Two weeks ago, it was announced that PamFax, with its ability not only to fax a document but also work through the Skype Extras Publishing Platform to collect revenues, was the winner of the European Mashup competition as well as the worldwide winner.

Thursday afternoon at a Skype Developer Event in San Jose, a mashup that I had been using during my trip to locate WiFi hotspots in the south Bay Area, JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype, was the recipient of the North American Mashup Cup. After receiving the cup JiWire COO Nidhad Hafiz (right) gave a brief demonstration and I had an opportunity to discuss its development with Nihad and CEO Kevin McKenzie (left). Not only does the JiWire Hotspot Finder locate nearby locations with WiFi access but it also provides local information of interest to the road warrior such as driving directions, weather, road conditions and several catagories of nearby retail, lodging and services locations. From the Skype Press Release:

The JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype allows users to search for and to find WiFi hotspots anywhere in the world through Skype. It allows one to view surrounding access points and then connect to them in just one click. The JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype includes easy keyword search capability; just type in "café" or "hotel" or the name of a specific location to find a nearby hotspot. You can also get local weather or traffic reports, news and directions by simply clicking on the map.

The download of the JiWire Hotspot Finder adds a contact to your Skype Contacts; typing "?" provides a complete set of instructions for using its Natural Language search engine. But not only does entering "restaurants in Sunnyvale, CA" into the chat window bring up a list of five "closest" WiFi-enabled restaurants (with a "next" command to bring up additional restaurants), it also brings up the JiWire WiFi companion that provides the meat of this mashup.

Initially the map will show interactive buttons indicating the locations of the hotspots found in the search; running your cursor over individual hotspots provides more details about the location.. The Location Tools tab includes five left sidebar buttons starting with a "Find Near By" button from which you can ask for, say, any Starbucks or Marriott Hotels, located within the map. Need the local weather forecast for the next five days? Click on Weather. Driving Directions and Local Traffic Conditions are also available via their interactive map. A local newswire runs across the bottom of the window. Run your cursor over identified locations for any of the services and a detail window pops up with more information, such as phone number, for the particular retailer or service or traffic condition.

The WiFi Tools tab provides details about your current WiFi connection and access to a tool which will check the security of your WiFi connection. Note that JiWire considers WEP keys as insecure whereas it defines WPA keys as secure. You also have the ability to register new Hotspots; JiWire will find the technical information; you only need to load the address and name for the location. It does also promote JiWire's Hotspot Helper (which I had subscribed to at some point prior to availability of the JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype). The JiWire WiFi Hotspot Helper does enhanced the security of your WiFi connection, if necessary (for instance changes WEP to WPA) and also provides a "SMTP" facility to send out your email, should the WiFi connection be blocked from your regular email SMTP server.

For the technical details: JiWire is written in C# and of course uses the Skype API's along with API's from Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft Live Search, Weather Channel, Yahoo (Directions, Traffic, News) and additional geocoding information from MapQuest, Yahoo and Google. Nihad mentioned also that the Windows API itself along with .Net framework were also key elements in making this product happen. While the full utility runs under Windows, adding it to your Skype Contacts on a Mac or Linux platform will only bring up the search results but there is no WiFi companion window available at this time.

In my discussion with Nihad he not only mentioned how easily he had developed this application using the Skype API's but he also drew particular attention to how the Skype API documentation provided sufficient information to execute the development project much more effectively and efficiently.

Speaking with Kevin he mentioned that, while there is no business model associated with JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype, he does see it as providing awareness generation for their services that may lead to both purchase of their WiFi security tool and to use of their ad-supported desktop services. Kevin also mentioned that Nihad had developed the JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype as a "work of passion" outside his normal responsibilities at JiWire. And that passion certainly came through in my discussion with Nihad.

WiFi access is a key infrastructure requirement for road warriors using Skype. Over the past week I found WiFi access to be of varying reliability with the easiest ease-of-access to be a friend's (secured) home WiFi networks. I found this tool useful in locating WiFi hotspots; however, the biggest issue is for the WiFi service providers and Internet security software publishers to make a determined effort to make connecting to these WiFi hotspots a simple process. (I could not even get the registration web browser to come up at Starbucks on the T-Mobile service yet it worked beautifully at one hotel location over lunch.)

Congratulations again to Nihad, Kevin and the JiWire developer team.

Tags: Skype, Skype Mashup Competition, JiWire, JiWire Hotspot Finder for Skype, Skype Developer Program, Skype API, PamFax, Nihad Hafiz, Kevin McKenzie

Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Just over a month ago a two-day Skype outage caused great consternation with predictions of gloom and doom for Skype. Early yesterday here in California (around 1600GMT) I noticed almost 9.7 million users online -- back to about the same number as peak loads immediately prior to the outage. Somebody out there is continuing to use it; for someone Skype is offering value-add.

Meanwhile Andy Abramson over at VoIP Watch wants Yahoo executives to admit "Yahoo isn't talking." And whither AOL's AIM Phone Line? Om reports on Vonage: How Low Can You Go? And Matt Asay, over at CNet, writes: Swapping Vonage for Skype: One man's search for VoIP that actually works where he starts out with:

Yes, you read the headline right. I have long been a critic of Skype, suggesting that eBay was foolish to buy the VoIP toy and generally ridiculing it as a serious business tool.

Today I'm eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I'm now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype.

Read Matt's full story about how deterioration of service levels is driving away Vonage customers. (Hat tip to Andy for pointing out this story.) This morning Alec Saunders writes Walks like a telco, talks like a telco.... must be a telco where he discusses why many VoIP companies are dying when they simple try to offer lower cost versions of traditional legacy telco services. And he concludes with (my bold emphasis):

To get to free phone calls requires a fundamental change in architecture which Vonage et al have not embraced. It requires pushing the core calling functionality to the edge of the network, which implies turning off the "minute meter". Voice, in this scenario, is nothing more than an undifferentiated stream of bits, charged at the bandwidth rate of the network operator. The profits must be made from the services surrounding the call - before and after - not during.

The SIP standard anticipates this model by allowing for both peer-to-peer calling models, and calling models which pass through a centralized proxy. While no VoIP "operator" has ever embraced the peer SIP model, Skype has delivered peer calling on their proprietary protocol. Skype understands that the money isn't in transporting the bits, but rather [is] in all of the ancillary pieces that can be offered around that bit transport — ring tones, voice mail, phone numbers, and protocol licensing to third parties who wish to attach equipment to the Skype peer network. Similarly, by embedding conference calling in Facebook, at iotum we're trying to create a better experience before and after the call, rather than during simply focusing on the cost of the call (although free is pretty compelling, I would argue…)

That's the fundamental difference between the success of Skype and the failure of Vonage and SunRocket. Skype doesn't look like a telco. Vonage, however, walks like a telco and talks like a telco…. without a telco's deep pockets.

Not only does Skype offer an unequaled range of real time conversations services -- chat, presence, video, 10-party conference calls, voice mail, SMS messaging, call transfer and file transfer; but we are also now witnessing the emergence of Skype's Developer Partner program fully demonstrate the value of having service-oriented, ancillary offerings. Offerings that embed Skype into (business) processes such as call centers, collaboration tools, audio hosting tools, faxing, conversation archiving and CRM tools. To recall my post Skype Partners Answer Jeff's Call for Innovation in Voice 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 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.

The post goes on to list some of these Partner-generated services. And as Skype's Partner program holds its various Developer events this month, we are seeing the beginnings of the evolution of Alec's Voice 2.0 Manifesto. Over the past two years as Skype's Partner services have evolved we have witnessed a withering of voice services at Yahoo, AOL and others. We have not see others recruit over 200 million account registrations (or disclose how many users are online in real time). Yet the Skype ecosystem is emerging from its cocoon, ready to fly as a major contributor to low cost worldwide real time communications services.

And the telcos don't have the strategic horsepower to compete with Skype; their most valid strategy for competing with Skype is to partner with Skype for the services and just ship the bits.

Now if we could just figure out what's going to evolve for Skype from the Google-eBay agreement announced just over a year ago that included this statement: "The companies will also explore interoperability between Skype and Google Talk via open standards to enable text chat and online presence."

Tags: Skype, Yahoo, AOL AIM Phone Line, Alec Saunders, GigaOm, CNET, Matt Asay, Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch, Voice 2.0 Manifesto, Google, eBay, Skype Developer Partners

Posted by Jim Courtney at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

PamFax now available for North America; Evoca launches phone-to-web media services platform.

The Skype Mashup contest award winning PamFax initially was rolled out as a beta for use by Europeans in order to determine infrastructure issues as well as performance requirements. You could send faxes to, however, not initiate them from, North America. Yesterday PamFax was made available worldwide, including North America. Download it at the PamFax website; it will be available in the Skype Extras Manager within a few days.

Evoca provides audio web hosting services using embedded Flash player technology where, for instance, voice recordings can be made via a Skype Contact algorithm. Today Evoca launched "a phone-to-web media services platform to easily create user-generated content"; a key feature is that there is no software download required to use the services. From their press release:

Evoca (www.evoca.com), the phone-to-Web services company, introduced Evoca Media Services to help companies increase their ROI - “Return on Interaction™” by using audio content to attract users to go online, generate more page and ad views, boost purchase and donation conversion ratios, and increase advertising revenue. Evoca Media Services technology gives companies easy ways for their customers, audiences, and supporters to record content from any phone - landline, mobile, and Skype™, and play the content with branded Flash players that bring any web page alive.

“Evoca invites media companies, political campaigns, cause marketers, social networking sites, and any organization to ‘Get a phone for your website’,” said Murem Sharpe, CEO and president of Evoca. “Now organizations can leverage the world’s 4 billion phones to capture customers and supporters’ exact words at the point of passion, when they have a phone in their hand.” People can record opinions, reviews, testimonials, and stories from local and toll-free phone lines available for over 40 countries. Companies can turn browsers into buyers and donors with Evoca's hosted voice application services that keep the target audience engaged both online and offline.

Along with this launch comes a set of Evoca API's and a comment from Mashable.com:

With its API, Evoca now enables users to customize their call recording solution for their audience. While it seems the focus is on business users, there could also be opportunities for social networks looking to add a voice comments feature (Facebook app anyone?).

Tags: Skype, PamFax, Evoca, Skype Extras

Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The editors of Practical eCommerce magazine asked me these five questions for their November package on the future of eCommerce.

1. Skype, wireless Internet, cheap broadband access, cell phones. How does the explosion in communication technology affect ecommerce businesses?

2. How does an ecommerce owner balance the offering of services, such as video, that require a decent amount of broadband against the reality that many consumers (and, potential customers) still use dial-up Internet access?

3. How will consumers access the Internet five years from now?

4. What new communication technologies do you foresee? How will they affect ecommerce business?

5. Other thoughts on the future of communication technologies relative to ecommerce firms?

What do you think?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My breakfast club asked about the future of music; my take.

In twenty years...

We'll be listening through...

• Wireless ear buds for the poor.
• Literal ear buds for the middle class (in the ubiquitous Lasik era).
• Bass-range full-body mods for immersive world players.

Everything touchable/viewable has the option of a sonic identity as printable electronics become free/cheap. This means all goods have theme songs, animation, and spoken (Chinglish?) instructions built in; and we're talking about products, not even their packaging. Early cacophony in retail (all those products talking, singing, emoting) leads to more polite sound triggers and real-time, inter-product/brand negotiation for which gets to play what when and for whom.

