Why Oprah's Skype day was ineffective: tone and Skype

Skype earned market acceptance when Oprah said "I love Skype" in 2008. Skype started to become a household name as Oprah brought guests to her her weekday show.

Thursday, a year later, she spent an hour in Skype's honor. Nothing happened; Skype's download rate didn't budge.

The "Where the Skype Are You?" show aired Thursday, 05/21/09, at 4:00 pm in most US and Canada markets, rolling across time zones. U.S. Memorial Day weekend might have dampened the "Oprah Effect." A few weeks' earlier, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a Nielsen Television rating of 5.4, 6,197,000 audience, and 7,110,000 viewers for the week of 04/27 - 05/03 2009.

Why didn't Oprah's Skype day work?

The small problem: The tone was wrong. It felt like an infomercial more than a celebration of broadband Internet's ubiquity. Oprah's delivery was wooden, the Skype conversations banal, video quality variable.

This episode must have looked great on paper. Skype reinforces several Oprah themes: Surviving tough economic times by using free or cheaper tools. The importance of family and communication. That we live in a connected world and affect each other. 

Sadly, Oprah's regulars already knew the Skype basics, having seen dozens of guest appearances over Skype. Skype day became a "best of" show; not the most exciting format.

The huge problem: Fans could not Skype Oprah. Unlike twitter, where Oprah created an account that everyone could follow and message, Oprah did not give out a Skype account for fans to befriend. People want to be closer to their celebrities so, for example, they followed Oprah on twitter; 1,182,301 at last count.

Why couldn't a million fans Skype Oprah?

Twitter scales well for their news and celebrity users (ones with high TV ratings). Fame changes relationships from symmetrical (we friend each other) to off the charts. 1,182,301 twitterers follow Oprah, Oprah follows 14.

Could Skype handle an Oprah account? Or a Coke, a White House, or an American Idol account? What would happen if someone with a fan base used the web and television to invite a million people to befriend them in Skype?  No PSTN, just in-network Skype activity. One user with a million friends.

Skype is engineered for the average user, with a handful of contacts and modest levels of activity. For the most part, Skype's network is thin, flat, like the long tail in a power curve.

Power skypers, like Skype Journal readers and those who work at Skype or who use Skype for selling, may have a few hundred or a few thousand contacts.

Stressors come to mind:

1. Approval work flow. Can you imagine opening up your Skype client in the morning to approve a hundred new contacts? You might get through 100 in 15 minutes if you click 'add to contacts' blindly. 1000 per day at 6 seconds each? Almost two hours. A million? 1,666 hours, about nine months. For all practical purposes, this must be automated.
2. Client Account Storage. Can your Skype client hold a million contacts? No. Even if it was the only software running and you had all the memory in the world, your Skype client was never built to hold that large a contact list. While some enterprises have hundreds of thousands of employees and and millions of stakeholders, Skype for Windows or Mac will slow to a crawl and crash when loading that many contacts. Let's say each new contact's profile, avatar, and history uses .1 MB. The contact list alone would be 100k MB. Skype still thinks like a phone or mobile phone company, not like a social network.
3. Presence and Activity Streams. Skype updates your friends when you log on, log off, or otherwise change your presence. A Skype client would be very busy with hundreds of thousands of mood and availability updates. Presence data might be very useful to the celebrity if you want to narrowcast updates ("today's show is about puppies") only to people who are online; no need for you to see the message when you log in next week.
4. Navigation. Skype's UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
5. Filtering contact activity. If you friend them, they will IM, call, and send you files. I sometimes have a dozen public chats and private conversations going at once; dizzying. What happens when ten thousand people try to chat with you during today's financial conference call? You must automate your responses in ways that produce meaningful experiences and that route callers to relevant people and services.
6. Public vs. shades of private. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman revealed a deep flaw in Skype's identity system. Her MegAtWork Skype account was different than her personal account, and she could only log in to one at a time. Techniques vary, but a celebrity must be able to manage personal, family, workplace, acquaintances, and fans from one login, disclosing only as appropriate.
7. Swamping Skype supernodes and relays. What happens when one node on the Skype network connects with five to ten percent of the whole network? Can enough supernodes emerge in Chicago for Oprah, for example, to support all the new connections, updates and conversations? Will this hurt the experience of other Skype users in Chicagoland? How much of updating is done directly between a Skype client and Skype's presence and client-backup servers? Can that client-server connection be swamped as the volume rises four to five orders of magnitude over the norm?
8. No server side messaging, voice, video APIs. No software developer in their right mind wants to build and operate their own IM gateway. Think thousands of Skype clients running on hundreds of boxes, each needing careful administration. Instead they want to talk to a web service API. Services like IMified (congratulations, Voxeo!) let you design and run bots for the AIM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google networks in hours, and without your getting into the gateway business. Skype isn't on the list because it doesn't host a public web service interface to the Skype network.

