$10 a month gets you multiparty video conferencing, screen/application sharing, browser and phone access for your guests, and video broadcasting. Vivu's VuRoom for Skype plugs-in to your Windows and Mac Skype clients. VuRoom launches your session using the Skype client. Vivu notifies your invitees to your call through a Skype chat. They can launch into the room through their own copy of VuRoom or click on a link to the browser version. Your meeting uses Skype's encrypted, high quality audio channel. Here's a flash demo, an offer for a 15 day trial account, and details on subscribing to VuRoom.
Vivu isn't the first company to offer multiparty video for Skype, but their timing is excellent. Hundreds of millions of Skype users now appreciate video calling, paving the way in customer appreciation and behavior. This plug-in helps Vivu extend its market reach to Skype's large user base and builds on the love and trust people have for the Skype brand.
Skype could easily target this market segment as it turns to business markets. Will Skype compete with partners like Vivu for customer attention, as they have with one-to-one video calling software partners and with desktop sharing software partners?
The founders of Helsinki startup Flowdock say you need online/collaborative services to focus on teams, combining the real time aspect of Google Wave and the simplicity of Yammer. You need to be able to stay in close touch with your team without complexity while organizing the team's data. On YouTube.
[Adam] Anders and his partner in Sweden, super-producer Peer Astrom (Celine Dion, Madonna), work on an intense timeline, with about seven days from music approval to show taping to producing songs. Their teams work across time zones, around the clock, arranging, tracking and mixing — multitasking to produce up to 11 songs in a single week. “We use the time change to our advantage, so when I go to bed he keeps working, and vice versa — basically, 24 hours a day, six days a week,” says Anders.
The team communicates via Skype and transfers files over the Internet. “At one point, I had three studios in Sweden going, I had three here and one in New York, at the same time,” says Anders, who records vocals at Chalice in Los Angeles. “I'm recording, then checking in every half hour on Skype, with all of the other things going on at the same time. It's pretty crazy.
Our worldwide creative classfollows the sun the way large companies position teams across the globe. Unlike large institutions, creatives assembles their teams as needed, through personal and professional connections.
Creating a shared vision, talking through it until it becomes a plan they both understand, then dividing up work between them, troubleshooting together and adjusting the plan, until it's done. Collaboration builds relationships, not just houses.
When I think of my community, where I belong professionally, I find my peeps highly concentrated in two places: The Emerging Communications Conferences and last week's Supernova Conference, #sn09. Collaboration and realtime communication was the topic during a panel discussion on day three. Dr. Weinberger brought the conversation through qualitative changes due to speed, brevity, and engagement; and collaboration norms within vertical subcultures. Side note: Skype wasn't mentioned once. Here's the video, my play-by-play notes, and my observations.
Jason Shellen (CEO of Thing Labs, founding product manager of Google Reader, Blogger.com)
Notes: [paraphrased unless quoted]
David: What's different about today's tools?
Laura: Speed of interaction.
Deb: Ubiquity. Filtering leads to activation of groups of people, like people who are in the same place.
Jason: Engagement and iteration.
David: What is good about the 140 character limit?
Laura: Meets the need of two-way, social grooming.
Jason: It's short, like a one line joke.
Deb: Constraints breed invention.
Deb: SAP tried 5000 character tweets in an in-house pilot and it didn't go far.
David: Lowers the transaction costs compared to blogging.
Deb: Twitter is more like communication.
Sanford Dickert: Twitter solved the privacy and noise problems. "Hmmm - I actually like the 140 character limit - it makes people more efficient with their thoughts - just like how limited memory and HD space made programmers in the 60s and 70s very efficient programmers."
My Observations:
Collaboration is a lot more than editing a document or a thread together.
It's casting (bringing the right people together).
It's the metawork of common language development, modeling the deliverables in a way everyone understands, goal setting, planning, coordinating, controls, communication.
It's the social activity of bonding around common purpose (sometimes around a paycheck but often around a shared interest or value).
It's trying small things before big things to climb a learning curve of how to work with each other, building trust, knowing who can do what well, of learning who leads, who works, who has insight, who has connections.
It's creating a common vision of the work to be done and how to do it.
It's learning how to resolve differences within the group and resolve stressors from outside the group.
It's creating rituals and rites of passage, of establishing behavioral norms.
It's about finding best practices that help you become productive, efficient, and effective together.
Tools like Skype, twitter, blogs, and wikis let people talk with each other but few tools help with any of the other parts (let alone the actual work).
You're still on your own.
- Phil Wolff
Laura: Public waves weren't planned but became popular, and are now part of the central design.
Deb: The fact that we're not collaborating more with all these tools out there is what's really interesting.
