PC Magazine sponsored The Best (and Worst) Tech Support in America, a customer support satisfaction survey for VoIP service providers, among other categories.

Methodology: They surveyed PCmag readers who were also customers of Optimum Voice, Vonage [congratulations on the new CEO gig, Mr. Lefar], AT&T CallVantage, magicJack, Time Warner Cable digital phone, Comcast Digital Voice and Skype. Dashes indicate insufficient data for meaningful results.

Skype's ratings were within 10% of average. A little below on overall satisfaction, sound quality, connection reliability, and support for non-technical issues. A little above on ease of setup.

But there's a remarkable statistic at the bottom of the table. 

7% of SkypeOut users needed technical support vs. 2% of PC-to-PC users. This is an order of magnitude lower than the 25% of users from the other services. On SkypeOut that's 360% better, on PC-to-PC that's 1250% better.

Only 1 in 50 PC-to-PC Skype users ever need tech support. 1 in 4 for other other services.

How does Skype score so well with such a small support staff?

Design. Engineering. Testing.

"It just works."

More on Skype's designs to improve "Ease of Setup" soon.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday eBay released their quarterly financial results, including an update on Skype usage. This chart presents the trend lines over the past year.

The only other information that came out in the call:

• Over 25% of all Skype-to-Skype calls involve video
• Skype is "double-digit" profitable (along with PayPal)

Comments:

• It is apparent that the MySpace agreement contributed to the accelerated growth in Q4-07.
• For the first time, during this quarter, the daily growth volume itself has dropped off.
• While Skype-to-Skype minutes tracked along with increased accounts in the previous two quarters, why have the growth of these minutes dropped significantly to 4% in a quarter where new account registrations rose by 9%? (And the Skype-to-Skype minutes growth rate itself dropped off significantly.)
• This usage level is consistent with the fact that concurrent online users still has not passed 13 million at its daily peak, yet grew significantly from 10 to 12 million in the previous quarter.
• U.S. revenue growth has definitely stalled; yet international continues to move forward.

But here is the big question:

Continue reading "Skype's FY08-Q2 Results ... Generates a Significant Question" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The beginning of the year began very promising concerning the concurrent Skype users online. In a speed record of 42 days we passed from 11 million to 12 million people online at peak time [18 January 2008 - 7 February 2008].

As my regular readers know, there are some fluctuations, resulting in less people online at:

• “GMT”-night
• Weekends
• National holidays of bigger Skype countries (USA, Brasil, UK, …)
• Christmas and New Year Period
• Northern Hemisphere Summer Period

The graph below represents my samples of concurrent people online since the early beginning of Skype, and it seems we are entering in summer recession.

• The points marked 1, 2, 3 and 5 are the Northern Hemisphere summer periods of 2005 till 2008.

• The vertical line “4” represents the huge outage of August last year.

The next “million milestone” will most probably not be reached before September. This is deceptive. Indeed, the promising “start of the year” mentioned above seems to have been a “one shot”.

All the new “features” added by Skype in the last months, including the caller ID number recognition launched some weeks ago were not spectacular enough to attract bunches of new users. This doesn't mean those features were not nice. I would even say the Skype client has improved in the last months: less bugs, more stability, better quality.

Skype continues to grow; of this I am quite sure. But not at the same speed as their best year, 2006, where almost 4 million “peak concurrent users” online were added! Let’s us meet in September again to witness the 13 million milestone.

Jean Mercier, the Skype Numerologist, is on his own family holiday in Brazil.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ecosystem upgrades...

PrettyMay Call Center for Skype just released version 3.0 for Windows. $150 for five operators, $500 for unlimited. Up to 30 simultaneous calls. Auto-attendant, IVR, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), call recording, and voicemail. Free trial.

Extralabs Skype Recorder updated to 2.0.

Review of the VoSKY Web Click-to-Call application by VoIP-News' Robert Poe. Good writeup VoSKY Exchange is not just for phone switches any more.

Skype for Mac with Quicksilver trick still works. via Walkah.

People in motion...

Skype's Audio/Video team is hiring a statistical analyst in Tallinn to help Skype understand real and perceived call quality. There are 42 more published openings at Skype: 27 in Tallinn, 8 in London, 5 in Prague, 5 in Stockholm, 2 in Luxembourg. None in the Americas or Asia/Pacific.

Tokoni story sharing service launched by former Skype president, Alex Kazim

Skype Nomad arrived in New York City this morning.

The human factor drives technology...

Take Your Team to India, says Stuart Henshall. You will learn about the future of mobility in the slums and malls of Mumbai. He also finds iPhone lust is global.

Long DataPortability.org thread on data portability for banking. When you move from one bank to another, should you be able to bring your entire history with you, so third-party analytics (Mint, Intuit) can help you better manage your money? What can we learn from this use case? Bank customers place high premiums on privacy, detailed data, auditability, completeness.

Report on Malaysian Internet use. "77% of IM users communicate on MSN/Windows Live Messenger and 57% on Yahoo! Messenger. Yahoo! Messenger is also significantly more popular amongst Malay internet users with a 56% reach." Meanwhile Yahoo! puts off its annual meeting until July.

While the dark side continues to creep...

Yet more evidence that pseudonymous blogger a1gjv knows nothing about software development yet opines about Skype's.

Astaro promotes fear-of-Skype to sell its network security appliance.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You can find almost everything on the Internet. The information is not always reliable but you can eliminate the scrap by comparing different sources.

I made a search of world population by time zone, but no site provided me with the complete picture. You can find many sites with population by country, and you can find sites with the population by region and/or time zone in a specific country (Russia, Canada, Brazil, USA, and some others). Wikipedia is often a very good information source. I even found the information concerning some smaller islands.

Then I plotted the following graph: those countries and regions that are simultaneously living between “9:00 AM and 23:00 PM” or in other words the sum of people who are “awake.” See the green curve below (left scale).

For instance: at 0 GMT, you have about 4 billion people awake at the same time (and a lot of Chinese people and other Asians), and at 15:30 GMT you have 6 billion people awake, in fact almost everybody, less the relatively scarcely populated Pacific Zone.

The blue curve (right scale) is the daily fluctuation of concurrent Skype users online in a typical day some months ago. The curves have similar shapes. But, the Asian peak is much higher in the world population chart (beware, scales are different!).

Why the difference? In Asia fewer people have access to Internet. This probably explains why the Skype “Asian peak” is proportionally much lower then the “People Awake” curve.

What if I had the Internet users by time zone? Would that bring the curves closer to each other?

Well, I dug deeper, and found data about the Internet users by country, but “less” exploitable. I had to make, for instance, the “probably” false guess that Internet penetration in Russia is the same all over the whole country.
Here is the graph:

Almost the same shape as the previous one.

What if I had only the broadband users by country and region? Would that graph come closer the Skype graph? Pity, I didn’t find reliable complete data by country yet!

Regular Skype Journal contributor Jean Mercier keeps track of Skype Numerology.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A VON.x General Session on Real-Time Social Communications this past Tuesday afternoon turned largely into a discussion of the impact of video on social communications. With panelists such as Robert Scoble (now with FastCompnay.tv), Brad Hunstable (founder of Ustream.tv), Ramu Sunkara (CEO of Qik.com) and Loic LeMeur (CEO of Seesmic) effectively representing broadcast streaming video, Skype's Jonathan Christensen (3rd from right) was the lone representative with the perspective of one-to-one video conversations. Jeff Pulver, right, was the session moderator.

But within this milieu Jonathan was able to make some interesting points:

• While Oprah had been using Skype High Quality Video for two sessions of her weekly "A New Earth" classes, for the first time she used it for about five minutes this past Monday during her regular late afternoon show to promote that evening's third session.
• 30% of all Skype-to-Skype calls include use of video.

Continue reading "Jonathan Christensen Provides More Skype Insight at VON.x Panel" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tamás Henning on the Skype Forums has initiated a survey asking "In how many group chats are you participating?" If you participate in at least one Group Chat or Public Chat, add your vote.

Two super heavy users have put up a response to day they are in 40 to 100 chats. And we thought heavy Twitter users were addictive. But in these cases it is helping their Skype business activities become more productive.

Another has commented "The amount of irrelevant chat outweighs what the chat was originally started for". Skype Group/Public Chat provides two tools for managing that situation. A designated Host can make and enforce the rules, including:

1. Set the Topic to Establish a reference point for any discussion
2. Make a participant "Read Only"
3. "Eject and Ban" one who does not "get it".

Following these guidelines has kept discussion on topic and focused on Skype Journal's "Skype 3.x discussion" Public Chat which has been active since the introduction of Public Chat last May. And there are eleven designated Hosts who will enforce these guidelines at any hour of the day.

Tags: Skype, Skype Public Chat, Skype Group Chat

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Hudson Barton, guest blogger

The two most noticeable long-term sub-trends or anomalies in Skype growth, as measured by "concurrent users" are:

1. Underperformance of Asian usage in comparison to American and European usage.

2. Outperformance of weekend usage in comparison to weekday usage.

The first anomaly may be already correcting itself. Asian growth is fairly strong this year so far. Notwithstanding the nearly two weeks during the Chinese New Year celebrations when Skype usage in the Pacific Rim dropped almost out of sight, growth of Asia's "real users" in 2008 has been unexpectedly strong, reversing the trend of the prior 3 years. "Real users" is a measurement that marks both actual Skype users and their average time logged into Skype. It is too early to tell for sure whether the trend will continue but this has to be welcome news for Skype; proof that registrations of new Skype names eventually turns into real customers.

The second anomaly is not correcting itself. Here we are essentially looking at the usage of Skype in America and Europe and comparing growth rates during the midday when we expect weekday usage to be weighted far more heavily toward businesses than weekend usage when we expect Skype users will be logged in for mainly personal and recreational purposes. What we see very plainly is that Skype is growing more rapidly as a general communications tool than as a specifically business communications tool. There could be several reason for this, and the measurement technique is not precise enough to know what the truth is:

• One guess is simply that the general market for VOIP is growing faster than the business market.

• Another possibility is that Skype is doing well in both general and business markets, but better in general markets.

• Lastly, it is possible (but not likely) that Skype is actually doing poorly in business markets, and that other VOIP carriers are having more success.

Observations about Skype growth from the perspective of "real users" are made regularly on The Borderless Communicator blog.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jean has pointed out the crossing of 12 million concurrent users online earlier today. And Skype finally released a number that won't help the investment analysts: Skype usage has passed the 100 billion minute mark. So what has the blogsphere said?

• Eric Schonfeld at Tech Crunch seems to have a minute-to-call converter with a 1:1 ratio. But nowhere do I see Skype giving out the average number of minutes per call.
• Villu Arak at Skype has looked up other milestones that use the number 100 billion.
• Jon Arnold notes both milestones and comments:

Skype may have its share of challenges, but they have definitely taken telephony where it's never been before, and of course are trying to do the same now with video. You only hit 100 billion once, and it's a great testament to what Niklas and Janus started only a few years ago, and I'd say it's definitely worthy of recognition. And for what it's worth, I've used Skype more today than I have in ages, so in my very small way, I'm helping the cause.

But let's get one number straight: 276 million accounts have been registered since day one, not 276 million users. There are lots of reasons to have multiple accounts and I can see more as Skype movers towards 0.2  trillion minutes of calling time.

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype reached around 19h GMT 12 million concurrent users online on Monday, this for the first time ever. It went from 11 to 12 million in 42 days.This is an absolute speed record. The previous record million “speed” was 63 days in March 2006.

In the past the peaks were somewhere between 16h and 17h GMT. Now it occurs about two hours later. This shows a recent growth in the Americas. Or, in other words, they are catching up with the usage rate of the Europeans.

And when will Asia catch up? When it does, we should see lesser fluctuations of the number of concurrent users online between day and night, or at least a change in the patterns of the curve.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At noon EST (GMT-5) today Skype had almost 11.2 million users online. This has been a relatively fast ramp up, given that the 10 million users online level was crossed just under four weeks ago at the beginning of CES 2008. Have to wonder if it's partly the impact of the MySpace implementation. Of note is that Hudson Barton figures that the number of "real users" has increased by 2.4 million in January.

Following up on a CES 2008 announcement, on Tuesday, Sony released a system software update for its PlayStation Portable PSP-2000 (version 3.90) that includes a Skype client. I had a Skype conversation with someone using this new offering and found it to have excellent quality voice. It does require that you be in a WiFi zone along with a PSP headse, the Remote Control and a Memory Stick Duo. This edition of Skype provides voice only that also allows SkypeOut calls. See the video at the link above for a demonstration. No keyboard, no chat.

 Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ipoque reports today:

VoIP isn't a bandwidth threat:

Voice over IP (VoIP) only accounts for one percent of the Internet traffic, but is used by 30 percent of all users.

While many other VoIM and VoIP products include voice and video talk, apparently Skype (with 95% share) is the one people choose for calling:

Skype is by far the most popular Internet telephony application.

Culture and costs change behavior:

The popularity of instant messaging (IM) varies heavily from region to region. In the Middle East, 60 percent of all Internet users also use IM, in Germany, however, it is only 17 percent.

Do people substitute between IM and mobile texting, depending on availability and cost?

