GigaOm: No Skype for Palm Pre yet.

"As things are evolving quickly in this space, we will continue to keep our eye on Palm’s Pre and webOS platform, which seems to be getting good traction in its first weekend. But we have nothing to announce at this time" a Skype spokesperson told Jennifer Martinez per her Skype: No Palm Pre App for Now report.

Of course, if Skype opened up their Skype Lite server farm as a platform, developers could build their own Skype clients for the Pre.

tags: skype, palm, pre, palm pre, webOS, mobile

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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When Skype Goes Mobile: INQ1

Guest post by Martyn Davies, News Editor at VoIP User,  Principal Consultant at Dialogic, Podcaster at Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast, and contributor to the Voice of VOIPSA blog. @martyndavies on twitter.

The INQ¹ is the third generation of phones from the “3” network (Hutchison 3G) that has Skype integrated into it. The INQ1 is designed and made by a division of 3, so the handset is currently for 3 only, and more handset models are expected to follow this year. On 3, Skype calls are free, which means that INQ1 to Skype (on a PC/Mac) calls are free as well as INQ1 to INQ1. 3 also offer flat-rate data (even for prepay customers), and this gives a lot of freedom to use IM and social networking without the bill worries.

Brushed, Bright and Vibrant

The INQ1 comes beautifully packaged in a cuboid box with a Japanese painting design. Opening the box you see the handset itself (in my case silver, there is also a matt-black version), with all the cables, power supply and so on underneath. The handset itself has a brushed metal case and feels strong and substantial; the screen is bright and vibrant, and the sound is good and loud. The handset is quite thick because it has a slider that reveals the keypad underneath. The slide action is strong, and tactile. The keylock is automatic when you shut the handset.

I won’t go in to the full specs, as they’re available on the 3 website [editor: inserted following this review], but it has an adequate camera for still/video (with comparable quality to my Nokia E71, although without flash).

A stereo headset is provided for hands-free and music listening, although unfortunately this has quite an ugly connector that goes into the side, making the phone less easy to put in a narrow pocket. There’s one connector for everything, a mini-USB that accepts the power supply, data cable and the headphones. It has 3G data (HSDPA) and can be used as a PC modem (tether), via cable or Bluetooth.

It also has a micro-SD slot, so you can store quite a bit of music or photographs/videos.

Social Mobile Software

The key feature of this handset is obviously the integration of Skype and other social networking features. 3 have been pushing this hard with the Skype (S1, S2) phones, and the INQ1 is offered with the same free calling to Skype contacts. The Skype client in this phone works well, and offers presence, IM and calling as you would expect. The only niggle I had was in the implementation of Skype chats, which seemed to want to open a new chat window every time someone posted to the chat.

Once you have logged-in with your Skype credentials, the client offers to integrate the contacts into your address book. In fact it does this trick for Facebook (FB) too, and this turns out to be a very compelling feature of the INQ1. Once done, all of your contacts appear in the same contact directory, with an icon to show which social network each contact comes from. There is also a ‘favourites’ list; so it is possible to make a preferential list of your ‘real-life’ friends, so that you don’t get swamped by FB and Skype contacts if they number in the hundreds. When you receive a call, caller ID is used to match up with the FB list, so the handset can display the photo of your friend downloaded from FB.

A further integration feature is that all the messaging inboxes also appear in a single list. The Messages screen shows you inbox (= texts), FB inbox (also pokes and requests), Skype chats, Windows Messenger chats and email. It’s great to have that all in one place. The email is slightly schizophrenic, in that 3 offer an email aggregator (to pull emails out of existing accounts), but there is also the separate Gmail application.

There are other useful applications too. In addition to Gmail, there is Google Search and Google Maps (a cut-down version with no location features). The music player is quite useable, and can log-on to your Last.fm account and ‘scrobble’, i.e. tell the world in real-time what music tracks you are listening to. The web browser works well, and I find that I use it a lot in ‘landscape’ mode, as turning the phone sideways does switch the display. This landscape trick also works in the music player.

Navigation between applications uses a side-button (the ‘switcher’) that controls a horizontal app ribbon at the bottom of the screen. You can quite happily run multiple apps (e.g. browser, Skype, music player) and switch between them quickly and efficiently.

Most of my criticisms of the handset are really trivial: The FB font is incredibly tiny and (unlike the browser) couldn’t be changed using the +/- buttons; the landscape mode screen should work in all apps; the volume control wasn’t granular enough, and jumped to fast from quiet to “too loud”. Also, because I’ve been using Twitter a fair bit recently, it would have been nice to have a built-in app for that.

All in all, it’s a well-made phone with a lot of features of a smartphone for much less money (£80). I imagine this handset appealing most to people in their teens and twenties, and with these kind of features built-in to a prepay handset, I'm sure there will be a lot of interest.  3 is the smallest of the five UK mobile phone networks, but they’ve already seen that the Skypephones help retain the notoriously fickle prepay customers. What 3 are trying to do in this area of Skype/social software integration is still unique, and kudos to them for creating their own path among the mobile operators.

tags: skype, 3, hutch, Hutchison Whampoa Limited, hutchison, inq1, facebook, fb, mobile, handset, inq¹, review, uk

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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From 3's data sheet:

Overview

The INQ¹ handset is the next device to feature in our internet category and is designed exclusively for 3. It takes the principle of easy-to-use internet to new levels and is the world’s first fully integrated social networking phone. Purpose built for 3 customers in the UK this handset is designed to get the best out of the biggest and best 3G network in the UK.

Highlights

Internet services such as Facebook, Skype, Windows Live Messenger and Last.fm are deeply integrated into the handset, transforming the mobile internet experience that consumers are used to.

But rather than constrain internet usage with artificial caps on downloads we’ve created a new tariff which, for only £15 a month, provides UNLIMITED mobile internet access, UNLIMITED texts, UNLIMITED 3 to 3 calls and 75 cross network minutes. Or for £20 a month you can get the same deal, but with 200 cross network minutes.

Pricing Info

• £79.99 on PAYG
• Free on Mix & Match tariffs
• Free on the INQ¹ £15 and £20 tariffs

Key features:

• Advanced integration of Skype, WLM, Facebook and Last.fm, plus home screen widgets
• Integrated phonebook with Facebook status & profile picture, Skype and WLM presence
• Switcher key and menu carousel for easy navigation to major internet sites
• 3.2MP camera, 2.2” screen, and auto-landscape browser
• HSDPA 3.6Mbps technical spec, and pre-loaded with modem drivers making it a plug and play dongle
• Picture blogging; upload photos directly to Facebook

Full Specifications

• Size: 97 x 47.6 x 14.4 mm
• Weight: 110g
• Battery: 329 hrs (standby) 324 mins (talktime) application dependent
• Connectivity: Bluetooth A2DP, USB 2.0
• Camera: 3.2 Megapixel
• Network: HSDPA enabled
• Games: Java compatible - xgames preloaded
• Screen: 2.2”QVGA -262K colour TFT
• Memory: internal 50MB - external to 4GB (Note 1GB card supplied in-box)
• Music: MP3 player
• Integrated Facebook
• Integrated Skype
• Integrated WLM
• RSS support
• Widget support

See also:

• INQ1 flickr photo set

What will eBay do with Skype money? Buy into Korea

$US 1.2 billion for a stake in South Korea's Gmarket auction site. Skype had better fetch a pretty penny if eBay Inc. is going to keep up this M&A effort.

