Weekly reading

Using Skype

Using Skype for Pain Management and Treatment of Chronic Pain. A hands-off therapy works just fine via Skype webcam. Alternative Health Journal.

50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom. It's an awesome list by/for teachers. Teaching Degree.org blog.

Soldiers head to war, Skype their mothers. "I'll Skype as much as I can. But Mom would like me to call every day, all day long, Skype every day, all day long. It doesn't exactly work that way," joked SPC Forney. Capital News 9, Albany, New York.

The World Mind Network advocates Skyping to improve the world. One conversation at a time.

Paris rolls out free Wi-Fi hotspots. The better to Skype with coffee. Click here to find the free hot spots in Paris.

Too Much Information.

"Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, those that result in T.M.I. and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love." New York Times Magazine.

Our community

Call for Papers: Digital ID World, September 2009, Las Vegas.

My rambunctious Call for Speakers at the Emerging Communications Amsterdam to be bold and visionary. 

Congratulations to Ken Camp, communications community leader extraordinaire and a heckofa nice guy, for joining the eComm team.

Charge for online news like SkypeOut does for calls: simple, prepaid, microcharges, no risk. So says James Fallows to Atlantic Monthly.

VoSKY PBX-Skype gateways are certified for Mitel PBX switches. Skype trunking to cut costs. This increases VoSKY's distribution.

Live Web, Real Time . . . Call It What You Will, It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It. Mary Hodder calls for better discovery and effective filters in live search. Mary's one of the early social media thought leaders and a pioneer in real time search.

Jajah connected its 1,000,000,000th call. Billionth. Jajah powers the voice parts of services like Yahoo! Voice, eHarmony, Jangl, Plaxo, Joyent, Callwave, Bitwine, iotum and Chumby. Just think: Skype walked away from this business two years' ago.

The Nokia N97 showed up in US stores last week. Did you find Skype preinstalled? Anyone? Anyone? Not due until Q3, but we can hope.

Skype seems to be running OK in Iran, assuming you can get online.

tags: skype, ecomm, vosky, gateway, jajah, n97, nokia, skypeout, pricing

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.

Roundup – Skype news

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.

eBay puts distance between Skype and Markets

You knew it was coming. Now eBay is weaning its markets sites from Skype influence. No longer is Skype among "More eBay Sites."

Meanwhile, eBay forbids Skype links/buttons in listings.

Skype voice and chat buttons in listings are being discontinued

eBay is discontinuing Skype voice and chat buttons in listings as of June 10, 2009 in an effort to remove features with limited buyer and seller usage.

This change does not require any action on your part. We are just notifying you that as of June 10, you will no longer see the Skype voice and chat options when you list new items, they will not be included on the new item page, and they will no longer appear in your existing listings.

We appreciate your continued commitment to good communications with your customers.

Sincerely,
eBay Seller Team

"Features with limited buyer and seller usage"? It's a shame how no executive in eBay markets had ownership of Skype integration. eBay made it awkward and difficult for sellers to try; Skype never had a chance with such passive-aggressive behavior from eBay.

One more nail in "synergy."

tags: skype, ebay, integration, synergy

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.

Weekend Reading

Nokia and Verizon set up JoinStarfleetAcademy.com. Nokia bought some nice product placement in the first 15 minutes of the film.

Skyping doctors on Good Morning America television show. Return of the house call?

Wiley publishing Skype's authors into bookstores for video readings. From home in New Jersey to an in-store audience in Cincinnati. via Nettie Hartsock.

China: One more reason why Skype needs to separate personas from Skype names: What's up with Chinese people having English names? - By Huan Hsu - Slate Magazine.

WSJ: eBay's Donohoe says US$2 billion "is low" to buy Skype.

Globetrotting investor Joi Ito describes his VoIP setup.

CNET: US Congress hearings may make use of Skype IM, Skype file sharing, Skype p2p criminal.

Hudson Barton points out Skype isn't reporting everything it should to create a clear picture of its business. I agree: Skype doesn't reveal active users or users becoming inactive (so we understand churn), revenue/cost/activity by line of business (so we understand the product portfolio), revenue/cost/activity by market (so we understand regional sources of growth and opportunity), headcount by role (so we understand efficiencies and returns on human/intellectual capital), and risks (although the annual SEC filing does an OK job of listing potential threats).

 

Interview with BT/Ribbit's Ray Lee on their platforming strategy.

Chinese are jumping on the Internet faster than Skype's growth. 162 million in 2009Q1. Are they choosing Skype over QQ?

The Equal Access Principal. "The principal, simply put, asks protocol designers not to be snobs."

The new Kantara Initiative tries to bring some consumer juice to bigco digital identity.

Kantara Initiative from nethawk interactive on Vimeo.

We caught up with Brett McDowell at the RSA Conference to talk about the Kantara Initiative, the new identity organization that seeks to to create interoperability between identity efforts: SAML, OpenId and information cards. A key driver is fast adoption of consumer technologies and how that intersects with the enterprise. What is the Kantara Initiative and why is it needed? Brett gives us some answers.

Jim Courtney digs into the new, webbier Tungle. I tried the first version, which Jim also reviewed last year. It was useful then; much more so now.

Belize's BTL is still blocking Skype. You might want to try a personal VPN like E-Tunnels which claims to get around blocking if you use Skype on PCs or mobiles. Or not.

Skype for iPhone 1.0.2 - hotfix

Upgrade in the App Store. Raul's announcement. A few bug fixes. Still free.

Still in the App Store's Top Ten Free Apps list at #10. #1 at the moment is the new F-MyLife app, storytelling about how your life is F'd.

tags: skype, iphone, hotfix, bugfix

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.

eBay makes a market in Skype stock

So you've read about eBay making an IPO of some Skype stock in early 2010 after "the founders’ offer fell on deaf ears."

This means:

• The stock market values Skype, instead of bankers or M&A experts. Mark Evans. "Skype has a strong, global brand and a fast-growing business to pull off an IPO. In fact, Skype’s IPO could be red-hot given how it will have strong appeal to retail investors."
• Value When The Market Is Low. The IPO won't be for all of Skype's stock. It could be for as little as ten percent. A 2010h1 IPO will value Skype near the bottom of a (presumed) economic and stock market recovery. So Skype's prices should rise with the market if the IPO is executed properly.
• Bargaining chip? Friis and Zennstrom were clearly trying to preempt a public valuation, getting Skype cheaply. Could an IPO actually help F&Z raise more money to buy Skype before an IPO?
  • Brier Dudley. "I wonder if this will be a milestone, marking the return of tech IPOs. Or could it be a negotiation tactic, to get someone to buy Skype before the offering?"
  • Larry Dignan: "My translation: eBay wants Zennstrom and Friis to raise their price for Skype. And the threat of a Skype IPO is one handy way to get that price up."
  • On the other hand, Alan Marks said for eBay "We're not soliciting bids, we're pursuing an IPO."
• More Liquidity. Post IPO, eBay can sell off the rest of its shares as it sees fit, hopefully appreciated. Meanwhile it can recognize its Skype holdings at more than the post-write-down purchase value.
• Bet on Management. IPOs are a vote of confidence in a company's management. John Furrier: "This again is total validation for the new management at Skype and Josh Silverman. Josh has masterfully led this rapid acceleration of one of the best performing five years old since ‘Sunshine Street’."
• Happy HR. Skype employees will switch to Skype stock instead of eBay stock, improving hiring, retention and motivation.
• Identity. Ownership won't change Skype's operations. It will probably affect their financial reporting, no longer filtered through eBay. 
• No debt to speak of.
• The deal itself: Goldman Sachs may get to sell Skype. No word on which stock exchange will get to IPO Skype. 
• Lots to talk about at the eBay investor call next week.

Other buzz...

Reuters analysts regurgitate useless information.

Andy Abramson is concerned about the company: "But, the issue around JOLT ID needs to be clarified and other questions remain, mostly how in a measured broadband world, Skype keeps playing without any payment to the ISPs, how they deal with the regulators and E911 issues as they look more and more like a telco each day; what their mobile strategy is and more."

Rich Tehrani is excited for VoIP: "It will wipe away the idea that Vonage represents the entire IP communications market."

Alec Saunders is excited for the stock market: "A massive Skype IPO would be just the thing to electrify financial markets, and bring tech stocks back with a roar.  Could Skype have the same impact on financial markets as Netscape with their massive IPO in the 1990’s?  We can only hope."

Larry Dignan is excited for the M&A game: "Now is a good time to take Skype public. It’s growing, it has a critical mass and it could be a fine acquisition target in the future—for a company other than eBay. By plotting an IPO eBay is clearly stating that Skype is worth more. Game on."

tags: ipo, skype, ebay, financials, investment

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 Journal investor relations events (22,29 April), forum, etherpad

1. Coming events:
   • eBay's Q1 2009 Earnings Call
     April 22, 2009
   • 2009 Annual Meeting of Stockholders
     April 29, 2009
2. Join our Skype Journal Investor Forum to track the news and dissect the financial statements. This is a Skype chat.
3. Let's etherpad the 22 April earnings call. I thought we'd try collaborative note taking with EtherPad, a realtime wiki page. Our etherpad (free, browser based) lets us see everyone typing on a single page at the same time. Creative commons. Kinda fun.

tags: skype, ebay, investor, skypejournal, 10Q

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 for Mac 2.8 Beta 2 (2.8.0.324)

Download the latest. 59 bugfixes. New: edit your account inside the Skype client, added a screen sharing spectator window.