Lastfm will offer a service to hotels and casinos. RFID your room key cards (passports?) and we'll program the music in W's lounges, hallways, elevators, bars and lobbies. personal music prefs blended with the ever changing mix of people in each space. You're bringing your ambience with you when you enter a room; it lingers for only a short while after you leave.

Live performance regains currency, for its freshness and authenticity. Those 4-hour-workweek folks source a Lincoln, NB, string quartet for their dinner in Shanghai.

Despite Google buying out AT&T, latency remains a challenge for musicians when they play, if not when they distribute their music.

Lastfm is still around, of course, because they exploited unsold/archaic ad banner inventory to sell instant access to live music performances. Combining personal/social music profiles with realtime ad targeting let them make irresistible offers. One click on a widget and you're listening/seeing/playing-with that Nicaraguan garage band you read about.

It may be retro in 20 years (after 15 years on the market), but people still use a TV scoring/fx bot for their personal video channels, sometimes even for their voice chats. With a few cues and clues, it cleverly drops in dramatic theme music, transitions, emergency room sound effects, laughtracks, and other audio. First used to spice up decades of old audio books, the company got rich by revitalizing ancient YouTube backlists.

Google will be how you find music, as rich media, especially those with words inside, become searchable. So you'll whip out your phone, hit the Goog button, speak "most embarrassing song ever" and see a young pre-lipo Britney Spears on the 2007 MTV Video Awards.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you'd like to meet Skype software partners, swing by Skype North America's Open House BBQ this Thursday afternoon, 27 September, in San Jose, California. Jim Courtney and I will see you there.

If you liked the Skype Mashup Contest, check out the Sylantro Mashup Contest, starting now, organized by Thomas Howe and Mashable. The Sylantro contest is open to any tools or technologies so long as you're making great demonstrations of voice technologies in mashups.

See also:

• Skype Public Platform Roadmap
• The Dawn of the Mashup World II: And the European Mashup Competition Winner Is...
• The Dawn of the Mashup World: Part Ia: What is a Mashup?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What happens when you blend Ustream.tv-style live video with facebook-like social media and a dab of iTunes-flavored commerce? You get Cornerworld. Co-founded by Kelly Larabee, former Skype publicist, and Scott Beck, Cornerworld launches today at the DEMOfall conference. More proof of life after Skype. News release below the fold.

CORNERWORLD LAUNCHES platform for original PEOPLE

Tools and Services Simplify Digital Life and Expand Image Controls

Two Guy Trio Performs For DEMOfall Audience Live From Austin, Texas

SAN DIEGO/DALLAS - Sept. 24, 2007 - CornerWorld (OTCBB: CWRL) - a free, groundbreaking business management and social networking platform that empowers independent content creators to share and profit from their skill - launches today at DEMOfall 07, the premier launch venue for the world's most promising new technologies.

"Original creators can use CornerWorld to easily distribute, promote and monetize their digital creations while controlling how their content is downloaded, sampled, and priced," said President and Co-Founder of CornerWorld Scott Beck.  "CornerWorld integrates Web 2.0's most valuable collaboration and sharing features and provides a platform for everyone to participate, and profit." 

Blogging, sharing photo, audio and video, instant messaging, subject-driven forums, e-mail and contact unification, event invitations and classified advertising are combined in one simple interface.  New technology also expands boundaries to enable live streaming and capture for global event broadcasts and/or live video chats.

"I see a magnificent change that blends distributed computing power with the social Web to fundamentally alter information creation, access to knowledge and the power that comes with both," said Chris Shipley, executive producer, DEMO.  "By uniting the best of social networking and introducing business management tools, CornerWorld is the new distribution and promotional vehicle that will inspire amateurs, professionals and entertainment seekers to push creative media to its fullest potential."  

"We are honored to be a part of DEMOfall and its long history of launching some of the world's most innovative and paradigm-shifting technology," said Beck.

CornerWorld's on-stage presentation at DEMOfall includes a sampling of a live musical performance by up-and-coming band Two Guy Trio.  CornerWorld will broadcast the band's entire studio performance live from Austin, Texas on Sept. 25 from 6:15-7:15 p.m. ET/3:15 - 4:15 p.m. PT.  Visit the DEMOfall event profile at www.cornerworld.com/demofall to catch a glimpse of the hottest new technology as previewed at the exclusive DEMOfall conference.  The Two Guy Trio performance will stream live and also be available after the show at the Two Guy Trio CornerWorld page: www.cornerworld.com/twoguytrio.

Uniting Networks

CornerWorld is joining with companies and networks to open access and spur creation.  In partnership with Napster, CornerWorld offers more than 4 million tracks and features, and provides opt-ins for its users to distribute works via Napster.  CornerWorld enables PayPal micropayments, deploys Plaxo's universal contact manager and serves a limited number of ads via Google's AdSense.  CornerWorld will expand its affiliations with other best-of-breed networks and businesses. 

About DEMO

Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.

About CornerWorld

Based in Dallas, CornerWorld (OTCBB: CWRL) combines social networking, content-sharing and business management tools to enable independent people to profit from their original digital works.  Cornerworld builds from the best of people-generated media and offers fine controls for professionals and amateurs to set their own prices and manage the promotion and sale of their content.  The CornerWorld platform combines live video steaming and capture, blogs, chat, interactive classified ads and invitations - all in one interactive, secure community. CornerWorld is free and easy to join. For more information, visit www.cornerworld.com. CornerWorld is an independent publicly traded company. 

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about our beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. These statements can be identified by the words, "expects," "continues," "projects," "hopes," "believes," "could," and other similar words. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to, management. Because such statements are based on expectations and are not statements of fact, actual events and results may differ materially from those projected. These statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. While these forward-looking statements, and any assumptions upon which they are based, are made in good faith and reflect our current judgment regarding the direction of our business, actual results will almost always vary, sometimes materially, from any estimates, predictions, projections, assumptions or other future performance suggested herein. Except as required by applicable law, including the securities laws of the United States, we do not intend to update any of the forward-looking statements to conform these statements to actual results.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Daniel Brusilovsky interviewed me for his Apple Universe podcast. In episode 54 (31 minutes) Daniel asked why we use Skype?

Off the cuff:

freedom from cost, privacy from government and employers, multiple modes of communication in one conversation, and presence for avoided voicemail. Listen.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a few pointers resulting from a day of using Skype and assisting acquaintances who run a couple of small businesses get going with Skype. The day started with three concurrent chat sessions with contacts in London, New York and Munich; why does everybody make contact at the same time and then it's quiet for hours?

In order to keep in touch with reality, it is sometimes useful to go out and help someone start their Skype experience to see what new Skype users come across as they install Skype (currently version 3.5). This was a case where my acquaintances are paying over $300 per month on North American long distance; they have been doing a number of three-party calls (telco limitation) and they do a couple of desktop sharing sessions each week via a GoToMeeting account. Here are some of the issues that arose:

• When you install Skype fresh, it seems that "Show Outlook Contacts" (in the View menu) is now turned on by default. I have never used this feature as I have over 1,000 Outlook contacts, most of whom I might contact once or twice a year at most. I don't need the Skype Contacts window clutter that would result. I would much prefer to access my Outlook Contacts phone number information via the Skype Email Toolbar installed into Outlook.
• This feature should either be left "off" at startup or be proposed as a parameter to be set during installation. Contributing to the problem is that, if you have a large number of contacts, it actually can take some time (like up to 15 to 30 minutes) before the Outlook contacts appear in the Skype Contact window as Skype needs some time to load up these contacts. And then the new user becomes very confused; "what did I do to make this happen?". So, on installation, make sure this option is turned off.
• They asked why one of them, who has a significantly more expensive (than Skype's) fixed rate North American long distance service, should buy SkypeOut credits. (I'll discuss the Unlimited Calling Plan later) We came up with four solid reasons for using SkypeOut beyond her existing plan:

  • To make multi-party calls beyond three participants

  • To make calls from the laptop while away from the home office

  • To make inexpensive calls outside North America

  • For desktop sharing, even if using GoToMeeting (they will be evaluating the Skype Partners' desktop collaboration tools in due course).

• Why not just go to the Unlimited North American Calling plan immediately? Because, in spite of the low cost via Skype, the most important criteria for this very non-technical user is reliability of service. She knows the other plan, even though it is more expensive, works. She needs a few weeks' experience with Skype to gain the confidence required to be able to use it as her primary long distance service and to drop the other "telco" flat rate long distance service. It would definitely be helpful to build this confidence if two weeks of unlimited North American calling could be provided to new North American Skype users.
• I was asked if Skype chat windows would recognize numbers for use via SkypeOut when entered as part of a Chat message. We tried "(416) nnn-7890" and did not get a link. A quick Skype chat inquiry to an expert on Skype's phone number recognition brought back the answer that you can't forget the country code; so "+1 (416) nnn-7890" is recognized just fine as a SkypeOut hyperlink within a chat window.. For the most part North Americans have no idea of what the "+CountryCode" phone number format is all about (although the presence of "+" on wireless device keypads is increasing awareness).

Upon completion of the initial installation there can be a lot of settings to review initially especially to ensure privacy. A starter wizard could set the following as the more critical parameters, phone numbers and settings for personalized Skype operation::

• Entry of mobile and office numbers (see this post for reasons)
• Basic Sounds: Classic or Modern
  • a single selection to cover all settings
  • frankly most people I encounter prefer the Classic settings to the default Modern
• "Allow calls from", "Allow chat from" settings
• Show Outlook Contacts (Yes/No)
• When someone calls me
  • {Show Skype call alert, Show Windows tray alert} (with examples)
• Automatically answer incoming calls selection
• Call Forwarding Number(s) entry
• SMS message option

And finally, doing a purchase of Skype Credits during this setup demonstrated new international economic paradigms. Whereas the Canadian dollar has traditionally tracked the US Dollar in relationship to European currencies, it now appears the Canadian Dollar is tracking the Euro and not the US Dollar's downward drift over the past few months..

And how is Skype contributing to this massive international economic change? Since the beginning of SkypeOut two years ago, SkypeOut rates to major countries were US$0.021 or less per minute but C$0.024 per minute (reflecting an earlier 15% premium for the US$ relative to the C$.). When looking at SkypeOut rates today, we found that the US rate has risen to US$0.024 per minute while the Canadian rate remains unchanged. Friday was the first time since the mid-1970's that the Canadian dollar traded above the US Dollar on foreign exchange markets. And Skype is pegging the C$ to the Euro.

By taking this direction in pricing changes, Skype is not only disrupting communications but also disrupting long standing international foreign currency trading traditions. My macro-economics prof told me that ongoing massive government operating deficits will eventually devalue a currency -- and he is getting verification during this period of high U.S. federal deficits and economic turmoil in the U.S. Proof again that there's no free lunch!

It also corroborates that Skype does most of their interconnect contracts in Euros - to be expected given both its headquarters business office location and much higher base of European relative to U.S. users.

Tags: Skype, Skype Unlimited North American Calling, Skype Credits, Skype Email Toolbar, Skype installation, Skype pricing, Skype Sounds

Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

At lunch Wednesday with investor James Seng and PhoneGnome founder David Beckemeyer, we wondered:

• Has anyone earned their money back making Skype-related hardware in the US market?

• Are mobile, embedded and hybrid Skype phones one order of magnitude too hard for the next 100 million US users? Or two orders too hard?

• Is the quality of Skype calls really degrading over time? or are customer expectations rising? Keynote research says hard-wired VoIP quality compares favorably with PSTNs. FierceVoIP comments. But no measurement of or comparison with VoIM products like Skype.

• Who is Skype's spokesperson to the US Spanish-speaking market?