Skype is currently operating in Korea as part of eBay's Auction company. Will Skype's separation from eBay require reorganizing their Korean operations?

The press release and SEC Form 8-K.

UPDATE: eBay stock is back where it was a week ago, discounting both the Skype IPO and Gmarket news.

tags: skype, ebay, gmarket, auction, kr, korea, business, investment, m&a

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.

Could Plantronics launch the first SILK Bluetooth headset?

Someone has to go first. Plantronics' teaser campaign promises Bluetooth and vague delights. But what I really want is a great Bluetooth headset, a digital signal processor with Skype's SILK codec inside, and a superwideband highest-fidelity microphone (so you can hear the real me). Launch is set for nine days and seven hours from now.

 

tags: plantronics, headset, bluetooth, silk, skype, mobile

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.

Voice VPNs Over Skype: Paying Less for Private Lines

Guest post by David Tang, Global VP at Skype partner VoSKY, and Craig Coward.

Voice Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have long delivered real benefits to businesses with multiple sites or branch offices. As well as free calls between sites, they enable call break-out to the public network at the point closest to the call destination – saving on charges for long distance calls. They also support global numbering plans for organizations, making internal comms easier. VoIP VPNs have taken these benefits a stage further, enabling calls and data to be routed on the same IP infrastructure.

The downside is, these private networks have traditionally proved expensive to deploy and maintain. In the 1990s, they used to demand dedicated private leased lines to link offices – each costing thousands of dollars per year to rent from the telcos.

Paying to go private

In recent years, with the advent of IP PBXs, Voice VPNs could be enabled over existing IP links, just like data VPNs, giving a secure site-to-site link that is set up as needed. This drastically cut the costs of renting dedicated lines, but with a drawback.

Typically, an organization has to deploy IP PBXs from the same manufacturer at every office, to enable VPN networking. This in turn demands expensive rationalization of premises equipment. In addition, though not as costly as dedicated leased lines, expensive MPLS-based links have to be installed.

So the choice has been to either pay for the ridiculously costly dedicated lease lines, or deploy interoperable IP PBXs and MPLS links at every branch, at considerable costs. And that’s before you even consider issues such as encrypting voice traffic across the private network, or handling traffic across your network’s routers and firewalls.

These issues have typically made voice VPNs a viable option only for larger organizations or enterprises. However, there are other options now available to businesses, without the high cost of entry.

Creating a Skype Voice VPN

By using Skype, the world’s largest and most reliable VoIP network, to form the VPN, the network itself is available for free. And with PBX-to-Skype application gateways that link any office phone system (whether traditional digital switch, or IP PBX) to Skype, the benefits of voice VPNs are available to almost any business, for a low one-time upgrade cost. What’s more, businesses don’t have to swap out or replace their existing investments in PBX equipment – which is useful in the current lean times.

So how does this work? How does a business build its voice VPN using Skype and reap the benefits?

First, the business deploys a PBX-to-Skype application gateway at each location. Depending on the company’s needs, the gateways add anything from 4 to 30 Skype lines to the company’s existing PBX that can be picked up and transferred between extensions like an ordinary call. Employees simply dial 8 for a Skype line, or 9 for an ordinary line. What’s more, the gateways work with virtually any model of analog, digital or IP phone system.

The company can then create a global numbering plan for their Skype voice VPN, enabling employees to use extension dialing to branch locations on the network. These site-to-site calls are free over Skype, and long distance calls handled using SkypeOut to reduce costs. The gateways also centralize Skype provisioning and management, giving IT managers full control over its use, eliminating the need to install Skype on each PC. This means no need for headsets – all Skype voice functions are delivered to users’ PBX handsets.

Enable PBX Remote Access to the Voice VPN

IT managers can enable remote access to the corporate voice VPN, by simply installing the free Skype for desktop or Skype for mobile software client on the remote workers desktop or laptop PC. With PBX remote access, road warriors and remote workers can securely access to the voice VPN, enabling free calls to and from employees at the corporate or branch offices. This solution is much better than traditional softphone solutions due to Skype’s ability to seamlessly traverse NAT/Firewall and its superior voice quality over the open Internet.

Build Voice Extranet for Customers and Partners

With today’s global economy, companies small and large have supply chains that cross national and international borders. Traditionally, voice VPNs (legacy with leased lines or IP-PBX enabled), were designed to focus on intra-company communication and did not support connections to partner networks.

However, with the ubiquity of Skype and PBX-agnostic Skype gateways, it is easy to extend the corporate voice VPN to include an extranet for free and secure partner communication. All the partner company has to do is to connect a PBX-to-Skype gateway to its existing PBX and have the main Skype ID of the partner site programmed into the PBX-to-Skype gateway’s address book.

This will allow both companies to make and receive calls for free between their offices by simply dialing a speed dial number, which is mapped to the Skype ID. In addition, the enterprise can also set up advanced click-to-talk functionality directly from company websites or HTML emails, enabling online browsers to call the company directly, at no cost to them using Skype.

Calling up benefits

A Skype voice VPN, like its traditional counterpart, eliminates costs for inter-office calls. It has the key advantage of working with any existing infrastructure, seamlessly connecting disparate phone systems without extra costs for the network links.

In terms of traffic management, Skype works transparently behind routers and firewalls without needing any complex configurations or set-up. Furthermore, all Skype calls are secured using strong AES encryption, to protect an organization's privacy – just like a secure data VPN.

There’s free, secure remote access to the corporate VPN for road warriors, which enhances productivity while helping reduce communication costs. Companies will be able to further reduce their telecom costs with a voice extranet that enables free and secure calls with partners in their supply chain.

These all help to make the Skype voice VPN solution a compelling proposition.  So while setting up a private network for voice may not be completely priceless, it’s a solution that will quickly deliver a return on investment – and will go on delivering savings and benefits.

tags: skype, vosky, vpn, voicevpn, gateway

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Review: IPEVO Wi-Fi Skype Phone

When most people think about using Skype, they probably envision a nerd with a headset sitting in front of his computer. Skype is primarily a computer-to-computer internet telephony product, but there are a few options for using your Skype service on more traditional handsets.

I have evaluated the VOIP841 from Philips before and was overall happy with the device, minus the OK audio quality. However, recently I heard about and received IPEVO's new Wi-Fi Skype handset for review.

This little unit is as small as most candybar mobile phones and contains the Wi-Fi chip directly in the handset. Contrary to the Philips VOIP841, which requires a separate base station along with the handset, everything with the IPEVO phone is housed on the handset itself.

This means you can take the IPEVO phone and use it wherever you can get a Wi-Fi signal for free Skype calls and ridiculously cheap calls to traditional landlines and mobile phones.

Opening the Box

First impressions with the IPEVO Wi-Fi Skype phone are postive. The black handset has a bright and readable screen and well-sized buttons that are used to navigate the handsets traditional Skype menus. Anyone familiar with the Skype user interface on a PC or Mac will easily be able to adapt IPEVOs implementation of them on the Skype phone.