For programmers: "get skypeversion", "get chat x dialog_partner", and "ping" are now in the Mac's Skype API. via Peter Parkes.

tags: skype, apple, beta, mac, download

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.

Download Skype app for iPhone 1.0.1 from iTunes

Download from iTunes app store.

Unless you're from Canada. "THIS APPLICATION IS NOT AVAILABLE IN CANADA AND THE USER WARRANTS THAT THEY CANNOT DOWNLOAD THE APPLICATION FROM CANADA."

tags: skype, itunes, app, apps, store, download, iphone, itouch

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.

Hat tip: Clive and Steven from the 3rd Party Skype Software public chat.

Skype for iPhone – the screenshots

Slide show: (screenshots below)

Splash screen:

Connecting:

Contact list:

Contact profile:

Recent conversations:  

A chat:

Calling:

In a call, speaker on:

In conference call:

Conversation history:

My profile:

Set profile picture:

screenshot credit: Skype.

tags: skype, iphone, screenshot, screenshots, pictures, apple

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 dial tone: 17 million simultaneous online

Guest post by Jean Mercier, the Skype Numerologist

Again a million milestone of concurrent users online today: 17 million at 17h34 GMT (my clock in the screenshot is GMT+1)!!! This is the fifth time since September 2008! This is quite remarkable, because, as mentioned before in this blog, it is also the first time we add more than 5 millions in a September – June period.

Exciting times ahead! And a pity that Skype doesn’t tell us from which countries the growth comes from, although they unveiled a little bit of the picture some weeks ago. They gave much more detailed information in the past, before they were eBay! See for instance this blog post from April 2005: Whose net is it anyway?. First hand information from the CEO himself!

tags: skype, statistics, stats, trends, simultaneous, online, concurrent, dialtone, charts

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

Friday reading

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

follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Ask for an invitation to the Skype Journal private roundtable.

Skype for Windows Skype 4.0.0.215 (hotfix)

Help > Check For Updates or download to get the 40 bugfixes, some to serious UI and device problems.

Known issues:

• Accessibility features still not complete. Download 3.8.
• Still incompatible with several Creative brand webcams and digital video cameras.
• Skype slows on launch when you have many contacts and slows when your hard disk is busy.
• Skype's backup feature doesn't restore manually-added phone numbers. Those same numbers aren't available when you log in on another computer.
• Skype's Outlook integration won't import phone numbers without proper country codes but it won't show you the problems. So you have to identify the number problems and fix them in Outlook.

Skype-XMPP IM Gateway: open source Karaka demoing at eComm

Vipadia's Karaka open source software is another reason to go to this week's Emerging Communications Conference (20% off with 'skypejournal' discount code).

The Karaka libraries manage Skype farms (many instances of Skype running in a data center) and bridge chat users to the Skype network through XMPP applications.

Skype farming is part of building a gateway. Fring, iSkoot, Eqo, Ribbit, IM+ and anyone else who wants to offer Skype chat, Skype presence, Skype profiles and other Skype data must have a gateway. Karaka helps you build your farm management system.

Neil Stratford, Vipadia's CEO, said "we needed the gateway to support our ClackPoint service - as a building block it seemed that it would be more widely useful, so we decided to release it publicly."

 

Scope of a generic Skype gateway?

• Instance lifecycle management: creating, monitoring, and closing instances of Skype.
• Instance virtualization: running your Skype instances on many servers/blades so you scale to meet demand.
• Multisite hosting: minimizing latency (speeding up round trips) by routing conversations to the closest server with available resources
• Skype client configuration:  streamlining instances to avoid using a computer's memory, cpu and bandwidth, and to avoid memory leaks.
• Session management: mapping outside clients to sessions in your gateway, even when they have flaky connectivity.
• Security: the usual, but more so.
• Modeling: associating Skype's data models for people, groups, chats, calls, to your own software and APIs.

What Karaka does and doesn't do:

• Instance lifecycle management: Yes.
• Instance virtualization: Yes. 
• Multisite hosting: No. You can use DNS SRV record load balancing to different sites. 
• Skype client configuration:  Defaults to a basic config, but you can script your own.
• Session management: Yes.
• Security: Up to you. "We have an API to enable encrypted transmission of credentials, but otherwise we rely on the security of the associated XMPP infrastructure."
• Modeling: Yes for those elements in the XMPP definition, No for SIP call elements.

In English:

Look at Vipadia's GPL'd libraries when you want to build a gateway to Skype, to have Skype inside your product or service.

The news release.

Vipadia is pleased to announce the release under the GPLv2 of Karaka, the open-source XMPP-Skype Gateway.

Existing Skype interconnect solutions focus on bridging voice even though the primary use of Skype is for instant messaging and associated presence data. Interconnecting with Skype messaging and presence has been a major stumbling block for many who wish to offer Skype interconnection to their network. Karaka bridges the XMPP and Skype clouds, removing this stumbling block by converting Skype messaging and presence to the popular XMPP protocol as used by, e.g., Google Talk.

Karaka is a scalable distributed XMPP transport that bridges instant messaging and presence between a user's XMPP and Skype accounts. In addition to full presence and instant messaging exchange, it also automatically detects Skype multi-party conversations, elevating them into XMPP conference rooms.

Karaka implements the XMPP standards XEP-0100 for gateway support, XEP-0045 for multi-user chats and XEP-0144 for roster exchange.

Karaka is licensed under the GPLv2 and is hosted on Google Code at <http://code.google.com/p/karaka/>. For more information visit <http://vipadia.com/products/karaka/>.

Vipadia <http://vipadia.com/> is a Cambridge, UK based startup that creates and innovates in the field of IP communications, specialising in Voice, Video, Messaging and Presence over IP.

Karaka uses the Skype API but is not endorsed or certified by Skype.

tags: skype, vipadia, karaka, code, platform, platforming, xmpp, ecomm09, ecomm, gateway, opensource, bridge

follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Ask for an invitation to the Skype Journal private roundtable.

diagram credit: Vipadia

Monday reading

Business

Skype's 2008Q4 contribution falls from Q3, but still profitable. (Jean Mercier)

20% off the Emerging Communications Conference with 'skypejournal' discount code. See you at the SFO Marriott this week.

UK's O2 and Orange oppose Nokia+Skype phones, T-Mobile support them, and Vodafone hasn't said. "if you spend upwards of £40m per year building your brand, you don’t want to be just a dumb pipe do you?" Sounds like hard bargaining to me. (P.S. Wishing/Branding you're not a dumb pipe doesn't make it so.)  (Mobile Today)

AIM for iPhone comes out. AIM Free is ad supported. AIM Paid is... price TBD. Now supporting multiple accounts and free SMS to people in your iPhone contact list. (Ars Technica)

Community in action

Eurojust retracts news release attacking Skype. "NOTE: This is an update of the press release issued on Friday 20 February 2009. Some of the information in this press release was issued prematurely and is therefore incorrect, as there is not yet an official case reported to Eurojust." If only the Sopranos or The Wire were still running. (Government Technology) SJ:Eurojust coordinating anti-Skype project; SJ:Evildoers trust Skype encryption, Cops seek more power

DataPortability.org calls for volunteers to fill a steering committee vacancy. One conference call per week until elections. [disclosure: I'm on the steering committee.]

Twitter Friends and the Influence of Influentials in Word of Mouth Marketing. On research performed by the HP Social Media Lab and explained by BT's JP Rangaswami. (Skillful Minds). Attention to statistics describing social conversation behavior can improve the choice of features in software like Skype.

Future visions

Theme for Supernova 2009 is "Change Networks." Think innovation/value networks but looking at how change propagates. December 1-3 in San Francisco.

Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019. Utopian vision, clutter-free, ten years' out, all feasible, if only for the wealthy. Videos and screenshots. (istartedsomething)

Marriage beginnings and endings

Father (Poland) gives daughter (Texas) away at wedding over Skype. (Killeen Daily Herald)

Ex-Wife Haunts House over Skype. (Ask Bossy column)

Weekend Reading

Crash witness speaks out via Skype on CNN. TV news continues to pipe Skype video.

Ear Candy makes your Gnome Desktop a little bit smarter. Turns off your music or video when Skype rings, for example. 

NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution. Hallway talk at the Counter Terror Expo in London.

Skype Growing by 380,000 Users a Day. "The number of its users is growing by the population of Singapore (more than four million) every 12 days and nearly a third of its registered subscribers now use it for business purposes."

Pamela 4.5 shipped Wednesday. The new Call Scheduler and Conference Call Manager look handy. Still the best for recording Skype video calls.

Tip: How to run two Skype 4.0 instances at the same time.

Skype Your Stylist: Cyber Cuts in the New Age. 15 minute previews of your new hair.