• Will James' laptop still be in his car after it was towed? (yes, it was.)

Skype Japan signs up A8.net for an affiliate sales program. The better to promote Skype downloads from blogs and other web sites.

Cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito is editing a new series of ethnographic studies of digital culture. I can't wait for the deep dives into how people really use technology. 

Jean Mercier caught Skype's download counter turned off and repaired.

SIPphone launched Gizmo for mobile beta.

Read about this week's Skype for Windows 3.5.0.239 hotfix bugfixes and security improvements. Or just download it.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday (Sept. 19) was the 25th anniversary of the birth of the infamous smiley via a bulletin board message on a primitive pre-ARPA Carnegie Mellon Universtiy network. Smiley's inventor Scott Fahlman tells the story of its emergence into the public domain along with the original message's recovery from CMU's tape archives.

Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning.

This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day. So I suggested that. In the same post, I also suggested the use of :-( to indicate that a message was meant to be taken seriously, though that symbol quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger

What began 25 years ago as a few emoticons to inject some basic moods -- humor, anger, wink -- into nascent text messaging has become flood of graphic innovation with emoticons reflecting wide ranges of expression; Skype chat dedicates a key menu item to a selection of 72 choices to express "a picture worth a thousand words". Pamela incorporates a Rich Mood Editor, which has been broken out as a free Skype Extra, to mix text, emoticons and hyperlinks. Entire websites are devoted to providing emoticons.

Hat tip to Jaanus Kase for pointing this one out; he shows a commerative flag displayed at CMU. And thanks, Scott, for bringing emotional life to text messaging.

Update: Peter Parkes at Skype has posted about this anniversary and provided a link to some "hidden" Skype emoticons as well.

Tags: Emoticons, smileys, Skype, Pamela, Rich Mood Editor, Skype Extra, Scott Fahlman, Jaanus Kase

Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past two years, Skype has developed, under the leadership of Peter Kalmstrom, Program Manager for Skype Toolbars, several utilities which facilitate the Skype experience when used in conjunction with email, web browsers and various Microsoft Office documents. The Skype Email Toolbar embeds Skype activity links into Outlook; the Skype Web Toolbars for both Firefox and Internet Explorer have been embedded into the Skype for Windows client installation. Finally the Skype Office Toolbar has recently been upgraded to cover the entire range of Office products: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Project and Visio. One challenge of developing the Office Toolbar has been the moving target of Office 2007 releases; however, now that it is officially released it is being reported that Office 2007 may be outselling Windows Vista.

The Skype Office Toolbar functions to:

• Identify and tag phone numbers within a document: while associating them with any phone numbers in the authors' Skype Contacts.
• Skypify Phone Numbers in an Office document such that right clicking on the document opens up a menu from which you can select an option for starting a call, sending an SMS message (the phone number is analyzed to determine if it is SMS-capable) and copying to your Outlook Contacts.

• Provide a document author's Skype Call/Chat icons in the toolbar. All documents created in Office documents incorporationg and activating the Skype Office toolbar have the author's Skype Name embedded into the documents properties. As a result when a recipient with Skype installed opens the document s/he will be provided with Skype icons in the Toolbar to immediately launch a Skype call or chat, as desired, with the author.
• Send the file directly out of the Office product to a Skype contact via Skype File Transfer via either the Skype Toolbar "Send File" Toolbar drop down item or via the File | Send To menu. This will bring up a list of Skype Contacts from which to select the recipient(s). This is a feature that will be found across all the Office documents and is perhaps the most used.

The Skype Office Toolbar is designed work with Office 2000/XP/2003 and 2007 under Windows and takes advantage of the newer Toolbar Ribbons characteristic of Office 2007.

Peter has prepared a complete 13-minute video showing all the features in action. Certainly well worth the time to review it and determine where you can use the Skype Office Toolbar in your daily routine. I think it is the "sleeper" of the Toolbars in terms of what is delivers across the complete range of Office products and documents as well as its potential for productivity enhancement.

Update: Peter has written about the Skype Office Toolbar on the Skype for Business blog.

Reference Posts

• Original Post on Skype Email Toolbar
• Skype Toolbars: Providing Contextual Access to Skype
• Eight Ways to File Transfer Using Skype
• Skype 3.0: I Don't "Dial" Phone Numbers".
• Remember "ET Call Home"? Now It's "Skype Call Home"

Tags: Skype, Skype Office Toolbar. MS Office, MS Word, Skype File Transfer, Peter Kalmstrom, Skype Email Toolbar, Skype Web Toolbar

Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Disparity between broadband haves and have-nots limit and focus Skype's market opportunity. 

Frank Bures' Wired magazine story looks at Internet Telecommunications Union data to compare raw prices of 100 Kbps broadband access by country. In some parts of the world, broadband costs two months' of a family's income.

Bures lays most blame on governments for high rates; artificial scarcity, censorship, and economic discrimination through tariffs only the richest afford put money and power in government pockets.

CORRECTION: Mr. Bures doesn't lay blame. I do; that's my interpretation. My apologies, Frank.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott Karp was a little put-off by Yahoo! Mash's treating its users like teens.

There's been some reporting of gamer culture seeping in to the workplace. Onlife, gaming and cyberculture influence players from 18 to 40 who, many assuming leadership roles in the last decade. Their notions of teamwork, intimacy/privacy, goal discovery, and measures of success change how we work and why.

Many industries are becoming adhocracies and wirearchies where personal brand and informal organization match or supersede formal hierarchy. Starting with email, blogs, and wikis, and now with twitter, Skype, and social networks, we're inventing and deploying tools for the new workplace.

So while Mash's clothing may appear goofy, put on your work hat and imagine how, with a few small tweaks you might adapt it to the new world of work.

• For example, past "my friend" and "best friend" add: my immediate supervisors, direct reports, peers, bowling team, chain of command, community of practice, customer, in-my-organization, partner, supplier (and other elements you might pluck from SAP or Salesforce).

• Imagine widgets enabling views of projects, your work schedule, internal news, what your colleagues are working on, risks/threats of the day/week worthy of your attention.

• And populate your bio with answers your community cares for: claims to fame, places you've traveled and lived, things you know / can do / understand / teach.

Innovation is as likely to start in consumer products as anywhere else, and many find their way into industry despite futile resistance. Among other nifty things, Mash brings direct manipulation to its blog/socialnet user interface, a portent of portal upgrades to come.

I'm not convinced Yahoo! particularly cares about the biz business. They got out of since they never made money sans advertising from office tools.

So I'm cruising for those capabilities that will find their way into other services, services I'm likely to smuggle into my daily work life. Yahoo!'s Pipes, Upcoming and flickr are everyday tools for me at work, as are Skype, Google desktop search, docs, mail, and calendar. Wouldn't it be interesting if Mash joined them?

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Being on a SkypePro subscription I have $3.00 taken out of my Skype Credits every month; it had been occurring on the 12th of the month with an email notification received two or three days prior to the due date. Overnight I received my notification for September with the credits to be taken on the 19th. True to their word, I am receiving my "goodwill gesture" seven day subscription extension announced August 21. And my monthly withdrawal date has been moved to the 19th.

When responsible at Quarterdeck in the early days of the commercial Internet for business development activities related to (dialup) Internet Service Providers, the primary reason for failure of an ISP was an inability to get their billing systems working to collect monthly revenues efficiently without manual intervention. Great to have verified that Skype's automated back office subscription management system has the flexibility to adapt so transparently and seamlessly to these one-time situations. Congratulations to Skype's customer services team on this one.

Tags: Skype, SkypePro

Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the Skype Developer Conference in June, Paul Amery, Director of the Skype Developer Program, committed to release a Public Platform Roadmap at the Skype Developer Days in Prague past this week. It happened.

Our mission at SDP is to enable developers around the world to bring Skype to more users and to enrich Skype users' experience. We want to open our doors to all developers, small and large. In the long run, we aim to make the entire spectrum of features and services that are available to the end users also available to the developers via client APIs and web services. And we want external developers to work not only for the end users but also for other developers, creating middleware, wrappers, and tools.

The Roadmap Wiki. Key points:

• They want to talk about the "public Skype API's - in plural", due to the variety of operating system Skype clients and wrappers (Skype4Com, Skype4Java, Skype4Py) supported.
• The Road Map has two key segments:
  • the first provides the delivery commitment for the next quarter (Q407) and
  • the second is an ongoing Idea Pool from which subsequent quarters' commitments and priorities will be determined.
• A window on the dynamics of issues being tracked in the Jira issue tracker categorized by bugs and feature requests.

The Developer Partners team at Skype is creating a RoadMappers Group who can register to contribute by editing this wiki.

For two years a Skype Roadmap has been a major request at the Skype Developers Conference, not to mention in the course of many of my discussions with developers. And web services support has been the number one outstanding feature request. Skype is now placing focus on these issues.

A key challenge to developer partners: with these additional tools coming along: can someone come up with that "innovative voice application" that meets Jeff Pulver's criteria discussed here: "Something cool. Something that truly helps to redefine communications."

Tags: Skype, Skype Developer Program, Skype Public Roadmap, Paul Amery, Jeff Pulver

Posted by Jim Courtney at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype makes me so aware of my minimal foreign language skills. So I'm excited about tools that help me compensate. The first I want to mention is the Worldwide Lexicon Project. Brian McConnell's essay, The End Of The Language Barrier, starts:

The language barrier, as we know it, will be gone by 2010. Computer scientists have been chasing a Holy Grail of machine intelligence for decades, but the breakthrough that will eliminate the language barrier is social, not technical.

Like Wikipedia, the WLP harnesses collective goodwill and self-interest. In this case, the multilingual translate web pages. Because they have the power, they choose what is translation-worthy.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

On Fridays we always can notice a lower number of users online. Usually concurrent users online go down by about 4.5% compared to Thursdays. And it goes even lower on Saturday and Sunday. Weekend begins on Friday for some (Muslim) countries and for a lot of other countries it starts on Saturday. Many Skypers leave their computers to do other things on the weekend.

But Friday, September 7, 2007, the number of concurrent users online went down by 8.2 % compared to Thursday. Why?

It was Independence Day in Brazil, and my “Samba, Futebol and Carnaval” friends prefer to be on the beaches. Brazil has quite a lot of Skype users!

Could I conclude (from the numbers above) that 3.7 % of Skype Users are Brazilians?

Jean's Skype Numerology blog is quantifiabley12.4% better than the average blog.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A post a few days ago, The Dawn of the Mashup World: Part Ia: What is a Mashup, generated a heated discussion on the Skype Mashup Group Chat. Also a few comments. Glad to get some feedback onto Skype Journal; thanks Don and Thomas. (And congratulations to Don Kennedy for having MyToGo selected by ProgrammableWeb.com as August's Best New Mashup.)

Having monitored the discussion and been involved as a judge in the Skype Mashup competition, my criteria for a mashup are:

1. A solution to a user or business problem that
2. Marries two or more otherwise independent technology platforms or technology services and
3. Makes use of both the technology craftsperson's unique toolkit mix and his/her experience
4. To satisfy an otherwise unfulfilled user or business process need.

In the course of this exercise I took the opportunity to ask a few developers what they used for delivering their solution. For instance, the iotum team combined the Facebook API's, Ruby on Rails, the Active MQ framework and an interface to the conference bridge to create their Free Conference Call mashup for Facebook.

In judging the Skype mashup contest I also learned a lot about the wide experience range of mashup developers. Many have excellent experience and development process skills while others forgot some basics such as testing their install and registration procedures and/or their software in a user environment. Some looked at the business or user need while others failed to realize that the world does not need another social networking platform. Ideally mashups are an opportunity to leverage the large user base of a Skype, eBay or Facebook! in meeting an unfulfilled niche user need.