Jason: One barrier to tool interop is the profit motive.
David: These tools give us new kinds of publics. Paul's software creates gated communities with defined publics.
Paul: A great deal of work is uncovering extant knowledge and creating new knowledge. Lots of knowledge is in verticals. Legal OnRamp's software respects structures for attorney-client privilege, so there's a public ramp and company-specific things. Solving collaboration as a horizontal problem is much more difficult than solving collaboration vertically.
Laura: The fact that twitter is so messy and random and torrential creates an interesting collaborative context. Problems find their way to the right people.
Paul: The social structure of law departments and their ecosystem are much more defined.
Jason: Knowledge management (document management) systems died, replaced by internal blogs and wikis and search.
David: KM systems became records management. When companies bring social media inside the firewall, how do the media change?
Jason: Talking in a human voice doesn't change. It's still about engagement and virality.
Deb: The writing depends on an org's people, culture, products. Contrast legal vs. media companies, for example. Media tools are making roles more porous. Inside the firewall, businesses have goals, focused energy.
David: Is there an anti-hierarchical cultural statement made by wave?
Laura: Waves are very democratic today. Enterprises may adapt wave to add back controls.
After...
Adrian Chan (via Google Wave): "Sorry to have missed it -- it just bugs me to no end that in the midst of the conversational turn in web and web tools, so many of us miss the fundamental differences introduced by talk... talk is the mode of production, talk is the means of distribution. that's social media. it's not "information" -- though it contains information of course -- it's more and much of what more it is still escapes us -- escapes our ability to capture, measure, relate, quantify, filter, sort, and so on...
I wanted to follow up on my Monday post about the importance of collaboration products to Skype's business strategy. The great thing about collaboration is that it is very hard. Collaboration is less a discipline than a catchall term. It's peopleware more than technology, anecdotes more than evidence. Universities have no Collaboration Studies department in schools of business, humanities, engineering, or medicine. Industry and governments study collaboration but produce narrow benefits, poorly shared.
Frankly, there's no Collaboration Science to inform the design of the next generation of tools like Skype.
Society needs it. The web needs it. I want to do it.
So what questions about collaborative behavior and collective productivity could investigations answer? Which avenues could radically improve the ability of live and time-shifted talk to become work effort? What collaboration patterns and social software designs can break down barriers and bridge teams and connect project stakeholders?
Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected network of information systems
Work adds constraints that help focus conversation
Collaboration as collective productivity
and the topics fell in three clusters:
Getting Started (Ridiculously Easy Group Formation; Group Goal Forming; To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together; Fame and Reputation)
Being Better Together (Augmenting Inline Conversation; From Discovery to Action; Decision Making and Decision Support; Collaboration Afoot; Situational Awareness; How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory; Gestures of Tomorrow)
Crossing Boundaries (Intergroup Collaboration; Earning Trust and Using Whuffie; Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams; Transparency and Collaboration; Backchannels; Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes)
It's a quick read, needs pictures and I consider this a rough, incomplete draft. The questions are a sample to get a feel for the space to be studied.
How can we answer the questions? Research. Each topic is amenable to a different blend of usability testing, instrumented communication tools, prototyping, field ethnography of high function collaborative teams, and analysis of data from virtual teams.
I'd like to assemble a body of knowledge that turns our digital tin-cans-with-strings into engines of effectiveness.
Help me kick start this. (Yes, this is a bit self-referential.) What topics are missing? Prior art? Can this research occur in an open space or must it happen inside a corporate firewall? Of all the research topics, which ones are low-hanging fruit and which are harder to reach but outstanding value? Here's the pdf.
The Volpi email says Skype must increase its reach, be in more places, connect with other networks. In other words, more.
That's an indefensible strategy. It won't survive attack.
Talk itself is a commodity with relatively low barriers to entry. Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife, and other communities add IM and voice calling as a feature for their millions of users. In other words, Skype can take those hills of commoditized ubiquity. It won't be able to keep them.
Skype needs to pioneer the next stage. A qualitatively different phase.
Collaboration.
Collaboration as a Service.
Collaboration as a Platform.
I’ve been blogging about collaboration since 1998. If the 1990s were about personal productivity, and the 2000s were about connecting the world, then this next decade will be about working together.
Until now...
I see two stages of Skype’s product innovation in its first six years.
Skype made VoIP easy and reliable. Then it poured the network into many operating systems, mobility and devices. Now everyone has more access to the Skype network. [Somewhere along the way Skype played with video, games, commerce, and public voice forums. Some failed; others, like video, are here to stay.]
These innovations gave Skype a large, growing user population. Sadly, its rate of growth is slowing.
Skype will commoditize minutes and Make Skype minutes more valuable
Skype’s next major stage of product innovation does two opposing things at the same time.