Why would Oprah want a million Skype fans?

Why would a brand or celebrity want to have a Skype relationship with so many people? For companies on Cluetrain 1.0 (markets are conversations) and moving to Cluetrain 2.0 (markets are relationships), Skype offers opportunities for engagement and intimacy. Unlike blogs or services like twitter, Skype conversations are held privately.

How will Oprahs engage?

1. Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
2. Deliver services. You could sign up for Oprah's book club, update Oprah's magazine subscriptions, get the link for the episode you missed, get local show times for next week, or suggest a show topic. Harpo Productions could support those services through a blend of voice mashups and call centers. How about Skyping an Oprah account that played a Skype video of her last show, or a show on demand?
3. Bring fans together. Introduce fans with similar interests to each other. Host thousands of small salons in Skype public chats before or after a show, or about a theme or a magazine topic. Help the millions find others to solve problems, share burdens, and make sense of the world.

See also:

• Jim Courtney's great play-by-play of the Oprah show
• flickr set of photos from the show

tags: skype, tv, television, us, canada, marketing, promotion, tie-in, oprahwinfrey, oprah, theoprahwinfreyshow, scale, fame

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Skype for SIP == Skype for Asterisk DOA?

Guest post by Jason Goecke, Adhearsion

Today Skype announced Skype for SIP (SFS). Put simply, enterprise telephone systems may now interconnect with the Skype network to receive calls from the Skype network and place calls to SkypeOut. All without the need to install any special hardware or software on most modern enterprise phone systems (IP-PBXs to be more specific). Skype’s new enterprise targeted connectivity uses SIP, the industry standard for VoIP interconnection. SIP already powers the bulk of Skype’s revenue, via SkypeIn/SkypeOut, so this is a logical progression to take advantage of the large scale infrastructure already in place at Skype.

This is a tremendous move by Skype and one I have contended for years was necessary for them to make headway in the enterprise. I applaud this step. There are plenty of great posts out there covering this already, including the one by @danyork on Disruptive Telephony.

What does this mean for Skype for Asterisk (SFA) announced last September? At best the value of SFA has been significantly reduced by this announcement.

Previously SIP interconnection to the Skype cloud was given to the rarified group of larger players such as Voxeo, Tellme, Genesys and others. SFA was the first time this access was going to be brought to the world of open source telephony developers through Asterisk. This provided an immense opportunity for the Asterisk developer community to create new applications to take advantage of this, which lead me to invest time to participate in the closed beta for SFA still underway.

The SFS announcement this morning has just marginalized SFA to applications that benefit from direct dialing of Skype users from Asterisk and from basic presence updates from the Skype network. Gone are the benefits of providing Skype/SkypeIn inbound calls to the enterprise, SkypeOut trunking, etc. More so, SFA is at a disadvantage since you will have to pay a per channel (simultaneous call) license fee on top of any SkypeIn/SkypeOut costs. Further, I suspect that the number of SFA channels available to a single account will be limited for the same reason that SFS does not do SIP to Skype dialing, so that no one may provide large scale alternatives to SkypeIn.

All of this has really taken the wind out of the SFA sails before it even had a chance to make it to a public beta. Digium must now look to quickly add new features. Such as advanced presence information, instant messaging, the SILK codec and others, if they hope to salvage their own investment in the development of SFA to date. While I understand these things take time, the lethargy of getting the SFA to market does not bode well for rapidly trumping the SFS announcement.

Time will tell.

tags: asterisk, ip-pbx, sfa, sfs, sip, skype, skypeforasterisk, skypeforsip, voiceoverip, VoIP, jasongoecke

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Ask for an invitation to the Skype Journal private roundtable.

Voxeo Grows Again: Voice Objects Acquisition Adds a Third Layer of Developer Resources

Over the past ten years Orlando, FL-based Voxeo Corporation has grown to become one of the largest hosts of enterprise Interactive Voice Response ("IVR") applications, building not only tools for developing and hosting these applications but also a track record of twenty profitable quarters as a self-financed private company.Historically Voxeo has provided, at no charge, resources for C++/Java and Web Developers to produce customized IVR applications that are then hosted at their network operations center. Their developer community has grown to over 31,000 participants. As their expertise has grown they have also developed their licensable Prophecy SIP platform for those enterprises that wish to host their own services using Voxeo's tools.

Today Voxeo announced an expansion their development expertise, technology base and user community through the acquisition of Germany-based Voice Objects.

While acquiring ownership of Voice Objects' technology assets, Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor emphasized in an interview with me yesterday that Voxeo's first reason for making an acquisition is to acquire the expertise and professionalism of the employees. Contrary to the popular perception of making an acquisition and focusing on the technology assets, Voxeo looks for team players who can fit into Voxeo's culture and then look at the technology synergies.

