Back to School: Learn Guitar on Skype

Meet Antoine Dufour, of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Antoine on MySpace and on CANdYRAT Records. I like Antoine's offer for a global market. Sections on currency, language, payment, and time zones spell out details you'd assume in local transactions.

Antoine Dufour
Skype Guitar Lessons

Private lesson; live on the Skype video conferencing service.
Intended for intermediate to advanced acoustic guitar players

Cost: $75 for one hour lesson ($ in US or CAN)

Requirements:

Skype application (available for free on skype.com);
High-speed internet connection;
Web-cam & Microphone and headphones;
A Paypal account;
Guitar

The lessons:

I'll be teaching parts of my songs, exercises, technique, tricks, extended techniques, open tunings, interpretation, textures and how to incorporate all that in an original composition and answer any question regarding my guitar playing or gear, etc.

The lesson can be in english or french.

How to register?

• Send me an email, with your skype info at: adguitarlessons@gmail.com
• Then, via email, we can schedule a time for the lesson.
• Payment must be received via Paypal one week before the lesson takes place.

Time zone:

• For lesson appointments, you'll have to provide me your time zone information and I'll find out a time to make it work for both of us.
• My time zone is Eastern time (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Terms:

• I must be informed of any cancellation at least 24h in advance or you'll loose the lesson.
• If I have to cancel, I'll contact you for another appointment.
• If for some reason I can't give you a prepaid lesson, I'll refund you.
• Sometimes, the Internet could be unstable, don't worry; you won't loose your lesson.
• Registration is now open for a limited number of students.

tags: skype, music, education, guitar, youtube, freemium, skypenomics, lessons, tutoring

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Back to School: Learn Banjo by Skype

Introducing Dennis Bailey. "I teach Banjo, Guitar and Mandolin lessons in the Dallas, Texas, area and also online via Skype."

Classic freemium model: free beginner banjo lessons on YouTube let you sample the product and leads you to paid personal instruction.

Contact Dennis via email or Skype chat.

tags: skype, education, tutoring, teaching, lessons, banjo, guitar, mandolin, music, texas, tx, us

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype sets new performance records, preserves margins in 2009q2

eBay reports $170 million Skype revenue for the quarter, 25% year over year growth. 20% of revenue was from the USA (green line below). Management kept margins stable at 23.6% (the big purple line below).

8.4% of all revenue ($14.3 million) is from marketing services and other revenues. These include licensing Skype's brand for Skype Certified products, certification fees, and Skype Prime fees.

+37.3 million new accounts, 414k daily (the red line below). This brings Skype to 480.5 million cumulative accounts. The adoption rate fell slightly this quarter.

25.5 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes served in Q2 (blue line), 3.0 billion Skype-to-PSTN minutes (red line). Is the rate of growth slowing or is it just seasonality?

This puts Skype's freemium rate at 8.5 (8.5 free minutes for every paid minute). Still within Skype's historical range and very low (lower is better) compared to other services. Some companies have freemium rates around 20-1 or 50-to-1. The curvy line below is Skype's freemium rate over time.

tags: skype, skypejournal, stats, financials, revenue, profit, margin, minutes, freemium, trends, charts, statistics, performance, ebay

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype throws independent developers under the bus to pursue WebEx market

Skype for Mac 2.8's new screen sharing feature signals Skype's move into the web conferencing and video conferencing space led by WebEx. Skype is also building screen sharing features for Windows and Linux clients.

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:

• Yugma 
• Mikogo
• Oneeko
• RemoteCall
• InnerPass
• Persony
• InstaColl
• Gogrok
• IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte
• Convenos
• 800Meet

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.

tags: devrels, developers, developer relations, skype, desktop sharing, video, yugma, mikogo, oneeko, remotecall, innerpass, persony, instacoll, gogrok, ibm, lotus, macworld09, mw09, sametime, unyte, convenos, 800meet, partnering, channels

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The AdultFriendFinder freemium case study

Skype Journal covered Skype's freemium business model this year. Now Andrew Chen pulls together fresh freemium business and funnel metrics from FriendFinder Networks' IPO filing with the US SEC. FFN runs AdultFriendFinder.com (nsfw), Penthouse, and niche dating/social sites. It's another data point when you want to compare freemium rates.

