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.
Reform the blob namespace so blob-names are short, even with a dozen hosts. Very long blobs impair our ability to use those urls in email, chat, or over the phone.
Add permanence. Create public chat permalinks that don't change with time. Right now they change with time, as hosts change. We need more permanent links, even if it increases dependence on a referring server.
Preview before click-through. Rebuild the redirection service to show more information about a public chat before a person clicks through. I'd like to see for example,
date created,
number of people,
title,
description,
tags,
moderator name, and
date (or days since) someone last joined via public click.
Group chat owners should also be able to end-of-life a listing by withdrawing it or by setting its status to retired-but-still-visible-for-historical-purposes.
Directory. As long as you have the data, host a searchable directory of public chats, for chats that opt-in.
Bonus Points: The directory is an opportunity for community behavior, including comments and feedback on directory entries, integration with event sites for cross posting and updating, and embedding within group sites using protocols like OpenSocial, RSS/ping mesh. This might even become a successor to the Skypecasts service.
Platform. API for search, to extract data about public chat objects. The better to create topical directories elsewhere, and create smarter badges.
Grandfather older public chats to the new services.
We have often reported on HiDef Conferencing as a leader in high quality voice conferencing. It's a service built around servers that specialize in connecting up to 500 conferencing participants from either the PSTN or Skype, and managing the call participants' level of participation. Should a participant be connected by Skype, they will hear all other Skype participants across their HD Audio service with all its benefits for providing better voice clarity (thus, the name HiDef Conferencing).
But HiDef Conferencing's owner, VAPPS Inc. has not let their success depend solely on Skype activity; they have been wholesaling their conferencing service to other conferencing and collaboration service providers. As one example, I often participate in (but do not host) conference call and desktop sharing sessions involving Citrix's GoToMeeting service and recently noticed that these calls were using the VAPPS service for provisioning the audio component of the calls.
Azure first looked at Vapps in 2006, but did not invest until the spring of 2007. First, they asked the company to change their business model. It used to focus on selling equipment. Instead, Azure wanted it to charge by the number of minutes people used the equipment to talk because they knew that number would grow exponentially, Mr. Weinstein said. At the time, people talked using Vapps’ technology only a few million minutes a year and now pay for half a billion minutes a year.
Acquisition is becoming the primary exit route for today's start-ups. Build a business and service that can readily complement another service that has capital for acquisitions and you may find yourself being acquired. At least this is one service that is not going to Google or Microsoft. On the other hand Citrix has been a leader in developing virtualization and collaboration technologies along with related services for over 15 years.
Congratulations to Ben, Jerry and the entire VAPPS team on this achievement. It has been a pleasure to watch, and to report on, the evolution of their service over the past couple of years.
Full disclosure; in 2004 the author provided business development and general management services for Citrix partner Runaware, whose Test Drive service, built on a Citrix virtualization platform, powers many online software evaluation programs, including Microsoft Office.
First, the Democratic party learned grassroots organizing on W's watch. There's an exponential curve moving:
from nothing in the 2000 Gore/Bush election,
through substantial roots activity in the 2004 Bush/Kerry campaign,
to overwhelming in the 2008 Obama/McCain victory.
Second, the elements that made campaigning so lively, engaging, social and meaningful may show up in Obama's governance.
You may not know this about me but my gig before Skype Journal was volunteering on the John Kerry presidential campaign.
Ten of us met in Berkeley a few months after the first Howard Dean meetups in San Francisco's East Bay. We became five thousand full time volunteers over 18 months until election day 2004. Our two-county grassroots operation made more than one million phone calls to swing states. 1,000,000.
We had no control over the candidate and his campaign staff, so we focused on what we could do ourselves. Using an American football analogy, we thought of East Bay Kerry as the ground game and the national campaign as the air game.
We modeled many of the practices used today in the Obama campaign.
Communications and coordination
Local blogs. Feed aggregation. CMS. All with free/cheap technology.