As a bonus the Voice Objects acquisition brings to the table as customers a new layer of developers; namely those who routinely develop "self-service" applications for service providers and enterprises as a full time occupation. Jonathan described Voxeo's current developer resources as having two layers: API-based telephony libraries favored by C++/Java "low level" developers and XML-based telephony languages using Voxeo's proprietary but simplified CallXML as well as other XML standards for web developers. The acquisition of Voice Ojbects introduces a higher level of object-based telephony tools, employing drag-and-drop and visual rapid development techniques.

Whereas Voxeo's legacy tools facilitated people-to-people connections, Voice Ojbects' toolkits facilitate the development of "self-service" applications where no human is involved in delivering or provisioning enterprise or carrier-based services. It is multimodal in that not only is voice involved but also SMS messaging and video can be brought into the application where appropriate. For example, T-Mobile Czech can easily program changes into their self-service applications reducing development times by an order of magnitude while dynamically addressing market needs.

Taylor described Voice Objects' toolkits as having three major components: a rich development environment, unified self-service middleware - that connects customer information within an enterprise with customers who desire access to this information via voice, SMS or other modes - and, finally, extensive analytics. The analytics component gathers real customer usage data and provides justification for making application modifications based on user experiences as well as changing local market conditions. To quote Jonathan: "Business owners don't want to build a bad experience; however, it is challenging and difficult to build applications that work well for customers."

In closing our interview, Taylor mentioned that Voxeo, recognizing that the best way to recruit talent is through acquisitions of this nature, will be looking at three or four similar acquisitions in 2009 building up a team of "great people who understand the industry well".

The acquisition of Voice Objects will not change Voxeo's business model of making their developer resources available at no charge while charging either for hosting of applications or for platform licenses sold to enterprises that wish to host their own applications.

It appears that Voxeo continues to set a benchmark for operating a sustainably profitable business in the Voice 2.0 world. On a broader scale Jonathan has provided an overview of the various levels of developer segmentation and classes of tools available on the market today for creating Voice 2.0 applications.

Other posts on this acquistion:

• Vox Populi "Best Freaking Voice Platform on the Market".
• Dan York at Voxeo: What the Voice Objects Acquistion by Voxeo means for voice applications developers.
• Michael Dinan, TMCNet: Voxeo Acquires VoiceObjects, Expands Cost-Saving IVR Solutions
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: What's New In VoIP? Lots with Gizmo, Voxeo and Fonality

Tags: Voxeo, Voice Objects. Jonathan Taylor, acquisitions

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Skype Becomes Platinum Sponsor for eComm 2009

Perhaps the most informative event I have attended during my two-and-a-half years of writing for Skype Journal was last spring's eComm 2008. Our of a sense of frustration organizer Lee Dryburgh took it upon himself to risk organizing this event when the former eTel Conference announced it would be no more. The 300 attendees were treated to a buffet of information about various initiatives being undertaken to deploy IP-based communications in innovative ways. From communications enhanced business processes to a garage-based operation to monitor security of abandoned farm houses, we all learned a lot. And the networking opportunity was excellent.

eComm 2009 has been announced; in fact, a call for speakers flooded Lee's email over the past few weeks. He has put together a tentative schedule and been recruiting sponsors. Last year's sponsors included many vendors we have written about since the event including iSkoot (Skypephone), Voxbone (iNum), VAPPS (HiDef Conferencing) and Brough Turner's NMS Communications. Sponsors recruited to date for eComm 2009 include, once again Voxbone, and newcomers Global IP Solutions and Voxeo.

Today we learned that Skype has added its name to the list of sponsors. This is a new initiative for Skype in that they have previously tended to maybe provide speakers but not sponsorship at this type of event. In a statement to Lee Dryburgh this evening, Skype's GM Audio and Video (and a keynote speaker last year) Jonathan Christensen said:

... thinking about why we did it.. We believe that communications is going through a major shift from hardware devices on dedicated networks to software applications. A new paradigm is emerging. As a clear leader in this new age of communications, it makes sense for Skype to sponsor the eComm event as it is all about celebrating this innovation and sharing our vision for the future of communications with those individuals and companies who are most interested in changing the way people around the world communicate.

It's been pretty quiet recently on the Skype scene. But then President Josh Silverman did tell us in our September interview that Skype was undergoing a major restructuring. And we have not heard of any layoffs. So it would only be natural to assume that development efforts (beyond the Skype for Windows 4.0 beta program) are under way and we can assume we'll see new product and service announcements in 2009.

Would any be made at eComm 2009? Speakers from Skype include Jonathan Christensen and Director of Strategy Julien Decot.