Ipoque makes products that examine and manage network traffic for ISPs and large enterprises. Source for this report:

Three petabytes of anonymous data representing over one million users in Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe have been analyzed.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I read the following Interfax China article by Chen Shasha: China becomes Skype's biggest market with 51 million users, yet to make profit, based on information from Skype partner TOM Online.

China Internet Statistics:

• 162 million users as of June 2007
• 122 million broadband users
• 55 million wireless internet
• 54.9% Internet users are male
• 57.9% are unmarried
• 51.2% are under 25 years old
• The majority of Internet users have at least a college diploma.
• 36.7% are students
• 25.3% are enterprise staff
• 33.9% earn more than 1500 yuan a month
• 53.6% earn more than 1500 yuan a month if student users are left out.

China Internet Cafés in 2005:

• China has 110,000 Internet cafés [Editor: anecdotal evidence suggests this number may be closer to 300k cafes if you include unregistered sites]
• more than 1 million people work in this industry
• 18.5 trillion Yuan per year spent
• 70% Internet café visitors are 18-to-30 years old
• 90% are male
• 65% unmarried
• 54% hold a college degree
• More than 70% of visitors play computer games
• 20% of China's Internet users go to Internet cafés

Like I do usually, let us assume the numbers are correct, this would mean that:

• 20% of the active Worldwide Skypers are from China
• 3.9% of the population of China are Skypers
• 5.4% of the "active" population of China are Skypers (discounting people older than 65 years, and younger than 14 years)
• 34% of Chinese Internet users are Skypers

Bear in mind that the second, third and fourth numbers above are very exaggerated.

As usual, let me correct this statement: they mean "registered user names,"not "registered users", and this isn't equal to "active users".

Reasons are:

• lost password, and therefore inaccessible user name, therefore the need to create a new user name
• testing Skype, and abandoned use of the user name
• spare user names, registered for alternative or future use (i have several!)
• the owner of the user name died (yes, this also happens!)
• the person switched to another VoIP tool
• the person registered a temporary name for a temporary past situation
• spammers also register multiple usernames to "attack" their victims

So, like always, this 51 million "users" statement is marketing exaggeration!

Jean Mercier follows the numbers on Skype Numerology.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a very interesting comment of Sascha Vitzthum on a previous post, and I distilled the following graph out of it:

According to eBay …

"Direct contribution consists of net revenues from external customers less direct costs. Direct costs include specific costs of net revenues, sales and marketing expenses, and general and administrative expenses over which segment managers have direct discretionary control, such as advertising and marketing programs, customer support expenses, bank charges, site operations expenses, product development expenses, billing operations, certain technology and facilities expenses, transaction expenses, provisions for doubtful accounts, authorized credits and transaction losses. Segment managers do not have discretionary control over expenses such as our corporate center costs …"

This means Skype had a 15% contribution compared to revenue in the last quarter. This is quite OK. From the graph we also see that 2007 will be probably the first year that Skype contributes really to eBay’s profitability.

Jean Mercier also contributes to Skype Numerology.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Facebook is no nirvana for VoIP services; six month total Facebook VoIP installations = 1.5 days' of Skype account registrations.

A real life Skype Conference Call experience: Last Friday, a situation arose while talking to a vendor in the Toronto area where I needed to introduce into the call a prospect at her office in San Diego, who, in turn, asked me to add a colleague on her Blackberry in San Francisco. For a variety of reasons, while all three participants had Skype accounts, at this point in time, all three were most readily accessed via the PSTN (requiring SkypeOut to all three parties). To add the San Diego and San Francisco contacts to my initial SkypeOut call I simply went to the "Add Callers" menu item in my active Call tab, entered each phone number and clicked on the Start button. In each case the addition to the Skype conference call was completed in less than a minute, required no additional action on the part of the party being added and we could focus on the business discussion at hand.

Bottom line: dead easy simple!

• Totally an ad hoc call.
• No conference call operators, no call back,
• No dialing into a central conferencing switch (with potential for long distance charges)
• No action required by the other participants other than to answer their ringing phones.
• No cost! (I am on the North America Unlimited Plan.).
• Technology transparent to the call.
• And achieved our business objective for the call.

In summary: An excellent user experience.

So what's the future for VoIP on Facebook?

Over the past few days lots has been written about the adoption of VoIP applications on Facebook. Launched by a link post from Stuart Henshall, Alec Saunders has elaborated with some statistics, and Jon Arnold has discussed. Om, in On Facebook, VoIP Has a Sore Throat, has the most interesting statistics provided by Ryan Nitz, CTO of Deft Labs, publisher of AppHound.

When Nitz ran queries using the keywords Skype and VoIP, AppHound found that the combined installs for all VoIP applications was 435,481, with 11,615 daily users. That’s about 2.7 percent. (See chart for the full breakdown.)

Check out the table in Om's post: CallMe on Skype leads with 110,650 of those "installs"; SkypeMe, under 4,000.

But here are some Skype numbers that put the whole picture in perspective:

Continue reading "Reality Check: Use the Skype Client for Real Time Conversations" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Regulation in Europe

EC proposals for VoIP emergency dialing. The EC will require Skype to connect 999 calls. Analysys' James Allens comments  "Under the new proposal, if a user can call telephone numbers at all, calls to the emergency services must be possible. This will mean that VoIP services such as Vonage and SkypeOut will need to support such calls, and this will no longer be optional."

is Apple's iPhone exporting the idea of a locked mobile from the US to the UK?

The New Video

UK's Bebo opens up to video entertainment distributors. No charge. Public protocols. Sharable content on personal pages. via The Hollywood Reporter.

Yahoo! Messenger is doing the same thing, with in-chat video. 

Windows is no more! Skype for Linux with video was the last thing foobar needed to remove Microsoft Windows from his dual-boot laptop.

Education

Estonia university teaches via Skype. For those Finns who want to avoid the ferry to Tallina Ülikool. Or for English speakers learning Estonian. via cafebabel.

This is part of a larger trend, Tom Regan reports in CSM. For the United States:

• 1 in 5 higher education students is now taking at least one class online.
• In the fall of 2005, 3.18 million students were taking online courses
• In the fall of 2006, 3.5 million. That's more than twice as many (1.6 million) as in 2002.
• The 9.7 percent annual growth rate for online enrollments from 2005-06 far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population for that period.
• 47 percent of high school students are interested in taking courses online that aren't offered at their schools.

Skype Ecosystem

IPEVO publishes Mac software for its USB Skype phones. Get Mac drivers and apps for the IPEVO Free.1, Free.2, XING, and TRIO.

Skype using On2 Technologies' latest video codecs, now for Skype for Windows 3.6's advanced video calls. On2's TrueMotion VP7 enables an 8-fold increase in video data rate over previous calls.

Fun fact: About 25 percent of all Skype-to-Skype calls involve at least one video participant.

Competition

AOL and Google now peer for Instant Messaging. via Google Operating System.

TUAW reports Microsoft will upgrade Messenger for the Mac to 7.0, part of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac.

Yahoo! Korea and LG Telecom bring web services to mobiles. Mobile versions of Flickr, News, Mail and Messenger. It's the Messenger that should catch Skype's attention. That and the overall convergence of communication tools. LG is also offering a Cyworld phone.

Trends

The 3 Skypephone seems to be selling out in some UK stores. More inventory to come for this weekend.

Dean Bubley predicts 250 million users of VoIP over 3G by 2012. More data over wireless means more opportunities for Skype and the operators' own versions of Skype.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week we reached for the first time 10 million concurrent Skype users online. Completely to my surprise, this week we went over 10.270.000 users online. This is an increase of 2.5% in one week!

Is the deal with MySpace already harvesting new Skype Users? Perhaps, because i noticed also an increase in the number of downloads of the Skype client! The download speed is twice as high as some weeks ago.

Below I published the updated graph of the evolution of users online since the beginning of Skype in August 2003 (my data samples).

Users online fluctuate during the day, week and months, but reach now sometimes 10 million users online, and never go below 4 million users online (see the two blue curves, representing "upper" and "lower" limits of users online over the last 4 years). Some reasons for the fluctuations are:

• At night some people log off;
• During the weekend, fewer people are online;
• Holiday periods (summer, New Year, other public holidays) are also "bad" for the online number.

Although the growth of users online has been strong the last two weeks, I still don’t believe we will reach the 11 million mark this year!

Jean Mercier keeps count at Skype Numerology.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I included Mobivox as one route to call your Skype contacts from any of the 3.5 billion conventional phones out there, whether landline or mobile (including the iPhone and Blackberries). I had the opportunity to get an update on Mobivox and its user demographics in a discussion with Mobivox CEO Stephane Marceau.

Their big news last week was the announcement of an $11 million financing round involving not only their original investors but adding in new Asian investors. The interest of Asian investors was aroused when Mobivox was able to point out that they were finding significant Mobivox usage by Asians. In fact, their top six countries for usage are: U.S., U.K., China, India, Canada, Germany and Israel. Funds are to be used for both marketing and development of new features and services.

Another interesting statistic arising out of their user base demographics is that over 20% of their users are over 55. Seems like Mobivox is being used to close family connections where the senior generation can easily make calls via Mobivox from any familiar telephone device, whether at home or traveling. Often they find a younger generation registering their parents.

Recently they also added the capability to launch calls via either SMS or a web interface -- especially useful for making calls from countries not included in their base of 40 countries with access points.

Goals for the next year include simplifying the user experience and more advanced features that leverage speech as a user interface. (Recall that Mobivox works by dialing an access number and then speaking a "registered" contact name to the VoxGirl who then makes the connection; speech recognition is one of their core technologies.)

Just to recall, beyond any carrier charges to reach an access point, calls between Mobivox subscribers or from a Mobivox user to a Skype user are free; while calls to conventional phones have rates dependent on the termination country, starting at 1.9 cents/minute to Canada, U.S., China and many European countries' landlines. And they offer a first time free 10 minutes to encourage user trial.

Note: Mobivox CEO Stephane Marceau will be amongst the panelists at a session, Going Mobile with Skype - Beep, Beep, at VON Boston in ten days.

Saunderslog: Mobivox and Truphone: What kind of mobile user are you?

Tags: Mobivox, Skype

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At today's eBay earnings conference call with analysts, eBay CEO Meg Whitman reported with respect to Skype:

• Higher revenues and ongoing operating profitability for Skype in Q3
• Less pleased with user metrics: flat (SkypeOut) or declining (Skype) usage minutes
• Earnout placed the wrong incentives on how Skype should grow its business
• Not enough focus on "Delight the User"
• Confidence in Skype as a long term investment
• New CEO search has generated strong interest from candidates both inside and outside eBay, largely due to the Skype brand

The Earnout's Consequences

In response to questioning from an analyst, Meg responded that the earnout effectively placed focus on meeting revenue and gross profit objectives at the expense of attracting and engaging users. Her summary statement: "we tried to monetize Skype too early", especially when Skype's original value proposition was "you can talk for free". She specifically mentioned user interfaces and customer support as areas that had suffered as a result of the earnout focus; in addition, profits at Skype had actually exceeded their original 2007 business plan. But they had dropped too much profitability to the bottom line instead of focusing on using their unexpected profits in 2007 to drive early user engagement through additional investments in marketing and customer support.

She certainly expressed relief that eliminating the earnout meant they could move forward by doing the things that are really required to build the business such as improving the user experience, driving user adoption and developing new products and features.

Personally my observation with earnouts is that they fail to create the win-win situation all parties think they are heading towards at the time of an acquisition. The goals in earnouts tend to defocus from the goals needed to truly build a business and create disincentives to innovation and team building somewhere along the line. My speculation: a big part of Skype's problems probably can be tied to the fact very few internal employees, especially at the management level, had any direct interest in the earnout. Yet I have to say that Skype employees I have met are self-motivated by knowing that they can make a difference in their users' lives through inexpensive real time conversations.

Going Forward

While my Skype Primer series has provided significant background on where Skype is today, going forward Skype has three key assets:

• Strong brand recognition
• Significant new product development and partner relationships
• A very keen, enthusiastic employee base

I have found these three factors have been the foundation for successful reorganizations in the past; ineffective baggage has been discarded; the new CEO can start with a clean slate. Analysts are more interested in knowing that processes, such as eBay's annual strategic planning exercise over the summer, were in place to facilitate the decision to make changes as opposed to arbitrary, irrational decision making. The challenge now is for eBay's board to select the right CEO.

Earlier Meg had stated the overall objectives for Skype going forward would include:

• Prioritize resources
• Refocus the team
• Ensure Skype users will continue to enjoy and benefit from "this great technology"
• Renew efforts at finding synergy with eBay and PayPal
• Make Skype available across many platforms (such as MySpaceIM)

As for eBay's divesting its interest in Skype, forget it. Get ready for the ride.... may the incentives and atmosphere for innovation at Skype be restored.

Posted by Jim Courtney at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

After listening to the 2007 Q3 eBay investor's conference call...

Start with a Skypeku:

Users calling less
losing traction for a year
Skype's mojo falling

From 9.1 to 7.5 billion minutes per quarter, an 18% drop of 1.6 billion minutes this year.