Star Trek USB Communicator. Generic USB speakerphone, volume controls, with velcro for mounting.

tags: skype, cnn, video, earcandy, linux, nsa, security, terrorism, stats, statistics, pamela, tip, startrek

Talk with Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.
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Skype for Windows 4.0 Goes Gold; Improved UI, Audio and Video Performance

Over the past eight months 1.2 million Skype users have participated in the Skype for Windows 4.0 beta program (stage 1, stage 2, stage 3). During this beta period, not only current user feedback was sought but also feedback from new users installing Skype for the first time. The goal was to provide a user interface that was more intuitive while encouraging users to go beyond simply voice calls to experience and use chat and video conversations. Today Skype is announcing the Gold release of Skype 4.0 for Windows. From the download page:

We've built this brand new Skype so you can have the conversations that make a difference to you, every day. It's easy to use, plus step-by-step guides help you get started.

While most of the new features have been revealed during the beta period, Skype's marketing will focus on three key features:

• New user interface; with over 25% of Skype-to-Skype calls involving video this new release has been designed with a focus on improving the video call user experience.
• Improved call quality: Skype 4.0 for Windows incorporates Skype's new SILK codec whose features are discussed in a separate post today. Bottom line is a crisp, crystal clear audio experience, yet only half the network bandwidth of other codecs is required to support a voice call.
• Bandwidth management: a new bandwidth manager has been developed with the goal of improving overall call performance by adapting, in real time, to degraded or low speed network conditions, such as those caused by excessive packet loss and/or jitter.

The new user interface also has taken into account factors that encourage users to explore Skype beyond voice calling. Incorporating beta user feedback Skype has found that the new UI is driving up adoption rates for Instant Messaging, file transfer and video. When you open a contact window launching a voice, chat or video conversation requires a single click on the respective voice ("Call"), chat or video button. The associated text pane tracks not only chat messages but also voice and video call detail information (launch time, end time) as well as file transfer information. And, as in the past with chat, the entire record is all archived on your local PC for future recall.

Other features: You can choose to view your Skype activity in one larger window or in individual "conversation" windows. During a call a drop down menu on the "call audio control bar" provides quick access to making any necessary audio or video settings. Single click buttons allow you to quickly change or add conversation modes to adapt to the context of the conversation. A wizard provides assistance with testing audio and video settings. During their testing they found that these features drove new users to more quickly experience chat and video while there was an increase in usage of these modes by legacy users.

On-the-fly the bandwidth manager can adjust both video and audio transmission by making real time adjustments to parameters such as video resolution, frames-per-second or audio bandwidth. to ensure an ability to maintain a basic level of communication while enduring these conditions. When combined with SILK's reduced network bandwidth requirements, the overall goal is to improve the overall user experience with minimum or no user intervention required.

Two changes;

• The SkypeMe! status button has been removed as a result of its tendency to be used for spamming and other forms of unwanted calls. (Of course you also still have the option to only allow callers in your Contact list to call you.). Along with this Skype has introduced "abuse reporting" which is monitored by Skype personnel for dealing with undesirable calling activity.
• While you can still participate in Public Chat sessions launched or joined from Skype 3.8, there is still no ability to launch or join a Public Chat from Skype 4.0 for Windows. This is my primary complaint about the new user interface. We have had a Skype 4.x Public Chat discussion ongoing since May, 2007; it has provided an interesting dialogue amongst Skype users and Skype personnel, including some feedback on features in Skype 4.0. And it has supported many other informal "water fountain" conversations amongst special interest communities of Skype users. Skype for Windows Product Manager Mike Bartlett claimed yesterday, during an interview, that Skype was reviewing how to embark on "public conversations" in today's messaging world where services such as Twitter and Friend Feed also provide ongoing dialogues. However, Skype Public Chat has its own "space" in terms of user community; it needs to be brought back as soon as possible.

Over the next few weeks, with more experience using Skype 4.0 for Windows we may cover some features in more detail. In the meantime you can download it here. We look forward your feedback in the Comments.

Yesterday Skype went past 16 million concurrent users around 1830 GMT. It will be interesting to monitor both the concurrent user number and Hudson Barton's "real user" indicator as Skype 4.0 for Windows installations grow over the next couple of weeks..

Of course, the best news is that Skype-to-Skype calls (including multi-party calls), chat and video calling remain free. And there are calling plan subscriptions available for low cost calling to landlines worldwide.

From the Release Notes:

• feature: New style when copying and pasting text in an instant message (text quoting)
• featue: Video Call in separate window
• improvement: Skype now creates thumbnails of display pictures
• change: Get more ringtones and custom sounds link removed from options panel
• change: Removed display bandwidth usage option
• change: Dial pad will be opened automatically on call to landlines or mobiles
• change: Increased minimum window size in compact mode

Other Posts:

• Product Manager Mike Bartlett: Skype 4.0 - It's All Yours
  
• Mike Bartlett Discusses Skype 4.0 Beta on Squawk Box
• Skype's videos about the 4.0 beta limited release
• Mike Bartlett Comments on Skype 4.0 User Feedback
• Mike Bartlett on Skype 4.0 Beta 1 Feedback

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Download Skype for Windows 4.0 Gold

Download Skype for Windows 4.0 Gold, now out of Beta. The full Skype Journal treatment coming momentarily.

tags: skype, software, download, windows, 4.0, gold, joltid

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16 million simultaneous online

By Jean Mercier, Skype Numerologist, of Belgium.

The fastest million ever.

It is the second time in 3 months that I have to use the same blog post title. Indeed, it took only 21 days or three weeks to add another million.

I made a very wrong prediction in September last year and believe it or not, I am very happy that I was wrong!

This is the first time ever that Skype crosses four times a million milestone in a Northern hemisphere “fall-winter-spring” period, or "School Year"! And, this ten months period is only half way, therefore we could see at least one more million, or perhaps even two! Exciting!

16,159,211 is today's reported peak.

Editor: See also: Jason Harris crediting this to London's snow storm and people working from home. Thanks to Julien Decot, Chaim Haas, and Neil Lindsey for progress reports from San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver.

 

See Skype Journal's alert last Monday (27 January 2009) as we approached 16 million.

Technorati tags: skype, trends, stats, statistics, million, millions, census, population, users, usage, simultaneous, concurrent, online, dialtone

Almost 16 million simultaneous Skype users on Monday

15,996,686 is the highest number of logged in Skype users. Ever. 3314 short of the 16 million mark. It was reported about 10:58AM Pacific time, Monday, 26 January 2009. Skype hit the 15.5 million mark 12 January. Just for those who drink a shot of millimallikas every time Skype reaches another million.

Hat tip to Jim Courtney for turning in the top number.

tags: skype, stats, statistics, trends, census, users, million, millions, 16, 15996686, dialtone

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The Skype Restructuring: Global Products, Regional Markets

Josh Silverman joined Skype as President early in the spring of 2008; since then he has been reviewing Skype's opportunities and building a team of experienced executives who can bring to Skype the products, programs and team building expertise required to operate a business with a run rate of $600MM per year, 20% contribution margins to eBay and growing at 380,000 new account registrations per day (with "real user" growth also increasing significantly).

Summarizing the past executive appointment announcements we can clearly start to see the evolution of a business structure, along with each unit's responsibilities:

• Operations: Product, Marketing, Customer Care, Support
• Technology: Engineering, Platform, Development Community
• Strategy: Partnerships, Strategic Alliances, Acquisitions
• Administration: Global Communications Human Resources. Finance, and Legal round out the top executive team.

During our interview at CES 2009 with Skype COO Scott Durschlag, he outlined details of his restructuring of Skype's Operations team along two axes: product and geography under the mantra of providing "Skype Everywhere".

Global product offerings will encompass three divisions: consumer, business and mobile, each responsible for developing products. Each of these groups will be interacting with members of CTO Daniel Berg's technology teams to convert their technology developments into marketable global product offerings and to adapt the technology to meet product marketing needs.

• Consumer will involve the current Skype client desktop offerings along with hardware, such as Skype phones.
• Business starts with the current Skype Business Control Panel but intends to expand well beyond this starting point into a range of offerings, such as Skype for Asterisk and the recently announced IBM LotusLive developments, addressing the small-to-medium business market.
• Mobile involves current products such as Skype for Windows Mobile, Skypephone (in conjunction with iSkoot), the recently launched Skype Lite (including Skype for Android) as well as any upcoming offerings for the iPhone and BlackBerry

In addition each of these divisions will be responsible for developing appropriate customer care and support programs appropriate to market demands. For instance, the business unit will come up with ongoing support programs relevant to supporting sustainable business operations of its products' users. Ideally these programs would follow the model of Red Hat for Linux or Digium for Asterisk and build up a network of resellers and VARS who would provide relevant and timely end user support. While Dan Berg's technology team will be responsible for third party developer partner support, an additional challenge for the Business products group will be to assist with marketing of business applications offered by these developer partners.

While Skype veteran Stefan Oberg is heading up the Business unit, announcements re appointments to head up Consumer and Mobile are pending.

Along the geography axis is a recognition that, while the Products divisions have a global mandate, there are different market needs within different regions of the world. For instance, in many Asian market wireless carriers do not subsidize mobile phones as is the North American practice. This requires a differentiated approach to these markets with respect to how easily innovations, especially around reduced calling costs, can be introduced to these markets.