National event directory. Developed locally, adopted by the campaign, used to drive activity.
Yahoo mailing lists.
Focus on organizing, not policy/issues.
Managing
Grassroots organizational structures that scaled and split.
Professional guilds (writers, coders, designers, speakers, lawyers) ran service bureaus for grassroots orgs in swing areas.
Lots of peopleware with just a touch of technology to
speed things up,
keep costs down,
push activity out to the edge, and
help more people make smarter decisions.
We also revealed many problems.
How grassroots fund themselves without violating campaign finance law (or not).
Web applications absurdly hard to learn and use.
National message management vs. local enthusiasm.
Strangers instead of locals in GOTV efforts.
The speed and efficiency of offline missing the disconnected and offline.
Difficulty pairing union efforts with grassroots efforts.
Inability to activate and motivate stale and tired Democratic Party organizations at the state and local levels.
Costly voter and geographic data sets that grassroots couldn't afford. Weak geomapping software for precinct walking.
Most of these problems were tackled by the Democratic National Committee in the 2006 races.
The Obama crew really built on those basics, applying four years of advances in
social media,
GIS,
cogsci,
smarter/mobile phones,
VoIM (like Skype),
streaming video,
agile methods,
creative commons and open source licensing,
emergent organization design,
more reliable and scalable server hosting,
SMS/texting (thank you American Idol),
internet sousveillance and surveillance,
flat rate long distance,
cheap conference bridges,
real estate 2.0,
and all the rest.
Near the end of the 2004 campaign we hoped to bring the Democratic netroots into the new administration.
Would there be a Chief Blogging Officer (CBO) as part of the white house communications office?
Would local groups be able to meet and have a say on national policy with a channel not just to their safe congressman but to the cabinet and to the white house policy advisors?
Would the conversation started in San Francisco's East Bay with 10 people sitting in a coffee shop, ending with 5000 full time volunteers in liberal Berkeley and Oakland and conservative Walnut Creek and Danville, continue into the new year?
We lost then. But what about now, after the Obama-Biden win?
Today, the hundreds of thousands of people who gave up work, family time, and school to volunteer want to continue the experience of being connected civicly with each other and of influencing their nation.
Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama. The scale and size of this community and its work is unprecedented. Individuals in all 50 states have created more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign. There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations played a critical role in Tuesday's victory.
What has made My.BarackObama unique hasn't been the technology itself, but the people who used the online tools to coordinate offline action. My.BarackObama has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world connections between people who are hungry to change our politics in this country.
And the site isn't going anywhere. The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact. Our victory on Tuesday night has opened the door to change, but it's up to all of us to seize this opportunity to bring it about.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be a great deal more information about where this community will head. For the moment, let's celebrate this victory and know that the community we've built together is just the beginning.
Competition fuels innovation. The pursuit of power, the struggle to help millions of people climb ladders of engagement and participation in your cause. These are a crucible with real consequences, measurable results, and strict fitness tests. How many lessons can we draw for the private sector, for education and for governance from what politics invents? Let's pay attention and dive in.
Just in time for Halloween, Learning Curve is out, the third episode of Star Trek: The Continuing Mission. Written by Andy Tyrer, "on the shakedown cruise of the newly refitted USS Montana, the ship is attacked without provocation by a heavily armed unknown vessel. Captain Edwards and the crew of the Montana must defend themselves and come to grips with 24th century technology or face certain destruction."
Executive Producers Andy Tyrer and Sebastian Prooth use Skype for ST:TCM's production, pulling together this audio adventure with cast and crew from Europe and the Americas.
P.S. I'd have loved appointment listening, narrowcasting Star Trek: The Continuing Mission episodes in Skypecasts rooms with the built in back channel.