The PamConsult team created PamFax to solve the problem of providing a very simple process (especially relative to the somewhat cumbersome WinFax) of using the Internet to easily fax an MS Office document anywhere worldwide. The primary Skype feature here has nothing to do with voice; they used the Skype Extras publishing platform not only to install the application but also as a transaction processor for collecting revenues for the service using Skype credits. Skype Chat is used to send notifications re a fax's delivery. In addition they developed a web-based portal to manage and archive your use of the service. The application can be launched from the Skype Extras menu or from within MS Excel or MS Word. A link to Google Maps will also show roughly where the fax is being sent (to within an Area Code).

PamConsult married the Google Maps API's, Microsoft Office COM objects and a backend fax API with their long term experience using the Skype API's. They started a year ago this summer with development of specifications; coding commenced in January with an initial version available in May. After a beta testing program in July, PamFax was released as a Skype Extra in the second week of August.

In the course of this process their CTO attended the Skype Developer Conference in Boston in June where there were several sessions on the Skype Extras program, including one on the Skype Extras publishing platform. And it was developed during a period when PamConsult was also developing and releasing new versions of Pamela, Skype for Salesforce.com and some eBay utilities.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect to me was the simplicity of the process. For years I fought with WinFax to have a means to send faxes from a PC (although many new Internet technologies have in the interim reduced the need for faxing). As an initial test I sent myself a fax via PamFax and was somewhat surprised that (i) I had completed the process in so few steps and (ii) I did not need the overhead of installing a printer driver to make it work. Find or create the document, insert the fax number, select a cover page and enter any cover page message, arrange payment and the fax is delivered. Serves a niche need within a small mashup application marrying multiple technology platforms. From the PamFax website:

Simple to use:

• Fully integrated with Skype
• User friendly wizard makes sending a fax a breeze
• Send faxes from Word/Excel 2003/2007
• Easy payment with your Skype Credit
• No upfront payments, no subscriptions, no additional cost, no registration

That last line is one example of why mashups can be so readily accepted; it's there when you need it but you have no ongoing commitment to use it with any regularity.

Well, last night at the Skype Developer Evening in Prague, Czech Republic, PamFax received the award as the best European Skype mashup. In a Skype chat interview this morning with Dick Schiferli, Founder and CEO of PamConsult, he stated:

"We are very excited to be the winner with PamFax. Using PamFax to fax with Skype is a great solution because you can pay with your Skype credit. And its very easy to use. We enjoy working with Skype and plan to further expand our solution suite."

Our congratulations to the PamConsult team. You can download PamFax via the Skype Extras [Tools | Do More | Get Extras | Business], the Skype Extras website and also at the PamFax website. Give it a try; the first fax sent is on Pamela.

Other posts in this series:

The Dawn of the Mashup World I: Challenges, Why and Expectations

The Dawn of the Mashup World Ia: What is a Mashup?

Tags: Skype, PamFax, PamConsult, Skype Extras, Pamela, Skype for Salesforce.com, PamBot, Skype Developer Program, iotum, mashups, Skype Mashup Competition, Dick Schiferli

Posted by Jim Courtney at 02:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Skype Journal Labs post by Howard Chang, product manager, AmperorDirect.

IPEVO SOLO Introduction

SOLO is the latest IPEVO release; and their first to move the Skype conversation out of the computer box. Connecting IPEVO SOLO to your router or cable modem, you will get a true stand-alone PC-Less Skype desktop phone. IPEVO SOLO is currently available in some Asian countries and will reach the US coast very soon.

What’s in the IPEVO SOLO Box?

Through AmperorDirect’s oversea department, we were able to get a hold of an IPEVO SOLO. The Asian version retail box includes:

• IPEVO SOLO base unit
• Handset
• AC adapter
• Graphical hardware installation guide
• Quick setup guide
• User manual
• 6 Ft. network cable

Unique Features

IPEVO SOLO is a decent designed Skype desktop phone. With the embedded version Skype software provided by Skype, it can handle the Skype incoming and outgoing calls without the need of a computer, and can do most of the extra functions such as speed dial and call diverting that we see on other PC-Less phones such as Netgear SPH200D and GE 28310EE1. However, there are some unique features which make the IPEVO SOLO stand out from its competitors.

Eye-catching LCD Display

The first thing I notice on IPEVO SOLO is the beautiful large sized LCD display. You can see a comparison of the screen on IPEVO SOLO and Netgear SPH200D at the side picture: a picture is worth a thousand words.

The big display on IPEVO SOLO does make the phone operation easier. For example, it is the first PC-Less phone that can fully present a long Skype ID, such as the “Echo / Sound Test Service”, on one screen. (Previously, the PC-Less phone will set the highlighted Skype ID to scroll mode so that the user can view the full name.) With this, IPEVO SOLO enables users to find the correct contact name on the screen faster.

Magnetized Handset

Yes, this old feature that used to be seen on a high quality home phone has finally made onto a Skype phone. The IPEVO SOLO handset is magnetized and thus can stay firmly on the base unit (which is also magnetized).

Have one Network Connection Only? No Problem...

The reason I like products from IPEVO is this company always take extra steps to think through what potential users need. On the back of IPEVO SOLO's base unit, there is a WAN port and a LAN port. An IPEVO user doesn’t need to buy an extra switch / router or sacrifice the network connection to the computer, if there is only one network connection available. Just plug in the network cable from the modem to SOLO’s WAN port and connect the computer to SOLO’s LAN port, both the SOLO and the computer can be online simultaneously.

In addition, IPEVO SOLO provides four different network connection modes: DHCP, static IP, PPPOE dynamic IP and PPPOE static IP mode. This should be able to cover all the possible real-use situations.

A Universal AC Adapter with Interchangeable Plug

The AC power adapter of IPEVO SOLO is rated at 100~240Vac. There is a push button on the adapter to pop out the plug. With the right plug, IPEVO SOLO has the potential to be used in domestic and oversea. However, at this moment, it is not clear if the final US version will include the European plugs.

IPEVO SOLO comes with a Pre-registered Skype Account

In the Asian version, each IPEVO SOLO comes with a unique pre-registered Skype account (with ID and password). This feature can be helpful if I want to send IPEVO SOLO as a gift to a person who has limited computer knowledge. Again, it is not clear if the pre-registered Skype account will be included in the final US version.

The Look?

The IPEVO SOLO we purchased comes with a black base unit and white handset. There is also a black handset version available. I have mixed feedback from my co-workers about the IPEVO SOLO design. But, those feedbacks can be very subjective basing on my co-workers’ taste. I think the best way for me to do is to provide pictures with IPEVO SOLO taking from different angles and on different table surfaces. You can make your own call.

Question Mark on the Audio Performance

The best way to describe my IPEVO SOLO sample voice quality is it can match the cell phone audio performance. I get distortion here and there in my testing but the overall quality is ok. It is a little disappointed especially after seeing what IPEVO can do on FREE1 – a USB phone. However, I also understand the issue might be on the embedded version Skype software provided by Skype. It comes with the 8KHz audio sampling rate. If IPEVO tries to upgrade it to 16KHz to match the sound quality on FREE1, the cost would go up.

The other possibility is we purchased a bad unit. The unit is from an auction site and I don’t know whether it is a pre-production unit or not. After reporting this issue to IPEVO US, I had a chance to talk to their tech support in California (he was on a SOLO too). The strange thing is that I can hear him ok on my SOLO without those distortions. I’m kind of making the conclusion that my unit is bad. I’ll report the audio quality again when I can get a hold of a US version IPEVO SOLO.

Wish List

As usual, I’ll provide my wish list for the next generation IPEVO SOLO.

• Build a dualphone to handle both Skype and PSTN calls.
• There is a USB port in the back of the SOLO. Can we connect a webcam to the port and do Skype Video using that big LCD screen? It will be a stand-alone PC-Less Video phone!!!
• A way to connect to the wireless network. (maybe using that USB port?)

###

Howard Chang contributed to Skype Journal before:

• Not the Time to Move Beyond Skype WiFi Phones - a Letter to Jim Courtney - September 2006

• Hands on the IPEVO TRIO USB Speakerphone - August 2007

"Red" photos (full flickr set) are by Patti Smolian for Skype Journal. Other photos are by Howard Chang.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As far as this worm is concerned, this is a virtuous cycle:

1. Cast out seeds,
2. Hope for fertile ground, and
3. Reproduce.

This isn't the first Skype worm, but a variant (Symantec profile of W32.Pykspa.D) that works roughly the same way.

We're fortunate this worm's only goal was propagation. Like any infestation it could have darker motives:

• distributed denial of telephony service attacks via SkypeOut, where a coordinated attack by thousands of phone calls to a few phone numbers overwhelms a service, such as a police department or a political opponent
• creating cyberwarfare botnet drones
• PC destruction
• stealing identities, Skype credits, PayPal funds

My takeaways:

• Skype is now prominent enough to warrant the attention of serious black hats.
• Skype's large presence in Tallinn makes it a target in future online attacks on Estonia.
• The Skype APIs offer capabilities not readily available through other platforms.
• Skype's security budget and headcount will continue to rise in response to this threat.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When looking at Convenos, think of entering your conference or board room and encountering the audio-visual devices within that room: a slide projector, a whiteboard, a video monitor and probably a display adapter with screen. In essence Convenos Meeting Center moves that board room to the Internet, even to the point where you can enter and leave the board room at will and re-enter to find all your shared content just as you left them previously. Convenos Meeting Center is a complete conference sharing collaborative environment suitable for both ad hoc and scheduled meetings as well as a virtual meeting room for "persistent", project-dedicated business activities such as key account sales strategizing or product management support. Perhaps the best indicator of its effectiveness is that Convenos Meeting Center is being adopted by enterprises requiring up to three figure numbers of licenses.

Sharing Modes: The essence of Convenos is demonstrated in their tab bar's titles:

• Slides: A full presentation slide manager (PowerPoint, PDF and MS Office files, etc.)
• Web: Cobrowsing (sharing links) of web pages
• Draw: A virtual whiteboard with the usual annotation capabilities
• Media: embedded Windows Media Player for full motion video sharing
• AppShare: an application sharing environment for either your full desktop or one individual desktop application window

In addition to displaying the five basic services, the Convenos Meeting Center session displays sidebars that facilitate and support management of the meeting:

The left sidebar includes single click access to shared content (such as presentations and documents formatted for sharing in the Slide tab, Bookmarks for display in the Web Tab or videos to show in the Media tab), listing of logged in users and a text chat service. The right hand sidebar includes Meeting Information (Name, Type, Host, etc.), Polls, Attendees (all who are authorized to attend the meeting and their status), a Notepad and a File Share window for files that you wish to allow all meeting participants to download.

The essentials:

• Convenos runs inside an Microsoft Internet Explorer browser ((IE 6 or later). However, although not supported by Convenos, I was also able to operate the Convenos Meeting Center environment in a Firefox browser tab when using the Firefox IE Tab extension. And, since it uses Internet Explorer and associated technologies, it requires Windows 2000/XP platforms. At time of writing it does not support Vista.
• Meeting Types: Scheduled, Recurring (say, weekly), Ongoing (persistent) and Instant
• Packages: Standard (up to 20 participants, 25GB storage, $30/license/month); Professional (up to 99 participants, 100GB storage, $100/license/month)
• Voice services: Skype (up to 10 participants); HighSpeedConferencing (up to 99 participants) or a host-defined option
• Private and Open (Public) Meetings
• Capacity: 99 participants except when doing Application Sharing - 25 participants
• Access: via Skype Extras (Instant Meetings only): Tools | Do More | Get Extras | Business or download from Convenos website for the complete range of services.

