Skype Developer Event New York City
Late this past Monday afternoon, VAPPS, Inc., operator of the High Speed Conferencing service, sponsored a Skype Developer Event at Soho House in the West Village of New York City (Lower Manhattan). Given that the Skype Developer Program has been in flux for the previous few days, there was certainly interest in hearing about the direction of the program.
At the event itself Peeter "Wolli" Mõtsküla announced that, having informed his wife the previous Monday that he would not be traveling any more in 2007, he was informed Thursday that he was becoming the Interim Director of the Skype Developer Program. As a result he was still getting his head around putting a direction to the program but could speak about the development roadmap that was first announced in Prague in September. Basically he reported delays in reaching this quarter's objectives for new API's and that he would be providing an updated roadmap by the end of January, once he had had more time to give a full assessment to what could reasonably be accomplished on the API front going forward.
Antoine "Ants" Bertout is continuing and expanding his role as the Developer Relations Manager, remaining in London, acting as the interface between the Developers in Tallinn and the Partners. Antoine outlined a few of his objectives but was more importantly meeting partners individually over the three days of his New York stay to get one-on-one dialogs going with each partner.
We then had presentations from:
Jerry Norton, CTO of VAPPS, who spoke of the path VAPPS had take in producing their HighSpeedConferencing service supporting three to 500 participants on a conference call, accessed via Skype and/or the PSTN.. Its most recent update was the introduction of HD Voice to provide wideband audio to all those conference call participants using Skype for access. As they had just launched their new service, they were eagerly awaiting their first two months' results to get a full picture of their progress. To Nov. 30 they had over 30,000 downloads of the new version of their client; the challenge now is to turn them into paying customers as the 30-day trials expire.- Murem Sharpe, CEO of Evoca, spoke about turning voice into a flexible digital asset from any "phone", whether mobile, landline or Skype
- Three new product introductions: including InnerPass, Mary Stuyvesant at Emotive, who bought a round to hold the crowd's interest in her presentation on RingJacker, a tool for generating custom ring tones, licensed by Hollywood producers, and Zlango, a universal icon language.
- Somewhere in there Boaz Zilberman of Fring brought us up to date on this IM aggregator for mobile devices.
Some pictures are above. I am withholding my comments on the program until I have completed an interview with Stem Tamkivi, in his role as GM for the Skype Estonia office as well as GM for e-commerce, for his perspectives on the Skype Developer Program.
Tags: Skype, Skype Developer Program, Peeter Mõtsküla, Antoine Bertout, Jerry Norton, VAPPs, HighSpeedConferencing, Murem Sharpe, Evoca, InnerPass, Mary Stuyvesant, Emotive, RingJacker, Zlango, Boris Zilberman, Fring