The Skype handset takes about 4-5 hours to charge and after doing so, you are ready to assign the device to your wireless network and start making and receiving Skype phone calls.

Setup

On my home wireless network, I employ WPA-PSK encryption. When I tried to utilize the phone's wizard interface to join my Wi-Fi network, it had issues and would not properly connect. As a result, I had to manually select my home network and enter in the security setting and details by hand. After successfully joining the network, the phone prompts you to log in to your Skype account.

With the IPEVO device, you can either sign into your existing Skype account or create a new one directly on the handset without having to log into Skype on a computer. I thought this was a nice little feature.

One note about the IPEVO Skype phone: if you have special characters in your Skype or Wireless password, it is a little tricky to figure out how to input these into the phone. When you press the pound key, aka #, you are presented an on-screen menu with all the special characters you might have in your passcodes.

Usage and Performance

The IPEVO Skype phone is quite easy to use, especially after you are set up on your wireless network and signed into Skype on the phone. Upon signing in, your Skype contact list is available and shows your contacts' presence information. Like the Philips VOIP841, from the IPEVOs home screen, you press the "Contacts" button to load your contacts for easy dialing. The homescreen also displays the current local time, the current user name that is logged in, and the current Skype balance.

The call quality with the IPEVO Skype WiFi phone was outstanding for a handset. My callers were very audible to me, in fact, they were clearer and louder than when I called them with the VOIP841, for comparison. Callers said I sounded great as well. This was true for both Skype-to-Skype calls and Skype to landline/mobile calls as well.

While call quality was good, battery life left a lot to be desired. I found that with moderate usage and keeping the phone powered on, the IPEVO device could only stay powered on for about 5 hours.

This is understandable, considering the IPEVO has the power-hungry Wi-Fi chipset on board the device, but this poor battery life is something to keep in mind if you are a heavy Skype user who needs a handset that will last a considerable amount of time.

Conclusion

Overall, the IPEVO Skype Wi-Fi phone is an attractive, feature rich handset that makes great sounding calls. Anyone who wants to be able to talk to their Skype contacts or make/receive very inexpensive Skype calls should consider this device for a purchase. Having Skype on a handset like this really makes Skype no different than a normal cordless phone for regular dialing.

One important note: if you have areas of your house that have weak Wi-Fi signal quality, this specific phone won't work in those areas. The IPEVO handset does have a Wi-Fi signal indicator, but I noticed choppy calls in rooms that are far away from my wireless router.

The IPEVO Skype Wi-Fi handset is Skype Certified and is available for around $130 at various Intetnet-based retailers.

Skype Journal columnist Jason Harris, engages communities for corporations and explores internet telephony, mobile technology, and the leaders who bring them to market on his Techcraver blog and onTwitter.

Skype offers SMS voicemail notifications: good idea, poor execution

Basic voicemail is so 1980s. Now SpinVox transcribes voice messages and alerts you, for a fee, when you get Skype voice mail. Set up your Skype voice mail alerts here. This is a great idea. I love anything that improves voice messaging freshness, accuracy, speed, comprehension, searchability, and context.

Sadly, this Skype implementation fails to deliver the minimum quality, reliability and affordability to be a useful market test. Eight problems:

First, Skype's SMS alerts will cut off transcripts.

SpinVox is famous for its voicemail transcription. Yet this offering is limited to no more than three SMS alerts. That's too little for half of voice mail messages.

SpinVox says “the average voice mail deposit is 18 to 22 seconds.” Let's say people speak 150 words per minute. That's about 50 words in 20 seconds, 250 characters at 5 characters per word.

Three alerting SMS messages at 140 characters is 420. Let's reserve 25 per message for identifiers (something like "SpinVox Skype Alert 1 of 3"). That leaves 345 for the payload.

Let's say it might take 100 characters for the intro voice mail metadata: sender Skype name or caller ID, receiver Skype name, length of message, date/time sent. That leaves 245 characters for the transcript.

So with 250 characters available and 245 needed, that should be enough, right?

It's not enough. Averages blend higher and lower numbers. If normally distributed, maybe a third to half of your messages will be severely cut off as users speak longer than the mean.

Failure to give me the whole message one third of the time, combined with transcription error rates, creates an unreliable experience.

Second, email alerts don't include transcripts.

Huh? Really? This would be immensely useful!

Third, I'm forced to choose between email and SMS alerts. I don't know in advance which will be the best way to reach me. Why force me to choose? And why can't I have multiple email addresses for alerts? Or alert other Skype users?

Fourth, no Skype chat notification.

Huh? Really? Vipadia can set up a Skype chat bridge for you.

Fifth, it costs too much: $1.50 per voice message.

I'm assuming nearly all voice mails will take three texts. Including SpinVox translation (about $0.20), sending Skype-to-SMS ($0.13 USA-to-USA), and receiving SMS ($0.20), most voicemail alerts will cost me $1.50.

For active Skypers, those who use SkypeIn and get voice mails every day, this adds up.

Sixth, no full transcripts of voicemails.

You have SpinVox! Use them! Send me full transcripts of voicemail by email, by browser, or in chat. Searchable, downloadable, persistent archives make voicemail useful and actionable.

Seventh, no videomail support.

Does Skype offer videomail? Not now. When Skype does, SpinVox should transcribe videomail too.

Eighth, no live call transcription.

Voicemail alerting and transcriptions treat a pain point. There's opportunity in transcribing conference calls the millions using Skype for collaboration, coordination, meetings, recruiting. As transcription costs fall, they are becoming standard meetingware.

I'm glad Skype and SpinVox are working together, finally. This initiative gets so many small things wrong; I can't imagine it meeting any commercial success as it's scoped now. So iterate quickly, please. Find a sweet spot and a vision.

Technorati tags: skype, spinvox, transcription, alert, alerts, alerting, sms, texting, voicemail, videomail, transcribe, messaging

News release follows:

SpinVox powers first Skype voicemail to text

LONDON and LUXEMBOURG, Mar. 03, 2009 - SpinVox, the global leader in voice to content messaging and Skype, announces the availability of voicemail to text conversion for all Skype voicemail users today. SpinVox conveniently converts voice messages to text in English, Spanish, French and German. The messages are then sent by Skype as an SMS text directly to a designated mobile phone for users to read.

Skype users can now benefit from instant ‘visible voicemail’, and never miss those important calls from friends or colleagues when they are away from Skype. Recipients of converted voicemail messages can listen to the full voice message by either signing into Skype or by calling their Skype To Go number*. As well as being able to receive voicemail as text via SpinVox, Skype users may choose instead to receive voicemail notification via SMS or for free by email.

“Skype is the first internet communications software provider to deploy SpinVox, further reinforcing our position as the only provider of voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people on five continents,” says SpinVox co-founder and CEO, Christina Domecq. “Our user base has grown over twenty-fold in the last 12 months and bringing Skype’s voicemail subscribers on board will accelerate this trend.”

“Using SpinVox gives our users added flexibility and convenience over their Skype voicemails, said Mike Bartlett, director of product strategy at Skype. “As people continue to spend more time on the move and on their mobile devices, people want to take their Skype conversations with them. SpinVox is a great option for our users to save time on checking their Skype voicemail and receive messages immediately sent to their mobile phone.”