Setup and Operation

There are three options for setting up a Convenos Meeting: Web-based, Outlook or as a Skype Extra. While the first two are more appropriate for Scheduled, Recurring and Ongoing meetings; the latter is more appropriate for, and limited to, Instant Meetings. All three options have a one-time free 14-day trial period after which subscription charges apply.

Outlook: This is probably the most general approach with easiest setup of scheduled, recurring and ongoing meetings since it links into your Outlook Contacts and Calendar. Install the Convenos Outlook plug-in, click on the Schedule Meeting or Instant Meeting button, fill in the meeting information, select participants from your Outlook Contacts and send the email invitations. Click on the link to enter the meeting; as the email is received it automatically gets added to Outlook Calendars of all the participants. Any meeting scheduled from the Outlook plug-in will default to using Skype for the voice service; this can be changed by going to My Convenos described below.

Web-based: Convenos is managed through a My Convenos host management session in IE. The three primary categories are Meetings (Enter/Create/Start Instant Meeting), Setup (My Profile, Preferences, Edit Instant Meeting, Purchase and Downloads) and Assistance (Help, Support). Creation of a meeting involves multiple steps including:

• Meeting information: Title, Description, Type, Schedule Information (for Scheduled and Recurring Meetings)
• Meeting Options: Open or Private, Hide Attendees Information, Server Location
• Audio Options: Skype only, Mixed VoIP, landline and mobile (HighSpeedConferencing) or host-defined audio
• Invite Attendees: via email address or from Convenos Contact list, set Attendees' privileges: (Guest, Participant, Speaker, Recorder)

Skype integration via this option largely consists of automatically bringing Skype users into the voice conversation when they enter the meeting. During any registration session you are asked to enter your Skype Name (but not password) such that when Convenos detects you are entering a meeting it also brings you into the Skype conference call session.

One shortcoming here is the lack of integration with Skype Contacts where one could select a Skype Contact for an invitation and send the invitation via Skype IM (in a manner similar to how the Convenos Skype Extra works).

Actual operation involves the Host entering the meeting from his/her My Convenos while participants can enter from a link in the email (or if they are already a Convenos Contact, from their "My Convenos"). An initial ActiveX client download (~1.5 MB) is required; for Private meetings, non-registered contacts are required to fill in some contact information to register with Convenos. However, given this is an enterprise tool, these operations, once completed, are not repeated, yet they maintain an appropriate element of privacy and security for Convenos sessions. (For Open meetings a one-time participant ID and Skype Name, if appropriate, are all that are requested.)

The Instant Meeting set up via MyConvenos jumps to the Attendee screen from which you can invite contacts. Not quite as spontaneous as inviting contacts via the Convenos Outlook plug-in or directly out of a Skype user's Contact List, such as with the Convenos Skype Extra, unless the invitee has previously registered with Convenos.

One key area for consideration is how a sharing environment displays across disparate screen sizes of the various participants. Convenos handles this by placing their session in an Internet Explorer window which can be resized in the normal Windows manner. Optionally the sidebars can be hidden to create an even larger display space.

Content for the Slide Tab is generated by a Convenos print driver that converts ("prints") any file format to a jpg file which can then be viewed in the Slide Tab. As a result slide shows can comprise PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Excel, MS Project or any other printable document; however, they cannot be edited within the Slide tab.

Cobrowsing essentially consists of sharing URL's to be viewing the same page and, while it will track mouse and keyboard activity, it does not allow any interactivity such as sharing entry of form data (such as Comments to Skype Journal). In practice this is a security feature to prevent unauthorized purchases and access to other personal/confidential activity. When watching a YouTube video each participant must actually start the video and the audio stream comes from each individual's web browser. (The WEB tab essentially embeds an IE session into the Convenos session.) To share interactivity such as form entry, you must share an IE session under the Application Sharing tab.

A unique feature of the cobrowser, whiteboard (DRAW) and Media Player is the content in these tabs can be captured and transferred to the Slide Tab's documents for viewing as a slide.

The Media Tab, which supports any video format supported by Windows Media Player including MPEG 4, has seen increased use with the evolution of user generated video content, especially for training and customer support videos.

The one weak area is desktop sharing on two counts:

1. There are only options to share either the full Desktop or one individual application (window) but not multiple selected application windows.
2. In several sessions we found the refresh/update rate to be sluggish. Fast enough to be usable; however, not "snappy".

One major strength of Convenos is the "persistence" of Ongoing Meetings: you can leave the meeting and come back several days later and find the "state" of the meeting has not changed (unless others with appropriate privileges have entered and made some changes). All your documents are there; you are back at the last slide viewed in the Slides tab, the last web page viewed in the cobrowser and the most recent markup of the whiteboard.

Convenos Skype Extra (Instant Meeting): The Convenos Skype Extra is installed via the Tools | Do More | Get Extras | Business path from the Skype for Windows client. Upon installing you are asked to enter your Convenos registration information (email, password) and a Skype Contact window will appear from which you can select names for an Instant Meeting session. Click on Start and meeting information, including a link URL, will go out via Skype Chat windows to each participant.

Subsequently, right click on a Skype Contact's Name, select DoMore and Convenos Meeting Center. The Skype Contact Window mentioned above appears again with the Contact's name as the first person to be included in a Convenos session. Click on Start and meeting information, including a link URL, will go out via Chat windows to the designated Contact(s). Basically, four clicks and you are launching a Convenos Instant Meeting session.

Positioning: Ideally suited as an enterprise team building and bonding tool, especially when team members are geographically disbursed. A complete suite of hosted tools for customer presentations, sales and support training, project management infrastructure, recurring team meetings and document sharing.

Strengths:

• A complete conference room environment suitable for enterprise team collaboration and external presentations
• Rapidly switch amongst the various sharing modes
• Persistence: ongoing meetings to support enterprise or special interest community projects
• Voice options: while Skype is there, can be expanded to allow other options for >10 participant sessions; infrastructure inherently provides backup in the case of a specific service's outage or capacity limitations
• Display versatility: total scaling within the limitations of a participant's screen size and resolution.
• Skype and Outlook integration
• Full motion video sharing
• Much more user friendly, intuitive user interface and less costly than Webex
• A feature compatible, Skype-enabled alternative to GoToMeeting
• On-the-fly polling to spontaneously develop consensus amongst participants
• Could use a designated coordinator but requires no assigned IT support
• Includes hosted storage of commonly shared and accessed content

Weaknesses:

• Limitations on application sharing (sluggish, options for sharing applications)
• Mildly cumbersome for setting up Instant Meetings from My Convenos manager.
• Flash or QuickTime support comes only via the "Web" mode using the relevant inherent IE plug-ins

Other posts in this Skype Extras Collaboration services series

• Desktop Collaboration: Ten Years Later - The Skype Impact
• Desktop Collaboration: The Skype Ecosystem Expands
• Yugma Skype Edition: Cross Platform Desktop Sharing

Tags: Skype, Convenos, Convenos Meeting Center, MS Internet Explorer, Skype Extras, Microsoft Office, Collaboration, Desktop Sharing, Video Sharing, Application Sharing, Salesforce.com, HighSpeedConferencing.com

Posted by Jim Courtney at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days ago I provided an introductory post to the forthcoming series on desktop collaboration offerings that are available as Skype Extras. In this post I simply want to mention the three offerings that will be reviewed along with some additional criteria for the evaluation.

Skype Extras for PC Desktop Collaboration:

Convenos Meeting Center: emulating your conference board room with a slide projector, video monitor, whiteboard and display adapter with screen. A key feature is Convenos' "persistence" capability that allows you to enter and leave the "board room" or conference at will without losing any of the information left in the room.

Unyte: bringing desktop sharing as complementary real time conversation mode to Skype's traditional voice, IM and video modes via a single click. Includes a "Remote Asssist" feature that allows the user to view a remote Windows platform for providing customer presentations and support to, or reviewing documents with, both Skype-enabled and non-Skype-enabled contacts.

And announced today (drum roll for Mac and Linux users): Yugma Skype: full cross platform desktop sharing (Windows, Mac and Linux). Simple swapping of shared desktops and a free offering for up to ten-participant sessions are two key features.

Criteria for evaluation include:

• User interface
  • Remote viewing: browser-based or independent window
  • Session setup and scheduling
  • Approach to handling different screen sizes
• Operating System, Web Browser flexibility
• Extent of Skype integration
• Sharing Modes
• Refresh/update speeds at remote participants' desktops
• Session/conference persistence

If you are looking for a desktop collaboration solution I would suggest you first determine what your needs are, try out all three for compatibility with your needs, identify features within the products that can bring additional productivity and value-add to your activities before making a final decision. All three products offer limited use trial versions and/or a free trial period for the full product.

Other posts in this Skype Extras Collaboration services series

• Desktop Collaboration: Ten Years Later - The Skype Impact
• Convenos Meeting Center: Your Conference Board Room on the Internet
• Yugma Skype Edition: Cross Platform Desktop Sharing

Tags: Skype, Skype Extras, desktop collaboration, desktop sharing, Convenos, Unyte, Yugma, Yugma Skype

Posted by Jim Courtney at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning when I came down to my PC I found a Skype chat session with some "strange" wording including something that was going to make me "populr". And then the word "erotic" appeared in a link. Once again my calloused sense of intuition said "Do Not Click".

Skype Heartbeat is reporting a virus; Skype is working with several security software publishers to address the issue.

Skype has learned that a computer virus called “w32/Ramex.A” is affecting users of Skype for Windows. Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect the computer of the person who receives the message.

Please note that Skype users ONLY become infected after they have downloaded the link and run the malicious software. The chat message, of which there are several versions, is cleverly written and may appear to be a legitimate chat message, which may fool some users into clicking on the link.

And the best protection you can have against these issues is to ensure you have some kind of Internet security software installed on your PC. For many years I have used Norton products; in fact, I also had an anti-virus update this morning which may have been related to this virus. Symantec has this to say about Minimizing the Risks of Instant Messaging:

• Most IM tools offer a method for sending and receiving file attachments — a major point of vulnerability. IM attachments, just like email attachments, can carry destructive viruses, Trojan horses, and worms.
• There's also a new breed of IM worms. To your friends and colleagues, it appears as though they're receiving a message from you. In reality, the message is generated by a worm, and may contain a link to a Web site that automatically downloads another bit of malicious code.
• Because it's so easy to create an IM identity, instant messaging is also a ripe medium for online scams, identity theft, and other predatory behavior. Cybercriminals use all sorts of devious methods — including hacking into accounts and impersonating legitimate users — to gain trust and elicit information from unwitting IM users.
• Finally, there's spim. Spim — the name given spam sent over IM —i s on the rise. Some spim can contain offensive language or links to Web sites with content inappropriate for children.

Obviously Skype is taking this issue very seriously. Consider yourself warned.

If you do not have security software installed and are technically capable, the Heartbeat post does provide a method to remove the virus:

There are two ways to get rid of the worm: the normal way and the techhead way. Most users should NOT attempt to edit their computer’s registry manually. For most people, downloading and/or updating their anti-virus software, and scanning their computer to detect and remove the worm, is the way to go.

One additional step beyond what is given in the Heartbeat post: according to some Skype forum discussions, you also need to go to Tools | Options | Advanced and click on "Manage other programs' access to Skype". (Or bypass all these steps by clicking on the double arrows in your status bar to open the Skype - Manage API Access Control window.)