The geographical market responsibilities are:

• Americas: Don Albert becomes General Manager, Americas. Don has had North America responsibility for a couple of years and will now be responsible for both North and South America. With respect to the latter he is looking forward to building on all the Skype activity in Brazil, for instance. (And, yes, once again at CES Don was made aware we are awaiting SkypeIn and a Skype Store for Canada)
• Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA): appointment pending
• Asia/Pacific: Yesterday we saw an announcement of the appointment of Dan Neary as General Manager, Skype Asia Pacific. One of Dan's initial responsibilities will be to build and monitor closer relationships with partners such as TOMSkype to avoid embarrassments such as that created by the TOM Skype privacy breach we have reported on last fall.

Outstanding executive appointments are expected shortly; at this point it's becoming all about execution. The next six months will tell the story.

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Thursday Reading

Stories

Coral Springs CBS4 interviews hometown marching band over Skype. Station saved flying a South Florida reporter to the D.C. inauguration.

US National Guardsman Skypes his family from Afghanistan deployment. Satellite uplink for connectivity.

Americans in Switzerland phonebanked for Obama over Skype. Three thousand SkypeOut calls reminding people to vote.

Competition

US FCC investigating Comcast's network neutrality. New network management may treat Skype and Vonage calls worse than their own telephony service.

Lotusphere 2009 Foreshadows the Death of Telephony. Zeus Kerravala, The Yankee Group: "While some of you may read "the death of telephony" and disagree, I do believe that telephony, as we know it, needs to die in its current form to accelerate UC and CEBP adoption"

Cisco television commercial makes the case for Skype video. WebEx lyrics to Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive"

Geekery

rhomobile application framework: open source Rhodes, and the $10k Rhodes app development contest.

Linking Skype 2.8 Beta to Twitter - here's how to do it... Dan York explains. Thanks, Dan!

tags: skype, fcc, vonage, us, lotusphere, lotusphere09, lotusphere2009, ls09, cisco

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Skype Everywhere: Coming Soon to IBM Lotus Live Engage

A year ago August IBM's Lotus Sametime Division announced the acquisition of Skype Partner Webdialogs to obtain their widely respected Unyte Desktop Sharing collaboration technology. About four months later we learned, from Lou Guercia, Lotus SameTime's Director of Operations and Strategy, more about Unyte's integration into the Lotus SameTime offerings. In that post on Lou's presentation I asked:

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..

Yesterday IBM announced "A Strong Fourth Quarter, a rarity these days". ZDNet's Dennis Howlett, in Can IBM sustain its momentum, goes on to provide some background, pointing out that most of IBM's growth is occurring in its software division. Certainly IBM sees its Lotus Sametime division as a key to sustaining their momentum. Except it appears that IBM has reorganized their SameTime collaborative services into "a cloud-based porfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business" under a new name: LotusLive.

In a press release this past Monday, in conjunction with IBM's annual Lotusphere event, Skype announced:

.... 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."

At the same time IBM announced Salesforce.com and LinkedIn integration into their LotusLive services. Andy at VoIP Watch comments on the competitive "collaboration and communications" space where IBM LotusLive, Microsoft Office Live and Google Apps are the key players.

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.

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Skype developer wanted

A friend asked me if I know any programmers good with VoIP, that can be trusted with a confidential project. Ping me on tips@skypejournal.com if you're interested. Free agents only. Project starts soon. Thanks.

15.5 million

by Jean Mercier, Skype Numerologist

Usually i am the first or second to blog about it. Today, two other fanatic Skypers warned me that I should blog. I was aware, but too busy. 15 million concurrent users online today, congratulations Skype and its users!

So, what is exceptional about this? Not that million added of course, not the 84 days it took to reach the 15 million, but it could be that we add another million before the end of June. In that case it will be the first time in Skype history that we cross 4 times a million milestone in one Northern Hemisphere “school year.”

Anyway, Skype shows a quite strong growth the last months!

Skype at CES 2009: Initial Steps Towards Liquid Communication

At a Skype's CES 2009 press conference today recently appointed COO Scott Durschlag provided the first hints of a vision statement for Skype under its new executive team along with some initial software offerings that hint at the direction Skype is taking towards "liquid communications" or "Skype Whenever, Wherever".

In leading up to the new software announcements, Scott made a few points about Skype's recent accomplishments and focus going forward:

• Skype now delivers 8% of the world's telecom minutes through clients that now support 28 languages
• New software will drive a liquid experience on the desktop, web, TV and mobile devices
• A key goal is to liberate the Skype experience from a captive device (desktop) to more user aware devices (mobile, TV as well as embedded into appliances)
• 41% of Skype calls on Christmas day involved video, only to be surpassed at 47% on New Years day.
• New software offerings have to pass a bar of four basic criteria:
  
  • high call quality
  • super simple user interface
  • sensitivity to power management issues
  • security

He then went on to talk about new software offerings:

• New desktop clients: Skype for Mac 2.8 (launched as beta at Mac World Monday), Skype for Windows 4.0 (with a February release date)
• Release of Skype Lite, a thin client for Java-enabled mobile phones with Skype for Android to be available within a few days on Android Market on T-Mobile's G1^TM and Skype Lite general availability in the U.S. (in addition to several countries previously announced) resulting in Skype availability on over 100 mobile smartphones.
• Internally developed new Skype "SILK" audio codec which is twice as efficient with respect to bandwidth requirements for the audio and video experience.
• Skype for Mobile Internet Devices with a demonstration on a couple of MID platforms. (Update: access download information here.)
  
• Skype for Mac 3.0 to be available by year end with the feature set of Skype 4.0 for Windows.

This afternoon Phil and I spent an hour with Scott discussing the restructuring, support issues, the TOM Skype Breach and how Skype will work with its developer partners to provide a win-win direction for the development and marketing of partner applications. These topics will be the subject of future posts over the next week.

First impression: it's the first event where a senior Skype executive has provided in a public forum an outline of its vision, guidelines for achieving that vision and how it wants to work in the real time communication and IP-based conversation space. The real challenge now lies in the execution.

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rumor: Skype over Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots, pay in Skype credits

Unconfirmed, coming out of MacWorld today. This is different from the Skype-Boingo 2005 co-marketing agreement for Skype Zones. Not sure if the Boingo iPhone app (news release) is related. More detail soon.

tags: skype, boingo, wifi, wi-fi, mw09, macworld09

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Bound for MacWorld and CES

Jim Courtney and I are heading to Las Vegas for the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.  We'll cover Skype's press conference and see what interviews we can arrange. We'll also look for members of the Skype ecosystem to show us their latest. And for close-ups with innovators and Skype's rivals.

I'm also going to the "Jobless" MacWorld Expo in San Francisco Tuesday morning.

Please share your tips with us. Email, twitter, or Skype Me. Love to see you there. 

Gear to pack for CES:

• Digital camera, Digital camera, Flip MinoHD, desk tripod, monopod, batteries, audio recorder, iPod, iPod cable, iPod earbuds, usb cable extender, Ethernet cable extender, power squid, laptop, laptop power brick, laptop headset, webcam, mouse, memory stick, usb hub, n800, n800 power, mobile phone, mobile power, ziplock bags.

Non-gear: 3x5 cards, notepad, flair pens, writing pens.

Clothes to pack: Warm, layers. Good walking shoes. Scarf.

tags: skype, macworld09, ces09, events, skypejournal, pack, packing, nomad, sanfrancisco, lasvegas

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Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 3 Available

We have just learned that Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 3 is now available. Once we have had a chance to install and review it, there will be more to say. But for now:

• Skype 4.0 for Windows Beta 3 Download.
• Release Notes
• Raul Liive's Skype Blog Post

From the Release Notes (which also lists many bugfixes):

• feature: Abuse reporting - allow users to report unwanted contact requests and Spam
  
• feature: Call Quality Feedback button
  
• feature: Skype Prime payments support
  
• feature: Outlook Contacts
  
• feature: Custom Chrome
  
• feature: History
  
• feature: My Account in Client 2
  
• improvement: Options panel updated
  
• improvement: improved layout of profile area in group conversations
  
• improvement: Instant Messaging display
  
• improvement: Call Toolbar
  
• improvement: More visible button to switch between default and classic view
  
• improvement: Improved bandwidth allocation methods
  
• improvement: Changes to file sending design
  
• change: Getting Started Wizard improvements
  
• change: Extras Manager updated to version 2.0.0.65
  
• change: Removed AMR-WB audio codec

Remember this is a beta release and should not be used in "mission critical" situations where you require the full Skype 3.8 for Windows feature set. Check it out and provide your feedback to Beta Feedback, Skype Forums or the Jira public issue tracker or in comments to this post below.

Skype's Restructuring Makes Major Moves: New CxO Announcements

Over the past few months, announcements have been few and far between with respect to Skype product news. But at the same time I have often discussed Skype's restructuring moves; the first official disclosure of a restructuring was disclosed in our September interview with Skype's new President Josh Silverman. Well it appears that Josh has been busy doing interviews; today three top level appointments were announced:

Daniel Berg, previously Sun's London-based Chief Technology Officer for Global Sales and Services as well as Vice-President of Systems Engineering for EMEA, has been appointed as Skype's Chief Technology Officer, starting January 2, 2009. In a summary statement from Skype's blog post:

As CTO, Daniel Berg’s primary responsibility will be to drive innovation and ensure Skype continues to develop great software. With a mandate covering Skype’s full range of products, he will develop and maintain a global team of more than 300 staff.