On the one hand, Skype is commoditizing its infrastructure. Skype has been opening up its network and telephony services to third-party distributors and developers. You can see this in Skype For SIP, Skype for Asterisk, and the web platform being built on Skype Lite. So while Skype sells minutes, third-parties innovate with vertical applications.
On the other hand, Skype will add value to its core talk service. Skype will pursue adjacent markets like voice, video, and web conferencing. Skype will compete by being cheaper and more convenient than the incumbents.
Competitors with their own network effects will add Skype-like features. So Skype must learn how to add value in the work context beyond cost savings. Skype will want to design and engineer services so Skype conversations become more fun, satisfying, productive, and effective than having those same conversations without Skype.
Collaboration Research will show how to make Skype minutes worth more
How? The way to make Skype minutes better than other minutes is to enhance Skype’s inherent support for collaboration. Multiple people getting things done together. These research areas will provide the insights, measurements, and experience Skype needs to make Skype the best brand for conversations that produce results.
If Skype’s first slogan was “It just works,” its next could be “You just work!”
Collaboration is a competitive edge
Many of Skype’s serious competitors fall into three categories. Low cost telephony and IM, VoIP and unified communications appliances, and conferencing services.
While they differ in modes, marketing, and value propositions, they all offer communications transport and some light directory service.
They don’t make you a better communicator. A better collaborator. A better teammate. A better leader.
Skype could.
Skype could advance the best collaboration practices and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and building economic security.
Remote participation via Skype in television production is disruptive technology: vastly more convenient, orders of magnitude cheaper, and lower but tolerable quality than other forms of electronic field production.
Cost. Today's remote live video shoots might cost $25k+ for satellite time, gear, van, and a crew (camera operator, sound recordist, producer, hair & make-up artist, lighting technician). This is more production value than a field reporter
On the other hand, let's say it costs $10k for a high-end Mac including free Skype software, webcams, insurance, geek time, mobile Internet, and a mobile phone for the control channel. Spread the cost over twenty guests/interviews, you might spend $500 for a shoot where the guest hooks themselves up in 15 minutes (power into the laptop, plug in the webcam, turn it on, fire up Skype, press the green "Video Call" button). And now guests like Kutcher are Skype-ready; no cost to you.
Convenience. With broadband in many places, with laptops and webcams benefiting from Moore's Law, you can overnight a Skyped-up laptop with a good webcam and a good microphone, ready to go tomorrow. Or your guest runs out to Best Buy or RadioShack for a webcam and is back and ready in 90 minutes.
Acceptable Quality. Skype doesn't capture in hi-def and most webcams don't use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Skype can reproduce 640x480@30fps with high end webcams, good enough for talking heads. You can see that Ashton's end of the show is poorly lit, color balance is off, he's not been through hair or makeup (or wardrobe), his office is badly decorated to get unlicensed art off the wall behind him. Nobody cares.
Skype's dialtone made that show possible without blowing the show's budget, without flying Kutcher from his office at Katalyst Films to Chicago for three days, spending five hours hosting a remote crew at his office, or even three hours to drive to a local television station for fifteen minutes of air time. It was almost as easy as having someone phone in. But with better audio and with live two-way video.
This changes the economics of television production. Don't ration your remote guest spots because they cost too much or take too long to prep. Just Skype them to your studio, enrich your program with live, just-in-time feeds on the cheap.
People are bringing Skype into the workplace. Millions solve problems, lower costs, create new services, work more effectively, and unleash human talent. The O Show is just one of the most visible.
@PacificIT community leader Robert Sanzalone and I have been chatting about Skype and its use as social software. Robert penned this blogworthy bit that started about a Skype client on the iPhone. Robert:
As you saw me mention, I have literally been OFF SKYPE waiting for this client to appear from SOMEONE and it still hasn't arrived.
About half a dozen apps exist to do various basic functions of Skype such as one-to-one text and voice. A few can now also connect with the Skype Out/In services as well.
With the recent development of the latest client focusing on video, it looks once again that "sexy" wins over practicality and what is really needed to keep this service at the front line. I'm almost expecting announcements for new deals with Friendster and Plaxo any day now (yes, it's that bad).
Regardless, my hope is time, money and effort isn't being put into making a VIDEO CLIENT for the iPhone before group chat is solved. I think building community around the client is far more important and the fans keep coming even though Skype seems to be telling them to go away.
My alternative challenge to the community is to look at other common technologies which can bridge this gap.
My crosshairs are on email. Understood and common.
One of the most attractive features of Chatterous was the ability to completely interact in a dynamic IM group discussion exclusively by email. It was (and is) amazing.