• Review all the programs that are authorized to link to Skype and remove any ".exe"'s that appear "foreign" to what you know you have installed. (And if you remove a working application by mistake, you will simply be asked to authorize its link to Skype next time you load the program).

Tags: Skype, Skype virus, Symantec, Norton Internet Security, Skype Heartbeat

Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The day following my initial post in this series, Thomas Howe produced what should be archived as a key reference post, The Truth is that Everything Isn't a Mashup, in which he goes on to succinctly articulate a definition of a mashup:

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

In general, you’d have to have all three to qualify in my book.

And his key points:

These integration technologies create a “web as platform” architecture, allowing the mashup developer to integrate his[/her] software on top of the world class infrastructures provided by Amazon or AOL, simply, easily and safely.

Mashups take things that might not go together, and puts them together in a valuable way.

.... [mashups] .... serve some small niche or community of interest. This last element isn’t so much about technology, or even business model, but is a very practical matter. Mashup architecture is a light weight architecture: it is best suited for solving small problems simply. [my bold]

When the winners in the Skype Mashup competition are announced over the next few weeks I think you will find that they all fit into Thomas' definition of mashups. (And most of the entries in practice did.) Read Thomas' entire post for completeness.

Update: The issue of the need for "Web integration technologies" has created some interesting discussion on a Skype Mashup Group chat. Does a mashup necessarily need "web integration". Here are two more definitions of mashups:

From TechWeb:

A mixture of content or elements. For example, an application that was built from routines from multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup.

And the website for a previous mashup event:

What is a mashup?

1. Wikipedia definition: A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.
2. Layman’s definition: Make technology the way you want it to be!

But if you go to Wikipedia today you get:

A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Does a mashup have to be a web application? What is the role of web services? Please use the Comments to continue the debate.

Tags: Thomas Howe, mashup, Skype, Skype Mashup

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

With the first full weekend of September and lots of upcoming conference and seminar activity, we found some interesting posts over the weekend:

Andy Abramson challenges Yahoo execs to admit that "Yahoo isn't talking".

John Musser at ProgrammableWeb.com comments on an interview by Sean Ammirati at Read/WriteTalk with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about the almost dominating role of the Twitter API's in Twitter's success:

Two things that jumps out is that Biz’s comment that the API has 10x the traffic of the website and that of all that’s happened with Twitter in the past year that “the amount of activity around the API has been the most surprising experience”.

One of the three specific API's mentioned in John's post is Skype to and from Twitter. (Thanks to Julian Bond for the heads-up on this via one of our ongoing Skype Group Chats.)

Ever wonder who dominates the mobile smart phone market? Check the graph at Om's Who's Afraid of Apple & Google? Not Symbian. Seems like Nokia dominates everywhere but North America where RIM (Blackberry) and Windows Mobile share market leadership. Certainly says why the folks at SlingBox are beta testing SlingPlayer for Symbian at the moment with release expected within the next few weeks. And it will be interesting to see how the Skype ecosystem evolves in the Symbian market with IM+ for Skype, iSkoot and Fring emerging as players.

A minor bug fix release for Skype for Windows last week; from your Skype client: Help | Check for Updates.

Tags: VoIP Watch, Yahoo, Twitter, Skype to and from Twitter, Nokia, Symbian, Blackberry, IM+ for Skype, iSkoot, Fring, GigaOm, Symbian, Skype

Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In February 1996, while with Quarterdeck, I came down to my Mississauga-based office early one morning and participated in a demonstration of Quarterdeck's nascent remote collaboration tools to a market analyst presentation in London, UK (another participant was in Paris) using a whiteboarding product (which later became core to Webex's technology), a VoIP offering and IRC chat (this was a year before ICQ introduced IM). Over the past eleven years, the desktop collaboration space, pioneered by Webex, has evolved to the point where, if you can spontaneously download a small client, remote collaboration tools are available for a wide variety of applications from building customer relationships, through remote presentations and customer support, to operating an ongoing, persistent virtual enterprise conference room.

The biggest issue with the early real time collaboration offerings, aside from the widespread availability of an appropriate broadband infrastructure, was getting the voice connection right - both technologically and economically. Until a few years ago, traditional voice conferencing could result in significant phone bills - several hundred dollars for a one hour multi-party conference call, especially when the call involved overseas participants. It was a significant inhibitor to adoption of real time collaboration on a worldwide scale.

Introducing VoIP into the enterprise has significantly reduced those costs. The availability of Skype and its voice conferencing offerings (up to ten participants within Skype or several hundred through Vapps' HighSpeedConferencing.com) has significantly broadened the market for real time collaboration suites to include small-medium enterprises as well as consumer, family and special interest community conferencing. As we shall see in one instance, it also allows Skype to take a role in social networking.

Over the past week I have been evaluating a few desktop collaboration offerings that are being offered within the Skype Extras program. As a heads up my criteria for the evaluation have included:

• transparency relative to the discussion or meeting agenda
  • ease of setup and operation
  • spontaneity
• role of desktop sharing as a real time conversation mode
• emulation of a traditional enterprise conference room
• platform capability (browsers, OS's)

With respect to the last item, I use Firefox as my primary browser (IE 7 just gave me too many headaches). But I have installed the IE Tab and IE View Firefox extensions to facilitate interacting with products that require IE features. As an aside, these, along with FirefoxView, are amongst my most frequently used Firefox extensions; highly recommended for more fluid web browsing. Having these extensions installed certainly makes the evaluation much easier to execute.

As the evaluations proceed I will list the products and links here for ready reference.

• Desktop Collaboration: The Skype Ecosystem Expands
• Convenos Meeting Center: Your Conference Board Room on the Internet
• Yugma Skype Edition: Cross Platform Desktop Sharing

Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dan and friends, I'd love to speak again at the Emerging Telephony Conference. But what should I talk about? Where can I offer the most fun and value in a few minutes? Here are some first notions. 

1. Tencent's QQ - The live community you don't know, with more users and cash flow than Skype (field reporting from the world's largest online culture)

2. Rebooting: the Great Skype Blackout of 2007 - What happened and why, Skype's responses, and the community's reaction (lessons learned)

3. Voice, Presence and the Social Software Stack - Interop for the Facebook age (for architects and geeks)

4. OpenCallerID - Updating the DND Button for the Web 2.0 World (for geeks)

5. Skype for Cows - and other products you've never seen

6. 15 Ways to Compete with Skype in 15 Minutes - Based on the Skype Journal series

7. Retailing VoIP - Storefront distribution bringing VoIP to mass markets (field reporting)

8. Five companies Skype should buy this year - TBD (strategic opportunities)

9. Live Communication and Community in the 2008 Presidential Election - What the campaigns are using/abusing to competitive advantage (field reporting and use cases)

What would you enjoy? (one question survey, 30 seconds)

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saturday, September 8, 2007

GSM 20th Anniversary: Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the signing of an agreement by fifteen phone enterprises to commit to build mobile networks based on teh Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications standard.

• Today over 2.5 billion accounts use GSM
• For every 100 Britons there are 116.6 mobile connections
• It took 12 years to reach the billion account mark and 30 months to double that.

Robert Conway, head of the GSM Association is quoted:

• "The technology is a gravitational force that brings in to its orbit a huge amount of innovators."
• "The technology will be in the fabric of your clothing, your shoes, in appliances, in your car"
• "You'll pull them out of your pocket and they'll look like a map but unfold like a screen. We're now on the verge of another wave and that's going to be stimulated by mobile broadband."

It was not just coincidental that Thomas Howe, in his interview with me last week asked the rhetorical question: "What do people always have with them? Their phones"

WiFi at 300 km/hour coming soon: When traveling from Hanover, Germany to London, UK last March I took a Thalys TGV train from Cologne, Germany to Brussels, Belgium. While you could see they were building a new high speed roadbed from Cologne to the German-Belgian border at Aachen limiting train speeds to around 200 kph on the old roadbed, going at 300 kph on the completed Belgian roadbed is an interesting experience. And soon you will be able to make Skype calls from your laptop or WiFi-enabled phone while traveling on this service that runs between Cologine, Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris. Ken Camp comments:

This is bigger than another Nokia Siemens press release. It speaks directly to new mobility and ubiquity. It's an example of not one or two, but four major players, each a leader, coming together to deliver next generation services.

It will be especially interesting to see if they can succeed, given the results of attempts to implement similar services on California trains.

Changing etiquette required in the AlwaysOn Age: Texting, including Blackberrying, while driving may bring two years in the greybar hotel:, at least in the UK:

• fiddling with a satellite navigation sysem while driving
• fiddling with an MP3 music player
• texting while driving
• introducing a new category of dangerous driving for the more serious careless driving offences

Mr Smith said extreme care should be taken when deciding to prosecute a driver.

"You cannot say because someone had a mobile phone they were driving dangerously. There must be evidence they were actually posing a danger to other people."

Under the changes, motorists who cause death on the roads face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Current guidelines say manslaughter is "very rarely appropriate" in road death cases.

Tags: Thalys, Nokia-Siemens, WiFi, CalTrains, driving etiquette

Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When I received an email purportedly recommending some new social networking service via (not from) Ken Camp, my calloused sense of intuition said to me, "Ken does not take advantage of his reputation this way!" and so I simply ignored the email. Well, at least I now know that I am on some email list that Ken has (we have exchanged emails from time-to-time). He is also a Facebook Friend.

So I was not totally surprised when I saw his post today: Quechup - Rat Bastard Disease of the Internet. Read it and be warned! Now if Ken would just fire up his Skype client so I could personally thank him in writing via Skype IM for having developed such an ethical reputation.

PhoneBoy comments also.

Update: Scoble issues a warning.

Tags: Ken Camp, PhoneBoy, QuechupScoble

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of weeks, as a judge in the recently completed Skype mashup competition, I have gained not simply an awareness of some new Skype Extras candidates but also a broader awareness of the emerging "Mashup" world's environment for creating and delivering mashups. The launch of the Facebook API's a few months ago was probably a key milestone for generating a much broader awareness of the potential of mashups and experiencing mashups.

In addition to reviewing the contest entries and interacting with mashup publishers such as iotum, PamConsult and several Skype-enabled collaboration services, I spent a most interesting hour last week talking with Thomas Howe and Patrick Murphy of the newly formed Thomas Howe Company whose mission is to provide "expertise in the integration of real time communications and the business process". Also coming into the debate is Jeff Pulver's challenge for more innovation in voice services..

The challenge of mashups: When desktop publishing first came on the scene two decades ago a whole new world of "graphics amateurs" appeared on the scene creating documents that were, to say the least, somewhat ugly and violated long held rules on publishing formats, layout, etc.. Eventually desktop publishing products were adopted by graphics houses, training processes emerged in both the private and public sector and the new technology built up its own disciplines around traditional graphics production rules and the new publishing opportunities provided by this new technology. The biggest challenge in this (Skype, Google, Facebook, Google Maps, etc.) API-infused mashup world is to get back to some product management basics to develop and publish mashup-based products and services that solve a real user pain while delivering a value-add. Simply because, as Thomas Howe asserted to me, "the barrier to entry for developing a mashup has become very low" is not a sufficient justification for producing one.

The key issues in the mashup world are:

• Why create a mashup?
• What are the differing expectations for mashups?
• How are the tools for mashups evolving?
• How are mashups getting promoted?
• What is the business model for mashups?