Another Skypeku:

Ghostly Skype accounts
dilute per capita stats
how many active?

Skype's "number of user accounts" include accounts of dead people, abandoned accounts, space aliens, defections. 

"Simultaneous accounts connected to the Skype network" is more meaningful, closer to "active user accounts." Out of everything, simultaneous online is the only metric that seems to be improving. And this last million of growth is the slowest since the first million.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, as confirmed to me by a couple of Contacts, and more recently by Skype PR, Skype, for the first time passed 10 million users concurrently online. That's about seven (7) Estonias or almost the combined population of Estonia and Sweden.

What has been also noticeable the past couple of weeks is that this number remains above 9 million well into the North American Eastern time zone afternoon. The count on the right was captured at 1408h EDT (1808 GMT) today.

In a few hours we will see the third quarter results for eBay with the limited information regularly provided about Skype. We can easily speculate that there will be over 240 million Skype accounts registered but we also know these accounts go stale over time (especially now that Skype is over four years old); there are multiple accounts for a single user, along with other reasons to question the actual number of active accounts.

At this point it would be most helpful to analysts and shareholders if eBay would divulge Skype numbers along the lines of what is revealed by the legacy telcos, such as number of Skype users who actually made at least one call during the past quarter, number of subscribers to revenue services, such as SkypeIn/SkypeOut/Voice Mail, Unlimted North American Calling and SkypePro, and % of revenue that comes from each of communications services, hardware royalties and software-related revenues (licensing and royalties).

Skype is playing with the big boys in terms of usage; time to play with them in terms of reporting. Rather than providing information which, in any event, would be of minimum value to competitors, of overriding importance is that providing these numbers could be a stimulus to increased usage, especially in the small-to-medium business sector.

And, at 1437 EDT, there are still 9,673,000 online.

Tags: Skype, eBay

Posted by Jim Courtney at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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):

Continue reading "Skype Refreshed ... And Looking Beyond Being a Telco" »

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

Back up to 8.6 million on Monday.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yep. As of a few minutes ago, 1.3 million Skype users were connected to the Skype network. I've been watching them come back over the last 90 minutes, but the number is growing rapidly now.

UPDATE 1: Thursday 0800 Pacific: 1.8 million online. 500,000 people reconnected in 3 hours.

UPDATE 2: Thursday 0825 Pacific: 2.5 million online. See chart snapshot below.

UPDATE 3: Friday 1030 Pacific: 3.5 million online. Connections remain intermittent but some users report drop outs are shorter and less frequent.

Look at the week as a whole to see the "overnight dip" and the short staggers as each time zone goes/leaves work. This might explain the five hour fall and recovery that started about 12 hours ago.

UPDATE 4: Friday 1445 Pacific: 5 million online. Five million simultaneous on a Friday afternoon in the US is not bad. The network is growing back more slowly than it crashed (about six hours to fail down, maybe 24-30 hours to propagate back up).

UPDATE 5: Friday 2015 Pacific: Spike up to 6 million, fall to 4 million. Download rate levels off as Skypers stop trying to solve connection problems by updating their software.

UPDATE 6: Saturday 0700 Pacific: Skype clients connected to the network falls overnight to 4 million but rises again to 6 million as Europe and the Americas come online.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Courtesy of Nyanyan via Skype Numerologist Jean Mercier.

If you've never seen this chart before, the number of people simultaneously connected to the Skype network fluctuates through the day and over the weekend. Downloads are up as people try to fix the outage from their end.  Here's a close-up:

Flatline at one million simultaneous users. Time zone for the chart is Tokyo time, JST+9.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Ike Roelfsema, Skype's Head of Forum Operations, has brought my attention to a survey of Skype users being carried out by an Estonian M.Sc. student who wants to understand "Skype users' attitudes, behavioural intentions and their response to influence of other users or experts in relation to the Internet telephone Skype".

While I felt a bit conflicted answering some of the questions about the impact of Skype blogs, I completed it to understand what it was about. As day-to-day Skype users, you, our readers, are in a better position to provide a broad cross-section of opinions. The survey takes about ten minutes to complete and is largely multiple choice.

Go for it here! Hat tip to Jean Mercier for uncovering this.

Posted by Jim Courtney at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Starting from about 18 million US users at the beginning of 2007, Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger picked up 4.3 million more from February through May. That's a healthy clip, 23% in four months.

Microsoft credits some of this growth its cause marketing program, "i'm", which shares WLM ad revenue with ten US charities. With the "i'm making a difference" tag line, Microsoft invites users to put one of ten charities' codes into their display name, with money going to that cause with each message. Microsoft is promising each cause will receive $100,000, for a total of $1 million paid out in the first year of the program.

At reported acquisition rates, about one million monthly, they will have roughly 30 million US accounts after the first year of the i'm program.

Thousands of users. Table data provided by Microsoft.

Like Skype, Microsoft's social software products, like their blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, have bigger user communities ex-US than domestic.

How much is Microsoft paying for its new users? If it's just one million dollars for the i'm programme, Leaving out advertising and word-of-mouth, it comes to $0.08 cents per new user over the first 12 months.  

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some days ago (July 26, July 23) I observed Skype download rates of 3000 downloads per minute. Speeds are back to normal, around 500 per minute.

As can be seen on the graph (edited screenshot from nyanyan.to) the bending point of the curve is exactly on August 1 (the green circle). That is the date at which the India and Pakistan promotional campaign ended!

I hope for Skype that this has generated some new lasting customers, but I doubt it. My purchase orders data isn’t very complete or reliable, but from what I have, it doesn’t seem there was any spectacular increase in SkypeOut orders.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should you bother comparing apples and oranges?

Or are messaging services converging?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will this be the next Skype boost?

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

The graph below shows this isn’t the case.

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

Then on one of the download pages I saw this:

And on the lower part of the page:

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

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

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

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

By every metric, Skype continues its midflight stall. Despite doing bunches of things right, Skype's core value is dying.

Skypers aren't calling any more now than they were before. SkypeOut minutes didn't change. Free Skype-to-Skype calling fell this quarter, back to where it was a year ago.

That's scary! Read it again:

• SkypeOut minutes didn't change.

• Free Skype-to-Skype calling fell this quarter, back to where it was a year ago.

Skype's brand is tied to talk.

Better, cheaper, more fun, less hassle.

Does "It just works" still work for word-of-mouth marketing?

Skype desperately needs word of mouth to keep the cost of customer acquisition low and to reach clusters of people that talk with each other.

Flat growth turns regional growth into a zero-sum game. With flat Skype-to-Skype growth, a minute gained in one market equals a minute lost elsewhere. In which markets is Skype losing ground? Where are defectors going? 

The signups aren't enough to cover churn. 24 million new user accounts in Q2 looks amazing, doesn't it? 183 signups a minute, 263k new accounts a day. But...

This growth is too small.

At 12% quarter over quarter growth, this can't be replacing people who leave the Skype network. People create accounts just to try Skype ("kicking the tires"), those who abandon VoIM for mobile or landlines, and defectors switching to broadband operators or other VoIP/VoIM providers.

If signups doesn't cover customers leaving, Skype is in danger. They have two choices: Regain virality (challenging) or Spend Money Wisely (costly). We'll learn more about Skype's strategies to turn this around over the coming weeks.

Is Skype's competition Jajah, Vonage or AT&T?

Here's a Blogpulse from last night. Skype and Vonage used to be in a dead heat for blogosphere mentions. Skype pulled itself out of that league in the last year without spending a Vonage-sized ad budget (great news). But Skype remains a far cry from Comcast or AT&T or BT. (Do you like AT&T's mid-July iPhone spike, below?) 

Zennström and Friis have their eyes on the whole telecom industry, not just VoIM. Skype now has 4% of all international minutes. In the short term, broadband providers have the marketing, billing and distribution to sell consumer VoIP and VoIM to hundreds of millions of existing customers. Skype is competing hard in North America. So the stalling of Skype-to-Skype calls, their word-of-mouth engine, is abominable timing.

A saving grace: Skype could be spinning off cash. Skype could be spending around US$50 million on personnel per year (more than 500 employees at $100K fully loaded), maybe $20 million quarterly if they've been hiring aggressively in Eastern European and Scandinavian development studios. That leaves $70 million for hard operations and marketing costs on $90 million revenue. A big chunk of that goes to wholesale telephony companies, but they were being paid even when revenues were lower.

See also:

• Cynthia Brumfield: Did eBay's Whitman Dig at Skype's Zennstrom, Friis? Quoting eBay CEO Meg Whitman, "Skype is not where we want it to be in terms of user activity. This will require increased activity and attention from the leadership team." Quoting eBay CFO Bob Swan: "“Activation levels are not where we want them to be."
• Kevin Kelleher: eBay: An Unwanted Bargain. "Good news, investors! eBay’s stock is trading at a value."
• Alec Saunders: Skype’s continued revenue growth. No surprises here. 

Below the fold:

• eBay's table of quarterly Skype accounts, Skype-to-Skype minutes, and SkypeOut minutes.
• eBay's bar chart showing quarterly Skype revenue
• eBay Q2-2007 Earnings Slides
• 2007 Annual Meeting of eBay Shareholders

the fold...

Continue reading "Q2 financials: Skype in costly trouble" »

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype revenue up, profitable for 2nd consecutive quarter, but usage down?

eBay's quarterly earnings conference this afternoon revealed little about Skype; we got the usual numbers:

In the more detailed presentation by CFO Bob Swan, he provided two additional numbers:

• Skype-to-Skype Minutes: 7.1 million, down from 7.7 million in Q1
• SkypeOut Minutes: 1.3 million, flat from Q1

and stated that Skype's activation numbers were not where they would like them to be. In her earlier summary presentation, eBay CEO Meg Whitman mentioned the WalMart retail partnership, three objectives for Skype:

• build the user base
• expand the Skype ecosystem
• improved call quality,

and closed with the single remark Skype "needs more user activity" as an issue to be addressed in Q3. During the Q&A with questions from analysts, who are supposed to be tracking the company's activities, there were NO questions about Skype. Maybe being 5% of the overall eBay revenue, yet profitable, is the formula to not attract their attention.

Over the past 24 hours I (i) attended my 10th Research in Motion Annual Meeting in Waterloo (makers of the Blackberry) where I came away with a very detailed understanding of RIM's business activity and where they are going and (ii) this afternoon listened to the eBay earnings conference where I came away with little additional understanding of eBay's Skype business. So here's my take:

Continue reading "Skype Continues to be Profitable in Spite of Activity Decline" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Seems that there is a large appetite for learning new languages, especially English. In March I wrote a post, When You Want to Practice Spoken English, about the KanTalk service that uses SkypeCasts to facilitate verbal language learning sessions. As discussed in more detail in that post, two of his key findings with the initial service were:

• Non-English speakers quickly became nervous or intimidated when speaking to "native" English speakers.
• Participants, considered as peers in this forum, were much more accepting of mistakes and ready to help correct them.

I had occasion to dialog with KanTalk's Founder today; the following update that he reported speaks for itself:

• > 7,500 users registered members, including 300 teachers/tutors
  • up from 2,000 in early March
• >1,100 Skypecasts session have been scheduled from Kantalk
• The top five native languages spoken by our users are: English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic.
• The top five countries that our users reside in are: Brazil, USA, China, India, Russia.

Besides letting our users use Skype to practice English, we also added Recording and Video Transcribing features to the site to help learners improve pronunciation and listening comprehension.

In response to Skype's invitation they have contributed suggestions for API's, many of which relate to Skypecasts. In addition they are investigating Skype Prime to provide their "teachers" with a means to generate revenues.

So the next time you get one of those random, unsolicited "I want to practice my English" chat messages, send them to KanTalk.

[And a reminder that Skype API suggestions are due tomorrow (Friday, July 13).] Update: deadline extended to July 31.

Tags: KanTalk, Skypecasts, Skype Prime, Skype, practice English

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I noticed that last night the concurrent users online went below 4 million. Quite normal "night dip" for a Saturday to Sunday night, but hasn't been that low since a long time. This is also an indication that we are entering a summer slowdown, see my explanation on this phenomenon in my post of September last year.
Skype growth is however clearly slowing down!

We will not reach 10 million concurrent users online before September (my guess), and then it will have been more than 200 days to acquire one additional million. The only time it lasted longer was for the acquisition of the first million concurrent users online: it took 418 days!

In 2006, Skype grew with 3.84 million concurrent users online (at peak time). Now in the first 6 months of 2007 we only have added 1.22 million users (see the table below)!

So what? Has Skype really reached some "saturation level"?

Jean Mercier analyzes the trends on his Skype Numerology blog.

Posted by Jean Mercier at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Dan York, over at Disruptive Telephony and a permanent participant in the Skype 3.x Discussion public chat, has just pointed us to Skype's announcement that the limit for participants in Skype Public Chats has been raised to 150.

Dan is perplexed (and I am also) as to why we often see the actual number of participants in the Skype Developer Public Chat is over the limit (whether 100 or 150). At 8:56 EDT this morning he saw (using the "/info" command in a Skype chat client) 201 "members" on the chat, yet less than an hour and twenty minutes later I get only 157. Did 44 members sign off within 75 minutes? (FWIW, I am running Skype 3.2.0.158.) Seems like the counter is having some difficulty. Or is it another "real time presence" issue?

