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Independently covering the Talk Revolution since 2003
Mark Spencer's speech to the Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. His slides on Slideshare. eComm2010a looks hot and may sell out. I'll be speaking, and so will thought leaders from Skype, Google, Cisco, and a host of others.
Labels: asterisk, augmentedreality, cisco, ecomm, events, google, SIP, skype
In 2010...
Hudson Barton predicts a 2010 peak of 27,695,335 Skype users online, Total "real users" will be 67,596,505.
What are your predictions? Can you do better? Prior years' predictions: Phil Wolff's 26 incriminating 2009 Skype Predictions, Phil Wolff's 37 Sketchy 2008 Skype Predictions, Predictions? Wish List? What's In Store for 2008 (Jim Courtney).
tags: skype, future, predictions
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: analysis, Android, business, competition, fun, google, ribbit, skype, verizon
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.
Part 1. (1 hour)
Part 2. (6 minutes)
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...
tags: skype, #sn09, supernova2009, collaboration, conference
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: business, collaboration, design, events, google, skype, usa
We try to be good to one another. Sometimes it's just about power.
The Associated Press newswire told search engines to pay for showing stories, or to stop showing them. [Ironic link above: AP story hosted on Google.] How quickly would AP enter bankruptcy if none of their stories showed up in Google News or search results?
Google's playing nice. They can, because they have the power in this relationship.
Yahoo! will kill Geocities later this month (26 October 2009). Millions of web sites, stores, online communities, blogs will vanish, along with their google juice. Geocities is a chunk of history for some, an online home for others. Yahoo! gave six months warning in its eviction notice. Yahoo! will move you to their paid hosting service.
Yahoo! holds the power over Geocitizens in this landlord-tenant relationship. [Kudos to The Archive Team and the Internet Archive for trying to back up Geocities.]
AT&T blocked wireless access to VoIP on the iPhone for two years. Just to see what Skype and Google would do. They had power over Apple before the first iPhone launched. Less so now that Apple is a worldwide success.
Renters get power over landlords from their contract and from their government's landlord-tenant laws. Those laws rebalance power, create some process for notice and appeal, and define penalties for abusing process or power.
Skype is in the middle of a network of alliances, partnerships, antagonists, and dependencies. While some relationships are defined by market forces, many are driven by the struggle for industry and government power. Skype steps lightly. For every Skype government affairs person, the telecom industry has thousands. For every euro Skype spends on publicity and advertising to influence the public and regulators, the telecoms spend thousands. Skype is deft and agile, a guerilla going up against vested interests, avoiding brute force confrontations they could lose.
Meanwhile Skype earned its own power. Skype spent six years defining a global brand people love and trust. Skype quietly framed regulatory issues in Brussels and Washington placing Skype on the side of democracy and freedom. Skype proved its legitimacy as a profitable business (although still a rounding error in AT&T's 2009q2 Net Operating Cash Flow of $15.8 billion) and a competitor (8% of international minutes).
Skype is investing in its power. Geek cred will come if its Skype as a Platform service is successful. Skype is spreading its political attention to smaller governments. Skype has new PR, advertising, marketing partners to reinvigorate Skype's brand for what the company will become. Skype is building products to diversify its business model and create new sources of income.
Skype is approaching a half-billion users. Skype will no doubt be a US$2 billion a year company by 2013. Skype will sit at the table with Internet and telecom giants.
So I'm left with an incomplete thought.
Will Skype be as tender with its power as Google? Will Skype be as courteous as Yahoo! with trusting customers? Will Skype abuse market power through partnerships as AT&T?
Winston Churchill said the price of greatness is responsibility. What in Skype's cultural DNA says do no evil?
tags: skype, power, politics, ethics, morals
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: analysis, apple, ATT, dataportability, google, iPhone, regulation, yahoo
Skype could be a better Skype with Wave inside.
Should Skype clients be Wave containers? Perhaps. When will Wave become truly free of Google control? That depends on how many other software companies and enterprises start building and host Wave servers.
Would you like to see Wave inside Skype? Skype inside Waves? Federation of Skype names with Wave namespaces? Sharing of presence between the networks?
See also: Google Wave: Loosely coupling IM to everything and video: Ribbit Conference Gadget for Google Wave.
tags: skype, wave, google, googlewave
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: competition, design, google, skype, strategy, technology
Skype soared when it wrapped IM around Internet voice calls. The familiar around the difficult. 
IM brings profiles, contact lists, presence, people search, and messages. Google Wave lets you build those into any software.