BUT.. the name recognition and trust is not as well established as Skype. I PERSONALLY found out people would rather stay with the tried and true recognized name than to move a whole community to a platform or service no one has heard of or is interested in experimenting with.
How to interact with email?
Again, the lesson comes from Chatterous. Essentially, you can choose how to have digested messages sent from a group chat to your email account which you can then react to, or not.
The email sent in completely blends in with the rest of the chat. I was amazed even with the latency of tapping out an email minutes after the initial digest was sent me that the conversation wasn't completely backward (since there are frequent delays, even with real time IM chats).
Now, apply this capability to a mobile device with email capability, and you have the whole issues of a "Skype group chat client" solved. You CAN interact with a group chat even without a specific client on the iPhone, or ANY mobile device anywhere in the world. A sweet solution.
Though I'm not a developer, I'm told time and time again the API in Skype does give the ability to make these types of toys. I have no way to verify this one way or another.
All I know is, it's JUST NOT HAPPENING. I was looking for a few smart people to get on the ball and do something about it.
Turn off your darn video cams and let's get the community together first.
"Meg 2010 - A New California" is the site tagline. Yet the language that follows is Reaganesquely nostalgic. "A New California, simply put, is returning California to the time when it ranked first among the nation in prosperity, education, and quality of life. Meg Whitman believes that, together we can rebuild our Golden State."
Henry Gomez, former eBay marketing SVP and a Skype president, is one of the people behind Meg's online presence.
The design elements are clever. The blue-green coloring taps into democrat and lefty color palettes; you cannot win statewide in California without getting some of the left and center. Meg standing by a redwood tree for the environmentalists. The masthead typefaces are very Californian, going back to our Arts & Crafts movement.
I particularly like the use of "The Power Of Many." "The Power Of Three" was Whitman's/Gomez's campaign slogan for buying Skype. The "three" were eBay, PayPal and Skype, each helping the others speed growth and profitability; it convinced shareholders to spend billions buying Skype.
The Power Of Many is a bandwagon appeal to tell personal stories; we'll see if that works. Personal storytelling is at the heart of political activation. It was a core grassroots cadre-forming technique used in the record breaking political campaigns of Dean, Kerry, and Obama. Encouraging those interested in Meg's campaign to share stories of pain and loss, of hope and inspiration, those stories bond both teller and listener to each other and to the campaign that fosters those stories. The story sharing service runs on Tokoni, of which Gomez is a director.
Tokoni, a startup funded in part by eBay, is full of eBay alumni. Alex Kazim, another former Skype president; Mary Lou Song, eBay's third full-time employee; Brian Sweeney, an eBay technology executive; Annette Goodwine, an alum of eBay's corporate communications team; and Rajiv Dutta, another Skype president. According to MegWhitman.com,
Tokoni, Inc. – Website and Online Media Tokoni, Inc. is a company dedicated to shaping the next generation of social media by creating communities that allow anyone, anywhere, to have a voice. Founded in August 2007, Tokoni breaks down social content and connection barriers and leverages the Web’s natural ability to enable a shared understanding around issues, individuals and brands. Tokoni is developing Meg’s Internet presence for the campaign.
The campaign site is paid for by the "Meg Whitman for Governor Exploratory Committee." In the US, exploratory committees are how political candidates raise early money before officially launching their run for office.
While Tokoni is supporting Meg Whitman's exploratory committee, that doesn't necessarily mean all its employees endorse Ms. Whitman's candidacy.
When the phrase "phone sex" becomes "skype sex," you're hearing a cultural phenomenon go mainstream.
This is great for Skype.
Nearly every technology gets used for sex when it becomes
cheap or free,
reliable, and
many people have access.
Skype is far past that tipping point.
What attracts lovers to Skype are the very things that make Skype attractive to a grandmother vidding her grandkids. Free, high audio quality, video quality at full screen, chat and presence for arranging calls, agile bandwidth management, privacy, and interruption management.
The bedroom is the last part of the home to get technology, and Skype is winning its way through that door.
Downsides.
Skype Spam.I'm tired of sex spam in Skype chats, IM adverts for webcam sex sites. Beyond the rude interruptions of SPIM (messaging spam), they cheapen the world's perception of my favorite conversation channel.
Skype Prime limits. Skype forbid selling "adult, sexual or pornographic" services through its Skype Prime terms of service. Skype's own brand is cute and wholesome. Prime's beta protects that image and avoids criminal issues by keeping the service family friendly.
Harassment.Women often "decline to state" their sex in Skype profiles. This sometimes prevents unwanted attention. Dina Mehta's landmark report, SkypeMe Eve, showed the dramatic difference between the number of stranger approaches received by men and women.
Opportunity.