BTW, if you use Pamela and upgrade Skype to this build (3.2.0.158) make sure you also upgrade Pamela to its latest version 3.5.0.54.

Tags: Skype Public Chat, Dan York, Pamela

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Amery is Director of the Skype Developer Program, based in London. This is an informal interview shot under some willow trees outside the Santa Clara Convention Center in California for seven minutes in mid-May 2007 by Phil Wolff, editor of Skype Journal. Paul had given a talk that morning to more than one hundred programmers at the TMC Communications Developer Conference 2007.

Continue reading "Skype Journal interview with Paul Amery of the Skype Developer Program" »

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Following up on Jim's Q1-2007 Is Skype's First Profitable Quarter, I thought I'd see if I there was more to it.  

Skype calling didn't grow in Q1-20070.

Skype-to-Skype calling didn't grow this quarter, despite 25 million new accounts. Isn't this a churn indicator? For each minute a new user called, someone else chose not to Skype for a minute. This could be seasonal: Q1 2006 was also close to flat growth.

And as you can see in the chart below, Skype's retiring of free SkypeOut plans killed SkypeOut growth for the same period. This is clearly not seasonal.

Paid calls are a bigger part of the mix.

Paid calls doubled their share of all Skype calls in six quarters. Only 1 in 11 calls was paid at the end of 2005 but 1 in 6 was paid for at the beginning of 2007. National calling plans (convenience, predictability) fed the increased use of SkypeOut.

No more than 60% of accounts are active.

The combination of fee and free minutes served rose along with the number of accounts. We can crudely guess the number of inactive accounts. First, let's assume active accounts use the same number of minutes each quarter. But you can see the minutes consumed divided into all accounts fell from 76 to 47 minutes per account per quarter. That means that at least 40% of all accounts are inactive.

Is that fallow rate accurate? We don't know and Skype isn't saying. It's probably higher. The number should rise as more people get separate accounts for work and home.

Is that churn rate good? 

Posted by Phil Wolff at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Details for joining eBay's Q1 2007 earnings call at 2pm Pacific (10pm London time) today. I'm betting the number of Skype registered users cracked the 200 million mark last quarter.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of years, there have been lots of requests, rumors, speculation, etc. about why Skype needs a client for the Symbian platform, for which Nokia is the primary device vendor. Through Andy Abramson's Nokia Blogger Program I have been able to evaluate several Nokia N Series phones including the Nokia N80i which supports both GSM/EDGE/UMTS and WiFi (and, on which, I have used the Truphone service over WiFi).

Alec Saunders recently pointed to a Business Week report on 2006 smartphone sales which states:

During the year, Nokia remained top converged device vendor with market share of 48 per cent and 38 million devices shipped, despite underperforming in North America and the enterprise market, which the company hopes to counter with a number of fresh devices which debuted earlier this year.

The report goes on to state that RIM was [a distant] number two at 7.5 million while Motorola rose to number 3 with its new Windows Mobile devices at 4.9 million.

Recall the primary issues with Skype on any 2.xG GSM platform are (i) the (unacceptable) inherent latency of VoIP on a 2.xG service and (ii) the economics of current data plan pricing, especially in North America. (And we are not going to see the level of carrier support for WiFi networks in North America that is being witnessed in Europe and Asia in any near future scenario.) The only offering currently available to wireless customers at this point is 3 Group's X-Series service where there is a Skype client for Nokia's N73 and the subscriber plan allows unlimited usage.

Going forward start with Stowe Boyd's statement in his presentation at eTel earlier this week:

In the second half he begins by saying that the buddy list is the center of the new universe. Social networks are key -- the individual is the new group, and the value is not in the number of people in the network, but rather the number of connections. Bingo! It's the same logic Google uses to rank web pages. More links equate to more authority.

With over 170 million accounts, one could say Skype has a lot of "authority". So here is my suggestion for a roadmap for both Nokia and Blackberry platforms:

1. Develop a Skype client that simply centers around IM but does not include voice.
   • It allows you to keep in touch with your Skype "buddies".
   • Default to the underlying phone service for actual voice calls.
   • Low bandwidth but actually helps drive up usage (and, maybe, ARPU).
2. When 3G networks become more readily available (especially in North America), develop a Skype client that has all the standard Skype features.
   • This could require working with the carriers to offer an unlimited usage plan but needs other competitive factors, such as other services that need significant data transfer volumes, to accelerate the process.

With 48% market share worldwide and 3 million devices, the demand for a Skype for Symbian solution becomes ever stronger, even if it initially only uses Skype's IM capabilities.

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Congratulations, Skype! Skype users downloaded the world's leading VoIP program 500 million times today. The current rate is 640 thousand downloads a day, according to Skype data. Adrian Cockcroft observed Skype downloads spike to a million a day during major upgrades. If that rate doesn't change, Skype will cross the billion download mark early in 2009.

Chart by にゃにゃん．と

The latest:

• 171 million user accounts
• 3.5 to 9 million users connected at any one time

Vonage execs dismiss Skype's large user base as not-comparable to theirs. They ask how users that pay for a service, that trust you with their credit cards, are like customers without commitments?

Skype is challenging that opinion. Skype's announced pricing plans may bring some of their customer base into a Vonage-style relationship, monthly payments and all. This migration won't change download rates, but it should boost the number of users connected to the Skype network. It will boost Skype's revenue this year.

What can Skype do to increase virality?  

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Got a note from Stephan Beckert about TeleGeography Research Group's TeleGeography 2007 : Global Telecommunications Traffic Statistics and Commentary report. The whole market for international traffic's been growing...

We spent some time going through Skype's subscribers and traffic flows, and compared them with "traditional" international traffic (that is, phone to phone traffic, whether it's carried by switched carriers, or IP based carriers, like iBasis).

Skype's numbers are huge--particularly for a company that was only founded in 2004. Interestingly, though, Skype's growth has not yet had a quantifiable impact on switched volumes. Aggregate traffic from the many many carriers we surveyed has continued to grow, pretty well in line with historical trends.

Skypelights:

• Skype traffic grew by 6.2 billion minutes in the last year. From 7.6 billion minutes in 2005 to 13.8 billion projected in 2006. 80% year over year.

Just in case that's sounds like a lot...

• Other VoIP traffic grew by 16.8 billion minutes to 42 billion minutes. These are the Vonages, cable and telco voip offerings.

Their growth was bigger than Skype's total traffic. But wait, there's more.

• Swtiched telephony, grew 8% to 237 billion minutes. Switched growth was 18 billion minutes.

So even if Skype traffic is growing 10 times faster than switched service, picking up a few points of share, the Skype threat falls into telecom's background noise. Skype's revenue doesn't even fall in telecom's rounding errors.

What did growth cost? What did it take to sell 41 billion more minutes this year than last? Skype still has its dramatic advantage in marketing cost per minute served.

Where is Niklas' vision of free Skype calls forcing telcos to slash prices? The market hasn't reached a tipping point where customers fly to Skype. Yet. 

Still, it's amazing that one company, let alone a three year old company with 500 employees, is even showing up on the charts.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

by Hudson Barton

Skype's concurrent users online just hit 8 million. We can therefore expect to see breathless reports about the number of days it took to get another million and how long it is going to take to get another. But these are not useful measurements of Skype's success. Skype doesn't give us much information, but there are better ways of interpreting the data we have than looking at the peak of the graph.

Skype usage at the peak time (around 16 GMT) is a combination mainly of European users and users in the eastern half of America. These are two of Skype's largest populations and they are online concurrently. Measuring at this peak has become the standard measurement of Skype growth, but it is not very useful. I prefer to measure at other times.

Skype usage in Europe (and Africa) is best reflected with data sampled at 11-12 GMT, before America's work day starts. American (North and South) usage is seen most accurately at 19-20 GMT. Asian (and Pacific) data should be sampled at 2-3 GMT. At each of these three points in time, the influence of one continent is maximized while the influence of the other two continents is minimized. Of course, Skype usage on the three continents is not perfectly segregated by this method (because some users stay online for extended periods), but it is segregated enough to use for comparison purposes.

This method of measurement permits one to analyze Skype growth in ways that are not possible when one looks only at the peak number. One can see for example a difference in growth rates between the continents. Or by comparing the rates of growth on specific weekdays and weekend days one can discern whether growth on each continent is being driven by business usage or non-business usage.

I have been measuring Skype usage in this way for about a month (my historical data is supplied by Jean Mercier, "The Skype Numerologist."). In a few more months of detailed daily measurement, we will be able to conclude much more than we can presently.

So what can we conclude from the data so far? On this day of surpassing the meaningless waypoint of 8 million concurrent users online, let's just say this: Historically, Skype usage in Europe has slightly underpaced that of America and Asia. In more recent months, this trend has continued and perhaps accelerated.

Note: Two factors are at play in the data; the actual number of active users and the user's average time online. It is difficult to distinguish which factor is driving "concurrent users online".

Posted by Guest Blogger at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Blogpulse tracks how much the blogosphere mentions a topic or brand. The unit of measure is percent of blogs that mention the keywords or an url. Nielsen BuzzMetric's blogpulse is slightly biased toward English language blogs although many blogs in other languages are represented.

In October 2004, Skype was mentioned in .015 to .020 percent of blogs.

In March 2005, Skype buzz was in the .045 range, doubling in six months.

Now Skype is in the .07 to .08 range, doubled in 18 months, with frequent spikes over .09 percent.

The chart above shows Skype's modest growth over the last six months. The bottom curve is "VoIP". When I first started looking at both of them, they overlapped. They used VoIP to explain Skype. Now they are mostly separate; Skype has its own identity independent of VoIP.

Just for comparison: Paris Hilton (.075), Harry Potter (.2), iPod (.5), election (.65), Iraq (.7) and sex (1.4%). From a marketing perspective, the new blogging service Vox is stable at .1 after launching its preview in August; Coke (.225, including all uses of the term) and Pepsi (.1).

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last May Skype announced their first "free" SkypeOut promotion -namely all SkypeOut calls within North America would be free until Dec. 31, 2006. In early September Skype announced a similar program covering France. Basically, if you were not already a Skype user, you simply sign up for Skype, and all your SkypeOut calls within the designated territory are free; however, you pay normal SkypeOut rates for calls outside the designated region. And the promotions expire in just over two months, Dec. 31.

Last week Skype UK announced Talk for Britain, a new promotion that probably gives a hint of what will happen to these earlier promotions after December 31. Talk for Britain involves :

• Purchase £10 of Skype credit using PayPal or a UK-issued credit card
• Wait for up to 72 hours to confirm eligibility
• Free SkypeOut calling within UK for the subsequent six months.
• Program expires Dec. 31 for acquiring the six months free SkypeOut credit. (If you buy Dec. 31, you have free calling to June 30, 2007)
• Call Forwarded calls are not included in the promotion.

Over the past few weeks I have had several queries as the what will happen to these promotions after Dec. 31. Does Talk for Britain start to provide some clues?

Continue reading "Talk for Britain - Is this the Direction for Free SkypeOut Promotions?" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How does Skype fit into the mix of other social media? If you recall, Lilia Efimova started using the ULRTMT - Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator this summer. Lilia and her online friend Andrea Ben Lassoued wrote "Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative" and it's being included as a chapter in a new textbook.

Their essay documents their professional relationship's evolution. The chart, at left, has three columns: Lilia's blog on the left, Andrea's blog on the right, and mutual territory in middle. The top of the chart is 2003 and the bottom is April 2006. They discovered each other in the blogosphere, reading each others' posts. After a while, they commented on each others' blogs, bookmarked each others' posts on del.icio.us, and swapped the occasional email. After a few months of more intense intercourse, they escalated to Skype conversations.

It is a solid ethnographic case study by professional social scientists. It spans a long time and covers multiple media channels (how we really interact with each other online). In this case, discovery and low level interaction earned (banked) a small amount of trust.

I'd love to see this analysis of online relationship-building extended to other groups and situations. How do entrepreneurs find each other? How do job seekers discover potential employers and choose media during job search? How do new project teams negotiate the fit of modes to communication tasks? How long do some patterns persist, and do people repeat them across different relationships? How effective is shifting into work/task mode before fully establishing lower levels of trust?

I'd also like to see the end of a relationship. Can you salvage a fading relationship by experimenting with other communication channels? What are the textual or other early warnings indicators that a person is fading from "friend" to "former friend" or "contact"? How much asymetric communication can most people tollerate?

Which behaviors affecting user adoption and migration: What factors affect the success rate in dragging your (family, friends, work colleagues) into new channels? Are social network hubs more able to migrate their networks? Or do hubs who switch lose their power and start from scratch?

The ability to create great experiences comes from deep understanding of human nature. If you'd like to fund a more exhaustive study, let me know. I'm organizing research proposals.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the "joys" of being a US-controlled public company is that SEC requires the breakout of International from domestic sales. So today's 3rd quarter report from eBay provides some information that allows us to look at Skype registrations coming from the U.S.