Daniel has authored several books. But since he has not made any statements on his appointment yet, we could paraphrase a statement he made about his Sun activities last April in a post entitled "Travel, Talk, Repeat" on Sun's "Contrarion Minds" blog:

So he travels. A lot.

"I actually spend 25 percent of my working day, on average, in the air," says Berg, who is based in the U.K. "That's not going to the airport, not coming home from airport, that's in the air."

He knows this because he sticks to a time budget.

"I know I need to be spending this much time with customers and this much with organizational matters and this much with employee development, to make sure I'm staying focused and balanced," he explains.

His biggest challenge?

"Articulating the value Sun [Skype] has," Berg replies. "I know this has been said before, but I've been at Sun 15 years and this is the best lineup of technology, products, and offerings we've ever had. Yet when I go talk to customers, one of the first things they say is, 'Oh, I didn't know you guys did that.'"

So we'll be expecting Dan to become one of the more "public" faces of Skype. And that those air miles will keep on building up.

The second appointment is Christopher S. Dean as Chief Strategy Officer. From his LinkedIn profile, Christopher has a long history of working with startups, including periods on the venture capital side in Silicon Valley, most recently as co-founder of Texada Capital. At one point he and Skype's GM Audio and Video Jonathan Christensen were colleagues in a San Francisco-based venture capital firm called Sweetwater Partners, whose Internet traces seem to have disappeared. From the Skype blog post announcement:

Christopher S. Dean will focus on Skype’s strategy, including the development of partnerships and strategic alliances with other like-minded organisations and the acquisition of companies and technologies for Skype. His team will act as the incubator and strategic planning hub for new ideas and projects which support Skype’s technology vision and long term corporate goals.

It appears that Christopher will be based out of Skype's San Jose office; his responsibilities will be a key to driving Skype from a $500MM per year revenue business into the the multi-billion dollar revenues needed to justify eBay's initial investment in Skype. Why the "S."? I assume that Christopher is trying to avoid confusion with the U.K.'s Olympic Ice Dancing multiple Medallist Christopher Dean.

The final appointment, another key to ensuring Skype hires and maintains appropriately skilled and motivated employees, is the appointment of Anne Gillespie, whose long history of EMEA positions with Compaq and HP, brings the experience required to serve as head of Skype Human Resources.

There's still one more major executive move I am expecting - a Chief Marketing Officer who bring the badly needed messaging and market communications strategies and disciplines required for a business that's expected to attract sufficient usage to generate those multi-billion dollar sales.

And I'm sure Lee Dryburgh has no problem with my publicly inviting Dan and Christopher to register to join the rest of the Emerging Communications community at eComm 2009; after all Skype is a Platinum sponsor.

Best wishes for success, Dan, Christopher and Anne from Skype Journal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other posts on this acquistion:

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

Tags: Voxeo, Voice Objects. Jonathan Taylor, acquisitions

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Fonolo Takes Its "Deep Dialing" Into Full Public Beta

When calling into an enterprise of any reasonable size, we all love to navigate our way through those pesky (and repetitive) enterprise auto-attendant services or phone trees that go through menu after menu to connect you directly to an appropriate destination service or person. NOT!

At last spring's eComm 2008 we first learned about Fonolo, a "Deep Dialing" service that bypasses phone trees to connect you directly with the destination extension you really want to reach. I provided a detailed description of Fonolo, incorporating a video, on Web Worker Daily three weeks ago. While Fonolo has been in private beta for a few months, today it is launching a fully open public beta.

I asked Fonolo CEO Shai Berger, aside from the open public beta announcement, what have they learned from the private beta and what other experience have they gained during this period? His response:

• Fonolo has grown to provide Deep Dialing for over 300 companies from 150 six weeks ago.
• They are learning what is required to scale the service; it's not the web portal that presents an issue but rather the scalability of the service itself where they need to be supporting several hundred concurrent calls over the phone network in real time. "Every call involves a "deep dial" which is processor intensive and uses voice recognition to make sure they get to the right place within an enterprise's menu."
• From the beta test experience, "We've learned that 'Deep Dialing' has tapped into a vein of consumer frustration. We get lots of fan mail! We've also learned that the companies people want to call are concentrated on a few verticals, in particular wireless providers and ISPs. We're going to disclose our "top 10" enterprise category list at some point in the future."
• What are the goals for the open public beta? "Watch how the service scales with usage and watch usage patterns. This is particularly important in helping to determine the structure of premium services."

But there's more to the Fonolo story than simply "Deep Dialing". With the data collected during the beta periods and the services they are considering, they will also be able to provide a service to call centers to assist them with improving their productivity. This would include providing data on where users get lost in a menu, hang up in frustration or end up at an inappropriate destination. Martin Geddes foresees potential for Fonolo as having more benefit for call centers than for consumers; check out Fonolo's role in a discussion led by Martin at the recent Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm conference in London, U.K.

… [but] who benefits more: the consumer, or the call centre? We think that it’s the latter, and the consumer is the price-sensitive side. The call centre wants the maximum rate of self-care, high customer satisfaction, and the web site offers the ability to do all kinds of enhanced multi-modal interactions that a 0-9*# keypad can’t do well… Therefore in our two-sided market world, we’d get telcos to distribute and promote this tool (on their fixed, mobile and on-device portals). They would then sell these enhanced capabilities to call centres.”

At the recent Mobilize 08 Shai announced the Fonolo application for iPhone, to become available early in 2009; Fonolo was awarded the Judges Prize at this event's LaunchPad segment. And, given the target user base, I'm sure they'll be looking into putting a BlackBerry application on their roadmap.

Symantec is one of the recent additions to their enterprise directory. I could have used Fonolo a month ago when I was having an issue with upgrading a Norton security product and had to make multiple calls to the same support line to resolve the issue. A mouse click and getting a call-back would have been a lot simpler and less time consuming than pushing "9" four times - interspersed with tedious voice directions - to get to the appropriate service personnel. .(The good news is that the issue did get resolved.)

Sign up for the Fonolo open beta here.

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Skype sued for old money

Do you want your money back after 180 days?

Skype's long taken credits from accounts it deems abandoned. Seattle lawyer Roger M. Townsend filed suit Friday on behalf of all Skype users in Washington who lost money this way.

The plaintiffs say a Skype account should be treated like a merchant's gift certificate. In Washington state, all gift certificates are refundable by law (and balances are turned over to charity 24 months after being abandoned). So Skype should be giving back a Washingtonian's money instead of keeping it.

If Skype broke the law, then plaintiffs want triple damages, legal fees, and for Skype to stop the practice. "Our goal is to get a fair disposition" Townsend said to Skype Journal.

The claim says Skype has billing information good enough to identify and notify all Washington Skype users about the suit. 

A similar suit in Germany ordered Skype to stop this in 2006.

So how could this affect Skype and Skype users?

The suit may not find a legal nexus. But Skype does business with Washingtonians daily.

Skype may win. It's not clear Washington's gift certificate laws apply to something that is neither a gift certificate nor a bank account. However there are enough similarities that Skype may be held to that standard.

Should Skype lose, while this class action is limited to one US state, suits in other populated states may follow. Other states have similar gift card consumer protection laws, but terms vary a lot from state to state.

I don't imagine the business impact would be severe. Skype has been driving customers to switch from Skype credit accounts to signing up for pay-as-you-go subscription plans for years.

Has Skype taken your money? How did it feel? Would you like it back?

2008 Skype Class Action

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business Skype Journal Skype s

tags: skype, security, law, terms, conditions

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Be Skype Journal

There is so much going on with Skype that the independent Skype Journal needs help. Please Skype me if you'd like to change the world, cover Skype, its competition, products and technology, industry events, and business affairs. 2009 will be a dramatic year for the hundreds of millions of people using Skype around the world. Tell that story.

The network of networks is making distance disappear, and everything is becoming the Internet. We are building pixels into the ambience of our homes, into the plastic we carry, into the theaters of our work, onto our cityscapes and into everything with wheels.

Those pixels are coming with sound and sensors. So the web's metaphor moves from paints and surfaces to glass and open windows. We talk through these open windows into other people's lives. And we share our own.

Somewhere in between here and there is the plumbing that connects all of us together. Energy pulses through glass and sand and copper and air, throbbing with life, with attention, with the minds of humanity, with our beating hearts, with our music.

As we make it, we are changing ourselves. We barely understand what that means. We are becoming more connected, seizing control of our institutions, revising what it means to know and remember, to belong.

And the Internet is only five thousand days old.

In 2001 our global blogosphere shared the horror of the 9/11 attacks.

In 2008 our global mediasphere tweeted, blogged, Blackberried, tagged, digged, YouTubed, streamed, Skyped, IM'd the horror of the #Mumbai attacks.

What could it be like at day 10k? 20k?

Rolling Stone magazine told the story of a music and cultural revolution. I hope Skype Journal does it's part to report and interpret this revolution, shine a light where it does good, and invite people to the party.

Which brings me back to you.

Consider this an invitation. Write the change that happens. Write the change you want. Skype Journal needs your voice. Skype me and we'll set it up.

Phil Wolff
Publisher, Managing Editor.

Wednesday read

Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) Developer Evening, London. Wednesday, 26 November 2008. Yahoo! UK, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, England WC2H 8AD.

Phonebook Art. Cheap paper that takes a pencil well.