Skype gained power by creating an IM namespace (the list of people who use Skype) that tightly coupled IM with more things to do (voice, video, file transfer, gameplay). Wave creates the same value but with loose coupling. Third parties have added voice conferencing, video conferencing, games. Third parties will be able to tie in their own namespaces (people@mycompany.com) and their own apps.
I fully expect to see Wave built into web sites, mobile apps, desktop clients, smart devices. Anything where you expect people (or things) to talk with people.
Loose coupling has its weaknesses. Incompatibility with extensions (we have to agree on which video plug-in to use in a conversation), no single point of contact to resolve problems, difficulty upgrading the entire network, and social issues like privacy and spam.
Wave supporters argue that the Wave protocol's weaknesses are strengths. That loose coupling provides for greater innovation in a marketplace of ideas (like software and music). That no single point of contact means no single point of failure, and no centralized control (like email).
It's still early, but now is when companies like Skype and Yahoo! and Microsoft and Cisco need to formulate something other than a wait-and-see strategy. Wave is as intensely viral and engaging as email. So you want to either jump on Wave's bandwagon or have your counter force strategy deployed before Wave hits tipping points and crosses the chasm from geek pioneers to the mainstream.
tags: skype, wave, google, googlewave
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: competition, google, skype, strategy, technology
Google Wave opens up to more developers today. Ribbit's voice conference gadget is a featured bot. Here's the demo.
Q. What technology does BT/Ribbit have, making this possible, that Skype doesn't? Q. Does this scale if Ribbit has to pay for each minute? Q. What advantages does decoupling chat from IM bring to users?
From the Ribbit blurb:
The Ribbit Conferencing Gadget allows Wave participants to escalate an online collaboration session to a real-time audio communications session, allowing participants to talk with each other while collaborating. The Conferencing Gadget is persistent in the Wave and allows any Wave participant to:
Create an audio connection with multiple Wave participants
Add non-Wave participants to the session
Mute or hold any of the individual participants from the stream
Disconnect any participants from the stream
End the session
tags: ribbit, skype, google, wave, googlewave, collaboration, conferencing
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: architecture, conferencing, google, IM, ribbit, skype, technology
From the Competition Is Good Department. Microsoft will sell its upgraded LifeCam webcam starting September 9. The "Cinema's" resolution is now 720p, 1280×720 pixels at 30 frames per second.
Your PC must convert all that video into streamable bits. The image encoding/decoding and compression take serious processor power, lots of memory, and real broadband bandwidth. Microsoft says this requires a dual core 1.6GHz processor, and recommends a 3GHz dual core processor and 2GB of memory. No news yet on which drivers and codecs they'll use, how much burden using the Cinema will put on your system (will you be able to run Outlook while calling?), nor how much bandwidth a HD video call will take.
This year Skype published the free SILK audio codec for wideband audio at the same bandwidth and Google announced it's buying On2, the maker of Skype's video engine. The race to fidelity hasn't been this hot since Skype promoted the GIPS audio codec suite in 2003, followed by Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Microsoft.
LifeCam Cinema Features: 4x digital zoom, glass lens, auto focus, Microsoft "ClearFrame" frame-rate doubling technology, noise-cancelling microphone, Windows Live calling button, aluminum body. For Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. £70 or $80.
tags: cameras, webcams, microsoft, lifecam, cinema, skype, clearframe, codec, compression, HD
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: codecs, gips, google, hardware, microsoft, partners, silk, uk, usa, video
I don't work for Skype. Here's advice I'd give to senior management on how to respond to Google buying On2, which makes Skype's video engine.
1. It's a threat. It may not have been Google's intent, but Skype should consider this an attack by a rival. While the media and the blogosphere have been focusing on On2's value to YouTube, Google could also apply these resources it to its realtime talk properties (Talk, Voice, Wave) and to the Chrome browser (the better to play/capture videos without an Adobe plug-in).
2. The deal isn't done. I'm sure the lawyers can cook up ways to interfere, contracts and regulatory influence (monopoly power), perhaps raid the company for talent that doesn't want to move. The low road. Better to engineer your way out of this exposure by making/buying the talent/technology/IP so you no longer rely upon On2 products.
3. It changes the video codec industry. Google hasn't had a strong competence in codecs. Until now. They have the potential to promote On2's codecs by licensing them freely or open sourcing them. That's how industry de facto standards are made. Two effects: This could drain the swamp as all the small video codec makers starve, going out of this business. Frozen standards may also limit Skype's ability to innovate around video codecs or strike interoperability deals as Google assumes industry leadership in that technology.