I occasionally follow adult industry information technology. In many respects they lead the Internet by a year or two.
They drove the inventions of payment systems for phone calls and for Internet commerce, long before Skype Prime, PayPal and Amazon.
They drove innovation in video distribution and cheap video production back in the VHS days and later in the early webcam and pre-torrent download days.
They pioneered bandwidth management and traffic analysis.
If you talk with young adult performers today, so many of them have sysadmin skills and talk about Ruby on Rails and CDNs and SEO and all the other geekery that boosts the right traffic, keep operations up, and keep site costs down.
Skype's technology doesn't offer the right connections for integration into today's commercial sex services. Skype would need to offer:
Pseudonymity. Privacy is important in commercial sex services.
Voice, video, and IM gateways. To pipe video between Skype users and the hosted media-stream management systems that route stored and live video.
Payment system integration. So you can pay, confidentially but reliably, with Skype credits.
Talking dirty pays well, as you'd expect in an US$18 billion industry. I expect to see the Skype network interop with adult businesses as the technologies and markets mature. If landline and mobile phone companies, ISPs, web hosting and payment services do business with adult service providers, why not Skype?
People using Skype for sex among themselves affects the sex industry. It raises expectations for quality and personal engagement. It lowers expectations for cost and redefines speed and convenience of setting up a video call. Perhaps most important: Skype sex is market evidence that adult IT providers trust, spurring entrepreneurship in two-way video chat technology.
Summing up.
So people's love lives are joining the rest of their onlives. And Skype is just the latest utility to bring people closer together. Saint Valentine would be proud that Skype serves Cupid.
Have a lovely Valentine's Day weekend. Skype someone you love.
Question: with IBM pursuing excellence on a service that comprises voice, video, chat and file transfer in a secure, encrypted environment, and with the stated goals of "working with their partners", would this not result in a situation where IBM would be licensing Skype technology to provide a comprehensive real time multi-media communications infrastructure?
With announcements this week, including some at IBM's annual Lotusphere 2009 event in Orlando, FL, it seems like that question is starting to get some answers..
.... it will integrate Skype™ functionality with LotusLive (www.lotuslive.com), IBM’s new cloud services which are designed to help individuals build communities to work smarter, more effectively and more efficiently across and beyond their own companies. Skype’s voice and video calling will add rich, real-time communications capabilities to LotusLive, making it even easier for enterprises to collaborate in the cloud.
At Lotusphere 2009, IBM demonstrated the new Skype integration into LotusLive Engage, "an integrated suite of tools that combines your network [of contacts] with Web conferencing and collaboration capabilities like file storing and sharing, instant messaging and chart creation."
Today we interviewed Peter Kalmstrom, Skype's Program Manager for Toolbars, who had been attending Lotusphere to assist with the demonstrations. Peter made several points:
This announcement covers only the first step of what will be a series of Skype integrations into the LotusLive offerings.
The integration into LotusLive Engage is targeted at "businesses looking to collaborate inside and outside the organization to easily expand their networks..." In other words for businesses that need to include, say, sub-contractors, third party consultants, suppliers and buyers within their business operation processes.
Within a LotusLive Engage contact profile, "Skype" fields have been added such that when a user clicks on a a name to bring up a profile card, the user can launch a Skype conversation and transfer files with a single click.
The only additional requirement for engaging in a Skype conversation is that the initiating user must have a Skype client open.
In addition to Skype-to-Skype calls, SkypeOut calls can also be made.
Where several contact profile cards have been opened, a user can launch a Skype multi-party call to host a conferencing session.
Due to the nature of LotusLive Engage's web architecture, the resulting Skype access is cross-platform; it does NOT require that the user have a Skype web (FF or IE) toolbar installed.
A session can then also launch a Lotus Web Meeting (also known as a Lotus SameTime Unyte meeting).
Sounds like the Lotusphere demonstrations got the brainstorming going between Skype and IBM. In a concluding statement Peter said:
"We are enthusiastic about the partnership with IBM and we see a lot of areas where we can collaborate and help each other improve our services. We met with a series of executives at IBM during Lotusphere and the general feeling was highly positive."
With the IBM offering, we are seeing one more example of "Skype Everywhere", in this case, being embedded into an offering that is key to IBM's future success in delivering cloud-based outsourced business services.
Phil will have some comments on the technical aspects of this integration along with where he feels there are "deeper" integration opportunities.
At CES 2009 COO Scott Durschlag spoke about "liquid communications" and "Skype Wherever, Whenever". InnerPass has developed a business-class hosted document management system; they have been marketing it via private label to over 3000 businesses or project teams on several continents. Over the past year the InnerPass team has developed a Skype Extra application that introduces real time communications, and serves as an interface, into this system. From their website:
InnerPass helps companies control their business critical files from anywhere and anytime. Our applications are delivered thru various Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings that are entirely web-based. InnerPass primarily offers its applications to end users through a network of partners who can private label and embed the software service into their own solutions or provide as a stand alone service.