Why create a mashup? There are two emerging high level market segments for mashups: consumer and enterprise. The former, as exemplified by several of the Skype Extras, provides broadly appealing applications, such as PamFax, which create a value-add for the Skype user. In this case publisher PamConsult has simplified the process of faxing MS Office documents anywhere worldwide. The Thomas Howe Company approaches the enterprise market by solving business process issues through the merging of voice such as to extend and support a business process. Example: one company handles six to twelve thousand voice calls a month simply to reset passwords; can this be resolved through a mashup of voice and database technology?

Is there a potential for market convergence? Will some of the consumer applications find their way into enterprises because of their cost effectiveness?

What are the differing expectations for mashups? This is an area of considerable debate. Does migrating a traditional voice application, such as Call Center management, to a VoIP-based system constitute a mashup? a Voice 2.0 application? One could argue that Skype makes the process of adding chat, conferencing, file transfer, etc. to a Call Center solution much easier and more cost effective. And a Skype-based Call Center is certainly appealing to businesses who cannot afford the six figure cost of a traditional PBX-based call center solution..

Jeff Pulver is offering to help a raw startup get going provided they can come up with "new and original ideas" and come from people currently not involved in a startup who want to "take on the status quo". His trigger was a panel discussion back in July on "Where are the VoIP Services":

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.

Thomas Howe Company focuses its efforts on looking for enterprises where the most difficult issue is to get recognition within the enterprise of the existence of a (business process) problem that can be resolved by using voice in support of a larger (and probably existing) business application.

In some sense this challenge has effectively been out there since the publication almost two years ago of Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto; at this stage we must ask:

• Why have we not already seen some "innovative" applications of the type and at the level Jeff is looking for?
• Is the entire concept of "innovative voice applications" an apparent technology in search of a problem?
• Are the criteria and expectations for innovative voice applications just too diverse or too esoteric to see an obvious answer that may be sitting in front of us?
• Why have services such as Skylook and Unyte desktop sharing seen success? Surely integration of (i) Skype into Outlook (thereby addressing a segment of the CRM market) and (ii) desktop sharing as an additional conversation mode into Skype are mashups. With revenues being generated (and, in the latter case, an acquisition), they certainly demonstrate value-add and an initially sustainable business model.
• Is Thomas Howe correct in his assertion during our interview that, aside from monetization of services through advertising (à la Google and now Facebook), enterprise solutions that bring improvements in business processes are the only sustainable business model for mashups?
• Is the evolution of high user volume social networks such as Skype, Facebook, MSN Live Messenger, MySpace a pre-requisite infrastructure requirement for successful mashups? (in the same manner that VoIP did not really evolve until broadband Internet was widely available).
• What, if any, is the difference between voice applications and voice mashups? From Thomas Howe:

From a non-technical perspective, the difference is pretty simple. Voice mashups are applications that happen to use voice. Voice applications are applications that are centered around using voice.

Using Thomas' criteria, Skype for Salesforce.com is a true voice mashup; the Salesforce.com application has existed for some time prior to the existence of Skype for Salesforce.com. Yet, it brings productivity improvements to Salesforce.com's customers.

Bottom line for expectations: Ask how a mashup can provide value-add to your activities and/or become a facilitator of your business processes.

Part II (to come): Tools, Promotion and Business Models

Resources: Programmable Web, Mashables.com

Tags: Mashup, Skype, Google, Facebook, PamFax, PamConsult, iotum, Skylook, Unyte, social networks, Salesforce.com, Skype for Salesforce.com, Thomas Howe, Thomas Howe Company

Posted by Jim Courtney at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AOL mass firings. How will they affect AIM?

when skype went down, people wrote me hoping i wasn't personally affected by the outage. huge milestone for skype: they've become a utility. -- Jack Dorsey via twitter

Skype wouldn't work for Guy Kawasaki when he tried to dial-in to speak to a class. (Guy's advising Jajah.)

Samsung created a new product category: VoIP displays. Microsoft's smartphone OS built into monitors. Showing Skype for Windows Mobile to demo a blend of computing, connectivity, video, and voice. Could this sneak Skype into the enterprise?

This faux ad for Skype is by gugacurado for a worth1000 vintage ads contest.

Via twitter...

The main reason for the relative calm was probably that, even for heavy users, Skype is a complement to their existing telecoms facilities rather than a replacement for old-style telephone equipment. So internet telephony is icing on the cake, rather than the cake itself. But if present trends continue, this situation will be reversed within a decade, in which case a Skype-type perfect storm would be a major catastrophe. - John Naughton [emphasis added]

New Zealand worries that a SkypeIn agent buys up too many phone numbers. We might have more on this soon.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a guest post by Armen Berjikly, founder and CEO of Experience Project. An expert in online trust and self-disclosure, I asked Armen to contrast web-oriented media with live conversational media.

What is the difference between self-disclosure through blog-like media vs. live IM or voice channels?

In terms of self-disclosure, the primary difference between traditional blog-like media and real-time messaging or voice chat comes down to the depth of the interaction with the audience.

With blog-like media, you have the opportunity to be highly anonymous, to ponder and edit your thoughts before sharing, to build significant context behind any given disclosure, and to reach an indefinitely large audience that will find your contribution relevant into the foreseeable future.

With live channels, you can still achieve anonymity (though voice presents a far greater risk), but the conversation is often unprepared, lacking context, and reaching an audience limited both in size and time.

As all traditional blog-authors are use only typed text, anonymity is straightforward and easy to achieve. Likewise, the opportunity to easily edit (and re-edit) content at the author's own pace provides the opportunity to truly share only what one feels comfortable making public.

Finally, once that content is public, it is easily accessible (search engines excel at archiving and organizing text), integrates with other content (as part of a series, or excerpts in another author's work), and can inspire a dialog indefinitely into the future (via commenting).

The upshot of these characteristics is that authors can share profound items, comfortable that their physical identity won't easily be discovered. In addition, their contribution will continuously reach many people -- readers who can then perhaps provide feedback, and likewise benefit from the author's own story as well. It is very reasonable that these types of contributions can even form the basis of new friendships between people who share a common understanding.

Contrast this with live media, such as instant messaging or voice communications, where the 'author' is generally more exposed than in blog-like media, either in terms of anonymity or the ability to form their thoughts. In the case of voice, the author's anonymity is more at risk since voices, both speech patterns and sound, are like fingerprints.

In both voice and in chat, editing thoughts before sharing them is more complicated since communication is immediately bi-directional and by nature, time-sensitive. You need to respond quickly or the conversation falls apart. Finally, while archiving both types of communications is certainly possible, it is less likely to serve as a reference to others in the future, or as a provocation for continued interaction.

Thus self-disclosure in 'real-time' media tends to be oriented more towards immediate problem-solving, with less surrounding context and reduced expectation for building relationships.

Are there differences when it comes to privacy or your sense of safety?

In terms of privacy, any time you express your thoughts with attributes unique to you, it potentially removes a layer of anonymity.

For example, with blog-like media, the author has the ability to achieve extreme anonymity with their audience -- reduced to a common language of typed text, their only risk of being discovered is either to mention identifying details in their content, or to demonstrate a highly unique writing style, both of which can be easily remedied with some creative editing.

While the result is often awkward, it becomes distinct enough from the author's usual characteristics to the point where identifying someone with certainty becomes highly unlikely.

When it comes to safety, the fact that it is an asynchronous, one-way conversation provides some insulation from the readership — the author can audit any interaction before responding or making it public.

With voice channels, your speech leaves a rather obvious fingerprint. It is unreasonable to try to disguise your voice, and furthermore, the generally live nature of the medium makes editing your thoughts before they are shared infeasible. On the other hand, this is a 'safer' medium in that demographic data about the other party cannot be faked — e.g., you'll generally be able to tell if the person on the other end is really a middle-aged female like their profile says they are.

IM can be extremely anonymous -- there is little to identify you inherent in the medium itself, and the staccato, time-sensitive conversations limit the audience one reaches. However, it is a very 'unsafe' medium in that there is little background, if any, on your audience members, who may be taking advantage of the anonymity to misrepresent themselves.

You can reach Armen Berjikly on Skype, by email, or at +1-650-745-1054.

About Berjikly and the Experience Project.

Armen Berjikly graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science from Stanford University. His primary research focus was Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where he worked closely with professor Clifford Nass, author of the ground-breaking HCI work, The Media Equation. He went on to obtain a Master's Degree in Management Science and Engineering, also at Stanford, with an emphasis on Organizations, Technology and Entrepreneurship. While at Stanford, Armen was chosen to be a Mayfield Fellow, a prestigious association that provided intensive training in entrepreneurship for those with an engineering background.

Armen helmed numerous successful internet startups in the past, including FileDemon-- the first meta-search engine for files, Do Everything-- the first comparison music shopping engine, and multiple online patient health communities designed to sponsor hope through research and community.

Armen's passion is building technology that efficiently unites people who can help each other. The Experience Project is the culmination of these efforts, providing a broad platform to connect new friends and ensure that no one feels alone.

Moved by the life changing Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis of one of his closest friends, Berjikly originally found Experience Project as a resource for people diagnosed with the disease as a place where they could share their experiences together in an honest, helpful fashion. He was inspired when he discovered the positive power created when people, often times perfect strangers, came together to share common life experiences. After witnessing powerful transformations and improved overall happiness and well being from his members just from connecting with people that share similar stories, Berjikly created the Experience Project to open the door to all people and all life experiences.

Berjikly is committed to growing the community organically into an always growing set of shared support tools along the journey of life. Referred to by members as the 'best kept secret online,' Experience Project membership is doubling monthly, with the community now reaching hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. Member affinity is outstanding and resonates around the theme of creating meaningful connections with new friends and finally finding a place to 'be themselves' online. Nearly 75% of the site's users are female. The ultimate mission of the Experience Project is to provide a place where no one feels alone, and perfect strangers can become good, possibly lifelong friends.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Marc Canter and friends are proposing a A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web (BORUS). These demands could certainly apply to Skype. As catchy as it is, BORUS is a shallow attempt to codify broader, deeper rights in cyberspace. It's like petitioning for the right to print an afternoon edition of the local newspaper on paper instead of fighting for Freedom of Speech with heart, guns, money and blood. So...

18 Questions to the Authors:

1. Would you apply these rights to enterprise/intranet social networks?

2. Do your rights supercede an employer's rights to manage workplace information, especially if it is to comply with laws and regulations?

3. How do we define "ownership"? Can we spell this out?

4. "activity stream of content they create" conflates two different sets of data. Do I own my "activity stream", the metadata describing my activity on the site, including which pages I visit, forms I fill out, things I click? Would this include things like web site log files? Do I own "content I create" even if it is a collaborative work?

5. Do you provide exceptions for "except to comply with the law" and "to operate our site" to the "Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others"?

6. Can we provide a model Terms Of Service that encapsulates these ideas?

7. Must these rights be transferable? What do you want to happen when a company agreeing to these rights is bought by a company that does not agree?

8. Must a company agree to provide escrow for this data, in the event of bankruptcy or takeover by an organization that does not comply with BORUS? Failing escrow, would you rather have the company commit to destroying all copies of your data than having it fall into non-BORUS hands?

9. In addition to syndication, should your host be required to keep permanent archives of your data? Some sites discard old data.

10. Should you be allowed to download your data in a documented, machine readable form? Blog services, starting with Dave Winer's Manila, have done this for years.

11. Do your rights of ownership include withdrawing public posts and public comments, even killing open public groups you may have created, should you choose to disappear from view on their site?

12. Do I have the right to edit information about me in other people's address books?

13. Which of these rights extend to groups of people or other objects I've defined in your network?

14. Is the "Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service" subject to "Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others"?