4. Act yesterday. While the deal's effects are not immediate, Skype's learning curve may be substantial and you'll want every day possible to own your core IP. I'm sure you've started already.
5. Keep focus. Skype has a diverse product portfolio. An audio/video/signal engineering initiative (a center of excellence? a subsidiary that licenses the technology?) (The Skype Immersive Reality Institute?) could take resources and attention from other strategic investments. Keep balance. The right workflows around product lifecycles and product mix should help keep balance.
6. Short term, this may be a time to negotiate a better deal with On2. You can always leave them behind, but you may want to secure promises of technical support, ongoing maintenance, best prices, continued improvement in the product, etc.
What advice would you add?
tags: skype, video, m&a, google, on2, googletalk, googlevoice, googlewave, adobe, googlechrome, competition, strategy, management
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: analysis, codecs, competition, ebay, google, skype, strategy
Skype is recruiting video engineers to work on Skype's next generation of video calling. This may raise the barre in multiparty video calls. At least it matches what ooVoo, iChat, and Sightspeed do.
Meanwhile, Google will buy On2 Technologies, makers of Skype's video engine. Conflict of interest? Maybe.
Coincidence? Somehow I don't think so.
Here's the official job listing. [Emphasis mine]
Video Codec Developer
developer stockholm tallinn usa video
Team
Skype video development team is developing technology enabling high quality multi-way, multi-modal video communications experience over the Internet on x86 based Personal Computers as well as embedded platforms targeted for Mobile- and Consumer Electronic devices. We are continuing to expand this exceptional team and are thus looking for highly experienced, talented and motivated individuals capable of both working collaboratively with others as well as making significant individual contributions.
Responsibilities
As a member of the video team you will be engaged at the forefront of Skype's innovation of breakthrough solutions to real-time IP video communication on heterogeneous networks. You will be expected to play an active role in the generation, development, verification and delivery of new concepts and methods for video coding as well as pre- and postprocessing of realtime video for enhanced quality.
Requirements
- degree in image/video/signal processing/compression
- minimum 3 years experience of H.264 AVC/SVC video codec algorithms development
- must have developed algorithms for a video codec that went to productization phase
- detailed understanding of underlying technology behind H.264 AVC/SVC
- Understanding of realtime requirements and error resilience toolset of H.264
- Understanding of signaling protocol for video
- Excellent skills in technical communication and teamwork.
- Command of programming languages including Matlab, C, and C++.
- Excellent command of English.
Location - Stockholm, Sweden; Tallinn, Estonia; Europe, various locations; Bay Area, US
Ref: VIDEO-CODEC-DEV
tags: skype, video, codec, H.264, AVC/SV, matlab, c, c++, coding, encoding, algorithms, dsp, compression, stockholm, tallinn
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: business, codecs, developers, google, jobs, skype, technology, video
The US FCC is investigating Apple and AT&T over Apple's rejection of several VoIP applications from the iPhone, including Google Voice. 
At the same time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation petitioned the Library of Congress to legalize doing what you want with your iPhone.
Could this lead to mobile net neutrality rules? Could this lead to mobile Carterfone rights, including the right to tether without carrier permission? If this leads to rulemaking, could Skype be free to communicate over 3G wireless? Will this inquiry conflict with the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition or Justice Department's Antitrust Division's competition promoting duties.
tags: skype, google, apple, ebay, goog, voip, eff, fcc, ftc, carterfone, regulation, competition, anticompetitive behavior, netneutrality, mobile net neutrality, neutrality
Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Labels: apple, ATT, fcc, google, iPhone, regulation, skype, usa
eBay is preparing to spin-out Skype, setting it free to steer its own course. Almost six years ago Skype redefined realtime communications and changed the industry. Lee Dryburgh, the man behind the Emerging Communications Conference, shared some thoughts with me about his vision for what comes next. – Phil Wolff
I spent many years thinking about telephony, seven days a week, in a way it “destroyed” my life in a mental health sense during those years trying to ascertain where it was going between 2005-2020. It was clear to me that what had existed for over a century and which today generates revenues that dwarf the Internet, was going to be surpassed and that we had already put one foot on the cliff edge. It’s the big reason I kicked off the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards, because no other event seemed to have enough inherent vision.
Where is it going?
First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it.
Relationships replaces Voice as the substrate in clients.
However because its substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.