Kill Your Telephone. "A step-by-step guide to Skype, the cheapest and easiest way to make a phone call." Replace your landline.

Xobni brings the internet into Outlook… 4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. New release adds your Outlook contact's Skype calling info to your Xobni Outlook profile. Best feature: automatic discovery of the Skype name for the people that send you email.

Thoughtpile.org. Herman Miller's open brainstorming about design, creativity, innovation and work.

eBay Traffic Plummeting. October 2008: –10% uniques, –33% page views, –19% time per user year over year. Page views may be less of an issue with Web 2.0 designs keeping people on a page. But 10% fewer people? Spending 80% of the time they spent last October? eBay is just not that efficient.

Heaven's Call Center. Feist the Angel puts Stephen Colbert's prayers on hold. An opportunity for fonolo?

Skype Becomes Platinum Sponsor for eComm 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Registration for attendees opens December 2, 2008.

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

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

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Another Skype Partner Acquired: VAPPS Goes to Citrix

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.

Friday evening New York Times blogger Claire Miller reported that VAPPS venture capital partner, Azure Capital Partners, had concluded a deal to sell VAPPS to Citrix for $26.6 million plus $4.4 million in bonuses, provided founders Ben Lilienthal and Jerry Norton and their team meet certain goals. For Azure Capital Partners this provides a 3.6 times return on an 18-month investment. From Claire's post:

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.

For Andy Abramson's Comunicano Internet marketing agency this represents a third client acquisition over the past fifteen months; previous ones being IBM Lotus Software Group's acquisition of Unyte and Logitech's recent acquisition of SightSpeed.

Related posts:

• Fierce VoIP's Doug Mohney also comments.
• HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Weekend reading

What Can Skype Do For Graduate Students? on the The Graduate Student Survival Blog. Save money is the first concern. I chipped in ten more things grad students can do with Skype: #10: Robots.

The Skype survival guide by David Tang of VoSKY Technologies makes the case for Skype trunking, adding Skype gateways to PBXs. 987 Hotels (Prague, Barcelona) uses VoSKY's 9040 Exchange gateway. 

Is Our Internet Future in Danger? InfoWorld's Gruman and Kaneshige say it is, that demand for video is quickly outstripping the world supply of bandwidth. Doc Searls urges America to go Forward with Fiber: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration. Doc makes a strong case that we can expand capacity far beyond

Korea's Cyworld virtual community gives up on North America. Culture barriers.

Google Reader Implements Feed Translation. Brilliant. Can't believe Skype still has not built in IM translation like Don Kennedy's Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator. Moka is jumping into this space with its own Moka Chat Skype Plug-in.

Super Mario Galaxy is absolutely brilliant writes Jaanus Kase.

Wish for Skype on Please Fix the iPhone.

Mail-order brides on Skype. hmm.

tags: skype, education, vosky, fiber, bandwidth, cyworld, korea, google, iphone, apple

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Skype adds a light installer

Skype is changing the way users download and install software.

Starting with your next full update to Skype 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows, you'll download a quick 2.5MB "light installer." It will then download the full  Skype client, around 24MB. From the Skype FAQs:

"It manages the download for you so if you have any hardware or network issues, the download can be resumed. It serves the purpose of a download manager for Skype, allowing pause/resume and recovery from failures. It also gives information about features as it is downloaded and installed."

This is a common strategy.

Users get more immediate gratification from downloading (about ten times faster) and a greater sense of control over installation.

Skype gets more and better information about the desktop to configure what gets downloaded and from where.

UPDATE: Pondering that last point… What will the experience be for TOM-Skype users? Will they be given a choice of clients (monitored/filtered vs. private/free) at first download? at update?

tags: skype, 4, 4b2, downloads, downloader, installer, windows

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November 2008 Events

I'm attending bold events.
Tips @ SkypeJournal.com with suggestions, photos, reportage. Spend your travel dollars while you have them.

2 November. Dreamforce 2008. Salesforce automation becomes an application platform for live talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

3. ARGS: Cross-Platform Entertainment 2.0. People in alternative reality games have strong reasons to talk live in groups. NESTA, London.

3. Defrag. Some of the hardest questions are tackled at this thought leadership event. Among others, Daniela Barbosa of DataPortability.org is speaking. Colorado Convention Center.

3. The Business of APIs - The Web's Industrial Revolution. Platforming as a strategy and survival trait. Brought to you by The Mashery. City Club of San Francisco.

3. Mobile 2.0. Grand Hyatt San Francisco.

3. Widget Summit. Putting some of your verbs into someone else's places. Hotel Nikko San Francisco.

3. ad:tech New York. The people who pay for lots of free. New York Hilton.

3. Future of Web Design. Roseland Ballroom, NYC.

3. VRM Hub London Conference 2008: Unlocking the see-saw. Vendor Relationship Management, putting people back in control of their identities and their relationships with companies. Sun Microsystems London.

4. US Election Day. If your election lasts for more than four hours, call your doctor.

4. Think Global, Drink Local: Think London/Sterling Communications Election Night Party. San Francisco.

4. Mobile Tech For Social Change. A barcamp. San Francisco.

5. Digital Garage New Context Conference. Joi Ito's clan convenes. Shibuya-ku, Tokyo.

5. Web 2.0 Summit. Still hankering for a press pass. Palace Hotel San Francisco.

5. WinHEC 2008. Windows hardware engineering. Los Angeles Convention Center.

5. Design Futures: Deconstructing Networks - Jonah Brucker-Cohen, of Trinity College Dublin, experiments in how we design and think about the social effect places and alert networks. U.C. Berkeley, California. 

6. Edge of the Web 2008. Perth has a growing Web 2.0+ community. Crawley, Western Australia. 

6. Tweets and Dreenks: November Social Drinkup. Mars Bar, San Francisco.

6. Mobile Forum Meeting: Opportunities in Broadband Wireless. San Jose, California.

6. Community Manager Meetup. San Francisco.

7. Unofficial iPhone TechTalk after-drinks. The Apple event at University of Middlesex is full. London.

8. Silicon Valley Code Camp. Hands-on with peer coaching. Los Altos Hills, California.

8. Freebase Hack Day. Build something with massive quantities of creative commons'd data. San Francisco.

10. Mobile Monday London.

10. Internet Identity Workshop. iiw2008b is a must-go event. This is where the digital ID architecture of the next 10 years is conceived, debated, and bought into. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

10. VoiceCon. Enterprise and unified communications. San Francisco.

11. e-Democracy '08. The first post-US election event to explore politics, public participation and digital technology. RIBA, Central London.

11. US Veteran's Day, Canada and UK Remembrance Day. National holiday.

12. Emerging Communications Dinner. Thought leaders who can't wait for eComm2009 March 03-05 will talk over supper. Ping me if you want an invite. (tips at skypejournal.com) San Francisco Airport Marriott.

12. Under the Radar: Mobility. 32 mobile startups less than one year old. Microsoft, Mountain View, California.

12. The Second London Futures Symposium. London.

13. NewTeeVee Live – Television Reinvented. Mission Bay Conference Center.

13. OpenSocial's 1st Birthday Celebration. Day long workshops. And cake. MySpace Offices, San Francisco.

13. IceWeb08. Kathy Sierra keynoting. Reykjavik. 

15. Convergence 08. Focus on long-term technologies, especially Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno. Co-sponsored by Foresight.org. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

15. >play – Berkeley Digital Media. This year's theme is Disruption: Changes in the Digital Media Landscape. Organized by MBA students at Haas, U.C. Berkeley, California.

16. Adobe MAX 2008. Designers and developers imagine the next generation of browser-based talk. Moscone Center, San Francisco.

16. Fall IETF Meeting. Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.

17. Future of Mobile. Jemima Kiss, James Brody, and folks from Google, Symbian, and Mozilla make this a must attend event. Kensington Town Hall, London.

17. Mashup Camp. Steve Repetti of DataPortability.org is speaking at this mostly un-conference. Mountain View, California.

18. Mobile Content Forum. The event for all those companies who made millions on ringtones and wallpaper. Register from your iPhone, baby. Hilton London Kensington.

19. Open Mobile Summit 08. Discount: Register by Oct 10 with priority code TRL and save $400. agenda. trailer:

Fantastic hallway with Skype's Jonathan Christensen, AT&T, Dean Bubley, Om Malik, Rebtel, BT Design's JP Rangaswami, Truphone's James Body, Orange, O2, The US FCC's Julius Knapp, David Isenberg, Amazon, T-Mobile, AOL, Nokia, Google, Symbian, Intel, TAT, LG, RIM, OpenMoko, Funambol, Qualcomm. San Francisco.

18. Robo Development 2008. Robotics small, large, smart, and social. Santa Clara, California.

19. SOA World and Cloud Computing. The 14th Service Oriented Architecture conference. Now the standard for platforming architectures. I want to hear the session on building real-time SOA systems. The program's big buzzwords: cloud and virtual. The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, California.

21. London Geek Nights: Game Programming. ThoughtWorks UK Office, High Holborn, London.

22. YouTube Live. Concert. Fort Mason, San Francisco.

22. Berkeley beats Stanford. Football. Go Bears.

26. The Media Festival. The session I want: "Case study: Lessons from the adult entertainment industry; learn the secrets of success in mobile entertainment." Always two to five years' ahead in technology and business practices due to intense competition. Manchester.