Registration for attendees opens December 2, 2008.

Note: Skype Journal editor Phil Wolff, Skype's Jonathan Christensen, Voxeo's Dan York, Brough Turner and Jon Arnold are on the eComm 2009 Advisory Board.

Tags: eComm2009, Skype, Jonathan Christensen, Lee Dryburgh, Julien Decot, Voxbone, GIPS, Voxeo

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Updates: iNum, Calliflower and Entering "Last Name" onto a BlackBerry

With both VoiceCon and Under The Radar events in the Bay Area last week, there were lots of announcements in the Voice 2.0 communications space; I wrote up some GigaOm and Web Worker Daily Posts to cover a few of them:

On Tuesday Voxbone announced the launch of their iNum Service. Basically it provides a means to have a universal worldwide "local" number that can be accessed through the recently accredited (by the ITU) +883 country code. Last Tuesday I hosted a SquawkBox conference call with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens; a post on GigaOm with more details talks about Geography Is Dead - Thank VoIP. Two other excellent "Voxeo Talks" posts from Dan York on this topic (Voxeo is a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner):

• How to get an iNum - a "global phone number"
• iNum and "global phone numbers: a video interview with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens.

A heads up on using iNum; access from Skype to a +883 number is considered a SkypeOut call requiring SkypeOut credits. It's not a "country" covered under Skype's Universal Calling Plans; check out the various alternative means to access iNum numbers here.

The following day iotum announced the official launch of their Calliflower conference call service incorporating premium options for businesses that see its benefits for more interactive voice conferencing through the Calliflower call portal. Document sharing and a much wider range of access points, including iNum access were amongst the new features. And they announced an iPhone application for accessing Calliflower calls. More details can be found in my Web Worker Daily Post: Calliflower: A Complete Conference Calling Service.

Finally, in doing some checking out of a new service, I encountered an Automated Attendant that wanted me to enter a person's last name in order to locate that person in the host business's extension directory. But that presents a bit of a problem when you have a BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard and you want to generate the tones where 2--> "A, B or C", etc. But the RIM people think of everything; there is a relatively simple solution. Find out the answer over at Web Worker Daily in "Entering 'Last Name' From a BlackBerry".

Tags: Voxbone, iNum, iotum, Calliflower, Research in Motion, BlackBerry, Dan York, Voxeo

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Skype Journal Interviews Josh Silverman: The Way Ahead - Platform and Partners

This is the fourth in a series of posts resulting from an interview a week ago Friday with Josh Silverman, Skype's recently appointed President. In this post we talk about directions for the Skype platform and partner programs.
When I first attended a Skype developer event in June 2006, there was lots of enthusiasm for the Skype partner program and for its integration into various third party applications and service offerings. Several of the feature requests, such as call transfer and access to the voice stream, that had come to the surface by the time of this event, have since been implemented. In December 2006 Skype announced the Skype Extras program for which there are over 100 offerings available, mostly for the consumer user but the list also includes about ten in the small-to-medium business space. Most importantly, partners have been asking not only for a platform roadmap but also for execution on that roadmap.
Skype Extras included a publishing and transaction platform, yet to date, only PamConsult has taken full advantage of these feature for its well received (and award winning) PamFax offering. On the other hand, OnState has been able to figure out how to provide a friction-free full services program for its call center customer base. However, over the past eight months market visibility of any significance for the entire Skype partner program has just not been there. Yet we see "Skype access" continue to be built into various platforms such as Ribbit and Voxeo. Skype Certification exists for only seventeen offerings. InnerPass has received Skype Certification two weeks ago (review coming). At IT Expo last week in Los Angeles I came across several service providers and application developers who wanted to have a Skype presence in their offerings.
On the hardware side there have been many innovative offerings; I have experienced many of them. As confirmed by 3 executives at last Thursday's Mobilize 08 event, the Skypephone has met with phenomenal acceptance in the nine countries serviced by 3. Yet several hardware partners have drifted away to the point where we only see limited visibility for Philips, GE and IPevo dual mode (Skype and landline) phones and a few accessory products, such as the FreeTalk Wireless Stereo Headset, from InStoreSolutions (who largely address the European market). Beyond the Skype Store availability, WalMart is carrying Skype hardware in the U.S. (and I found some at Fry's in Sunnyvale this past Saturday).
Frankly, sorting out its platform strategy and partner relationships, and giving them appropriate visibility, is perhaps one of the biggest challenges that Josh and his team face in sustaining Skype's presence in the IP-based conversation space. In our interview with Josh it became quite apparent that these issues have not missed Josh's scrutiny leading up to the business reorganization we have been discussing in the various posts in this series:
SJ: In your interview with Om Malik yesterday you mentioned as one of your key growth initiatives "Skype as a platform, embedding Skype as the conversation infrastructure for devices and services". Tell use more:

JS: We're incredibly lucky that almost everyone in the world wants to do something with us. That's fortunate because we need to be everywhere. For Skype to be successful and to fulfill its full potential we need to be part of every device and every communications experience. We can't do that on our own. We need a really robust platform that allows us to be part of other people's experiences or devices and allow other people to be part of us. We all recognize that we have a long way to get from where we are today to there. With the relatively small program we have and small investment we have made we have 15,000 partners who have signed up for our program today. I think that's a great indication that if we really invest behind this we can do something magical.