With over double the registrations from two quarters ago, it certainly demonstrates that the free SkypeOut within North America is probably helping to build some traction but Skype remains essentially a non-US business with over 84% of registrants outside the US. This is corroborated when you compare the % revenue increase with the % user increase; certainly some of the difference can be attributed to absence of revenue for SkypeOut calls within US/Canada.

The results are even more impressive when you consider there has been very limited marketing of Skype within North America - Phil has noticed some media ads in the Bay Area; there are some Skype ads on the eBay website.

These results also reveal some other interesting information:

Continue reading "Skype Starts to Build US Traction" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Jean Mercier is our Skype Numerologist.

Skype was - in the past - proud of its viral growth. But business is business, and they try to attract people by gifts and promotions, hoping to generate more revenue through SkypeOut, SkypeIn and Skype certified products. The last two promotions in September were:

1. Free SkypeOut for France in France
2. September Giveaway for USA and Canada

For the time being this has been unsuccessful IMHO! See the graph below:

Even if MuppetMaster pretends downloads isn't a measure of the growth of Skype (and I partially agree with this), the number of downloads should have shown some acceleration if these Skype Marketing campaigns mentioned above had been successful. Indeed, a bunch of new users downloading Skype should show a change in pattern in the download curve, as it was some months ago when they launched the free SkypeOut in Canada and the USA. It doesn't: almost straight line growth since several months.

September Giveaway was targeting mainly students, and this (probably) proves again that the Skype Users are mainly adult professional users.

Skype Users seem to be also quite often small businesses. But French small business mainly have their customers in France (France is a big country), and phone calls inside France are not free but quite cheap. Belgian small business (as an example), because of the tiny size of the country, do more business abroad (in France for instance), therefore they are more interested in reducing their phone call bills.

So? Why trying to force Viral Growth? Let it grow the usual way, by improving mainly quality, reliability and services.

One of my new "Skype Customers" told me: Skype to Skype has a fantastic quality, but SkypeOut isn't that good, but it is much cheaper indeed! She phones to her family in Algeria, and lives in Belgium! Improving quality will attract more Small Businesses!

Posted by Guest Blogger at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Live Contacts offers developers 400+ million active users with 12 billion contact records. That's more than Earth's population, so should we assume a bit of duplication among the 30 contacts per active user?

A peak of 20 million simultaneous online (8.7% of the Live Messenger population, or 1 in 12) is 2 to 3 times more than Skype's reported raw peak usage.

Microsoft says Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls. Skype's decentralized conversation prevents us from knowing Skype's messaging traffic.

Microsoft is building Live into a hot software development platform, including Live Messenger tools. Live's demographics should be strong bait for Microsoft's developer, co-marketing, and distribution ecosystems. A mashup city worthy of serious phreaking.

More details from Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb, one of my favorite blogs, about from the Auckland Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference where George Moore, GM of Windows Live, spoke.

George Moore also told the conference attendees some stats of the current MS active audience -

• 240M Hotmail users,
• 230M Messenger,
• 72M Spaces,
• 8M mobile subscribers.

He tells the mostly developer crowd at TechEd that "this is the audience that can be reached by Windows Live services." He goes on to say that at any one moment,

• 20M people are simultaneously connected on Messenger and
• 5.7 Billion messages are sent per day.
• Also there are 300M F2F video conversations on Messenger every month.

George said Spaces is "now the largest blogging service on the planet" (RM: so it's bigger than blogger.com?) - it grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

Recently a couple of posts discussing VoIP Quality:

Om Malik reports on a Brix Networks study, based on data collected on Acceptable Call Quality via their TestYourVoIP.com site.  Note that Brix also announces the availability of this service as a Google Gadget (for Google Desktop) providing ongoing measurement of the quality of your connection for voice and video activities. The study reports an ongoing decline in VoIP Acceptable Call Quality from 84% to about 80% over the period December 2004 to May 2006.

Andy at VoIP Watch found  MyVoIPSpeed Internet Connection Test and was using it as a tool to measure the connection speeds and QoS at the hotel he was staying at. I checked out my own home office connection and got this report:

Om talks in his post about degrading quality of calls received from callers using Vonage. I have been a Packet8 subscriber for almost three years and have found the quality to consistently improve over time to the point where I have minimal problems. I also find I am getting a high quality level with my Skype and SkypeOut calling with one exception: SkypeOut calls to some wireless phone services.  Too much compression/decomprssion going on? first via VoIP, then at the wireless end?

I also ran the Brix TestYourVoIP and got a MOS score of 4.2, close to the MyVoIPSpeed result shown above of 4.0. The tests appear to have some level of consistency across the tests and do appear to reflect the quality of calls that I am experiencing.

Powered by Qumana

Posted by Jim Courtney at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

On reviewing my notes from last week's eBay DevCon and eBay Live, some interesting numbers came out in the various sessions:

• eBay: last year sold a "Gross Merchandise Value" of $44B, representing 14% of all ecommerce on the Net.
• PayPal's highest growth is in "off-Ebay" commerce. Last quarter (Q1-06) "Off-eBay" transactions grew by 59% while overall PayPal growth grew by 43% to $8.8 billion of transactions. On PayPal $1.5 billion of stored value is turned over every three weeks.
• Skype, in Q1 of 2006, provided infrastructure for 6.9 billion minutes of long distance calling; representing 7% of all long distance call minutes worldwide.

Developers:

• eBay - 30,000 whose work contributes to 25% of all eBay transactions
• PayPal - 2,500 supporting 350,000 web integrators
• Skype - 3,500 delivering 350 applications and over 400 hardware devices

As mentioned previously, eBay developers and Skype developers have two totally differentiated motivations: eBay developers serve as micro-IT departments to eBay resellers producing customized Seller websites while Skype developers produce Skype-embedded applications for resale to the general public.

Continue reading "eBay, PayPal, Skype by the Numbers" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

With the turbulent migration to VoIP occurring in 2006, it will be interesting to track usage and subscriber data to support the impact of VoIP and Voice 2.0 business models. A couple of items that appeared this week:

Skype vs Vonage in the UK: Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, an online Internet usage monitoring service, has reported on Skype, Bebo and Vonage -- Why Skype Visits are Through the Roof. Her chart that results from tracking visits to websites for each demonstrates how UK visits to Skype have climbed from ~1% of UK site visits in early February to 6.9% mid-May while Vonage has stagnated in the 0.8% range. And this happened in a market with no free SkypeOut! Score one for market penetration by a Voice 2.0 business model.

Earlier this week I reported on the $15 million funding of Bebo, a social network with 24 million members predominantly in the European market and Andrew Hansen's observation as to how Skype support was probably a factor in their financing success. Heather goes on in her post to report on how Bebo is responsible for over 50% of the upstream sources for visits to Skype. And this number has increased with a Bebo-Skype partnership tied into the launch of Skypecasts. A Voice 2.0 application driving adoption and market penetration in the social networking space.

Continue reading "Data in Support of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto" »

Posted by Jim Courtney at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Data: Skype.com SkypeOut Dialing Wizard; CIA World Factbook

India is not yet served by SkypeOut nor by PayPal purchasing, so is not on the list.

Some online populations adopt Skype at rates beyond their size. For example, the UK, Taiwan and France are ranked higher than countries with larger online populations. What cultural, infrastructure and economic factors contribute to these differences? How much will these factors affect workplace adoption? Skype Journal Consulting would love to research this for you. Skype me to discuss our research service.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype continues its infiltration of PCs across the globe. 100 million people is staggeringly large. Edging out the Philippines for 14th largest country. For all you English readers that would be more than the UK and Canada combined. See Jean Mercier's post for an analysis of what the number stands for (basically a consistent indicator of cumulative user uptake, not a measure of current usage). But that's just the scorekeeping.

100 million is a lot of people made happy, money kept in consumer hands, boosted personal and team effectiveness at work, and the fabric of humanity more tightly woven together. Not bad at all.

Continue reading the official news release which translates the dancing-around-the-water-cooler Joy of this humoungous milestone into  mind numbingly dull and appropriate corporatespeak.

Technorati Tags: sans serif, arial helvetica, badge image, flickr, skype, 000000, padding, image img, image text, icon, font, img border, text align, scorekeeping, english readers, edging, mercier, infiltration, uber, hover

Continue reading "100,000,000 or so Skype accounts. More Skypers than bloggers?" »

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jean Mercier, Oostakker, Belgium

New numbers on the home page of the Skype website!

Technorati Tags: skype, rss feeds, rss feed, names, bloggers, excel sheet, cheating, niklas, mercier, screenshot, occasional, ceo, belgium, jean, lost, members

Continue reading "How many users does Skype have today?" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Guest Blogger Jean Mercier, Oostakker, Belgium

It is time to update this article, "Why Skype Peaks." It has been a year. Now is a good time to ask the question, "Is Skype still growing?"

First let's look at the number of Downloads of thye Skype Application.

The growth of the downloads is quite linear the last year, with sometimes smaller accelerations, like when the video feature was launched (see one of my previous blogs in this Journal). Of course, as a lot of us knows, downloads are also a result of users upgrading their applications. But still, I am wondering how many other software applications can show a growth like this!

Second, my favorite, the number of users online! This is still, in my “humble” opinion (IMHO), the best public available measure of the popularity of Skype. Interesting how none of the other IM clients release this information. Hmmm…

Continue reading "Skype is still growing" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Continental Research reports 1.8 million UK Internet users used VoIP in the last twelve months, and that number should double in the next twelve. 48% of those surveyed used Skype, and 56% of VoIP users expect to increase their usage.

This consumer survey would not reveal enterprise use of VoIP, largely transparent to workers.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

This accomplishment is amazing! Do you have any idea what 1% US radio share across North America is worth? How hard it is to earn? How many talk radio hosts would sacrifice their ethics on the air to get a national syndication contract? The barriers to behavioural change listeners have overcome? Congratulations, long tail!

I started blogging in 1998. It took eight years for bloggers and blog readers to experiment , evolve, and adopt the medium and its tools.  Give baby podcasting a break.

Despite this success I think podcasting is an interim form, with many new producers and viewers bypassing audio for video. Like blogging, the medium is full of every expression of humanity. Unlike blogging, there is low tollerance for poor production quality. And nothing like the hyperlinked mesh of the blogosphere to make podcasting into a social medium for listeners the way blogs are for readers.

Much of the grief seems to be about Forrester only including podcast feed subscriptions, not the more popular audio on demand.

The Skype story: While Skype Technologies S.A. was rumored last year to have queued up podcasting features, not likely happen this quarter. But Skype remains an enabler. It's driving people to buy speakers, webcams, and microphones for their PCs. Recording tools for Skype like Pamela, Skylook, and Hot Recorder are improving quickly, and morphing into quick conference-call-to-mp3 capture and and upload tools. Skype continues its infiltration of schools and workplaces, so conversation timeshifting and placeshifting makes podcasting and vlogging more relevant than ever.

See also: The Social Software Weblog, Kevin 2.0, Publishing 2.0, Mark Evans, Investor Relations Blog, Guardian Unlimited, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Blogspotting, Bloggers Blog, InterMedia, Barnako.com, blackrimglasses.com, SeattlePI.com Buzzworthy, Digital Inspiration, Texas Venture Capital … and John Cook's Venture Blog

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Martin eviscerating network neutrality.at Freedom to Connect.
  
• 10% discount on Skylook for Skype Journal users until the end of May 2006. Coupon code "SKYPEJOURNAL06". Jeremy Hague says Skylook is now "Skype Certified." Congratulations! (While I absolutely believe Jeremy, you can only take a vendor's word for the claim since Skype doesn't list their vendor certifications on their web site.)
  
• Screenshots of Pamela 2.0 preview. Adds vlogging, video recording, and video messaging to Skype. Pamela was the first Skype Certified software.
  
• Skype on U3 Smart thumbdrives now joined by Pamela for Skpe Pro Edition, Pamela for Skype Standard Edition, and Pamela for Skype Basic Edition (free)
  
• ioGear's USB VoIP Skype Calling Kit: Dial Pad - Headset - Audio Switch - USB 2.0 Hub.
  
• SkypeMate for Mac OS X screenshot.
  
• Skype with more than 6.1 million users online yesterday. by Kengo.
  
• Status info for Skype with GPS information in Google Earth.
  
• SKMap mashup of Skype presence with Google Maps.
  Global map.
  Click on an icon on the map to see a collection of links on map or info about a Skype users.
  Zoom in to a metro view.
  Updated presence stats for forum members. At the time (about 2100 GMT) the group was 2% Skype Me, 46% Online, 15% Away,  31% Not Available, 4% Do Not Disturb, and no Offline.
  

Posted by Phil Wolff at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Andy: Skype, Zennstrom, Friis Et Al Sued for RICO Violations. These laws are commonly used by law enforcement to seize cars, houses, cash and other profits from illegal activity. Could this be why Niklas Zennstrom never travels to the USA?
  
• TechCrunch previews SKY-click call center for Skype.
• N-Yoshi points out that Skype just crossed the 276 million downloads mark today (chart) and we may have missed moment when the Skype network had 6 million simultaneous users online. (This a great Japanese Skype blog, even through Google or Babelfish machine translation.)
  