It’s easy for Skype users to set up voicemail to text from their account page, by simply registering a mobile phone number. Each voicemail to text conversion will cost €0.20/£0.17/$0.25 plus the cost of sending an SMS at standard low Skype rates. Additional SMS charges – a maximum of 3 - may apply depending on the length of the voicemail message.

All payments are made fuss-free through Skype Credit. Users have a choice to set a limit on the number of voicemail conversions received per day and to receive messages from people only in their contact list to help them manage their Skype credit. An email notification will be sent if that limit is exceeded. For more information please visit http://www.skype.com/go/voicemail-to-text.

About Skype

Founded in 2003, Skype is revolutionizing the way people communicate around the world.  Skype has more than 405 million registered users globally who use Skype software to communicate for free through voice and video calls as well as instant messages.  Skype generates revenue through its premium offerings, such as calls made to and from landlines and mobiles, voicemail, call forwarding, and SMS.  Skype is used in almost every country on Earth, and people have made more than 100 billion minutes worth of free Skype-to-Skype calls.  Conversations over Skype can take place on computers, mobile devices and Skype Certified™ hardware. Skype certifies and sells hundreds of hardware products from more than 50 partners, and works with hundreds of third-party developers who have created plug-ins to extend Skype’s functionality.

Skype is an eBay company (NASDAQ: EBAY). Learn more and download Skype at www.skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required. Skype is not a replacement for your traditional telephone service and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Skype, associated trade marks and logos and the “S” symbol are trade marks of Skype Limited.

About SpinVox

SpinVox® is the world's largest privately-held speech technology company, providing the only voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people and whose user base has grown over twenty-fold in the last 12 months.

Through significant innovations in voice and network technologies which are protected by over 60 patents worldwide, SpinVox has converged the two most natural forms of communication - voice and text - to create the fastest-growing form of messaging: Voice-to-Content™.

SpinVox services are available directly on www.spinvox.com and through leading carriers and through new media, Unified Communications and other service providers globally.

Implemented as a carrier-class hosted network feature, SpinVox is proven to able to easily create value from everyday user behaviour using voice and deliver rapid and easy implementation of low input, sustained high reward services.

At the heart of SpinVox is its ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion System™ (VMCS), which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process.  Developed by the Cambridge, UK- based SpinVox Advanced Speech Group; VMCS now serves users across five continents in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian.

SpinVox is now live with Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype and Livejournal.

###

*Skype To Go is currently available in Australia, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, UK, and the U.S. For more information about Skype To Go visit www.skype.com/go/skypetogo

As netbooks become the new mobiles, will AT&T preload Skype?

American wireless companies are control freaks when it comes to configuring the mobiles they sell. They limit hardware features, choose applications, and otherwise protect their walled gardens.

Now they're set to sell netbooks with wireless data plans. AT&T piloted this with Acer and Radio Shack over the holidays.

The software that comes on PCs is usually determined by the manufacturer and the operating system. Skype comes on some netbooks via Linux, on some PCs via manufacturers. Will AT&T and others use their power to add Skype to netbooks? Or will they keep Skype off of netbooks?

Should netbook+wireless proves popular, Skype will want this desktop real estate. Trial and adoption rates are much higher with the trust that comes from being preinstalled.

tags: skype, netbooks, att, at&t, acer, netbook, wireless, strategy

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A Partnership Is Worth Zilch When....

... your partner fails to provide an obvious path to download and install your software.

In early July last year I wrote about the launch of Dell Video Chat, based on a newly announced agreement between Dell and SightSpeed to use SightSpeed's video services. The bottom line was that Dell Video Chat would become available on an expanding range of Dell PC's.What follows is a story about what turns users away from Windows PC's and why Apple is doing so well with its iMac's and MacBooks these days. But it also has to be an embarrassment to Dell.

As background I should say that recently I have watched as two non-tech persons have started up their MacBooks for the first time. Turn it on, asks for your name and contact information, upgrades the software, takes your photograph with the built-in webcam, finds the WiFi, connects to the Internet (and finds other PC's on your LAN). In about 20 to 30 minutes you're up and running. No hassles, no new software to install; it just happens!. And subsequently these people do not come back to me for technical support, especially on security, operating system upgrade and new software installation issues.

This weekend I am helping an acquaintance getting transitioned to a new Dell Vostro 220 desktop PC. Due to one critical business application that only supports a Windows installation this person could not change to a Mac. In the course of starting it up I found there was a webcam embedded onto the monitor and installed the appropriate webcam software. (No, Dell did not pre-install it even though a monitor with embedded webcam was included in the initial order.) Ran a client called Dell Webcam Central. You could take photos or record video while seated in front of the monitor.

Then I noticed in the upper right hand corner an option to "Switch to video chat". Recalling that I had written about Dell Video Chat last summer I clicked on the link. And got a dialogue box stating: "You have not installed the video chat application 'Dell Video Chat'. Do you want to download now?" Clicked on the "Yes" button.

This took me to a Dell web page that asked for my Dell Service Tag. Entered it and ended up on the standard page of driver downloads for the Vostro PC. Looked through the various categories (after identifying my OS as Windows XP) and could not find Dell Video Chat software anywhere. No application downloads. Nothing about it listed in a sidebar on the same page. Nada, Did a search. No luck.

So, at this point, not being sure if I had installed Dell's webcam software properly I installed Skype on this PC and found it recognized my webcam, including its associated microphone, with no problem. Dell had failed to provide any means (let alone a user-friendly means) to download and install the Dell Video Chat software.

Sort of defeats the purpose of having this SightSpeed-Dell agreement and the associated easy access to the relevant software somehow. It actually turned out to be easier for me to download and install Skype (and have ready access to voice and/or chat conversations with the huge Skype user base).

A couple of points made in posts since my initial one about the arrangement between Dell and SightSpeed have happened since last summer:

• Skype hired Scott Durschlag as COO. In a post about CxO's and their persoanl business networks I pointed out that both Scott and Ron Garriques, now Dell's President of Global Consumer Group, had worked together at Motorola.
• Logitech announced it would acquire SightSpeed in late October.

Aside from Dell's obvious quality assurance problem described above, the sceptic in me might ask:

• Did Logitech's acquisition of SightSpeed somehow sour the Dell relationship with SightSpeed
• If it's all but impossible for a somewhat technically savvy person to find and install Dell Video Chat, is there any Dell Video Chat user registered out there with whom a user could have a conversation?
• Has SightSpeed been tracking any metrics on Dell Video Chat adoption?
• Is there an opportunity here for Skype to leverage a Skype executive's previous relationship with a current Dell executive to initiate discussions about having Dell provide Skype with all its PC's?
• Will "Skype Everywhere" include Dell PC users when they want to hold voice, chat and video conversations simply by default? "No biz dev required."

Just wondering .....Where's the value in a Dell partnership? It's all about execution!

In spite of being a 14-year purchaser of Dell PC's, it's one more nail in the Dell/Microsoft coffin as I contemplate a transition to a MacBook for my next laptop purchase.

And, in case anyone was wondering about what Steve Jobs brought to the table at Apple: a discipline within Apple's corporate culture that focuses on a friction-free and overwhelmingly successful user experience. In spite of Steve's current absence that corporate culture is not going away anytime soon.