HiDef Conferencing, a leading audio conferencing service that incorporates HD Voice when accessed via Skype, but can also be accessed via designated country-specific numbers and toll-free 800 numbers, wants to assist those businesses and professionals who can save travel and meeting costs in today's economic environment through teleconferencing services. As its key differentiator HiDef Conferencing is a server-supported business grade conferencing service with full host/moderator support as opposed to Skype's multi-party conversation service (mistakenly called "Conference Calling").
For their current customers they have waived their monthly subscription fees for the balance of 2008; new subscribers can now have a free trial that lasts until December 31, 2008.
As a free trial subscriber, what do you get?
Up to 25 participants in a conference.
Free Web Controls, Recording and Hand-raising
No reservations required
Unlimited Skype access duration
Participants responsible for long distance charges to the country's HiDef Conferencing access number
Recall that not only do Skype-enabled participants have unlimited access to calls, they also have the benefit of Skype's inherent high quality HD Voice wideband audio when both speaker and listener are participating via Skype. To quote Tom Evslin's experience earlier this year:
I used to think the reason I have a hard time understanding people on the phone is because I can’t see their lips and their expressions. Now I realize much of the problem is the terrible audio quality – which we’re so accustomed to – of a traditional phone call.
Landline and wireless participants remain limited to the audio bandwidth inherent to the underlying landline or wireless service.
With an Outlook plug-in it's easy to set up a call from Outlook; calls can also be set up via the HiDef Conferencing website.
Ben Lilienthal: Yes, we are in the process of shutting down highspeedconferencing.com. In reality, we stopped operating this service almost a year ago when we launched the 2nd iteration of it -- www.HiDefConferencing.com.
SJ. HiGhspeEdconferencing was novel for its Skype integration when you launched it. How has the world of conferencing changed since then?
HighSpeed was the first integrated Skype and Phone conferencing service.
HiDefConferencing.com replaced it and is the first and only wideband, fixed price, better than PSTN sound quality conference calling service in the world!!!
Q. What was HighSpeedConferencing's business model? How is it different than HiDefConferencing?
With the shutdown of Skypecasts last month, we more than doubled the minutes on the service and the number of registered users. Highspeedconferencing relied on payments from rural LECs to generate revenue.
HiDefconferencing.com is targeted squarely at the SMB market which currently spends over $1billion/year on audio conferencing services. That segment of the market is projected to grow to over $2bn in the next five years.
HiDefConferencing.com is the only service in the world that offers fixed price, unlimited minutes plans for Small and Medium sized businesses
Q. Will Skype for Asterisk lower barriers to entry for voice conferencing?
We don't compete with free. If people are going to use free services there are plenty available within Skype itself for conferencing.
Q. How is the shocking news about our changing world economy affecting your plans?
Collaboration, especially the type of collaboration that we have been working on for the last 5 years, which is a product of fearless innovation and delivers high quality for lower costs just happens to be a counter-cyclical business.
In other words, as the economy does worse, www.hidefconferencing.com does better.
People still need to collaborate but they are looking for low-cost, innovative solutions such as www.hidefconferencing.com to replace getting on airplanes, and staying in hotels.
Q. I use HiDefConferencing for weekly meetings of DataPortability.org.What are three features we're probably not using that we should try?
Three features you should use and probably don't are recording, hand raising and web controls.
Also, we will be launching a new UI later this month to streamline the scheduling and invitation process.
Mikogo spun off in July 2007, from BeamYourScreen.com, a Mannheim, Germany, company. Since then, fifty thousand users registered for free desktop sharing.
They publish a Mikogo Skype extra, a small plug-in program, so you can start screen sharing sessions from within Skype, using Skype contacts. Nearly ten thousand downloads of the extra.
People use Mikogo for poker training and other live distance education. Companies use Mikogo for technical support, using the remote controlled desktop and file transfers. Sales people host presentations. Small companies and freelance workers are the early adopters.
Features:
Up to ten participants in a meeting
Switch presenter
Access remote keyboard and mouse
Pause/resume session
Select applications
256-bit AES end-to-end encryption
File transfers up to 200 MBs within a session
More features are available for a BeamYourScreen subscription. Up to twenty participants, whiteboard, recording and playback, live support. Their browser viewer is pure dhtml without ActiveX, Java or Flash required.