Windows Live Messenger to be Essential

ArsTechnica reports Microsoft's Windows Live Manager (WLM) will be part of the Windows Live Essentials family with Windows 7. More PCs will come bundled with WLM, setting WLM as Microsoft's new standard IM client. Microsoft's consumer MSN and workplace Office Communicator clients will find distribution harder.

This OEM distribution will raise the opportunity cost of messengers, like Skype, that require a download. Advantage: Microsoft.

Other Essential apps: Windows Live Family Safety, Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer and Microsoft Office Outlook Connector.

It seems WLM will continue to be subsidized by advertising.

tags: microsoft, wlm, windows, windows7, windows live messenger, messenger, oem, freemium

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Skype's Freemium Rate (free/fee) is flat

Local fluctuations are less interesting than the range.

I applied several curve fits to Skype's freemium ratio but nothing reliable came of it. I don't imagine it is predictive of anything, merely descriptive. 

The wobbliness[1] of Skype's freemium ratio is, obviously, a function of variations in the supporting data. Eyeballing it, free activity leads fee by a few months. This makes sense if free experiences are preparatory behavior to greater commitment.

At a larger chart scale, like 1-100, the world of percentages, the curve would look amazingly flat. Many freemium businesses would interpret a ratio in Skype's 7-8 range as golden.

tags: skype, metrics, stats, statistics, free, freemium

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[1] I did love Professor Magaddino's econometrics classes, but wobbly suggests so much more than the proper language of statistics.

Skype's P2P architecture supports freemium

Skype can give away free video calling because customers pay for all the expensive marginal costs.

• With every account, Skype hosts account creation, account backup, and presence service on their servers. These are very lightweight, low cost services but they grow linearly with the user population.
• Skype also provides technical support, customer service, security and R&D, spread across all users, fee and free. The costs of these services grow slower than the user population.
• Skype's customers pay for their own microphones, cameras, computing, and P2P connectivity. So while this is a linear marginal cost, Skype doesn't pay.

Contrast this with Yahoo!, Microsoft, SightSpeed and other VoIM providers. They have Skype's fixed costs and more. They pipe all talk through hosted servers. So every additional free user requires them to pay for more server capacity, bandwidth, and server farm management.

Skype doesn't pay when customers

• speak more often
• to more people
• for longer times
• through more bandwidth-consuming media.

P2P's low marginal cost helps Skype scale and tweak their freemium rate.

tags: skype, p2p, architecture, free, freemium, business, yahoo, microsoft, sightspeed, voim

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Measuring Freemium with Minutes is easier than with Money

Hudson asked me about using minutes instead of dollars and the trend of the Freemium Rate I described Monday.

Comparing apples to apples, minutes-talked is the only data I have on both sides of the free/fee equation.

Money as a measure is useful. It leads us to the lifetime value of a customer. How can we measure free in dollars?

We might value the free minutes at some averaged rate and compare that to Skype's overall revenue.

Skype earns money from licensing its brand, the rental of SkypeIn phone numbers, from its online store, ads in Skype’s yellow page directory services. Sadly, I don’t have access to revenue data broken out by source.

We might include costs with dollars, seeking profitability or net value of customers. Costs for fee-based services are higher (transaction costs, higher security, admin, sales costs, customer service, technical support, business development) than for free. 

Meanwhile, we have customer behavior in the form of minutes. And the simple freemium rate comparing free to fee. It will suffice.

tags: skype, freemium, metrics, business, strategy, free, skypeout, directory, yp, yellowpages, skypein, revenue, costs

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Skype is tweaking the freemium model

Following up Monday's post about the Freemium Rate, Hudson Barton wrote "in a normal 'freemium' relationship, it is the higher valued services that have a fee attached to them."

Most freemium services offer free but limp, shallow versions of their paid products. I show that on the chart below by the boxed "0" (free, few features) and the upgrade path to the boxed "$" (high cost, more features).

In Skype's case, that's not how it works. SkypeOut users call a voice line and pay for it by the minute or with a subscription. Skype-to-Skype users get free multi-modal talk (persistent IM, voice, video), file transfers, voice conferencing, public chats, audio fidelity far better than mobiles and landlines.