Phil's Observations:

• Two More Reasons why SightSpeed is good for Logitech
• Why Did Skype lose the Dell account to Logitech

SightSpeed's CEO Peter Csathy:

• Speculation About SightSpeed's Partnership Success -- "How Did They Do It?"

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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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LotusLive: Level 1 on the Skype Journal Site Skypification Maturity Model

I first documented the Skype Journal Site Skypification Maturity Model in November 2007. Skype Journal's Jim Courtney analyzed IBM's Lotusphere announcements. LotusLive services have a maturity of 1 on the SJSSMM scale of zero/zed to 4.

Here's what I mean.

Skype Journal Site Skypification Maturity Model

Level 0: None
What's Skype?

Level 1: Static
Storing Skype names and Skype-linking Phone Numbers

Storing and linking people’s Skype names is one part. The other is to offer SkypeOut links for PSTN phone numbers.

Tech: Skype’s “skype:” html protocol to launch Skype from a browser link.

Level 2: Dynamic
Integrating Skype Presence

Is this person available for a call now? You can show a person’s Skype presence in a web page.

You can also use presence information to inform other site behavior. For example, you might aggregate presence data for a team to create collective presence scores.

Tech: Polling Skype’s web presence services

Level 3: Peering
Syncing Skype Profile, Social Graph, and History Data

Skype clients are information rich. You can use that data to enrich profiles, enhance your site’s social graph (who knows whom, how, and how they interact), collect communication histories (who talked to whom, when, for how long), and import chat archives.

You can keep your site's data synced with Skype's by refreshing active connections with your Skype client.

Tech: Using Skype’s client APIs to log in on behalf of a user. With that access you can both read and write to the client, and trigger conversations. At large scale, you will need to operate a Skype client farm.

Level 4: Transactional
Integrating Skype Business/Commerce Services

Skype offers some access to its payment services. PamFax is an example of this, where customers pay with Skype credits for sent faxes.

Tech: Skype publishing and DRM client and web service APIs.

The LotusLive product falls smack dab into Level 1: Static. Just to be clear, although you can associate a Skype name with a colleague, partner, or customer within LotusLive, and while you can launch a Skype call from a LotusLive web page, LotusLive and Skype are not integrated. Repeat: Not Integrated.

• The Skype call happens outside of LotusLive.
• You cannot add people to an ongoing call from LotusLive.
• You cannot trigger a LotusLive session from within a Skype call.
• You cannot mix LotusLive callers and Skype callers.
• If you want a Skype call, all users must have downloaded Skype, created Skype accounts (not the same as your LotusLive account), and be logged in to the Skype network.
• You cannot use LotusLive media assets (presentations, documents) within a Skype call.
• LotusLive has no record that the conversation occurred. No institutional memory, unlike conversations that use LotusLive tools and channels.

It is excellent that you can launch a Skype call or conference call from a LotusLive web page. That's enormously useful, a great first step. But that click passes call-starting data to desktop Skype clients; it's a one way trigger.

We'll have to rewrite the model to include new capabilities Skype Journal expects to emerge from the Skype platform by 2010 year end, including elements of the Social Stack.

• Login Interop. So you can log in to LotusLive using your Skype ID/password (think OpenID).
• IM and file transfer Gateways. So you can participate in a Skype chat even if you don't have Skype installed.
• Voice Gateway – Low Def and Hi Def. So Skype users can talk with non-Skype users.
• Voice Conferencing Gateway – Low Def and Hi Def. Multiparty, using Skype and non-Skype experiences
• Video Conferencing Gateway. So Skype users can join video conferences with people using LotusLive.
• Video Messaging Interop. So you can use Skype video to record messages to people in a LotusLive directory.
• Contact (address book) data sharing, syncing, creation - bidirectional
• Contact Group (team list) data sharing, syncing, creation – bidirectional
• Calendar/Schedule Sync. 

The SJ SSMM helps us assess current Skype readiness and plan a Skype strategic roadmap for our consulting clients.

tags: skype, lotosphere, lotusphere09, ls09, lotusphere2009, lotuslive, skypejournal, sjssmm, interoperability, interop, integration

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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 at CES 2009, Part II: An Overview and Observations

There's a "new sheriff in town" when it come to running Skype; CES 2009 was a "coming out" event for the new executive team.

CES 2009 provided an opportunity to catch up personally with many of the vendors we have covered in Skype Journal including Skype, Truphone, SlingMedia, Philips and Research in Motion (BlackBerry). I also had a chance to attend a most informative afternoon session of Jeff Pulver's Social Meia Jungle event. Unfortunately Palm closed their suite after only two days of CES; thus, I missed an opportunity to learn more about the Palm Pre on Saturday. As Palm had just been awarded a CES "Best of Show" award, that was a "Huh?" moment when there was only a security guard at the suite's door.. I also wanted to catch iPevo and Nokia but did not have time to get to their booths.

With respect to Skype we had three activities: the Skype press conference, an interview with new COO Scott Durschlag and Skype's first reception event Friday evening. It was our first opportunity to observe the new Skype executive team in action. While I will be providing some more detailed posts, here are a few observations:

• For the first time, a senior C-level Skype executive personally acknowledged Skype Journal's participation as a playing a significant role in the Skype ecosystem. Scott thanked us for our loyalty to Skype through all the challenges of the past two years. (That does not mean we'll always be cheerleaders; it's important that we maintain a skeptical and critical viewpoint within the context of the overall IP-based communications space.)

While we have had co-operation in the past, usually via Skype's public relations agency, from many Skype employees at an operating level, it's important for the media to be able to communicate regularly and openly with those at the C-level who are providing overall direction and developing high level strategy. Josh has initiated such openness through his blogging and interviews; now we are seeing it on a person-to-person basis.

• On the other hand many times, last week in both the press conference and our discussions, Scott acknowledged the existence of several previous controversial issues, such as technical support, platform development, the role of partners and internal management structure issues as requiring attention by the new management team. The newly recruited management team will be introducing a new level of experience and maturity to address these issues; execution over the next few months now becomes critical.
• One future post will cover Skype's new operating and management structure focused on products and geographical markets.
• Another will cover Skype's overall focus as a software platform developer and the standards being set for these developments. Within this context I'll provide my perspective on what is meant by "liquid communications".
• We'll soon have a follow up post about our discussion with Scott of what Skype's new executive team learned from the TOM-Skype privacy breach last fall and how it became a bonding exercise within Skype as well as establishing some new operating parameters to avoid a repeat.
• Skype is NOT shoving its partners under the bus. The new executive team is determining what innovation Skype will drive and what innovation they can expect partners to drive. Andy Abramson articulates his perspective on the issue:

Most of all, Skype is not sitting back. The are pushing the envelope, but at the same time sending mixed messages externally to partners and developers. But that too will change. Some recent hires have brought maturity to the table.

• We learned the answer to "Will There Be a Skype Client on the iPhone?"
• Finally, for the first time since I have been writing about Skype, we can see some well-articulated high level vision for where Skype is heading, where they need to focus and how they want to play in the real time communications market space at a strategic level.

Looking forward to writing about the evolution of Skype as it grows from a $500MM per year operation with 500 employees into a business with a revenue level and valuation that finally justifies eBay's initial investment in Skype.