InnerPass starts out its communications enhanced service, called InnerPass Share and Collaborate, by building persistent document "meeting rooms" that store mission critical documents such as FDA filings, engineering and architectural drawings, legal agreements, real estate papers and other business documents which require:
access across a geographically dispersed team of project stakeholders
persistent storage for asynchronous 24/7/365 access
version management
amongst other features. InnerPass has taken their document management service experience and gone a step further to support file sharing, collaboration and real time communications. They embed, within their own Skype Extra client, the ability to launch and hold real time voice and/or chat conversations, whether informal ad hoc sessions or scheduled conference calls, to discuss the underlying projects, sales meetings or other business team activity.
Using InnerPass Share and Collaborate, a user can set up a "meeting room", store documents, launch conversations and share a designated screen for presentations or demonstrations. The room's host can designate and invite team members from amongst his/her Skype contact list, grant permission to their team members to contribute or modify room content. From anywhere in the client, any team member has the ability to schedule and launch conference calls or group chats using the integrated Skype services.
InnerPass offers four levels of their collaboration service. A free service supports up to 5 meeting rooms with a maximum of 5 participants and 15 days of file storage. Offering perpetual file storage, the Professional Plan at $4.95/month supports 10 meeting rooms and up to 10 participants in each. The Workgroup plan, at $12.95/month, allows up to 20 rooms and 20 people per room. Their last plan, launching in March, is designed for the SMB (Small to Medium Size Business) will offer additional features including access to their hosted full document management service.
Over the past few weeks I have experienced a few sessions using InnerPass; the InnerPass team has been very responsive to suggestions made for improvements, especially with respect to some speed issues that are now resolved. It now works reliably with both Skype 3.8 (still Skype's latest release for general use) and Skype 4.0 Beta 3.
Since obtaining Skype Certification and its subsequent launch last fall, InnerPass has registered over 270,000 users (as shown in the graphic) growing virally amongst Skype users with little publicity. You can download via Tools | Do More | Get Skype Extras using Skype 3.8 or Tools | Extras | Get Skype Extras under Skype 4.0 for Windows beta 3. Normally it should show up as "InnerPass Share and Collaborate" under the "Sharing" category but until a bug is resolved by the Skype Extras team, you may find it as "Share, Collaborate, Communicate".
As mentioned at the beginning, InnerPass's Share and Collaborate service is a representative example of making Skype available anywhere there is an opportunity to benefit from real time conversations. Skype has enabled InnerPass to offer real time conversations to virtual meeting rooms incorporating file and desktop (or screen) sharing. And it brings large enterprise services down to a cost level such that any individual, mobile professional or small business can afford to benefit from a collaborative document management service.
Skype's bundling free screen sharing into Skype's software will popularize the feature to hundreds of millions of people. This makes the market for online conferencing bigger.
The bundling will also kill the freemium business model (try our free version, upgrade to our posh version) conferencing companies use to get customers. This will hurt the following Skype developers directly:
Back in mid-2005, Bill Campbell asked "Does Skype eat its children?" when Skype competed with presence developers with Skypeweb. Those developers abandoned Skype. Since then Skype competed with video developers, who've abandoned Skype. And with Outlook integration developers. And with Salesforce integration developers. And with mobile developers.
Skype's ecosystem is littered with the bleached bones of third-party software developers. They filled gaps in Skype's product line. They made Skype's network more valuable. They bet their jobs on Skype's partner program being safe from Skype itself.
Clearly, a bad bet.
Skype desktop sharing will be wildly successful. Building it into Skype clients and putting it one or two clicks to add sharing to a call makes it 10 to 100 times more convenient than other systems. Ubiquity will change the way people think about desktop sharing the way ubiquity is changing how people think about video calling.
WebEx-style meeting, sales, training, tech-support, and webinar services comprise a multibillion dollar industry. Skype desktop sharing will be disruptive to the industry: vastly cheaper, more convenient, more social. We'll hunt for market share stats this year.
So while this announcement is great for Skype, the choice will chill investment by software development partners. Platforms must be safe, trusted, with manageable risk. And platforms must foster creativity, innovation, and opportunity.
Skype's choice subverts developer trust. That's one hell of a brand note.
Tonight out at the "ShowStoppers" event at MacWorld in San Francisco, Skype announced the new 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X. The new version will apparently be available for download tomorrow, January 6, 2009, from Skype's website. [NOTE: I will update this post with the download link when it becomes available.]