27. US Thanksgiving. A nation shuts down for a long weekend of American football, turkey, beer. And gratitude.

30. St. Andrew's Day. Scotland's national day.

Wednesday Reading

Staffing

I didn't make Obama's short list for U.S. CTO. Darn.

Teachers interview for jobs via Skype video.

Family

ReadWriteWeb summarizes a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:  

"Simply put, technology may bring us closer, but, as this study shows, its constant use also means that we may be sacrificing other activities in order to fit it into our schedule. It really is both a blessing and a curse in many ways." - Sarah Perez

Design

James Kendrick dives deep into deaf users and text messaging. Text 4 Deaf serves this community.

Freedom

Skype could license Microsoft's patent on real-time speech censorship to improve the quality of filtering and monitoring in the TOM-Skype client.

UAE regulator reconsidering ban of Skype and Internet calls by year's end.

Economy

Fareed Zakaria's Question of the Week: "How long do you think this economic downturn will last? Some economists predict 1 yr; others say 4. And you? Email us at FareedZakariaGPS@cnn.com".

Competition

Mobilkom austria fights the 3 Skypephone with a Fring phone. News release in German.

Nomad Life

Anywwwhere Internet Café Services features Skype calling.

Deal

DLink DPH50U Skype Phone Adapter - $14 Shipped from Amazon.

Skype for Barack Obama

Local phone bank host invites you to bring your laptop and Skype.

Corner Pocket

Performance Pool Cyber League. Shoot from home over Skype video.

Touch Skype

Asus Eee Top one-finger touch PC. Hot boots with Skype.

14 million online - The fastest million ever

Skype Numerologist Jean Mercier writes: "We needed only 35 days to go from 13 million concurrent users online to 14 million."

17h55 GMT

Monday reading

Gear

Cute. Minoru from Novo 3D stereoscopic webcam, works with Skype. Anthropomorphism intended. They may be competing with IPEVO at the CES I-Stage in Vegas this weekend.

CNET reviews the Sony PSP 3000 (black). Skype inside.

Nokia N810 WiMAX starts shipping in the US. Skype inside.

Business

3 orders a campaign for the new Skypephone S2 from glue London. Glue explains their approach. Online ads "Poke" and "Beard." 

Pike & Fischer predicts US may have 25 million Vonage-like households by 2010.

7300 Family Mart stores are selling Skype credit tokens throughout Japan.

Joonathan Mägi, Skype web front end team lead, now leads Edicy user interface development. More vested Skype alumni finding startup homes. CORRECTION: "web front end team lead", not "UI designer"

Freedom

UK Home Secretary to roll back privacy, blames Internet phone calls like Skype for crippled fight against terrorism

Life

Charleston, West Virginia, high school teacher Skypes her AP English class from home while recovering from injury.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist lists Skype as one of five ways to use your PC to save money.

Slate's Barack Obama & John McCain Crank-Call Generator.

Dan Benjamin explains How to Record a Podcast with People in Multiple Locations. In short, talk on Skype, but record locally and mix together in post-production. Hardware recommendations for podcasters.

Communicating in military families. Skype one option among many.

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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Monday reading: New PR firm, eduSkype, Emergency dialing, Sex Video, Dating, Multiparty Video

Text 100 became one of Skype's PR firms. Text 100 is a much larger firm than 3 Monkeys Communications, dropped after just five months. Text 100 has presence in North America (new New York office opening last May), EMEA, and APAC (ten years in Japan). They already serve clients eBay, PayPal, Nokia, Cisco, and IBM. via PR Week UK.

♦

Education and music was the topic on the MusTech.Net podcast. Skype's Ian Robin guest starred on last week's show. Distance learning, language instruction, music education, music performance. Ian is an alum of Skype partner Vosky.

♦

Tom Keating's "Vonage slams Skype for not following emergency rules" is a simple and thorough explanation of UK Ofcom's rules, how they apply and don't apply to Skype, who claims what, and where policy conflicts with technology. 

• Clear labeling for UK VoIP by June, March 2007
• Who's In Charge Here? Carrier Battles for Revenue Sustenance, June 2007
• Will It Take UK's Ofcom To Make Canadian SkypeIn Numbers Available?, December 2007

♦

Deadspin's "Kendra Wilkinson Will Skype Your Brains Out" delights in a Playboy Playmate's experience that Skype video is better than phone sex. So that's what all the Skype High Quality Video fuss is about!

♦

Michael Pennington's Wazzum is making turn-key software for dating services. Project "Orange" should launch next month. Key feature? Launching Skype video calls. Saves hosts from paying for video bandwidth.

♦

It's been more than a year since Philippe launched ooVoo's six-way video calling, a year that included an upgrade to high resolution video, Windows only. Apple iChat has had multiparty video for years, Mac only. Meanwhile, Skype just teases...

tags: skype, video, sex, dating, apple, ichat, wazzum, playboy, playmate, "Kendra Wilkinson", kendra, wilkinson, text100, text 100, mustech, ofcom, uk

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Fall-Winter-Summer growth

Jean Mercier is the Skype Numerologist and a regular contributor to Skype Journal.

As usual after a Northern Hemisphere Summer, the growth of Skype users is again visible. Not that there is no growth in summer but

• less people are working,
• more people switch their computers off while they are in the garden, or
• they are traveling and have less access to Internet.

Therefore, fewer users are online at the same time.

Those summers are very visible on the "million milestones" graph that I published last week. In all the past years, excluding the first year, the dots representing the "million milestones" are quite close to each other (see the brown left braces), except when there is a July-August period in the middle (see the red "summer" arrows).

So, what for 2008-2009? I would guess that Skype will as usual add two more "million dots' to its graph before July 2009 (see the Sky(pe) Blue extrapolated dots), going well over the 15 million people online. And I predict also that Skype will reach 16 million concurrent users somewhere around September 2009. But it is only a guess :-)

About growth speed

Each time that I pretend that the growth of Skype isn’t exponential, but linear or even slowing down, fellow blogger Hudson Barton tries to refute it. See his comment on my last post for instance (yes, aaytch, is Hudson himself)!

Perhaps I was a bit too fast and too rude to answer (I apologize for this), because indeed the last 12 months were much better, than the previous 12 months. But anyway, let me analyze the table above, to explain why I still feel I am right. The table shows the top or record concurrent users online at several dates in the past.

The third column is the mean daily (rounded) number of additional concurrent users online at “peak time” for a certain time span. For instance:

• The last two weeks (before September 22), the mean increase was 35000 additional concurrent users online.
• The last year it was 9800 additional concurrent users online.
• And so on.

How do we predict the future? Based on the last two weeks (+35000)? Or on the last 6 months (only +5300!), or on the last year? We can’t predict the future of course, we only can make guesses.

Choosing periods smaller than a year is often wrong for predicting long term growth. Changes in speed in smaller periods can however teach us something about temporary effects (the success of the launch of new Skype features, or the seasonal “Northern Hemisphere summer” effect).

For the long term past growth, we the see that the 2007-2008 season (+9800 users/per day) was very much better than the previous season (+6500). Does this mean that the growth is much faster? Is Hudson right? Could be, but in my opinion, the season 2006-2007 (+6500) was a very bad one compared with the two previous ones (+8300 and +10000), and last year (+9800) was just catching up again.

Only the future will tell, and some signs are very promising: Asterisk, Client version 4.0, Skype for iPhone, perhaps even multiparty videoconferencing, …

tags: skype, trends, stats, statistics, seasonality

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Skype President Addresses Chinese Privacy Breach

Read Josh Silverman's announcement.

Skype 3.8 for Windows update

Download release Skype for Windows 3.8.0.180.
New features:

• Added Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) webcam support
• Added High Quality video support for Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro
• Command line login

Changes:

• Removed Live tab (Skypecasts now gone)
• Removed links to Klonie Avatars (seemingly abandoned by provider Comverse) and Emotive Ringjam ringtone (Emotive apparently out of business chose to discontinue RingJam on Skype) UPDATED
• Updated Firefox plugin to version 2.2.0.102
• Updated Internet Explorer plugin to version 2.2.0.205

Bugfixen:

• Video devices with non-Latin characters in name did not display correctly
• Video calls occasionally caused Skype to crash

tags: skype, 3.8, windows, downloads

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997667891 Skype downloads

Counting down to one thousand million served. Just a few more days.

tags: skype, downloads, stats, statistics, trends, performance

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13 million – congratulations Skype!

Jean Mercier writes the Skype Numerology blog

So another million mark was reached on 15 September 2008: 13 million concurrent Skype users online.

After a very strong start in 2008, where two million-marks were reached in a very short time span, we had to wait 210 days for the next million. [Skype reached 12 million online on 20 February 2008.] This was the third longest period we had to wait for a million mark. This also means there is still a good and steady growth of Skype users, and it also means most of them are satisfied with the services offered.

But the growth isn't exponential anymore. The graph seems to show a small downward bending tendency.

I hope some innovations will cheer us up in the near future: a genuine Skype client for the iPhone for instance!

And perhaps another side comment: until right now, almost nobody blogged about these 13 million. It therefore seems to be a no-event!

tags: skype, trends, statistics, stats

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Josh talks with Om

Om Malik wrote up his interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman today. Here's his 19 minute interview.