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Post-CES blues: Cash crisis shifts power in the consumer electronics supply chain

This is the worst CES in decades, according to some who've been exhibiting that long. Vast sections of the floor were unsold. You could walk without getting crushed. There were few traffic jams. Shorter lines for food. And easy parking. Attendance was down. Those who came left early and spent less.

So I'm looking at all these exhibiting factories, brand name manufacturers, wholesalers, and the retailers shopping for products to put into their sales pipeline.

The retailers are playing it safe, cutting back on the number of SKUs and how much they're ordering. The ones they're buying from are over capacity and starved for cash. That's bad during a credit crisis.

Strapped manufacturers can't count on loans they once got to afford the months of delay between order and payment. Some are giving up equity for working capital. Others are paying higher rates with harsh terms.

Say you're Wal-Mart, sitting on billions in cash. How many of your suppliers will run out of cash before delivering product? Or will be unable to replenish your inventory when their products sell well? You will start to demand cash flow statements from your suppliers. Favored suppliers may get better terms like faster payment or less agonizing returns policies. You may even offer select suppliers bridge or inventory financing loans.

In the post-credit era, those with cash are kings.

Maybe you're Skype. You have hardware partners who make phones with Skype embedded or pre-loaded, webcams and headphones that bundle Skype. Firms like Vosky that build telecom gateways. What can you do in this environment to support those suppliers?

Low hanging fruit:

• Suspend your five-percent-of-retail logo license fee, cut it dramatically, or rebate it through a cooperative advertising program. I talked to name brand headset and webcam vendors who dropped out of the Skype co-brand program because five percent of retail income (10-20% of wholesale) doesn't pay.
• Help manufacturers of high-end gear craft value offerings that still exploit Skype's high quality audio and video.
• Bring gear partners together for joint marketing to retailers. Skype's Wal-Mart model is one approach.
• Share in-depth market research and consumer behavior insights so designers can make products Skype users will buy.
• Remodel your online store and create a process for ongoing innovation in driving the right Skype users at the right time to the right products. Perhaps even making the store more social. And don't forget the department for Skype at Work buyers.

CES 2009 is over. Taxi rides and shoe shines are half of CES 2008. Liquidity trumps innovation in 2009 as sectors consolidate and power changes hands in consumer electronics.

Technorati tags: skype, ces, ces09, wal-mart, walmart, channels, distribution, alliances

CES rumor: Skype Lite for Android Mobile Devices

Working to confirm Skype’s Skype Lite will be available for the Android mobile operating system.

UPDATE: TechChuck seems to be quoting an embargoed CNET story no longer online:

"Skype announced on Wednesday the forthcoming release of Skype Lite for Google Android and other Java-enabled phones. Skype Lite marks the communication company's first native VoIP client for Java. Skype is submitting the app to Google's Android Market on Thursday morning, though it could take Google a few days to offer it for download."

Technorati tags: skype, android, mobile, skype lite, lite, google

Skype throws independent developers under the bus to pursue WebEx market

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

Skype's bundling free screen sharing into Skype's software will popularize the feature to hundreds of millions of people. This makes the market for online conferencing bigger.

The bundling will also kill the freemium business model (try our free version, upgrade to our posh version) conferencing companies use to get customers. This will hurt the following Skype developers directly:

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

Back in mid-2005, Bill Campbell asked "Does Skype eat its children?" when Skype competed with presence developers with Skypeweb. Those developers abandoned Skype. Since then Skype competed with video developers, who've abandoned Skype. And with Outlook integration developers. And with Salesforce integration developers. And with mobile developers.

Skype's ecosystem is littered with the bleached bones of third-party software developers. They filled gaps in Skype's product line. They made Skype's network more valuable. They bet their jobs on Skype's partner program being safe from Skype itself.

Clearly, a bad bet.

Skype desktop sharing will be wildly successful. Building it into Skype clients and putting it one or two clicks to add sharing to a call makes it 10 to 100 times more convenient than other systems. Ubiquity will change the way people think about desktop sharing the way ubiquity is changing how people think about video calling.

WebEx-style meeting, sales, training, tech-support, and webinar services comprise a multibillion dollar industry. Skype desktop sharing will be disruptive to the industry: vastly cheaper, more convenient, more social. We'll hunt for market share stats this year.

So while this announcement is great for Skype, the choice will chill investment by software development partners. Platforms must be safe, trusted, with manageable risk. And platforms must foster creativity, innovation, and opportunity.

Skype's choice subverts developer trust. That's one hell of a brand note.

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

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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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OnState Virtual PBX: Taking On and Managing All Callers

OnState's Virtual PBX incorporates Skype as a contributor to lower cost, yet more productive, small business communications management activities.

A mainstay for communications in any office with at least a few employees is the need to accept incoming calls, determine who is calling, what is their general need and getting the call to the right employee. In the interest of effective and productive customer and supplier relations, calls need an automated way to reach sales personnel, customer care, accounting or technical support or "the boss". Preferably this call management should be handled without any human intervention; over the past twenty or more years this has resulted in the evolution of increasingly effective Private Branch Exchange ("PBX") offerings from telecomm equipment suppliers. And it traditionally required a reasonably demanding capital expense, from $15,000 up.

The basic functions of a PBX include:

• Receiving and answering a call from an external caller
• Offering a menu of options to determine to whom the call should be connected
• Transferring the call in response to answers provided either by entering alphanumeric or dialpad information or by using speech recognition.
• Accepting, recording and managing voice mails if nobody is available to take a call
• Ability to make a subsequent call transfer if deemed necessary

However, IP-based communications technology along with web 2.0 tools provide opportunities for enhancing the PBX to build more productive and effective business processes when it comes to managing relationships with both suppliers and customers. For instance:

• An individual agent portal for overall conversation management
• Intelligent call queuing would permit an "occupied" employee to either put a caller into a queue for answering when available or transfer a caller to another employee with the skills to handle the call
• Chat sessions can be offered as either an alternative or complement to voice conversations
• Building a searchable call archive integrated into an email system such as GMail.
• Making call transfer destinations independent of the recipient's geographical location, whether "in the office", at a home office or out "on the road".
• Reducing and minimizing the costs associated with various PBX services.

Building on its Call Center experience OnState has launched its Virtual PBX which provides all this functionality as well as:

• Receives calls via Skype, SkypeIn as well as Local DID numbers and toll free numbers in over 20 countries
• Call transfer to employees, agents and other designated recipients on their Skype-enabled PC, landline phones or mobile independent of geographical location
• An extension-based agent/employee/representative portal for managing incoming calls, including call waiting notification, queuing and redirection
• Integration into GMail, Zimbra and Salesforce.com

A few weeks ago, OnState CEO Pat Kelly was our guest on a SquawkBox conference call where he provided more details about OnState's Virtual PBX, including a sharable slide show presentation accessible as a Google document.

Bottom line; for as little as $15 per month per seat and no capital investment, small to medium enterprises and organizations as well can establish an enhanced PBX capability to facilitate both more productive business processes as well as more cost effective communications.

Definitely a business model disruptor.

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Would you trust Skype with your vote?

I've been wracking my brain for the defining Skype moments of 2008.

It comes down to Skype's identity. The marketing, psychology, defining oneself sense; not the login, badge sense.