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

Zoom for the full size image. From Philippe Biondi's and Fabrice Desclaux's Silver Needle in the Skype presentation at Black Hat Europe. (Acrobat pdf file) The 20,000 supernodes serve about 90 million users, about 4000 to 5000 peers per supernode.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

TOM Online Inc.

At the end of February, the Company had more than 9 mn registered TOM-Skype users, up from over 5.2 mn registered users at the end of October 2005. Mainland China is now Skype’s second largest market after the United States. The Company continues to work with Skype to co-develop more local features and services for the mainland China market as well as premium services over the TOM-Skype platform. It is hoped that some of the services will be commercially launched in the later part of 2006.

This may be the fastest growing sector for Skype around the world.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's three Skype products that aim to enhance your Skypeing experience that leaves me questioning exactly what I'm buying with Skype Certified. The three products are the VoSky Chatterbox, Jawbone Headset and the Motorola Wireless Interenet Calling Kit. Each provide a different angle on bettering the standard Skyper's headset and as you might expect each has their pro's and con's.

VoSky Chatterbox.

This simple USB device provides an easily portable plug and play speakerphone for Skype. It's simple to use and requires no additional software to be loaded. It has a volume and mute button on top and works probably as expected, as a low cost speakerphone. I'd liken it to the solution we had as kids when we could finally plug in a speakerphone box between the old phone and the whole family sat around. In principle great, in practice it left something to be desired. The Chatterbox is a little like this. It works. It's also no substitute for a decent headset. The caller on the other end of the line will know and possibly complain. Handsfree solutions curently work better with a good set of speakers and a proper stand mic. Locate them correctly and the caller won't get a any feedback. Many laptops work as good as the Chatterbox. If you feel the need try it. Just don't expect it to be a Polycom and ready for the office. For kids it may be more robust than a headset - read youngsters talking to Grandma.

Continue reading "Three Skype Products - Three ?'s" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Phil's facts on Skype for ETel. Skype was on everyone's lips at ETel and yet many knew little about it. "Closed" was an anathema to many in the audience.

(Note, this was recorded on my iPod with iTalk, it is not meant to be IT Conversations. In a few weeks I'm sure many of these will be available there)

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Voit, a popular sports equipment brand, is catching up on VoIP according to Blogpulse. It also seems to be stealing mindshare from Vonage.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype users share data about themselves in their profiles. SR Consulting sampled 3.9 million profiles for statistics about age, country and gender. Some of their data from October suggests these findings.

Skypers are 30 years old, give or take.

• Average age: 29.7 years
• Mode: 25 years (most common age)
• Percent of users 40 years old and Younger: 80%
• The average age of Skype users within countries ranges from 19 in Lithuania and Bulgaria to 40 in Ecuador.

Europe and Asia beat the Americas.

Men report their sex more than women.

SR Consulting collected sex data, but 52% of users declined to state. We already know that women often "Decline To State" to avoid problems (harassing phone calls, for example) so this data is not worth sharing, IMHO.

More about the survey

Sebastian Ruell, CEO, said "We comply 100% with the Skype EULA and that we do not collect or store personal data of any kind. We take the privacy of skype users very seriously and avoid data like the person's real name, phone numbers or anything else that could connect the data to an individual person."

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

We've looked at the buzz before.. Will eBay help to build Skype's Blogpulse score? No surprise that downloads apparently jumped after the announcement.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The rumor of Google Talk appears to be rattling the cage at Skype and will shake some egos. This post reflects on Skype's latest PR release which opens the gates on new initiatives. Are they in response to Google Talk? I wrote this prior to testing out Google Talk this evening. I'll let you be the judge.

Party time at Skype over the next week.

...is preparing to mark its second anniversary next week by opening up its platform to anyone who wants to integrate Skype's presence and instant messaging services into their website or application. By opening up Skypes platform to the web, it will now be simple for anyone to connect to Skypes fast growing member base,.... Skype Anniversary Press Release

Underlying the fluff we find two new initiatives that indicate Skype is testing a bolder (or maybe reckless if the news is too premature) strategic direction. Certainly these components support Lenn Pryor's desire to build a broader ecosystem around Skype.

SkypeWeb: Creating a web of availability.

Skype will launch a web presence server solution under the name SkypeWeb. This will be supported in a new client release (we don't know when) which will broadcast your presence data via preferences in the client. Apparently a new bit of code in the P2P network will ping status updates every five second to a presence server. Presence information will be availabie in the form of an ATOM feed which will enable presence updates and also enable contact lists. All list detail is said to be controlled by the user. Thus the Atom feed will push presence data direct from the Skype client enabling contact lists for a circle of friends. The general idea space is good. Details? Client? We don't know yet.

SkypeNet: Stripped down client extends Developer opportunities:

Skype will open up presence and IM functionality to the whole world under the name SkypeNet. It's unknown whether this will include file sharing. SkypeNet is made up of SkypeLite clients --- a headless Skype client, without user interface, that can be integrated into any application. This should let you build Skype servers and web services. It should help Skype become enabled in programs like Trillian, make Skype more interesting for online game publishers, and create opportunities for business applications that need to scale. This is a huge gap in their architecture and, depending on execution, SkypeNet may fill it.

Some of the PR announcement is fluff. Skype has done a tremendous job of building and growing a software platform. Still, the combination of big deal buyers (Murdoch billions) and bragging on registered names (51 million) doesn't sit well with me. It hides the plain truths. Skype at two is still an upstart minnow. It's achieved much. Year One saw the launch of P2P telephony that just worked and free conference caling. Together these reinvented telephony. In Year Two we have SkypeOut, SkypeIn and the SkypeAPI and Skypers who want to do more with Skype. Today Skype has a global following in the 10's of millions talking for billions of minutes.

The industry clearly needs some metrics. However apples and oranges examples isn't the way to do it.

Skype's minutes served are currently flat. Active users are stalled. Releases with substantial features - voice recording, - call forwarding, work groups, contact lists, all seem to be coming along very slowly.

What is slow? From a developer's perspective progress may be very fast. However, from a Skype user point of view, many are now using Skype as a super telephone replacement, often for mobiles, so we expect all sorts of complex new features to be available. They are standard features on other systems. Now Skype adds these two initiatives. Expectations for Skype's next major client release are growing. We want it all and yet, two years after Skype first launched, I still can't do the things with it I dreamed I would like to be able to do.

So, Skype, please don't put your credibiltiy on the line with stretch announcements. The meme is still spreading because Skype is inherently good when I can talk to one or more for free. However, nothing kills a meme faster than the smell of desparation or an empty store. Telling me about presence servers and stripped clients is not the same as delivering them to me. The developer community has provided many gifts. I just hope when you blow out the two candles this week our wishes come true.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had an interesting discussion a few days ago. One of those rambling international ones with a fellow who like me has watched Skype from the beginning. I jotted a few notes down, ideas and points that were made or fleshed out.

• Skype 4 Million Active Users Online
• Is Skype Netscape
• More than Buddies
• Free Calls
• Voice Differentiator
• Developer Program
• Skype Video?

Continue reading "Skype Rambles" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype hasn't told us important information about their numbers. This hurts our ability to interpret them (not that we'll stop trying). Continue and see our letter to Skype.

Continue reading "How do you measure a cloud?" »

Posted by Phil Wolff at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Average number of minutes used per day according to James Enck. Now where have they gone???

Average minutes of use per day

• Jan - 28,954,133
• Feb - 37,533,906
• Mar - 41,745,885
• Apr - 41,732,959
• May - 39,451,552
• Jun - 38,479,729
• Jul - 35,754,556
• Week of 12 - 19 Aug - 36,601,232

EuroTelcoblog

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Om posted interesting numbers last night suggesting Skype growth has slowed. I'm more inclined to believe they provide some insight into the evolution of the community.

Om comments:

I managed to get my hands on some data which shows that the growth might be “really” slowing down, and that is perhaps one of the reasons Skype is out shopping itself. For instance, active users dropped 19% from April to May 2005 in the US, while France and Brazil had no growth during that time. UK and Germany grew at low single digit levels for that time frame. The overall active user base for Skype grew between 35%-to-50% from Q2 2004 through Q1 2005, but in the Q2 the numbers dropped to around 7%. Q3 is showing similar downward trend. Gigaom

I’m also not convinced that a slowing growth rate means it’s all going backwards. It’s difficult to convert new people. I spend very little time getting new Skypers on board. Yet in the beginning I worked hard to get key members of my network using it. As the base of users grows, the “newbies” struggling to build up a buddylist are less visible in terms of impact --- on infecting others. As a result, growth percentages will decline. Their incentive to infect others also declines when there is a large immediate community ready and available to connect.

The numbers suggest that users for more than, say, three months aren’t adding new buddies to their lists; rather they just add more people already in the Skype community. At some point in the growth of your buddy list there just isn't the same same incentive to find new Skypers. Add SkypeIn and SkypeOut with a big buddylist and converting others becomes even less important to those heavy users.

As an observation and hypothesis. For many, a buddylist of 25 may seem perfectly adequate. The ultility and behavior changes when buddylists expand exponentially. I doubt the number of calls and time in a call grows exponentially with a doubling or tripling in the size of your buddylist. You simply couldn't cope. However more buddies means Skype is more sticky and more useful.

How big is your buddy list? When is the last time you introduced someone new to Skype? Go on. Convert a new Skyper today!

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hmmmm.... Five million new registered users in the last three months? No big deal. In fact if I was running Skype I'd be concerned if I didn't know already that the registered user number is grossly overstated. In gross terms this is the way the IM industry appears to count. Even then I'm not sure the players count apples and apples. For example in Yahoo you can have more than one alias on one account. How many registered users is that? In Skype each name is counted as a different user. In real terms like the downloads it's just another fiction. Here's why.

When we look at the last three months we see approximately five million new registered users. Cool, they just broke 50 million. Growth has apparently slowed. Skype added only 10% in the last three months. So what is this five million number comprised of. What does it mean?

1. Legitimate New Users. These people are new to Skype have never registered before and are just getting started. A percent will download and forget it after the first few experiments. I have no figures on abandonment. What would it be? How many percent over the first six months? 10% or 50%? Perhaps 10% even before they make a calI and 15% before the second call. (Part of the no buddies connundrum and no free minutes). So the conversion loss could be quite high. Users install to satisfy a friend or family member. Others add it and then don't get enough of their social network across. It's a hard life for a new user. Skype knows this and has added all sorts of features to help. Import contacts, toolbars etc. The more contacts / buddies a person has the more power the application provides.

2. Aliasing: Many users want more than one name. Each registration counts as a new one. The fact is for the most part users aren't running these as multiple lines on multiple computers. They log in and off. They may use one for SkypeMe and another for more legitimate business. I've lost count of how many names I've registered. I'm not alone. Most of those names are idle. I'd think most new users will over time end up with at least two names.

3. Name churn. My daughter churns her AOL name quite often as do many of her friends. It's a way of cleansing their buddylist. The more youthful Skype's appeal, the greater the likelihood that "churn" has an impact. While I doubt 1 in 10 users churned their name in the last three months, given the base (45 million) churn could now have a significant impact on the growth of new registered names. Thus the larger the Skype user base, the more churn in new registrations we get.

Now there is another way to look at the 5 million new registrations. If we saw five million new users then at a minimum we would say we had added 10%. If all else remains equal then we would expect the number of active users online to have increased similarly. At the end of May the daily peak for active users concurrently online was consistently through the 3 million mark and I think reached approx 3.25 million. Since then, growth of active users online appears is static (at best). That means the number of new registration is significantly lower. Alternatively, many abandoned Skype in the period.

Separately, don't underestimate the impact of summer, college kids at home, perhaps less access to broadband. Skype surged last September and I'd expect it to surge again this September. Plus some Skypers share an account. So that's one registered account but two Skypers. A number Skype has been releasing that does matter is the number of SkypeOut users (round to 2 million). A good portion of those are using it daily. Separately Skype has quoted that 30% of Skypers use it for business. So they are online all the time too.

In the end it's all guesswork.

Conclusions:

1. Nowhere near 5 million new Skype users have been added in the last three months.
   
2. The registered user number does not represent with any degree of accuracy actual Skype user numbers. It is more materially wrong than right.
   
3. Many factors account for the difference, behavior, peer groups, legitimacy, size of buddylist, SkypeOut,early experiences, etc.
   
4. My number on unique Skype users last seven days would be 12.5 million tops. I'm happy for Skype or you to prove me wrong.

Finally the only numbers that matter is the number of users that have conversations and exchanges each day. Be nice to know how many actually held calls and how long those calls lasted for. The health of the community is in the numbers. The 50 million may make it seem like Skype is the gorilla. In fact Skype is still an ant and the definite underdog. People like underdogs. Perhaps Skype will come clean and report more representative numbers. Unless of course they are trying to sell.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Niklas Zennstrom, the company's co-founder, estimates that 30 per cent of its 40m users are corporate. A lot of the companies using it are small and medium-sized businesses that are saving money by doing do.

Financial Times

Posted by Phil Wolff at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stuart Henshall, Skype Journal's publisher, posted his Grade "D-minus" for Skype's developer ecosystem. I think it's too harsh. Slightly. I give their developer program to date a "C".