Continuing Skype's rather fragmented product strategy, they have rolled out some new features in this 2.8 beta release that will at least stop us Mac users from whining about Windows users always getting the good stuff first. Here's the quick list of what Skype notes is in this release:
Skype Access
Screen Sharing
Improved chat management: ability to sort chats in the drawer and set priorities to chats
Quick Add: much easier to add people to chats
Mood message chat: mood message updates from your friends as chat messages
Large avatars: 256x256 pixels
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
Ability to add your own notes to contacts
Courtesy of Skype's PR team, I've had a chance to play with the 2.8 beta for a couple of weeks and have these thoughts below...
SKYPE ACCESS
Probably the largest "new" feature is "Skype Access", a service that lets you go to any of the 100,000 Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots and - using Skype - connect to the Boingo hotspot. When you connect, you pay on a per-minute basis and the fee (roughly 20 cents per minute) is deducted from your Skype Credit. You do not have to pay the Boingo monthly fee. You do not have to pay any hourly or daily fees.
Judging from the news release and pre-release info, Skype is immensely proud of this feature but I will be honest and say it does little for me. I just don't use Wi-Fi hotspots as much while traveling (especially now that I'm paying for a wireless broadband adapter). However, I can see how this could be of value. If all you wanted to do was crack open your Mac and send some email, this gives you a great way to do that on a per-minute basis. If I were a heavy user of Wi-Fi hotspots, I'd want to do the math to figure out if it would just be cheaper to buy a monthly Boingo access.
Regardless, it's an interesting move for Skype to get into the business of connecting you to Internet access.
SCREEN SHARING
The coolest feature of the 2.8 beta is a "screensharing" feature where you can share either your entire screen or just a portion of your screen with the Skype user on the other end. Now, this works with all other versions of Skype because it replaces your video stream with the screen sharing. So a Mac Skype user can share their screen with Windows and Linux users.... which is pretty cool.
It's hard to show in a blog post, but if you watch my screencast about the 2.8 beta, you can see it in action:
You can share either your entire desktop or just a section of your screen. You can also resize the section you are sharing while you are in the middle of sharing. When you stop sharing, you just flip back to showing your video.
CHAT PRIORITIZATION
By far the most useful feature I've found in the 2.8 beta is the ability to set the "priority" of a chat session - and then sort your chat sessions by priority in the Mac's "drawer" way of displaying chat sessions. I can just control-click a chat (either a private or public chat) and then go down to the "Set Priority" menu choice:
You can then sort the chats based on their priority using the drop-down menu at the top of the "drawer":
You can also sort based on title or date. Personally I've found the Sort by Priority to be very useful when you have, as I do, a zillion chats open at any one time. (And yes, I report to RJ, our CTO, so his chat gets the highest priority! ;-) )
MOOD MESSAGE CHAT - AND FOLLOWING (like Twitter)
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 2.8 beta is the new "Mood Messages" pseudo-chat that you can enable in the Advanced part of the Skype Preferences:
Once you enable the "Mood Message Chat", you get a new chat window that opens up that shows you the mood messages of all of your contacts:
It also very nicely lets you set your mood message simply by typing in the window as you would to any other chat window. This is quite nice for someone like me who almost never changes my mood message in the regular window.
This actually makes Skype mood messages useful to me.
However, because of that other option that says "Show iTunes song in my mood message", you rapidly wind up seeing that a whole lot of people have that option checked and your Mood Message Chat rapidly fills with updates of music people listen to. What if you don't want to see their updates? Well, Skype has made it so that you can "follow" updates from your contacts through a simple menu choice:
The down side here is that if you enable the Mood Message Chat, you are following all your contacts by default and have to go through and "unfollow" (i.e. uncheck the menu choice) people you don't want to follow. It would be great if Skype had a "follow by default" or a "stop following all contacts" choice... something along those lines to let you control who you are following.
The intriguing aspect here is that this enables you to turn Skype mood messages into the kind of status updates that you typically have in Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other zillion services offering status updates. The great thing here is that it is simply another Skype chat window like all your other chats. (Of course, you can get a Skype chat for Twitter using "twitter4skype", but this is now with Skype mood messages.)
I think, though, for it to reach any kind of real usage, you need more people to enable this feature (it is off by default) and actually start using it - and for that it also needs to be on more platforms.
[As a tease, I'll mention that there is a way to integrate this mood message chat with Twitter, so anything I type there also shows up in my Twitter stream... but I'll write about that in a separate blog post as it's not directly tied to the 2.8 beta release. Soon...]
QUICK ADD
Another nice feature is the ability to quickly add someone to a chat through a button at the top of the chat window. You click on the window and start typing in a contact's name:
Before you could always drag-and-drop a contact from your main Skype window into a chat, but now you can use this quick add button. It is particularly useful if you have a large number of Skype contacts.