In their latest update, as Yuuguulaunches a browser-only flash client, they complete moving participant chat from Skype right into their screen sharing application. They can because they already have the people in a collaboration session.
This adds value in two ways.
First, it keeps the visual part of the conversation right in line of sight, without any application or contextual switching. Adjacency should improve user focus and overall satisfaction.
Second, it reduces dependence on Skype's software and on Skype as a company. (Diversification vs. eggs-in-one-basket.)
Second and a half: It opens up the potential for eventually building voice conferencing into their new flash app. Although Skype remains a voice channel, Yuuguu sells access to a voice conferencing bridge. Participants can can dial in from desk or mobile phones so call quality is not affected by desktop power or connectivity and so conference calls can scale to 30 people, more than Skype's native capacity. Should they care to, Ribbit APIs make it easy to add voice right into their flash application.
The downside of embedding their own chat: people are relying on Skype's multichats and public chatrooms for extended conversations. So a Skype chat could both precede/trigger and follow a Yuuguu session. In that case, increasingly common in workplace teams, using Yuuguu's chat feature will leave a hole in the Skype chat archive.
Wishlist: A perfect implementation would have the Skype chat move into the Yuuguu flash experience. So the yuuguu chat and Skype chat were exactly the same and nearly synchronous. This would let people in a group Skype chat keep focus in the yuuguu session without giving up the personal and collective memory that lives in the Skype experience. Sadly, this isn't technically or commercially feasible with today's Skype APIs. It may become feasible if Skype executes on its vision of helping companies put Skype into their applications.
While there has been lots of dismay about the discontinuation of Skypecasts (Skype's blog posts: here and here), it had appeared for the past several months that the service just did not have the robustness to provide the reliability and quality of service that users would expect. Being a free service, it was obviously placing resource demands with zero revenue potential on Skype developer and support personnel that hopefully can be diverted to bringing feature equality to Skype's basic service, whether on Windows, Mac or Linux.
There are alternatives; in fact, this decision provides a unique opportunity for two third party conference calling services:
1. Skype Multi-Party Calling:
For up to 25 participants on a call, Skype has recently expanded its multi-party calling capacity. The caveat here is that the host must use a multi-core Windows PC and a reliable broadband internet connection (preferably cable). Participants can be on any version of Skype or be accessed via SkypeOut. In this case the host must set up the call and call out to all the participants. More details here. A unique feature of Skype's multi-party calling is its ability to show which participant is actually speaking at any given time. But keep in mind Skype really offers multi-party calling, not a full conferencing service. 2. iotum CalliFlower iotum's CalliFlower has the benefit of no charge other than whatever it costs to make the connection to one of their access points. I often participate in their daily SquawkBox call via my SkypeOut account; the recent availability of SkypeOut CallerID, displaying my mobile phone number when I make a SkypeOut call, has allowed me to participate in these calls within my SkypeOut subscription without even using the provided password for each call. In fact, there are four options for accessing these calls:
Truphone VoIP: A PC, a headset and an internet connection puts you one click away from your conference call.
Phone: Dial from anywhere in the world to one of our U.S. or French dial-in numbers to get connected.
Skype: Call our U.S. dial-in number from within the Skype network, and get high quality audio.
Sitofono call back: Enter your phone number and get called back for free in more than 12 countries
SquawkBox participants regularly call in from the U.S., Canada and U.K. but there is really no country-specific limitation The real gem of CalliFlower is the web-based user interface where participants can see who is on the call, raise a hand, enter text on a "wall". The host can record the call for later playback, mute/unmute participants as well as set up the call, invite participants via email and SMS, and put up the subsequent recording.