SJ: What would that future platform look like?

JS: What we want to do is lay out a set of principles around the platform that say:

• we want people to be able to incorporate Skype into their experience.
• It should be the full Skype stack of functionality
• it should include all of our feature set and not just hive off one piece or two pieces.
• When you use Skype you should know you're using Skype and
• you should have a SkypeID which works across all of our experiences,

So somebody who wants to take Skype and build it into their experience but create a walled garden of "only within their experience" doesn't build value for the greater ecosystem. If you start with Skype on one experience and then you go to another experience with another platform partner, you still need to be able to communicate. There needs to be one SkypeID that works everywhere and then it needs to hold true to some basic sense of brand principles around what the Skype brand should be. Beyond those principles we really want to allow people to innovate and use Skype and do what they will to extend the functionality for our users.

SJ: Has the architecture for this started?

JS: Right now we have created the job of GM of Platform; I hope to very soon name a GM of Platform. That person is going to have to really work on what does the architecture need to look like to support this, what are the API's going to be - reference UI's, technical documentation - as well as evangelizing to the broader community forming some of our partnerships, so we have some work to do.

SJ: Is the job posted on your job board?

JS: Not yet, we have some candidates; but if there are folks in your community that are excited by this and we haven't already filled this in the coming days [faded away but implication was to apply].

SJ: Is there a timeline?

JS: I don't want to speculate too much. We do have a API [set] today, we do have lots of people working with the API's so we have something to build from. I'm not an expert. I wouldn't be able to lay out a timeline but we are going to get an expert who can lay out a timeline. ... As with everything at Skype, we want to be fast but also make sure we do it well, in particular with a platform. It's got to be well thought through so we support our partners really well. We know there's a big responsibility in there and we take it seriously.

SJ: Would you be looking at getting the partners involved in helping design that platform and getting some feedback on it?

JS:I think that would be essential. One of the things I'm pretty passionate about is always bringing the voice of the customer in early to anything we're trying to do and I think that, for the platform, that would be absolutely essential.

SJ: What are you looking at to address ongoing partner communications issues with respect to the partner program?

JS: I take the partner program really seriously and we're aware that we've not invested adequately behind it and want to do more. The first thing we are going to do is hire an experienced, capable leader of that organization who will pull together for me a plan for what resources do we need to invest in -- engineering, partner support, evangelism, technical documentation -- to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly.
What I don't want to do is over promise. Step one is, when you get somebody good in, lay out a plan and then when we're ready to announce some more forward looking things we'll do that.

Changes are not going to happen overnight when Skype is acquiring 300,000 new registrations per day and profitable. But, based on the strategy and principles outlined by Josh in this interview, going forward we should be looking to see within a three to six month timeframe:

• Announcements of the appointment of two key senior executives who bring along experience in building platforms and partnerships
• A platform architecture and developer roadmap
• Revamped plans for Skype's hardware and software partner programs

It will also be most interesting to see what forums or other means Skype provides for input into the platform architecture and developer roadmap strategy. Execution is everything, especially at this stage of Skype's growth within the IP-based conversation space.
(For background on Skype's partner program history check out: A Primer for Skype's Direction - Skype's Extras Gallery and Developer Partner Program. And for an example of what attracts developers to Skype as an ecosystem check out "On Spotlight: Don Kennedy AKA TheUberOverLord".)
Next: Markets: Business and Geographical

Does Office 2.0 include Voice 2.0?

I'm stopping by the Office 2.0 Conference Thursday and Friday. When it started, Office 2.0 was document centric, bringing Microsoft Office to the web. Last year it became more metawork (work about work) and project/workflow oriented.

Realtime talk remains off topic.

There are a few contrary examples. Plutext.org enables live collaborative editing of Microsoft Word docs.

So where do Office 2.0 and Talk 2.0 overlap?

Simply, you have...

Talk with Office features might look like Skype plug-ins for document co-writing. Call centric with talk experience enhanced by office tool.

Office with Talk features might include collaborative spaces that add live chat room.

There's room for service-to-service interop, but we haven't seen much.