Two reasons: My metrics biases are a hair kinder. And I cut Skype a lot of slack for their small size and tender years.

"Doctor, the labs are in."

Generally, you model what you want the system to do. You diagram the states and flows. Then you seek out metrics that sense general system health, that help diagnose problems and prescribe solutions.

In this case, you want a large and vital business ecosystem. It's many outside developer subcommunities, several subcultures within Skype, and the processes you design and deploy to keep virtuous cycles going.

Some of my favorite measures...

Continue reading "Stuart's Ratings are Harsh, But On Target" »

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

Skype issued a press release 8 July: 130 million downloads, 30 million more since April. Is this news? Many (most?) must be upgrades. Better for Skype to report more meaningful numbers:

• number of accounts,
• number of SkypeIn numbers,
• number of SkypeOut calls made,
• number of SkypeOut minutes served (total and per capita),
• number of affiliate sales,
• frequency distribution of languages people choose in their profiles,
• moving averages and peaks of simultaneous users online or in calls,
• number of text conversations.

These measures suggest the health of the Skype community, the use of Skypenet, the revenue of Skype Technologies.

30 million downloads in 45 days may be newsworthy, but explain it better. Were they from some countries more than others? How many were referred by Skype's new portal partners and which ones? What proportion were upgrades by users wanting some of the new features which came out in versions 1.2 and 1.3?

And how about some context? Are 130 million and 30 million downloads big numbers? WinZip 9.0 was downloaded 146 million times. 30 million is a little bigger than the population of Iraq, a little smaller than the population of Canada. Australians buy 130 million books a year, 130 million Chinese take the train, and American hunters kill 130 million animals. Is 400,000 a day a lot? Download.com reported the new WinZip 9.0 was downloaded 380,213 times in one week.

This news release's real significance is (a) that 130 million is the highest possible number of Skype users if everyone downloads just once and (b) someone will take more than five minutes (the time it takes to shine a pair of shoes) to write the next one.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The statistics and the quotes change slightly. In this FT article 5% of 40 million registered names are paying accounts for Skype. That's 2 million paying customers.

Mr Zennstrom says 5 per cent of Skype members now use one or other service. He says the company is working on other paid-for ancillary services but wants these to be unobtrusive. If anybody simply wants to use Skype to make free calls to other Skype users, that is what they should be able to do. FT.com / Business life

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

John Bosnell at Point Topic provides the latest round of who dominates the voice market. We learn soft phones dominate the VoIP market today with a 37% share according to his estimates. According to his figures Skype thus has approximately 35% share of the VoIP market worldwide.

More than 11 million people worldwide were using a retail voice over IP (VoIP) service for at least some of their telephone calls at the end of March 2005, according to market research group Point Topic.

The number climbs to just under 17.5 million users when 'soft-clients' like Skype and VoiceGlo are added in, according to John Bosnell, senior analyst at Point Topic. InformationWeek

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype has an online survey up. It's all about habits and practices - but there seems to have been little thinking on and stretch in terms of options, scales, wants and wishlists. It's not well designed, poorly structured, with many gaps in areas covered, and no real behavioural information being collected. A wasted opportunity!

Just because online surveys are simple doesn't mean they shouldn't be well thought out. It's also more dangerous to have information that is incomplete or poorly collected than to have no information at all. Unfortunately many organisations fall into this trap. There is down and dirty research -- this is not it.

Breaking down the survey to understand the gaps further, there are problems in several areas :

Continue reading "Skype Skimping on Asking the Right Questions?" »

Posted by Dina Mehta at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

Nope there are no degrees in Skypecology. It's not old enough to attract anthropologists and Skype psychologists aren't exactly in high demand. Still Skype needs a new release to coincide with going back to school. It also needs to do some deals with the likes of faceplace.

Skype's overall strategy remains "number of registered users" actively using Skype. Active users online has effectively stalled. Growth won't return until September when kids return to colleges and universities. Then we'll see a huge jump.

It was the same last year and it's logical. Student have broadband on campus and may not have it at home. Also some of their Skypeing may have well been to home.

The question is what surprises will Skype have coming for back-to-school?

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Living the Skype Life

engadget: Use DittyBot and Skype to access your iTunes collection from any cellphone (Mac). It works, but Om says you can buy an iPod for the same price as the added mobile minutes. DittyBot (cute name, cuter character) is another example of the willingness of customers to make their own features.

Russell Shaw explains 15 common Skype error messages.

For your inner Quant

The latest Skype stats:

• Total Skype Downloads: 122,320,159
• Users Online Now: 3,014,635
• Total Minutes Served: 9,947,864,820 (should roll over)

Researcher Sandvine says Skype users rule North America.

• Skype users account for 35.8 percent of individual callers on North American networks.
• Skype calls account for 46.2 percent of minutes used.

also...

• Cape shows Skype now synonymous with voip, at least in the blogosphere. Poor Vonage.
• Skype is filling the void left by broken email.
• Xandros is adding German and French desktop Linux versions (with Skype inside). Skype's also shipping with the English and Spanish versions. When Skype is bundled with the operating system...

vSkype multiuser video chat free Beta release shipping now. See Bill Campbell's product review and exclusive interviews.

IPdrum promises a bridge between net and mobile phones later this summer. "Patent-pending technology to connect traditional mobile systems with Skype." Wholesale service or retail? via Engadget.

Skype voicemail came out of beta. New feature: Voicemail customers can leave voicemail for any Skypers.

Security? Om Malik re-voices concern about Skype crossing firewalls.

Skypes To The Editor: Online publication MSmobiles.com uses Skype for reader feedback. Leave a voicemail with your comments.

What's Your Skype Strategy? Blast from three months ago.

Coming this week:

• Supernova 2005 Conference. San Francisco. Stuart Henshall and I will see you there.
• Philadelphia Metro Telecommunications Enthusiasts Group Meetup. First meeting.
• CPSN'05 - The 2005 International Conference on Computers for People with Special Needs. Las Vegas.
• Internet Law 2005. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Gnomedex 5.0. Seattle.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jean Mercier, Ghent, Belgium, Monday June 1, 2005

Some weeks ago I searched a way to record the users on-line without staying awake the whole night. Perhaps this is possible with the Skype API and some programming, but I am not a programmer anymore! But I found a trick ... View image

Some time ago I found also interesting data concerning the Skype Users by Country.
Of course Users on-line peak around 17h GMT+1 (means 16h GMT), because according to the Skype statistics more than 42% of the users are Europeans located in the GMT 0, GMT+1 and GMT+2 time zones. At the same moment the USA, Brazil and Canada and some other American countries are starting to work!

There is also a "dip" in the curve between 12h and 14h GMT+1! Could it be because a lot of Europeans are leaving the office to lunch, and log-off their Skype? And could it be that the other "dip" in the curve (around 6 AM) has something to do with the Americans (South and North) going out to lunch? Pure speculation, but if somebody has another explanation, I am willing to discuss it.

My curiosity did not

Continue reading "Why Skype peaks at 16h Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Could I be missing something when others query Niklas's cash flow claim? Is it too simple to look to the invoice numbers we quoted and looked at the other day. The chart is here.

Although subscribers only pay a few euros, these revenues would help to make the 2-year-old start-up cash-flow positive this year, he said.

"That's the case," he said, when asked if his company would be cash flow positive in 2005. The company has not yet given any indication about its profitability. Politics News Article | Reuters.com

My lastest order number on May 24th was 6523135 for an additional SkypeIn line. The day before my order number was 6515443 for a Euro 25 SkypeOut credit. Not 24 hours apart.

I had previously purchased a SkypeOut credit for 10 euros exactly one month earlier on April 23. That's 931508 orders in a month. Or some 30000+ orders per day.

Continue reading "On the Money" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jean Mercier, Ghent, Belgium

Jean is an active participant in the Skype Forums and a Total Quality Management Expert. He provided data for an earlier blog on Skype's Growth Rate here. The data comes at an important time as it is likely that Skype concurrent online will reach 3 million in the next 24 hours.

As a Skype fanatic, I have followed up my own Skype stats for more than one year. Perhaps it's time to share some thoughts about it!

First my favourite one: Users on-line! This one really matters to the Skype Community. More users on-line, means more possibilities to contact people, or the other way around.

Continue reading "Is the Growth of Skype Slowing Down?" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Moments ago Skype passed another threshold. 7:30 AM in British Columbia Canada, 8 PM in Bangalore, India according to Vir Bhanu of Knowledge Systems who gave me the heads up.

Here was the world at that moment in time compliments of here:

If you follow Voice on the Net this is an important moment. About 8.5 percent of the Skype User community is online at one time.

Continue reading "3 Million Skype Users online Concurrently" »

Posted by Bill Campbell at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (3)

A report by In-Stat found that many users want voice activation and Wi-Fi in their phones. There is also a recurring request that comes up in the Skype Forums that asks how you connect a bluetooth mobile with a desktop PC and then act as a Skype handset. I don't know of any mobile that can currently handle this assignment. However, the first handset provider to work it into their phones will have a "bonus" feature that carriers won't reject and users will switch for. It could even lead to getting better audio quality in mobile devices.

-- 42% of the respondents were very or extremely interested in voice activation for their wireless phones.

-- More than four in 10 were very or extremely interested in buying a wireless phone with built-in Wi-Fi for voice and data.

-- Just 12% had an interest in buying a wireless phone capable of receiving TV broadcasts. Phone users have mixed feelings on future features - report

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Phil Wolff at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

James Enck pulls some more statistics together on Skype and draws a comparison with MSN. I'd like to learn more about how Skype is changing IM usage patterns.

At c.30m registered users, Skype would appear to have penetrated 20% of its addressable market, and with around 2m concurrent users, more than 1% of the world's broadband population is running Skype at any given time.
EuroTelcoblog

Continue reading "Broadband Users with Skype" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

In October 2004, when the blogosphere was all about the U.S. Presidential campaign, Skype was mentioned in .015 to .020 percent of blogs. That level of attention remained the same through year end. Then something changed and word started to spread. Six months' later, Skype buzz is solidly in the 0.045% range. via BlogPulse.

Just for context, "Bush" was discussed on 22% of all blogs when he was reelected (1000 times more popular a topic) and "steroids" spiked twice to 0.25 (10 times more popular). Big movement. Early days.

Posted by Phil Wolff at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's NY Times article reported that Skype has 2.8 million users in the US. Now households and users may not be quite the same thing. The following numbers for Instant Messenger shares via Business Week. Why don't we hear more about Skype and IM numbers? Has Skype hurt IM growth? Probably not, it is more likely to have grown the market. Are we nearing the point where 1 in 10 internet savvy US households has Skype?

U.S. households using as primary IM provider Percent market share, 2004
AIM 18.9 million 50.70%
MSN 7.76 million 20.80%
Yahoo! 9.07 million 24.30%
Alternative 1.6 million 4.20%
Source: The Yankee Group's 2004 Technologically Advanced Family Survey BusinessWeek Online

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times catches up on Barlow's Intimate Planet post, providing a positive SkypeMe look at Skype and updates on statistics. Guess one satisfaction is my readers saw this all months ago!

Skype says that it has over 2.8 million users in the United States and 30.6 million worldwide and that it is adding users at a rate of 155,000 a day. Skype's biggest competitor, Vonage, a paid VoIP service, has about 550,000 customers.

But voice brings to life the other person in a way that typing cannot, like hearing Mr. Einkamerer laugh at my jokes. The instant-messaging environment is anonymous; with voice, you cannot hide from the other person.... It feels intimate because it is; more of the users' voices reach each other The New York Times

See also "Hanging out online".

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Techworld Skype reports around 1.3 million Pocket PC users. Very much more popular than expected. When they are $200 and iPod like this number will grow exponentially.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Will Pate posts on "Why Skype Should Start Blogging". Should I ask or wonder why they need to start blogging when "we" blog Skype here? (Tongue in cheek!) I'd be more interested to see the advice for the companies that don't blog (eg Apple) and still have massive blogging support. What do you think? Should Skype go blogging? With the Skype Journal is there a benefit to Skype starting a blog? Plus who will share with our reader their thoughts on how Skype should handle the Skype Journal?

I sometimes find a Skype Journal entry emerging from what other write or are saying. So for "customer complaint" numbers rather than heresay evidence I looked for some insights in the Skype Forum. These numbers aren't quoted or looked deeply into when one looks casually at the Skype Forums and says... "wow lots of problems"

Continue reading "Should Skype Start Blogging?" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

More statistics from Skype. Skype today announced that more than 1,000,000 users are using SkypeOut. Skype claims 29 million registered users and is adding 155000 new users per day. The counter at Skype.com is close to six billion minutes. See Skype News

With the release of Skype 1.2 beta yesterday the potential for a significant increase in Skype revenues is close at hand. My initial experience with SkypeIn (GREAT!) means many SkypeOut users will buy it. The issue for some will be number availablity.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I've been sitting in on the VON Spring show, telecoms are being threatened in Europe. Follow quote via EWeek via Cebit.