Second, we’ve got the economic model behind it. Even today, well over a hundred years since it’s original inception, we still have the same usage paradigms and economic models put in place at the time of the first electro-mechanical switches.
Now the keyword in all of this is “software.” Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.
Looking forwards, we can consider Skype phase one.
Phase two is emerging on the horizon and it will have deeper impact yet. In fact, played out it will change social governance, market economics, how humans relate to each other and even the nature of geo-politics. It’s likely to have ramifications on all social order. In the long-term view, it will also be the “new” multi-trillion dollar market replacing much of what today is the multi-trillion-telephony market.
Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like.
And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency.
Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.
Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.
If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers. Google even has machines reading your emails in order to deduce your possible intentions and desires, which is why you may often find an eerily relevant ad above your Gmail account inbox. The underlying reason for the Android initiative surely has to be to gain access to better intention deriving data in order to sell upstream to advertisers.
Yet telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).
To make the situation even worse, telecoms today is still charging downstream to the consumer, ignores money and wishes of upstream parties (like retailers, media companies for example). Because the telecom business model and regulation is pretty much hard nailed like the network itself, the bulk of telecom operators are not likely to be able to transition in time before other entrants move in who appreciate the new economics and who don’t have ball and chain legacy. New entrants and probably a third of telecom operators will transition successfully around phase two.
You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of more communication modalities. Now underpin that with attention and intention based economics.
Now dream a little.
tags: skype, strategy, intent, intention, intentioneconomy, presence, richpresence, privacy
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.
Labels: business, codecs, ecomm, google, skype, strategy, technology
Yugma desktop sharing still hosts multiparty Skype meetings. New CEO tells TMC's Patrick Bernard this Skype partner is restarting after layoffs and generally winding down the company. From happier times, Skype Journal wrote up: Yugma Skype Edition: Cross Platform Desktop Sharing, Yugma Skype Edition Version 3: Fluid Collaboration, Yugma Skype Becomes Skype Certified. Yugma may avoid Convenos' dismal fate. Skype offered its own 1-to-1 desktop sharing this year, throwing independent developers under the bus to pursue WebEx market.
PrettyMay partners with Sangoma, one of Skype's oldest independent software developers, announced Sangoma, a VoIP hardware manufacturer, will sell their Skype PBX Gateway running PrettyMay Skype trunking software. Excellent distribution for PrettyMay, new markets and 4/5 stars for saving money. Sangoma can now compete more directly with VoSKY's Skype trunking systems, some of which distributed partnership with Skype.
Truphone beats Skype to push notifications on the iPhone. Martin Bryant says the push service on iPhone 3.0 software lets people call you via truphone even if you're using another app. "If someone calls your Truphone number and you’re not using the app they’re prompted to leave a voicemail message. A notification is then pushed to your iPhone inviting you to listen to the recording."
NumberGarage does for phone numbers what domain hosts do for domains. "NumberGarage™ empowers people to manage their phone numbers, with or without phone service, all from the NumberGarage™ Web site." Park and forward phone numbers, just like at GoDaddy.
Google reserves a million phone numbers from Level 3. Probably for Google Voice customers. Is that a weekend supply, like Apple iPhone 3G S sales?
Courts uphold TiVo patents on playing, pausing, rewinding streaming video. Do TiVo patents apply to voicemail/videomail too? Many mobile phones now offer some TiVo-like features for voice and video messaging.
Skype cuts SkypeOut rates to Turkey mobiles and landlines. Turkey's landline prices are falling toward Skype's world rate of about €1 per hour. Meanwhile telcos in other countries raised rates a little: Albania – Mobile, Benin, Comoros and Mayotte, El Salvador – Mobile, Malawi and Malawi – Mobile, Swaziland, Togo, Wallis and Futuna.
eComm, The Emerging Communications Conference 2009b (Amsterdam), issued a Call For Speakers. It's a boring read, so they really need your creative, mind-blowing, insightful, world changing, quintessentially European, future bending proposals.
tags: skype, truphone, numbergarage, google, ecomm, sangoma, prettymay, yugma, tivo, million
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.
Last week Google announced Wave, a pre-alpha browser application project. The experience is like instant messaging but with the extensibility and variety you might find in facebook or OpenSocial applications. Wave can be highly decentralized, like email, with Wave servers hosted by any person or company that cares to. 
Wave clients run in browsers. (Good to know: Skype desktop clients have tiny browsers inside.)