Brand marketers may talk of lovemarks, but trust comes before love. We trust Coke products to be Coke-like in taste, feel, fragrance, color, and packaging, for example. We trust products not to hurt or endanger us (unless you're into that kind of thing). We trust brands to keep their promises.

The people of Estonia trust their electronic voting systems with the fate of their nation. In a country that recently survived cyberwar, that's a lot of trust.

Estonia conducts elections online.  Building on successes in 2005 and 2007 they recently approved voting with mobile phones by 2011. The Estonian National Electoral Committee (VVK) will provide SIM chips to Estonian voters for free. The special chips from AS Sertifitseerimiskeskus (SK) will authenticate voters and keep vote transmissions secret using public key encryption.

Would you trust Skype's technology and Skype's business with your vote?

If you asked me in 2007, I'd have said yes. Skype's brand promises privacy and safety. Outside security experts applauded Skype's authentication, strong encryption, and ability to bypass most obstacles. Skype is an eBay company (though few people know this) and borrows some of our trust of eBay and PayPal.

I'm unsure now, as 2009 starts.

Skype's technology is strong but incomplete. Skype's encryption is end-to-end, from Skype client to Skype client. Nobody can listen in. So the weak points are the end points: a user's PC or Skype-enabled device and the gateway to the the voting system. Secure those end points and you'd have a pretty secure system.

That's not the whole story, though. We learned in 2008 that Skype shared a copy of their desktop source code with the TOM-Skype joint venture in China. That includes Skype's authentication (proving who you are) and encryption (foiling eavesdroppers) code.

We don't know how many people, including TOM-Skype former employees, contractors, and members of Chinese security services, have access to that code. (Hypothetically, if I offer a $1000 bounty, would someone sell me a copy?) Many people have the means to interfere with an election conducted through Skype. Given time, we know a way finds itself in the hands of those with a will. 

Speaking of intent, let's return to the joint venture. Skype's founding executives traded code for access to China. China is now Skype's largest market. The new executive team tightened up operational security, minimizing unauthorized access to log files, surveillance, and source code.

Despite Skype's 2008 policy review, the original deal stands:

• TOM-Skype gets a copy of Skype's source code with each major release,
• TOM-Skype modifies the Skype software to comply with China's government agencies,
• TOM-Skype shares data collected with users with Chinese agencies,
• TOM-Skype does not disclose that privacy breach to customer before or after sharing. 
• Skyper's talking with a TOM-Skype users are surveilled like TOM-Skype users

This is the arrangement we know of. We don't know if Skype agreed to similar arrangements with, for example, EU law enforcement or USA intelligence agencies.

Landline and mobile phone companies have long given keys to their networks to law enforcement and communications intelligence agencies. We're accustomed to the rule of law applying to our phones. We hope, we assume, we believe, perhaps naïvely, that our phone company keeps our secrets.

It is sad to let go of those illusions regarding Skype.

So this goes back to Skype's brand promise of privacy and security.

Do you trust Skype? 

Would you trust Skype's corporation with your vote?

With your country? With your liberty and freedom?

I'm less certain.

 

photo: Coca-Cola Blāk by The Rocketeer

PamConsult Has a "Fantastic Year"

Amidst all the macro economic turmoil of 2008, there are businesses that have stuck to their knitting and had a quite successful year. Pioneer Skype Partner PamConsult recently reported on their 2008 achievements where they have both built out their product line and provided consulting services that have resulted in a stronger development team and enhanced product offerings.

PamConsult comprises two business divisions: Scendix for software product offerings, such as their widely accepted Pamela utility for Skype (the first Skype Extra going back to 2005) and PamFax, and PamConsult for development consulting where, for instance, they developed Skype for Salesforce.com under a contract with Skype. Some highlights:

• A major accomplishment has been the ongoing growth of PamFax. During the year they built out the infrastructure to provide the robustness and scalability such that PamFax now supports over 130,000 registered users. They have announced plans for a fax-in service as well as Mac support in 2009.
• Pamela has now had over 5 million downloads; early in 2009 they expect to release version 4.5; mcePhone, their Skype integration tool for Windows Media Center, will soon see version 3.
• Finally, PamConsult continues to provide eBay offerings, including the eBay Skype tabs licensed to eBay Germany, eBay France and eBay UK. At last year's eBay Live event, PamConsult won an eBay Star Developer award for their Jaast for Wii, which brings eBay to your TV via Nintendo's Wii console.

It will be interesting to see how PamConsult's Skype partnership evolves in 2009 as the new executive team introduces a comprehensive technology roadmap and revamped partnering programs.

Other posts:

• Radio Free Asia: A Skype Facilitated Broadcasting Service
• PamFax: Adding Click-to-Fax

Product Information and downloads:

• Pamela
• PamFax
• mcePhone for Skype
  

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Phil Wolff's 26 incriminating 2009 Skype Predictions

Last year's Jim Courtney's 2008 predictions and mine. 
In 2009:

1. MacWorld sucks without Steve Jobs.
2. Steve Jobs steps down as Apple CEO.
3. Skype brings back Skypecasts with a new feature: with one click, introduce spammers, con artists, and sexy webcam girls to each other.
4. Skype for Neocortex. Mood based on serotonin levels. Very high quality audio and video by tapping directly into the optic nerve and auditory system. Some side effects.
5. Skype for Lovers. Extension of Skype 4.1. Just one buddy to dial. No interruptions. Ultrasimple UI: click the heart.
6. Skype's new platforms have more active developers than BT Ribbit. More than Google Android. Fewer than Apple iPhone.
7. Litigation. 1530 sleep deprived patients sue Skype for keeping them up late.
8. Google Central will be exciting.
9. Google Video Talk adds multiparty video.
10. The Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) will sell out.
11. Yahoo! fires thousands of people. Decimates the messenger team. Hires a new executive team. Reorganizes. Again.
12. Skype introduces multiparty video. The kids love it. WebEx hates it.
13. Skype for Asterisk gets video call support. Dating sites love it.
14. Skype for WoW builds on Skype for Asterisk. The raiders love it. 
15. Skypephone comes to the Americas via partnership with with US mobile carriers. Wal-Mart will carry it. Nothing for Canada.
16. 3 INQ1 sales will cut into 3 Skypephone sales in the UK.
17. U.S. Mobile Carterfone rules (to free mobile phones from carrier contracts) will be considered by the FCC.
18. VoIP falls from telecom jargon. Even VoIP bloggers stop using the term. The public starts using Skype as a generic name for internet talk.
19. eBay's auction businesses will do well in tough times, better in the second half of the year.
20. Skype will make $630 million in FY2009.
21. Peak Skype usage will top 18 million simultaneous users.
22. Skype will serve 23 billion minutes in 2009Q4.
23. Skype scores product placements in:
    
    
    • Hannah Montana: The Movie, spurring the rise of Skype pajama parties.
    • The Sinatra Club, using the new Skypeoke feature.
    • Star Trek, as ancient technology.
    • Startups will rally to Running Out Of Angels (March 2009).
    • 24 as Cisco cuts ad spending.
    • In My Pocket (2009) is not about mobiles.
24. Skype issues new krypto since its old cryptographic source code escaped from TOM-Skype control
25. Skype Video for Mobile. Skype buys a streaming video service for smart mobile camera phones.
26. China approves SkypeIn and SkypeOut.

tags: skype, predictions, 2009, inq1, skypephone, wal-mart, canada, asterisk, video, ebay, voip, carterfone, WoW, 24, china, tom-skype

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Skype product placement: Who Wants to be a Millionaire (US)

"Millionaire has teamed up with Skype for "Ask The Expert," one of our most fun and innovative lifelines!"