Three dimensions affect the uptake of this union:

1. Time structures
2. Engagement
3. Packaging

Time Structures

Nearly all Office 2.0 services are mostly asynchronous. While most Talk 2.0 services are nearly synchronous.

But we're seeing some blending. For example, Blackberries turn email into instant messages. Persistent IM chat rooms keep history so you can catch up on a conversation.

The other structure to time is that Live Talk is an event. It takes place in time. Divide each conversation into periods before, during and after a call. 

Before a talk, you have to discover people to engage, using a namespace, group affiliations, authentication of ID, permissions, white/yellow page directories, etc.

You'll also want to schedule your conversation using calendars, project deadlines and services that find common time windows.

If you're exceptionally lucky, someone has tools that map to-do lists to agenda items and reminder services.

During a conversation, you can augment the experience. For example, adding live chats or conferencing backchannels to desktop sharing or collaborative writing exercises.

After, you can add the conversation's debris to a team/project/process/transaction workspace. Or publish it to a blog/vlog/wiki/microblog, becoming part of your team's institutional memory, searchable, attributable.

Degrees of Engagement

You are more than an email address or Skype name. The more you share digitally, the closer your experience comes to feel like face-to-face contact. The higher the fidelity (wideband audio, high quality video) the higher you climb the ladder of engagement.

Engagement brings people into a call, make it more real, vivid, increasing focus and participation. When embedded in an Office application, that engagement improves the quality of the work experience.

Embedability

OK, so you can design solutions that exploit Talk's time, engagement, and modality attributes. How do you add talk with as little effort and as much reliability and scalability as possible?

I started off saying few Office 2.0 companies have Talk 2.0 features in their products. It's a little failure of imagination. Mostly, though, it's the companies that offer Talk 2.0 components haven't made them very embedable.

What does it take to make Talk readily embedable?

Web services. Web services let my servers talk to your servers. To start, you want access to a metatalk command language, creating accounts, groups, sessions and getting statistics, status, and reports. More, you want access to the content of conversations; the better to index and repurpose them. A startup can't force a customer to download 20MB software clients and keep them running on a desktop; they rarely have that sort of power.

Browser clients. Flash and JavaScript downloads are small and cached. So you can access your Office/Talk service from nearly anywhere. Side benefit: you aren't tied into a Talk supplier's UI, you can adapt and adjust it to meet your changing needs and your deep understanding of the workplaces you support.

The customer's name spaces. Skype commands the Skype user namespace, Microsoft Microsoft's, and so on. As an infrastructure provider, you have to go beyond that; you no longer control the customer relationship. Each Office 2.0 service will either have their own namespace ("thank you for registering at Octopz") or administer an enterprise's namespace ("set up the call using your company directory or org chart").

Security. Your security must be better than your customers' and much better than their customers' security.

Commerce. Office 2.0 companies will charge for many services, so accounting, billing, automatic payments, and revenue sharing must be part of any Talk 2.0 service offer.

Fidelity and Immediacy. Skype's been spoiling people with amazing audio quality. Skype sets expectations high. Wideband spectrum, noise reduction, echo cancellation, high resolution, fast frame rates, deep color depth, smart compression and other techniques are expected in rich clients like Skype. Thin/browser clients suffer from comparison but are in demand anyway. The same applies to the problems of latency, compute demand, and network connectivity. Skype makes it all seem easy but it isn't.

Media access. Many services don't let you manipulate IMs, audio or video during a live session. Others won't let you get them after a session. Your Office 2.0 application may have excellent reasons for touching those streams or files, solving real customer problems.

Widgets and other user-facing components. I'm still surprised at how many Voice 2.0 vendors don't make it simple for designers to add talk without knowing three programming languages and four APIs. Delivering Talk in ready-to-install UI components expands reach and embedability. 

How does Skype fit in?

Skype doesn't. This is an architecture Skype cannot deliver today.

Should Skype strive to? I believe so.

Skype's downloads earn a measure of customer lock-in. But downloading is a barrier to adoption, a problem as people use multiple devices in their onlives, and an inconvenience. Browser-based talk solves these problems for Skype's own customers.

Should Skype offer white label talk?

Others are quickly filling that gap. Jajah has 9 white labeled users for each Jajah branded user. SightSpeed is very successful in private labeling and co-branding its services. Jaduka only delivers wholesale talk. BT/Ribbit has embedding as its charter. Voxeo is years ahead of Skype on its voice platform.

An embedding strategy is within Skype's reach.

The theme of 2009's Office 2.0 conference?

I'm betting on talkification.

tags: skype, jajah, sightspeed, jaduka, ribbit, voxeo, talk, talkification, talk 2.0, office 2.0, talk20, office20, embedding, embedability, voip

Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.