Factoids:

• 6% of all international calling minutes.
• $136 million revenue last quarter.

What follows is a very rough and partial transcript of the first half of the interview, starting after generic introductions. Spelling, typos, omissions, and other errors are all mine. Corrections and additions welcome. 

Om: eBay Synergy?

Josh: "Our mission is enabling the world's conversations. We aspire to be is the world's leading communications software company."

Josh: "I think that the communications industry is going through one of the great sea changes of our time. And we'll look back ten years from now at this moment in time and say this is the time when communications transitioned from being hardware to being software.

What i mean by that If you cast your mind back ten years ago, you'll remember that dedicated appliance you had called the telephone. and it was purpose built for voice and it was tied to a network that was purpose built for voice.

if you think about the world we live in today we use these multipurpose computing devices, i don't know about you, maybe 5% of my time on this is spent with voice communications. i do all kinds of other communications with it. if you look at the iPhone, it's not even a communications device. you're checking stock prices or the Internet, watching movies and listening to music. one of the applications you use on that device is around communication.

so communications moved from hardware to software.

it's now part of every device and every device is connected to a multipurpose network called the Internet.

so what that means for consumers is massive amounts of innovation, making communication richer and fuller.

again, going back to when communication was embedded in the hardware, it was only voice. now, if you think about the spectrum of communications, it goes all the way from very short twitter-like communications, in our case we call them mood messages, to chat, to voice, to video, to file transfer and online collaboration; a whole set of different modes you want to talk in, all tied together by some common services. for example one common address book, a common set of presence. and what consumers want and need is that core set of services to follow them from device to device everywhere they are.

we think Skype is uniquely well positioned to capitalize on that. in fact we think that is the future.

just like the train industry did not invent the airplane, the telephony industry is not going to invent the communications business of the future.

Om: I wrote about ten of the telephone companies getting together and building their own client. What do you make of that?

Josh: We welcome competition from all sources.

Om: If you were a betting man, when would you bet will they release a product like that?

Josh: the phone companies have not been known to be world class at building software. when ten of them get together the odds go down a lot.

the great thing about communications being in software is this is going to be a massively competitive industry. and when it's massively competitive the consumer wins.

what we need for that to happen is we need open networks.

and the world that North America lives is in today, where the carriers control the device you can use and the software you can load on the device, consumers are losing big time.

Om: I wouldn't go that far. That's Skype's argument. I don't buy that. Although I agree we're are living in a country where competition is scarce, and where it's almost like an emerging economy as far as broadband and IP networks are concerned.

Being married to eBay seems like a big mismatch.

 

...

Josh: One of the interesting things about the communications space is that it is very balkanized. cable providers against the fixed line against the wireless. and any camp you join makes as many foes as it does friends. one of the really unique things about eBay is within eBay umbrella I'm a totally neutral camp, i can work with everybody.

Om: why not just go public? spin it out of eBay? you are profitable, you've got revenues, you have customers, your are growing business like crazy. why not a standalone company?

Om: What should we as consumers be excited about?

So there's three things we're focused on right now at the highest level. Product innovation, paid services, and platform.

On the product innovation side I'd highlight a couple of things.

Skype was not the first company to do voice over the Internet, it was just the first one to make it really easy. while Skype is very easy to use, it's not easy enough. and so a lot of the innovation you should expect from us is making it even easier and even more reliable.

Another big area of focus in product innovation is going to be around video.

Video is going to be the dominant form of communication. now i don't mean that that all calls will be video calls. i think voice and chat will be table stakes and people will make the decision around which application to use based on who delivers the best, most reliable, highest value video experience. so we think video is a great source of differentiation for Skype.

On the paid services side, we have some great paid services. They're just not particularly well marketed. A lot of our users don't know we have them, we haven't named them well, we haven't described the what the value proposition is well. When people find out about them, they're delighted. We just haven't done a good job. So I think there's a lot we can do just to market our current products and services better and bring some new and exciting ones to market.

The last thing I talked about is platform. Skype has historically been a relatively closed community. now, we have created an api that has about 15000 partners working with Skype to build their capabilities into Skype. there's a massive ecosystem of people who want to build Skype into their products and services, from hardware providers who want to build Skype into flat panel televisions or cordless phones to software providers and web sites who want to build Skype in. and we should be working with all of those, we can't win if we're working with all of them one off, so we need to have a really robust platform. obviously, the within platform the area of most importance needs to be mobile.

This is a great start. Let's explore this further.

tags: skype, gigaom, ommalik, joshsilverman, strategy, competition, differentiation, positioning, marketing, partnering

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Josh talks with BusinessWeek

Catherine Holahan interviewed Skype CEO Josh Silverman. Notable factoid: Fully 10% of Skype users buy a paid service.

tags: skype, businessweek, stats, trends, financials, ebay

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Zennie on CNN before #DNC08

Weekend reading

Skype for email? - can the p2p architecture that works for Skype be applied to email?

Skype Emoticons Club - drawing tool for emoticon art.

Evoca drops free service. For an annual fee, add Evoca to a Skype conference call and it will record the call, up to 180 minutes. You can download the mp3 or order transcripts.

C-SPAN reporters used Skype video to cover spots in and around the Pepsi Center at the Democratic National Convention this week. Jerky video (low frame rate) but added coverage.

Skype alumni are funding Inkspin1, bringing Skype calls onto your home television screen. Hat tip to Ray Crowley.

Skype turning off Skypecasts 1 September 2008. Fantastic long comment list. And a follow up from Skype.

tags: skype, news, roundup, evoca, linkspin1, skypecasts, emoticons, emoticon, emoticonart

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Midweek Skypeland news roundup

Expressivo text-to-speech reader plug-in for Skype. $49. Comes in female US-English, male and female Polish, and female Romanian.

Kara DioGuardi, new American Idol judge

Howard Greenfield interviewed me for ZDNet Asia on The Talkification of the Web. (Should I trademark "talkification"?)

UAE ISP du still blocks Skype, writes PC Magazine's Midddle and Near East edition. The Emirates has an effective duopoly with Etisalat the other ISP. Both du and Etisalat now block Skype as mandated by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, per Gulfnews.

The Yahoo! Messenger team hosted their first open chat workshop with users, part of a monthly educational Q&A series.

LinkedIn's company directory is up and running. White and yellow pages meet social proximity. Now add talk.

Jaxtr is promoting their low international rates. Using public data, Jaxtr says they are cheaper than Jajah, EQO, Mig33, SkypeOut, Truphone, and Rebtel in calls to the UK, Indonesia, Germany, Canada, Mexico, China, France and Pakistan. Often 10% to 50% less. Not sure how this compares to Skype's global or regional flat rates.

Marc Andreesen funds Qik. Qik streams live video from mobile phones to the web.

Music composers talk with concert performers and audience via Skype video.

Off topic: Kara DioGuardi to judge American Idol. Barack Obama's Daughters Wanted Jonas Brothers, Not Their Dad, Onstage At DNC. And the Red Sox acquire Kotsay from Braves. 

tags: skype, expressivo, uae, du, etisalat, blocking, censorship, privacy, freedom, TRA, yahoo, yahoomessenger, linkedin, whitepages, yellowpages, directories, jaxtr, prices, rates, competition, qik, video, music, education, americanidol, barakobama, jonasbrothers, redsox

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Creative leader leaves Skype

Malthe Sigurdsson was the design force behind Skype's playful, cute, and colorful visual identity. It's rare when the emotions, the times, the technology, and the user experience meet well. Skype's form and function, and visual iconography surrounding it, defined Skype.

Before Skype's message of "it just works" could be accepted, people had to trust Skype. At a glance, people believed it was possible. One look and they believed turning their PC into a magic Internet telephone was easy, simple, painless, fun, exciting, safe, immediate.

Malthe instigated one of the most effective and enduring global brands of the decade.

From a 2006 recruiting post...

The coolest thing about being at Skype is that I'm helping to give away this fantastic thing of people in separate corners of the world, the country, the city or indeed just the house, being able to talk to each other... for free.

I'm in charge of design and branding at Skype, and since the above is our core product, I have a really easy job: do the opposite of what every big, boring, customer-unfriendly corporation in the world would do, and make sure that every single little task is done with the millions of people using Skype in mind. If it's not good for them, it's bad for Skype.

Having been here since forever, since we were me sitting in my apartment in Paris, some guys in London and a small office in Tallinn, it's tremendously cool to still be sitting here, now in London, and with offices on most continents and users in even more places, seeing it all grow so much, so fast, so well.

In closing: Please come work with us. It's fun, it absolutely makes a difference, and you and the hundreds of other smart people working here will do great stuff.

 

Take a look at Malthe's slides from Reboot 7 in 2005 and Stuart Henshall's thoughts on Skype's brand two years in.

And then read through Malthe's July 2005 essay, A new face, for a walkthrough of the Skype's language and visual elements.

The Sigurdssons are now on Project Hector. Congratulations!

tags: skype, creative, brand, design, people, dk, marketing, identity, emotion, malthe, sigurdsson, malthesigurdsson

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Skype for Vampires rumor

They have to be joking. It's such a small market niche. Can't the noble dead make do with the same Skype everyone else uses? s4v seems off strategy. We'll see.