Niklas Zennstrom, CEO and co-founder of Skype Technologies SA, stopped cold the chatter at CeBIT's Technology Industry Summit by announcing that the company that provides free phone calls over the Internet now has 29 million users and is currently signing up new users at the rate of 155,000 per day.
EWeek

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An update on Skype facts and statistics taken from the article by Rich Tehrani

Skype is the leading VOIP-category product worldwide,
* More than 24 million registered users
* SkypeOut more than 735,000 users around the world.

Downloads will always be larger than the number of registered users
* 130,000 downloads per day today, compared to 90,000 per day in October last year and 30,000 in March.

Current Updates:
* Marginal cost is zero for each call and the cost of adding new users to Skype is less than $0.01.
* We will keep Skype-to-Skype calling free and maintain the efficiencies of a technology business.
* Releasing Skype for Business this year, targeting groups not enterprises.
* Expanding our carrier relationships and regional partnerships, most notably in Asia.
* We've published an API and made it freely available for non-commercial use.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More on the statistics front. Now James has a go. When we last looked at minutes (Two Million Reasons) on the 14 of February, just 10 days ago the daily run rate was approximately 36m per day. So one new add is that skype is currently growing at 400k minutes per day. Now according to Aswath Skype Minutes are probably double counted.

Continue reading "40m Minutes Per Day" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is Skype's impact on VoIP traffic? These numbers apparently from TeleGeography. This is a number I've tried to run down a few times. Still what's 4% today could be 10% tomorrow. Let's just say... it is big enough to count!

Estimated to carry 25% of annual VoIP traffic (as counted by TeleGeography), or the equivalent of 4% of total international traffic worldwide, the impact of Skype and other VOIP applications could put a serious dent in mobile operators' revenues. TheFeature

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype broke the 2 million active user concurrently online for the first time today. Concurrently I tracked call minutes off the Skype site. Just over 3 million minutes were recorded in an hour. Two numbers that encourage crude Skype maths.

My conclusion again... numbers confirm "communications behavior" is being radically changed. Concurrently every Skyper wants a better headset, handsfree or a cordless handset. They also know the value of these new "minutes" and will spend to make them "better". Confirming while free; users do value them.

Jump to possible conclusion. Mobile operators will have to merge "mobile" with Skype in order to retain "loyalty" to their networks. They can't provide that based on the "usage" profile of Skype adopters. They also can't address the global nature of the calls. Skypers want mobility make no mistake. Mobile operators are going to have to address "SkypeIn".Give me my mobile number for Skype!

Continue reading "Skype Two Million Reasons +" »

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is it possible that Forrester asked the wrong question. Consumers don't buy VoIP they buy an experience. How was the question asked?

Despite a significant industry push, consumers are cool to VoIP, with only 13% interested or very interested in using the technology, according to a new survey by Forrester. Only 43% have even heard of the technology, and only three percent of consumers are using it, the survey of 1,132 online households concluded. Networking

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skype for Mac and Linux are out of beta with the announcement of OS X Version 1.0 and Linux Version 1.0

We are glad to announce that Skype for Mac OS X 1.0 is now available for http://www.skype.com/products/skype/macosx . It marks an important milestone in development for us since the first Skype for Mac OS X public beta was released on August 31 last year.

I would like to underline that "version 1.0" is not the end of the road for us. There is a lot to be done in both improving existing features and adding missing ones (for example group chat). Skype has announced a lot of new exciting features and services for 2005 - voicemail and SkypeIn, just to name a few - and these will obviously be supported in the Mac OS X version, alongside others. Skype Forum

I think I prefer this view of the world. How can a phone company invest $16billion and not think about what Skype has set in motion so far. From CNet in relation to the announcement today.

The number of new Skype users is increasing at rates not seen since the early days of instant messaging, and at no cost to Skype other than hosting a Web site to make the software available, and "making software tweaks," Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom said in a recent interview. More than 140,000 new users register each day.

It would cost phone companies still using traditional means untold billions in construction, marketing or merger costs to come close to matching Skype's growth rate. And they are running out of companies to buy. Recently, SBC said it plans to spend $16 billion to buy AT&T; while Sprint finds $31 billion to pay for Nextel Communications. Cingular Wireless vaulted to the top of the U.S. carrier heap last year when it bought AT&T Wireless. CNET News.com

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Belated Birthday wishes to Skype who just turned one. As I post this there are 625,000 users online. The numbers in Skype's first year letter are interesting. Despite what Kevin Werbach says I think Skype is the largest effective VoIP network. The other IM systems still can't substitute for a phone call. In a second piece of news it was noted that Skype has about 100000 paid up customers for SkypeOut. That is a respectable number for a month. It also cost them a lot less than Vonage!

At the same time they have released Skype for Mac OS X Beta and I've made my first calls with Mac users. Hurray!

Over our first year in operation, the number of broadband users globally has passed the 100 million mark and continues to grow rapidly. Skype has approximately 9.5 million users, consistently more than 500,000 people connected via Skype at a given moment and more than 1.5 million users per day. Skype customers have already spent more than 1.2 billion minutes engaged in free Skype-to-Skype calls. More than 2 million SkypeOut calls have been initiated. Skype

Skype isn't the only VoIP product of its kind, but it has by far the most users. SkypeOut has about 100,000 customers, Zennström said, generating what he hopes will be the beginning of a solid revenue stream. MercuryNews

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)

I was doing a little Skyping today trying to get a line on the impending roll-out of the PSTN interconnect which for all I know was announced at VON Canada today.

Whenever Skype launches their PSTN interconnect which I assume will use a prepaid card format and proprietary interconnect agreement (for they have no advantage going to SIP directly) somethings will happen...

Five Million Softphones will be launched. Has anyone else ever achieved that sort of number? They are claiming 5 million registered users now. If their interconnect deal is sweet they will provide some cents worth of free calling with each upgrade. Then Skype will infect many more households. I'm calling you on Skype on my dime.... cost us nothing if you start Skyping....

Five Million people get their first PC softphones (most of these have never seen one before, or completely given up on earlier examples). At least 10% will buy a $10 prepaid card (say 500 minutes anywhere on earth) even if just for goodwill and support for Skype. If the ratio is right and they can protect multiple identities through the creditcard number then a $.50 free offer will come with every PSTN softphone upgrade. Sweeter would be options to incent Skypers to sign up new connections. PayPal did this at launch.

The SkypeSoftphone will likely look nothing like the other softphones out there. It's name driven. Simply key the number in and dial. Even if they add an addtional dialer tab, the message "click on the person" to dial will be clear.... never enter a number again.

"Skype isn't about making cheaper phone calls it's about communicating better. It's much more convenient, has superior voice quality, instant messaging and conference calling." Niklas Zennstrom Globetechnology

Finally the guess is that you will be able to dial out or bridge a non Skyper into a conference call however this interconnect won't allow inbound calling at this time. Neither will you have any presence information for these out of network callers. That will only come later if / when integrated with SIP.

Time will tell if I am right.

On the competitive front Italk2U was relaunched in beta --- lousy sound quality does it get through all firewalls now. Don't bother. Then today I saw Peerio which wasn't downloadable when I visited. See Ted Sheldon's comments re the open source aspects.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (5)

A recent comment on my blog asked why the hype about Skype? "Aside from quality, why is everyone going crazy over Skype. I have used yahoo, netmeeting, and dialpad with success." I've tried them all too. What's inspired me to keep plugging away and digging deeper on Skype is it's base architecture. All the other systems use some form of centralized directory. Centralized directories create control and incur costs. Decentralized directory systems and input systems appear to create new markets. eBay never decided what should be auctioned, only how to auction it. eBay facilitates connectivity between buyer and sellers - flow and thus trade. I suspect if Skype or an open source substitute comes along it too will facilitate connectivity and create new markets around new very low cost voice exchanges.

If nothing else Skype is changing perspective on VoIP. Today I see 26488 users up +40% from the 18869 I saw yesterday about the same time. A good part of my practice has been scenarios for the last few years. While Skype should not be "news" to telecoms, MS or Yahoo for it's potential. I'd like to know how many have really thought it through and if even aware. Then what action and scenarios are they using to challenge their strategic thinking. Will US Telecoms be the next RIAA?

This link below to a comment sums up why it sounds good to me. It also suggests a solution is required for directory security. Can someone track this down and verify one way or the other? True or False?

An interesting editorial, but you might be wrong. My take on Skype is that it is using P2P technologies for the "white pages" portion of the VoIP network, not just in peers communicating directly. Super-peers store portions of these white-pages. Just as super-peers in Kazaa store indexes to music files stored on other peer machines, these super-peers store indexes to the phone numbers of other peers. They aren't clear if they are using this approach, but it's my take when they say "the network works just like Kazaa". This is also an unsecure approach, which is probably why they aren't publicizing it in detail. These super-peers could "lie" and reroute calls to the wrong peer, just as super-peers in Kazaa can "lie" about what music files are stored where. When you tell the system to find the phone number for 510-938-2222, it probably actually initiates a "search" on the network of super-peers to resolve to the actual peer that has this number, just as it would "search" for madonna.mp3.

This is an important approach, by the way, because if we don't need to maintain massive white pages servers then we can significantly reduce the capital needed to build such a network. In fact, we can reduce it down to such a marginal cost that businesses aren't needed to build these networks at all. The network, including the white pages, self-organizes out of the peers themselves. This network can then be used to build VoIP apps, virtual hard-drives, etc. I have been working on an open-source project named P2P Sockets that is attempting to achieve this; check it out at p2psockets.jxta.org. One significant issue that needs to be solved before this approach is tenable is that these white pages need to be secure even though they are also decentralized and human-friendly.
Comment at Rebels Without Cause

I don't agree, Skype is a one at a time (currently one to one) communication mechanism. You can only talk to one person at a time, and whilst you're in that conversation you're out of communication with everyone else, even if they develop an answerphone system, you'll still have to listen to each message. Speech is a very slow medium of communication, and it requires full attention. You can't talk on skype whilst in your office, or in the middle of cooking a meal, or doing any other task that takes you away from your computer momentarily. (I have a bluetooth headset which solves some of the problems - but popping to the toilet, or to the door, or somewhere out of bluetooth range is still impossible)
refer Jibbering Musings.for more

CNet. State regulators attempt to control VoIP phone services (Vonage). Here is a more informative bit of analysis from Jeff Pulver. LOL. Let them try that with Skype. [refer J Robb]

So, you can Skype me TDavid of www.makeyougohmm.com answers my request for a Skype me link. Heres his explanation and the HTML tag and heres my Skype me link. Youll need to download and install Skype. On the this looks like a viral winner... [refer Ratcliffe]

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's plenty more out there on Skype today. The number of users online has doubled (from my observations) in a day. Currently there are 10049 users online. This is up from the 4500 approx early yesterday....... I noted yesterday. They claim 160000 downloads. So at this point probably close to 10% of the Skype population is staying online.

How many users will they need to have more computing power than the traditional switching networks? With 10000 online now.. Only 5% to 10% are actually staying online. I'd guess we can expect this to increase. If not it suggests consumers are using a particular strategy with the system perhaps wary of being connected P2P all the time. Eg... Use a current IM client turn on and switch to Skype for Voice. From a brand point of view the associations with Kazaa are both good and bad and I'm going to address that separately. Why isn't the % participating higher? Well many will have problems with mics and sound. Others won't have got their buddies on yet. Not everyone does it immediately. Easily fixed (get a headset) see the helpful hints below.

Things that ... make you go hmm

160,000 Skype downloads in 12 days Skype helpful sound tips
Here's a Miss Cleo prediction: Skype is going to be huge. Yesterday I tested (while working on a few technical support issues actually), chatting with several folks on both broadband and dialup and I remain very impressed with the sound quality. Remember, it's still beta software, and thus there are some kinks, but it is catching on fast. Here's a few helpful tips:

Stowe Boyd also reports on his take at Corrante IM I've also received a number of comments and trackback about "Spyware" concerns (any proof anyone?) and comments read the Eula. I've read the Eula - as much as one reads it... What should I be scared of there? Where is Larry Lessig on this? John Robb remains equally enthused.

Seem worthy to note... that from my perspective this is another one of those "blogging accelerates knowledge sharing" examples. I went to IMPlanet this am. Looking to see what they might be advising. Nothing! There is an IM conference in less than a month. Enterprise focus or not I think they should be hustling to "think outside the box". Bloggers are beating the papers on this one! Combined Skype and blogging demonstrates how viral the "knowledge exchange" really is.

My rec... keep watching feedster on this one.

Posted by Stuart Henshall at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Are there more business models around P2P? Seems a good time to highlight this emerging research business. BigChampagne is bubbling in the media world. Like Zoomerang lowered the cost of market reserach BigChampagne is the online ethnographer. They simply observe - watching for behavior changes.

In fact, it tracks every download and sells the data to the music industry. How one company is turning file-sharing networks into the world's biggest focus group. By Jeff Howe from Wired magazine. [Wired]

This month, I chatted with Kai Rissdal about the RIAA and BigChampagne, the company that gleans customer intelligence from filesharing networks. (The interview is in RealAudio.) [Z+Blog!]

Hard media is in jeopardy: By 2008, revenues from CDs will be off 19%, while DVDs and tapes will drop 8%. Piracy and its cure -- streaming and paid downloads -- will drive people to connect to entertainment, not own it.

If you a