SquawkBox Discusses Skype's Fifth Anniversary

Over the past few months I have been a frequent participant on Alec Saunders' daily SquawkBox conference call where several of those involved in following today's communications and web developments will discuss topics of the day. Subjects for yesterday's call were the impact of the Internet on this years U.S. President campaign and Skype's fifth anniversary today. Participants included Dan York of Voxeo, James Body of Truphone, William Volk of MyNumo (one of the more successful iPhone Apps developers) and Jonathan Jensen amongst others. The Saunderslog post is here.
The Skype discussion commences about half-way through the call. The one universal agreement was that Skype has succeeded because of the user experience. You can build all the communications technology you want but unless people can get all the way through the setup and readily make a call, people will not use it routinely. And the discussion highlights the importance of getting the Skype 4.0 user interface right but starting with some experimentation that challenges all of us to think through how to set up and manage a multi-modal conversation experience.. Some comments from the SquawkBox discussion:

• James Body: participating in a discussion at a smoke-filled bar in London with Nicklas just after Skype launched: "this proprietary thing will never work because it does not use SIP". James then goes on to point out that if Skype had not had the success it has achieved, Truphone may never have been funded to the level they have obtained.
• Alec Saunders: basically it was the first VoIP-based service that "just worked".
• I then discussed my memories of watching the Quarterdeck team develop WebTalk back in 1995 - and how our CEO of the day drove the engineers to make it work on 50MHz (not 50 GHz - a slip of the tongue) Pentium PC's and over 14.4 kbps modems. But the overall infrastructure was just not there to let it become viable as a consumer in the 1996 time frame.Yes, having widely deployed broadband was one major contributor to the timing element that helped achieve Skype's immediate success. (I did have WebTalk running over a 56kbps modem on a 100MHz Pentium but it was challenging to carry on a conversation. Yet a few small businesses did adopt it.)
• William talked about the importance of usability. "Just because it - VoIP - works is not enough. Users are fickle. You will lose a significant number of users at each step where the process of installing and completing a call may fail. The user experience is everything."
• Dan York the security expert amongst us, got into a discussion of how Skype worked when offerings such as NetMeeting and CU CMe just did not get significant traction. Firewall traveral across NAT - a major failing of SIP, the first true high quality wideband codec, and Skype's inherent security are all features that impressed Dan.

But listen to the recording via the link/player on the Saunderslog post to get the full story, especially helpful for Skype employees involved in the Skype 4.0 beta.
And Happy Fifth Anniversary to Skype from all of us on the call! There are many challenges ahead as Skype liquifies communications - we look forward to the next generation of Skype under its new executive team. And thanks to the iotum team and SquawkBox producer Alec Saunders for making such a conversation feasible

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VoIP Blocking Explained

Dan York, Director of Emerging Communication Technology at Voxeo, but also on the Board of the Voice over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) has written two excellent pieces in another of his blogs, Voice of VoIPSA, discussing the blocking of VoIP calls by Aircell. The first explains how they can block Skype calls, even though they are encrypted while the second goes on to explain why Andy Abramson could make a VoIP call using Phweet.
1. How Aircell is (probably) blocking VoIP phone calls on planes (hint… VoIP Whack-A-Mole)

There it is… all in UDP… and coming in at about 100 packets per second. And if I look at the actual Wireshark traces, I can see that these 100 packets per second are all very tiny sizes. Many of them are between 37 and 50 bytes.
And this is an encrypted Skype call!
No need to decrypt it. Just see that it’s a steady stream of 100 very small packets per second (50 packets per second each way) all over UDP.
Kill the stream. Block it. Conversation dead. No more VoIP on the plane.
It’s basically the network security version of Whack-A-Mole. See a VoIP stream start up… block it. See another one… block it. See yet another… block it. Whenever anything pops up that meets the profile, stomp on it.
This explains, too, why people could talk for a few seconds and then had their conversations terminated. The pattern has to appear in the network monitoring software. The software has to be sure it’s a VoIP stream and not something else… and then the software can block it.
Now I don’t know for a fact that this is how Aircell is blocking VoIP, but it would be easy enough to do it this way.

2. The reason why (probably) you can use Phweet on a plane when Skype is blocked

And there you go… one very possible reason why Phweet may work and Skype, SightSpeed and others were blocked is simply this:

The Tringme Flash-based softphone is sending audio over TCP and Aircell is not recognizing and blocking VoIP calls over TCP.

Or at least Aircell wasn’t blocking TCP. (They probably are by now or will be soon.)
Now to be fair, if Aircell isn’t blocking TCP, this was probably a decent assumption to make. I mean, the typical mindset to date has been… who in their right mind would send audio streams over TCP?
In all the VoIP systems I’ve worked with, I can’t think offhand of any other systems that send audio over TCP. As part of its range of tricks to get through firewalls, I understand that Skype can use TCP if it is unable to send over UDP, but I’ve never captured it doing so. The IP-PBXs I’m familiar with, both commercial and open source, all send RTP over UDP.