As an example of building communities, iotum has worked with Alan Hunkin to provide a weekly interview session, CalliFlower Communiques, with notable personalities such as William Shatner. Immediate future guests include Ken Blanchard, author of "Being a One Minute Entrepreneur" and actor Alan Alda discussions his recent memoir "Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself." Recordings of previous sessions are available at the page linked above. 3. HiDef Conferencing
Vapps' HiDef Conferencing (formerly HiSpeedConferencing) provides high definition (HD) voice quality calls for participants accessing via Skype. Their business grade service involves fixed rate monthly hosting subscriptions involving unlimited Skype access, dial-in to specific numbers in several countries and toll-free numbers. Obviously this involves some ongoing expense to the host but their infrastructure supports providing the best possible voice quality, depending on access mode. The host uses their web controls to set up calls, manage call participants as well as record and archive calls.
Looking at the options it appears the best conference experience comes when:
hosts are able to setup and fully manage the calls, including an open access invitation;
users can participate through a web-based experience not only via voice but also via chat.
On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me." You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.
Brough Turner is CTO of NMS Communications. In the 1990s, Brough was a leader in PC-based telephony and contributed to the emergence of VoIP technologies, products, and standards.
Skype was a revelation – now love and disappointment.
When I first tried Skype in early September 2003, it was a revelation. First it just worked! I don’t mean it installed and executed properly – many software packages do that. With Skype, I could make voice connections through our corporate firewall, despite our IT department blocking all UDP traffic. Now that was a breakthrough.
Next it combined IM and voice in a useful fashion, something no one else had done at that time.
Finally, it used wideband audio! Skype connections were better than “toll quality.” Assuming adequate broadband, Skype audio beat anything else. I recall an early conversation with a friend in Tokyo. There was music playing in their apartment and it felt like I was in the room with them.
Today I use Skype on a daily basis for business and with friends, but almost always with people in Europe or Asia. It seems Skype’s adoption rate in the US is much lower. Also, mobility trumps presence. For US associates, I can use whatever IM reaches the desired party and then call them on my mobile. There’s no per minute charge for mobile calls (within the US), so all that matters is what IM the other party is using.
I continue to love Skype’s voice quality, especially given the diverse accents of some of my friends and associates. J and I routinely use SkypeOut and Skype voice mail.
The disappointment? They stumbled. The eBay acquisition meant a nice chunk of cash for the founders and early staffers, but no synergies, and in due course the founders were gone.
Communications services need critical mass. But other instant messengers have grown their user bases more rapidly – certainly QQ and likely Windows Live Messenger. This afternoon, there were 11-12 million Skype users on-line (10.5 million right now) while QQ had 37-40M (admittedly mostly Chinese) users simultaneously on-line. Skype is not enough for my IM needs. To see status for the people I communicate with, I have to run four IM clients at once.
Looking back, initiatives to increase their user base or wrap other instant messengers might have been better than the focus on video (which I seldom use). Looking forward, I dream of the day I get integrated mobile IM and voice that just works, everywhere.
For now, I’m encouraged that current Skype management seems to have their eye back on the ball. And I still love and use Skype with those friends (disproportionately European and Asian) who are routinely available on-line.
On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me." You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.
Dr. Ashim Roy is India Country Head for Stoke Networks, providing local support to network operators in the region. Dr. Roy sent this post called "Skyping at Stoke - Keeping the fire alive."
While happily Skyping away, we often forget to thank the team that created Skype. Some good things in life are still free.
I am heading a small energetic band 20+ networking professionals and we are developing a product to enable better quality of service in broadband networks. My team is in Bangalore, India and the other team is in Santa Clara, CA. Skype has become lifeline for us as we are using Skype extensively for better communications between the team members and that too at no cost. I still have a cell phone and I am certain that within next couple of years I will be using voice Skyping over my cell phone. I am sure you have heard of all this before so it may not be very exciting. However, let me tell you a story which will give you a feel for why we love Skype.