15. Does "personal information" include information about you obtained from third parties? The way credit card companies or people-search firms do? Or the way online advertising agencies do? For example, if a facebook app shows your eBay score to other people, do you have the right to compel the site to hide that otherwise public information?

16. What are "external identifiers"? Are you referring to OpenID style logins? Or my usernames in other networks?

17. Some networks, like Skype, decentralize data, making it hard or impossible to comply with some of the syndication and linking or web access clauses. Can the language be generalized?

18. Should you insist on services defaulting to privacy instead of openness when they expose profiles to public search engines?

I wrote a Desktop Bill of Rights back in 1996 to set expectations between the LSI Logic IT department and its internal customers. Communication is great, governance is better. I like Matthew Green Smith's suggestion: create a company to put a seal-of-approval on compliant services.

I agree that with Scoble that, like privacy and consumer protections, "Most people just don’t care about this." Pete Cashmore asks "Do 99% of those users on social networks care about this stuff anyway?" We'll see.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Name: "IPEVO P.O.V."

Tag line: "The webcam that sees what I see."

P.O.V. stands for: Point Of View, a cinematography term

Talking points:

• Webcam as pointing device
• Easily detachable
• Close-up mode
• Instant image sharing

Camera lifts off base so you can point to what you see, and share it over Skype.

Contoured like a pen for the hand.

Close-up mode for documents, focus adjusted by dialing the silver ring on the front.

Not sure which feature (on/off? light sensitivity?) the green button on top adjusts.

Not shipping outside of Taiwan and Japan anywhere. First shipping this winter.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

iotum introduces its Free Conference Call service for North American facebook subscribers

We've all been deluged over the summer with not only various services for making low cost mobile voice calls but also an avalanche of Facebook applications, most of which I have had a tendency to ignore. Occasionally there comes along a service that actually provides significant value-add to Facebook subscribers; in this case there has arrived on the scene today a service that extends the normally asynchronous Facebook dialogue amongst Facebook friends into synchronous real time "talk" conference sessions.

iotum, publisher of the Blackberry Talk-Now application for managing your interruptions, has launched for beta testing a new conference call service, Free Conference Call, for North American Facebook subscribers. Dan York, at Disruptive Telephony, goes through the details of a call setup but here's the summary:

• Organize, schedule and create conference calls amongst both Facebook friends and "Friends not on facebook" using full Facebook event emulation including Agenda and RSVP features..
• Call notification to other participants is via both SMS and email; participants can enter the conference directly from the SMS message.
• Uses the (mobile) phone number you register on the Free Conference Call application to capture phone numbers (Facebook applications are not allowed to use any Facebook profile contact information)
• Conference calls can be private (not announced on Facebook) or public (goes up on your Facebook profile, etc.)
• All parties call into a conference bridge in area code 218 (northern Minnesota)
• Parties are recognized by their callerID; at the moment no PIN number is required but this may become an option for security reasons.
• You can call into the bridge up to 15 minutes prior to the scheduled time.
• The service itself is free; however, there may be wireless or wireline access charges to the conference bridge, depending on your individual calling plans to these services.
• There will be advertising accompanying the SMS messages.

As for iotum's primary Relevance Engine technology: CEO Alec Saunders stated in an email today:

I know you’re probably asking “what does this have to do with the iotum Relevance Engine?”. Everything. Although our presence capabilities aren’t in the application as you will see it today, they will become part of it over time. We made a strategic decision to get to market quickly with the conferencing system, and then roll out additional features, like presence, as quickly as possible afterward. Also, later this fall the capabilities we have developed for Facebook will be re-integrated with the Talk-Now application on BlackBerry, allowing users to create instant conference calls from the BlackBerry driven by the iotum Relevance Engine. Users will be able to see at a glance who is available for a conference call, and then immediately bring all available people into that call. We’ve had interest in this feature from organizations ranging from sales groups, to political parties, IT professionals and public relations companies.

When compared with Skype's Conferencing:

• iotum's service is initially only available for participants located in North America (and is ultimately limited at the moment by access to the SMS messaging and use of callerID) whereas Skype Conference calling can be worldwide
• IM+ for Skype offers the ability to conference, from a mobile platform, worldwide (for up to five participants) via Skype but call costs will also depend on wireless access and roaming charges.
• Mobivox, with local access points-of-presence in 29 countries, provides a conferencing capability for up to 10 participants, including Skype contacts, from a mobile device.
• iotum's Free Conference Call does provide the ability to define an agenda.
• Skype Conference calls can be accompanied by chat and desktop sharing sessions.
• Skype Conference calls are limited to ten participants whereas iotum's service can handle three figure numbers although there is no interface for a "host" to manage the call (muting participants, hand raising, adding/removing participants, etc.)
• Both can include in their calls participants who are not members of the respective underlying services.
• Skype is inherently more suitable to launch ad hoc (spontaneous) conference calls; personally I find it much faster and easier to set up a Skype Conference call.
• Skype with its wide audio bandwidth will provide much better voice quality than inherently audio-bandwidth-limited mobile phones. This was born out in a couple of calls this afternoon; one via Skype with all parties using Skype, the other via Free Conference Call where two of the three parties were on a mobile device. But the latter was quite acceptable for normal conversation.
• The costs for each service are going to largely depend on your relevant wireless or landline network access charges to any infrastructure conference bridge.. For instance, from Canada, most mobile calling plans do not include long distance calls to the U.S and can result in charges of up to $0.30 per minute.

However, the bottom line is that iotum's Free Conference Call will handle calls primarily amongst networks of Facebook friends while Skype Conference Calls will largely be amongst networks of Skype Contacts. For you as an individual, these two social networks will only have the overlap that you, as the person responsible for your network of personal friends and business contacts, permit. In the end it's not only about both these social networks and but also about which overall environment you choose to use for each particular purpose.

I think a big issue with all conference call services is to get the consumer public familiar with the basic concept of low cost, multi-party conference calls. Six years ago I was paying $200 for a one hour four party conference call (often involving a conference operator).. Earlier today I set up a five party Skype conference call in about ten seconds; we conferenced for 27 minutes at no cost to any party. But the consumer is still, at best, most familiar with three party calling as a legacy PSTN service and needs a mindset "reset" when it comes to conference calling.

And to reduce those wireless or landline access charges when using Free Conference Call:

• from any Skype client call the Free Conference Call bridge number via your SkypeOut service; you are then asked to enter your mobile number and are subsequently added to the conference call (an optional PIN number requirement is on the list of futures.). This has the potential to add a security issue but only if you know the scheduled time of the call and are somehow able to access information about "private" Free Conference Calls.

Let the mobile telephony plays continue!

Update: Garrett Smith (of Smith on VoIP fame), at his new Facebook Observer blog feels that iotum's Free Conference Call "sets the bar for business Facebook applications".

PhoneBoy comments at Voice over IP weblog. (Yes, we were both, along with Dan and Phil, on the initial test calls.)

Later update: iotum CEO has posted iotum's own perspective on the key Free Conference Call features as well as links to the blogger world reaction.

Tags: iotum, Facebook, Free Conference Call, TalkNow, Blackberry, Skype, Mobivox, IM+ for Skype, SkypeOut, Dan York, Disruptive Telephony, Garrett Smith, Facebook Observer

Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Just some ideas to consider as you design the next generation of Skypeweb.

Collective presence. In which countries are members of group X in? can you show a little chart? Are half the members of this group online and available for a chat? Can we define dynamic groups based on common presence attributes, such as friends planning to travel to Prague?

Faceted presence. What is shared with Whom under Which conditions? We set up rules of disclosure, and they vary from Skype to facebook to Amazon. Can I share my rules across networks? Can those rules apply to sharing objects across networks? So my Amazon wishlist is only shared with members of my Skype contact group "family" on facebook?

Presence attributes and dimensions. Presence is much more than availability or "mood messages." Presence is the wide range of signals we send to invite communication. You start with time (availability) and space (location). Then you add intention (what you want) and context. Contexts include areas of our lives like romance, work, exercise, sport, health support, politics, etc. How do you let me articulate my interest in wanting to talk with someone about "fame's downside" before my report is due? 

Presence federation. In the simplest case, availability, can I not only aggregate presence but also syndicate it? We might look to the architecture used in weblog ping mesh syndication, part of the plumbing of RSS.

Presence prediction. While presence is all about the now, it might be useful to accurately guess someone's or some group's presence. Given what is public about a person, how well can you predict that person's status and availability?

I'll be brainstorming these and other presence and digital identity topics over the next few weeks with friends and strangers at these events:

• Office 2.0 Conference and Unconference
  5-7 September, San Francisco, California
• Portable Social Network Hosted Conversation,
  September 7, San Francisco
• Marc Canter's Data Sharing Summit and the SocialNetworkDevCamp,
  Sept. 7th-8th, Richmond
• Web 2.0 Summit,
  October 17-19, San Francisco

If you're in the Bay Area this week, look me up. My mobile is +1-510-206-1138 and I'm on Skype too.

I'm putting together a list of thought leaders on this topic. If you'd like me to put together a one or two day presence workshop, I can do that too.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Preetam Rai took the photo on the right at the Cambodian Blogger Summit in Phnom Penh. In this case, Fulbright Scholar Kalyan Keo was Skyping in from Syracuse, New York.

See the same behavior at the Eahil conference (10th European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries) in CLuj-Napoca, September 2006.

Or at the MacFair in Cerritos College, California, where a speaker Skyped in from New Zealand.  

The Speaker-Skypes-To-Conference use case (design jargon: "use case" is a common pattern for how some people use a product) has best practices:

1. Turn other software off on both computers. You don't want Outlook to slow Skype down or alerts to pop-up in mid conversation.
2. Test the connection.
3. Test the webcam.
4. Test you can hear the speaker. Try to test the audio in the auditorium, including any public announcement or other speaker system. You are checking for feedback and noise.
5. Test the speaker can hear the audience. When you use "sound reinforcement" (where the stage and audience use microphones) assure the laptop has audio-in connected and working and at the right levels.  
6. Assure you have enough light on you (the speaker) so you show up in full color. Light helps the camera.
7. Display the speaker with video at full screen. Spare the audience looking at your desktop's wallpaper.
8. Put a webcam on the conference laptop. Point it at the audience. So the speaker can see the audience. This really helps speakers. If you have a wide-angle setting, turn that on too.

Most Commonly Mentioned Benefits:

• Speakers presenting who would not be available otherwise.
• Lower cost to speakers/organizers.
• Fast and Free, except for projector and speaker rental.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

A simple mashup: Skype + mobile phone + speech recognition + Media Player:

Idlearts' SpeakMediaPro:

• answers your SkypeIn call 
• you speak the titles you want to hear
• Windows Media Player plays the music to you through Skype

The Idlearts gang developed their SpeakMediaASR speech recognition engine for use with assistive technology. Here, they're using their Skype plug-in to promote the engine (free trial, $40 purchase).

Like the Robodance extra, SpeakMediaPro uses Skype as a voice communications platform. In a world where time-to-market matters, Skype's APIs are an easy entrée to VoIP, PSTN, secure data transfer and lots of other goodies. 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Can't wait for these folks to enter Robodance in the next Skype mashup competition. The Robodance Skype plug-in (expected in November 2007) lets you control your robot at a distance over the Internet. Robodance:  

• Answers incoming Skype calls
• Connects the local PC to the robot via a local infrared connection
• Passes the robots video to Skype, so you see what your robot sees
• Listens for commands and translates them into signals to your robot

They show their architecture and describe the project. Sign up for the Robodance mailing list. 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)