Extensibility makes a container useful in more ways. Like adding new tools to your Swiss Army knife or multitool. Apps could change what goes on inside the chat. We will be able to combine them in interesting ways. To surround chat with useful information about people. To enrich ways we discover people to talk with, to initiate conversations, to conduct those conversations using the right tools for that conversation, and to use the history of those conversations meaningfully.
Wave solves several Skype problems:
The flip side is opportunity:
What would you like to see Skype become?
tags: skype, google, wave, ebay, design, im, chat, voip, voim
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.
Labels: design, developers, google, IM, skype, technology, voip
Pandemics change human behavior for millions of people. Our networks may not be ready for those changes.
Just stay home. Wash your hands. Advice from the US CDC for people at risk of the 2009 swine flu. Mexican authorities urge avoiding face-to-face contact in many-to-many places like hospitals, museums, theaters, cinemas (releases of X-Men Origins and Star Trek are postponed), churches, sports events, public markets.
Working at Home. While television (or streaming video) might substitute in sports and music events, bringing other work home is harder.
Online communities swarm in response to emergencies and threats. 9-11, Tsunami relief, Katrina, Mumbai invasion, Southern California wildfires had four stages.
By contrast, people shun common places and take refuge in their homes in a biological outbreak/epidemic/pandemic.
This creates new problems.
What can we do to prepare?
See also:
photos credit cc:by Randal Sheppard
tags: skype, H1N1, google, wireless, mobile, isp, breakout, epidemic, pandemic, disaster, disasterplanning, infrastructure, disasterpreparedness, scenarios, flu, influenza, swineflu, cdc, who, hyperlocal
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.
Labels: architecture, google, mexico, mobile, security, skype, strategy, usa
The face of the Great Recession. From Google's quarterly conference call.
A maturing market? Or a contracting market?
Weakening seems to be all US for now.
The good news is that as the economy tanked, and per-unit ad values fell, Google spent less on advertising to bring in traffic.
Labels: advertising, business, competition, financials, google
me
I'm in the New York Times coverage of Google Voice. Quoted correctly (yay!) but before my own column on the subject came out (d'oh!). Google has some truly delightful advantages in the race to become the world's largest communications company.
under
Australia's Telestra keeps Nokia N85 inside the walled garden, keeps Skype out. A year without growth leaves them cautious, even when Skype offers to pay.
New Zealand's Yellow partners with Skype. Search through the Skype Directory and call most nz companies for free until June 10.
the future
Foresight Institute gets a new president. Skype me (evanwolf) if you want to come to Dr. Hall's Sunday reception in Palo Alto. We'll all be talking molecular manufacturing, nanotechnology and the singularity.
Nokia shares its vision. Smartphones rising. Death of patience. Rewarding engagement. Personal expression. New learning economy. Clickable world. Personal relevance. A good summary of forces driving the interplay between mobile technology, industry dynamics, and human behavior.
the present
One in four drop landlines in some states according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study. Turning to mobiles, an act of belt-tightening. Q. Of those who switch to mobile, how many have unlimited flat-rate data plans, favorable to Skype?
CRM Over Voice: Using Voice in New Ways for Service Providers to Retain Subscribers and Strengthen Brand. White paper by analyst Jon Arnold for Mobivox. The cool stuff starts on page 4. Speech recognition + VoIP + SaaS = Contextual CRM, creating touch points that add value to the customer journey. Jon explains why it's good and how to build it, using Mobivox as an example.
VoSKY sells Skype trunking to Majorcan hotel chain. Attach a box to your PBX and your staff doesn't even know they are calling through the Skype network at lower rates.
Larry Dignan shows why mobile developers migrate from Symbian to RIM and Mac OS X. Growth and share favor the Bold. And iPhone.
the past
Transcript of Skype's Jonathan Christensen's talk about speech quality at the Emerging Communications Conference last week. History as prelude to something new?
gig
Benjamin Leviton seeks VoIP help: "I have a Brekeke SIP proxy server. I am looking for someone to remote on to my desktop, log into its interface and config my carriers with the proxy server. Also check the interface of Polycom phone and make sure it is working properly with the SIP proxy server." Contact: +1-917-273-5808, ben@capitalfinanceusa.com, yahoo IM gcc644@yahoo.com, or skype:levtop.
tags: google, googlevoice, australia, telestra, nokia, N85, New Zealand, nz, yellow, skype, directory, search, foresight, smartphones, landlines, cdc, mobile, crm, mobivox, vosky, majorca, spain, pbx, symbian, rim, apple, blackberry, iphone, jonathanchristensen, ecomm, brekeke, sip, polycom
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