About 3 weeks ago, our equipment was in Japan for an equipment trial. We had one engineer in Tokyo and rest of the team was spread between Santa Clara and Bangalore. Time difference between Santa Clara and Bangalore is 11.5 hours and time difference between Tokyo and Bangalore is 3.5 hours.
Anyway, I received a Skype message around noon in Tokyo (night time in CA) that the software had some problems. We had a Skype session set up between our engineer at customer site in Tokyo and our engineers in Bangalore, who started looking at the error messages (which were cut-n-pasted) into the Skype chat session with a simultaneous Skype voice call. The problem was that we did not have any equipment in Bangalore to replicate the problem so we needed someone to transfer messages showing up on the screen in Tokyo site.
In the mean time, we woke up one of the engineers in CA and included him in the chat session. In about 3 hours we were able to figure out the problem and 2 more hours later we had a patch sent to the engineer in Tokyo before the end of the day. Customer was really blown away by the global cooperation and speed of execution. That evening, I took the team out for a drink and I toasted “Skype” for the success.
On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.
I started using Skype when my girlfriend was living in London for a summer, I tried various ways to call her and Skype offered high voice quality, ease of use, and was cost effective. After that I kept using Skype mostly as an IM client as it provides encryption under the hood. And then I discovered the greatness of Skype's group chat feature when a number of friends and forum members at SuperFuture started using it for group and voice chat. I was amazed how I could get to know someone across the globe so well via Skype.
I changed careers and got into the "web 2.0" business and was the VP of Technology of OnMyList.com, I suggested using Skype group chat to collaborate among the 4 people we had in the company. It worked extremely well and it was paramount to our communication. When I joined another startup I got them to use Skype as well for collaboration.
I am now working as a freelance consultant on Ruby on Rails sites, Facbeook, and other social applications, my partner and I communicate exclusively via Skype. We created Dealistic.com while he lives in DC and I am in San Francisco, 70% of the work done together via Skype voice chat and iChat screen sharing. We would have Skype voice chats for over 12 hours and it works flawlessly.
So what Skype means to me? It means staying closer to my closest friends and family, it means saving cost while running my own consulting practice, it means getting things done and collaborating effectively.
The new Skype for Windows 4 beta consolidates all the elements of a chat into one vertical pane on the right side of the main Skype window.
The upper half shows an alphabetic list of participants in a multiparty chat or conference call. People in the room. What else can we know or do with people in a room?
You can hide the list, but what else could you do with that space?
Sorting compares/contrasts people in the room. Sort by:
Most recently contributed to the chat/call
Freshness/aging by participation
Mutual Availability
Of the times I'm online, what percentage is this other person also online?
Time zone, relative to yours
When are the Australians waking up, rejoining the conversation?
Contacts vs. strangers
Which of these people have I yet to befriend?
Provocateurs, Amplifiers, Lurkers
Who triggers threads vs. who jumps in? Look at Marc A. Smith's research on mining Usenet for social network and relationship data. You can look at time gaps in conversation, followed by responses.
Visualize participation volume
Who has been most/least active? Show a chart (pie chart?) or meter of the number of words contributed to the chat or seconds spoken in the conference call. Acknowledge contribution, encourage the quiet to jump in.
Other profiled demographics: country, age, gender.
What other info would be useful if I move my mouse over someone's name in the panel? Hover information:
Faces
Mood text
Last text contribution to the chat
Show the contextual menu now shown by option/right-mouse clicks.
Other options:
Slide show of profiles, rotating through the participants
Highlight people who contributed recently in other chats in which we are both members
Help those in the room make the most of being in that room. Help us with the metawork of scheduling, the facilitation and moderation of the conversation, launching sidebar talk, building reputation through social grooming and participation.
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.] 
But HiDef Conferencing's owner, 
Berkeley a few months after the first Howard Dean meetups in San Francisco's East Bay. We became five thousand full time volunteers over 18 months until election day 2004. Our two-county grassroots operation made more than one million phone calls to swing states. 1,000,000. 
Join the Skype 4.X Text Chat Room