NOTES ON CONTACTS
Another useful feature is the ability to add private notes to each of your Contacts. So you could store information about how you know the person... their interests... basically anything you want as it is a free-form text field:
What's not yet clear to me is where these notes are stored. Are they accessible through multiple Skype clients if you were logged in on multiple machines? Or are they tied to the machine where you create the Notes? I'm guessing that they are stored with the local client like chat histories are.... but I'd need to have multiple installations of the 2.8 beta to really know this.
OTHER FEATURES
Skype also added a few other features:
New set of icons
Large avatars: You can now have images up to 256x256 pixels in size.
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests - so you aren't exposed to images that might be offensive.
There are undoubtedly other features that we'll find as we work with it more.
CONCLUSION
So with this 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X, Skype provides some interesting new capabilities. I can see the screen sharing being quite useful to show people what's on my screen. The chat prioritization is great for heavy chat users like me. The possibilities of actually making the Mood Messages useful intrigue me. Frequent Wi-Fi hotspot users may find the Skype Access feature useful and economical.
All in all, it's a great evolution of the Skype client for Mac OS X.
I do wish, though, as I've discussed before, that Skype's product strategy weren't so fragmented. Sure, as a Mac user, it's fun for a few minutes to have some features that Windows users don't have... but that fun rapidly fades when I can share my desktop with a Windows user but they can't share their's. And they almost never use the Mood Messages because it's not convenient to do so.
Perhaps most annoyingly, I am currently in a position where I am helping some Windows users get started with Skype and so I'm trying to help them with their Skype client... when mine is markedly different. It's a frustrating experience. I do hope Skype's new management can help converge the product streams so that the user experience (and technical support experience) is closer between platforms (while, yes, acknowledging that platforms have UI/behavior differences). We'll see.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy using this new beta on my Mac and seeing what else might be inside the release.
Again, Skype indicates that the 2.8 beta will be available tomorrow, January 6, 2009, for download for Mac OS X users.
I'll look forward to reading what you all think...
I use HiDef Conferencing for my work with DataPortability.org. You can Skype into your conference bridge directly for better audio quality. Free trials through February. But 50 people will cost you about $1 per person per month after that.
Presence is a stream of signals you give off. You've seen simple availability presence signals in instant messaging: I'm online, I'm offline, Do Not Disturb. Some of us lifestream what we're doing during the day: I'm in this meeting, I'm catching up on email, I'm making soup. We also give off contextual presence signals: I'm available for lunch on Tuesday if you're a recruiter, my dream date, or someone I know.
Disclosure like this feels strange. At first. And then something unusual happens. We get used to it. It starts to feel familiar. Like being in an open plan office where you overhear small talk, see people come and go. Or having a break room where you catch up with people a little bit here and there.
And then presence becomes useful.
People use our signals. Strangers decide if they should introduce themselves. Colleagues decide when they should interrupt, and for what. And that makes your life better, because the people around you are making better choices about when and how to engage with you.
We use many tools to broadcast our presence. Twitter, blogs, public calendars, job sites, project status systems, IM mood messages. Even simple things like IM and email. So long as the people in your world can easily see your presence and update their own, tool choices don't matter too much.
Presence is a social interaction. You share yours. You consume others'. And through this, you get to know each other in ways that may be more intimate and current than if you were in the same physical office.
Collective presence is what it sounds like. A stream or a place where you can see what a group of people are doing. Where you aggregate your group's presence signals.
Collective presence is a mix of informal, unstructured, casual talk and structured messages. The Europeans in our team are coming online now. The programmers are working through a pre-release checklist. Someone's dealing with a problem today.
Members of a team experience this collective presence through group chats, like IRC's or Skype's persistent chat rooms, or a listserv. At Skype Journal, we augment group chats with RSS aggregators and other software that pull in team member blogs, twitter updates, public calendars, public bookmarks, new photos and illustrations. So all through the day we keep in touch.
Three payoffs:
First, social media and presence tools sustain bonds that help a team know and trust each other.
Second, collective presence cultivates situational awareness. So people make better choices about what is important, what is urgent and what needs resources.
Third, collective presence means you are not alone. When those feelings of isolation kick in, it's easy to drop into the group chat and see what everyone's been up to.
The essence of productivity is choosing the right things to do and doing them. Collective presence makes remote team productivity easier and more immediate.
Tonight out at the "ShowStoppers" event at MacWorld in San Francisco, Skype announced the new 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X. The new version will apparently be available for download tomorrow, January 6, 2009, from Skype's website. [NOTE: I will update this post with the download link when it becomes available.] 
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