So Skype is making the free experience rich and sophisticated and full. On the chart, users start in the bottom-right quadrant (free, full features) and ADD SkypeOut (costs, simple features).

Skype has a pricing advantage in their freemium model. A year's national SkypeOut subscription can cost less than 10% of what people spend on land lines. So even Skype's premium charges are cheaper than many alternatives.

tags: skype, freemium, business, strategy, free, skypeout

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Two more reasons why SightSpeed is good for Logitech

Video cameras are being built into everything. Phones, monitors and nearly every new laptop. Logitech buying SightSpeed marks the end of the generic webcam add-on market, as Jim Courtney wrote up yesterday. Or the beginning of the end, at least.

Logitech can sell its high-end webcam technology to laptop and mobile OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus and Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericson, Motorola, Qualcomm.

Logitech Video Inside. With Carl Zeiss Optics. With SightSpeed MultiParty Video. And Skype High Quality Video.

SightSpeed's white-label distribution has been effective, accounting for many more users than its own brand. Logitech could very well become a Dolby Labs for personal video, licensing the best quality video features, and de facto standards for video, to the world's devices.

Logitech wants freemium marketing power. Free video calling entices newbies who pay later for multiparty, higher quality experiences. This is a branding and customer relationship program that could spill over to Logitech's hardware products. It may also be Logitech's strongest relationship with end consumers since most of Logitech's sales go through resellers. SightSpeed's own revenue stream is a nice bonus to the strategic value of direct customer relationships.

A larger theme is synergy between realtime social networks and devices. Skype and Skypephones. Twitter and mobiles. Gtalk and Android. And now SightSpeed and Logitech.

tags: skype, logitech, sitespeed, dell, video, hp, lenovo, acer, asus, nokia, samsung, sony, ericson, motorola, qualcomm, optics, dolby, freemium

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Skype and the Freemium Rate (free/fee)

So here’s a little chart for you. Billions of Skype minutes served (left axis). Light blue bars are free Skype-to-Skype minutes. Dark blue bars (at the bottom) are SkypeOut minutes, paid for.

The curvy line at the top is the ratio between the free and fee. It has been hovering between 7 and 8.5 (right axis) for years. I’m calling it the freemium rate.

This is astonishing for being low (a good thing) and for its constancy. Other companies are lucky to get one-in-twenty or one in one hundred.  

Skype’s project to make user experiences more convenient should boost all talk activity. Skype for Windows 4 is smoothing the customer journey from first download to routine calling.

tags: skype, trends, charts, statistics, stats, freemium, business models, conversion, rates, behavior, revenue, minutes, billions

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HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

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.

• Pat Phelan: HiDef Conferencing gives an amazing recession offer
• PhoneBoy Finds Conference Calling Solution: Score 1 for HD Voice
• VAPPS leaves Freemium for HiDef Conferencing
• VAPPS Rebrands Its Service: High Definition Conferencing

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VAPPS leaves freemium for HiDef Conferencing

Chatted with Ben Lilienthal, CEO and founder of VAPPS, this morning.

Skype Journal: Saw you turned off HiGhspeEdconferencing.

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.

See also on Skype Journal:

• HD Voice: "Priceless", January 2008
• High Definition Voice: Bringing Skype's High Bandwidth Audio to Conference Calls, October 2007
• PhoneBoy Finds Conference Calling Solution: Score 1 for HD Voice, April 2008
• HighSpeedConferencing.com - When The Meeting Grows Beyond Ten, February 2007
• The Skype Mega Conference, January 2006

tags: skype, vapps, highspeedconferencing, hidefconferencing, asterisk, skypeforasterisk, conferencing, collaboration

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Mobivox leaves freemium services behind

So your free users never become paying customers? What should a smart business do? Fire the freeloaders! Refocus on the profitable customers.

Mobivox did exactly that this week. After studying user behavior, data showed conversion from free-to-fee was near zero, and nothing would change that. Mobivox will devote the freed up resources to enhancing services for its commercial clients and to building up its Mobivox PL voice application platform.

Kudos to Mobivox's new management for an adult decision. 

tags: mobivox, mobivoxpl, freemium, strategy, voip, platform

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