Read the entire posts for the details of Dan's assumptions and explanations. One of Dan's writing strengths is his ability to make technology understandable to the lay person.
As for not wanting to have voice calls available in flight I would soften my stand if human nature would change. Over the weekend I was reading a book on the history of one of our rural independent telephone companies where they were providing anecdotes about early usage of the operator-serviced telephones:

Mrs. Alice Cooley's brother, Billy Huang, Tiverton, used the phone for the first time to call his chum a few houses down the street. Alice and some others were out in the garden and they heard Billy shouting loudly on the phone. He thought he had to shout to be heard. Some people never did get over the idea that they had to shout on the phone.

From "Bruce Municipal Telephone System - A Long Line of History 1910 - 1994" by Anne Duke Judd.

Enough said. Thanks, Dan for taking time to put up these explanations.
Tags: Dan York, Aircell, Skype, GoGo, Andy Abramson, TringMe, Phweet

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Voxeo: A Textbook Case Study for Voice 2.0 and Telecom Partnering

When fellow blogger Dan York joined Voxeo Corporation last October, very few of us in the IP-based communications blogging space had heard of this rapidly growing service provider. Over the next few months, sometimes with Dan's assistance, Voxeo has become a familiar name identified with a self-financed startup, a profitable business and a very large enterprise customer base focused on supporting voice applications through third party development activity. Revenue generation comes solely from their "cloud" hosting and VoIP/SIP communications server software business. Last week, in following up on a couple of press releases, I had the opportunity to interview Voxeo's CEO, Jonathan Taylor, and to learn much more about their success story.
Fundamentally Voxeo provides hosting environments for telephony applications, whether hosted on their in-house server "cloud" or on a customer's premise-based servers. Developers write applications to their Prophecy platform creating XML files and SIP connections that are understood by the Prophecy-enabled servers. The Prophecy 9 client used by developers to create and manage these applications is now available for Mac OS X and Linux in addition to their legacy availability for Windows. Originally Voxeo only offered a hosted service but two years ago, in response to customer demand, they also provided the capability to support customers' premise-based servers. Key elements of their program that have led to their success (and profitability) include:

• No charge for downloading, and use of, their software
• A focus on ease of development and deployment
• Charging customers only when a service is launched and providing business value
• Option to use either Voxeo's hosting "cloud" or customers' premise-based servers (usually based on the overall business case for supporting the application)
• Licensing based on a "per port" or "per minute" business model, as appropriate
• Providing Prophecy as a suite of components for SIP implementations
• A platform based entirely on open standards
• Including solutions for supporting conferencing, voice mail, call recording, speech recognition and auto-attendant requirements
• A strong channel and developer focus recognizing the role of third party professional developers as their key to implementing their enterprise customers' services
• Lowering their customer support requirements through innovation in their software.

Two recent press releases covered:

• Launch of Prophecy 9, providing support for OS X and Linux clients to their platform as well as a new management console that not only reduces the complexity of development and associated deployment costs but also provides increased scalability.
• Acquisition of Beijing, China-based Micromethod, not only complementing Voxeo's Prophecy suite of modules with their SIP-focused products but also providing a base for expanding Voxeo into serving the Asia-Pacific markets.

When I asked Jonathan about representative applications beyond the flexible yet effective IVR applications they can support, the list of several thousand applications includes:

• Intelligent call routing (using their call control features)
• Voice mashups providing access to, say, email or Google Calendar
• Emergency notification services due to weather or business disruption
  
• Anonymous calling services
• Facilitating calling services for children's websites such as Nickelodeon.

Jonathan summed up their application support as providing a "services innovation platform" that operates "at the edge", bypassing any carrier dependence beyond acting as a pipeline for their services. A final key feature is their provision of a highly accurate billing infrastructure, critical to their ability to support both their own invoicing and receivables management as well as their customers'.
Last Wednesday Voxeo issued a third press release discussing some of their business success with revenue growth of 99.7% (no rounding allowed - who would believe 100%, they say), 18 successive profitable quarters and a very high customer retention rate. Not being a public company they do not need to release any detailed financials. But building and supporting a community of 31,000 developers probably says it all.
In conclusion, Voxeo's business represents a practical, successful and profitable implementation of Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto, emphasizing that the value-add for voice conversations going forward lies in the applications.
Note 1: Tomorrow morning (August 26) Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor will be the guest for Alec Saunders' daily Squawkbox conference call. Dan York provides more details on how to participate. Update: If you missed the call, you can hear the recording posted on SaundersLog.com.
Note 2: Voxeo's hosted "cloud" also supports connectivity to Skype for inbound calls.

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