM
Shame of me but I've never used skype before. A lot of my friends do, and I plat to join them.
Posted by: Sally | January 17, 2008 07:38 AM