From an August 2008 ABC press release: "Contestants are invited to ask an expert's advice on any question beyond the $1,000 level. Experts appear via a live face-to-face Skype video call and will include newsmakers, journalists, former "Millionaire" contestants, politicians, doctors, professors and trivia champs, among others. Bill Nye appears during the show's first week, airing September 8-12, and Ogi Ogas, a former "Millionaire" contestant who won $500,000, appears during week two, airing September 15-19."

Here's a video clip that shows Skype in action.

This version of Millionaire is in syndication in the US. It hasn't made Nielsen's top-twenty-most-popular-syndicated-shows lately, but it is seen by millions of households every week.

Experts Skype in to the television studio. In this clip, Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, calls in from Pleasantville, New York.

See the little white mark in the upper left corner? He's using Skype's High Quality (640x480@30fps) video.

The expert is shown on a large screen in the studio, exposing him to the in-studio experience and letting the contestant get a feel for how much to trust the expert with a lifeline.

When called on, the expert and the contestant talk to each other and the production team shows them side-by-side to the audience. The expert's reactions to being right, wrong, or not knowing add to the drama. 

On the web side of the business, this is the Millionaire home page. See the Skype artwork (bottom middle with the rainbow)?

The Skype badge takes you to the "Ask an Expert" landing page. It encourages you to download Skype. "It's free, easy and quick to get on Skype so check out all the great information below on how you can use Skype to connect with family and friends!"

This makes the fourth US/Canada television product product placement I know of in 2008. Oprah uses Skype for people to call her show, starting in March 2008. CNN started using Skype for interviews in March. And Skype was mentioned briefly in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent in July 2008 for a bit of character development involving transatlantic romance.

P.S. What television shows, movies, or characters would benefit from a little Skype?

tags: skype, video, television, tv, conferencing, whowantstobeamillionaire, millionaire, marketing, productplacement, game, shows, advertising, call, us, shortz

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SyncMood and Twype for Windows

SyncMood and Twype copy your twitter updates into Skype for Windows. I’ve had great success with Twype for a while. Now I’m trying SyncMood, happily so far. Thanks, Andrej.

This is part of a few broader patterns.

Open Platforms. Skype’s and Twitter’s APIs are public, free, and easy. So people can build apps that work with them.

Social Sync. Update once, see it everywhere you want it seen. As a category, this is getting smarter. I’m seeing useful features like

• Deduplication. Your update gets caught in feedback loops among networks, creating echoes. Deduping dampens the feedback loops. 
• Time stamp preservation. Assures an update’s original date/time is passed through, not the time it was last passed along.
• Accurate provenance. Keeping metadata about an update’s original system/service source.

Lifestream Shaping. Setting up filters and agents so you and others see only what matters, at the best times, in the best media, in the right contexts. One response to social network overload. 

Data Portability. The social platforms, and the sync and lifestreaming tools which use them, put some power in user hands. It puts a little proof behind a promise that your-data-is-really-yours.

Technorati tags: skype, plug-ins, SyncMood, twype, skypeapi, skype api, platforming, twitter, sync, social sync, lifestreams, data portability, dataportability

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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Will Sony layoffs affect Skype distribution?

Skype software runs on the Sony PSP 2000/3000 and Sony Mylo, perhaps on the Playstation 4 some day. Sony Corporation announced they are setting free 8000 employees and 8000 contractors from the 160,000 employee company. The decimation and plant closings should affect Sony's semiconductor, recording media, and television manufacturing most.

We won't know for until next year how this will affect products that can extend Skype's reach.

See also:

• News Release Bereft of Emotion or Humanity: Sony Announces Initiatives to Improve Profitability and Enhance Operational Efficiencies in its Electronics Businesses.
• New York Times, Silicon Alley Insider, CNET layoff coverage.
• Sony Ericson joins the Open Handset Alliance (to make Android handsets).

tags: skype, sony, psp, mylo, sony ericson, layoffs, us, japan

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IPEVO gives free Skype minutes, free US shipping

A message from IPEVO's Caroline Andreolle:

Happy Thanksgiving! To celebrate and thank our customers, we're offering free ground shipping until the end of year (to the Continental US).

And to celebrate that, we're offering 300 free Skype vouchers to all Skype lovers and to our friends at Skype Journal! Simply email iWantSkypeMinutes@gmail.com for your free minutes today!

All vouchers must be redeemed this month, before 31 November 2008, limit one per household, 300 vouchers total.

IPEVO makes Skype USB and desk phones, speakerphones, and webcams.

tags: blackfriday, ipevo, skype, discounts, pricing, free, minutes

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Interview with Julien Decot of Skype

Christopher Smith of Relevantly Speaking interviewed Julien Decot, Director of Strategy for Skype, at the >play Conference last week. Rough transcript follows, emphasis mine.

Q. Hey, it's Christopher Smith here for Relevantly Speaking. We're in Berkeley at the Haas School of Business. We're at the play conference and we're talking with Julian from Skype.

You've got a really enviable position there at Skype. you're a director of strategy, which means you have the ability to see the future, move the company into particular directions. Where are you going right now?

JD. The beauty of working for Skype is the breadth of opportunities you look at is very very wide. I'll give you a few examples. Skype could get into SMBs or enterprise. Skype could move more aggressively into mobile. Skype could get into the web. So there's a flurry of opportunities. And my job is to navigate the ones we should go after first knowing we're only a 500 [person] company.

So a few things that says...

One is: mobility is a big deal for us. There's tremendous appetite from our users to use Skype on the mobile. We don't want just to take the experience on the desktop into mobile. We want to invent something that's very unique to mobile and complements the desktop really nicely.

And also we think, even if it doesn't sound super sexy, just improving the basics of the service making it into the next level is a big deal for us. The best example is video calling in high def for everyone. We think that's really exciting, for example, and we're working very hard at this.

Q. You just released a desktop device to assist in that.

JD. We work with ASUS as a partner. They built the first Skype specific video phone, for example, which allows you, for I think it's a $200 device in the US, to get very simple video calling capabilities from your home without having a computer or anything else. That's one example of things we think are pretty cool.

About Google Video

Q. Last week Google comes out with Gmail Chat and Video in there. Do you find yourself in a defensible position there? Do you think Skype already has a very significant head start?

JD. Every time Google enters a space you have to watch out. They're big and they're very good and they innovate really fast. First thing I'll say we're not very surprised, that's something we've been expecting for a while. We're surprised it took so long.

We think it's a good product, we think the quality is good, it's not great, it's good, a nice implementation.

We think it also validates our idea that video is a big deal. And it's so early that everyone who can come with us and sort of help evangelize the fact that video calling is free for everyone and that it works is good.

Of course it's going to force us to get better and better, but I wouldn't say it's going to change our course. we're going to watch them. That's a company we have a lot of respect for in general.

Search

Q. Discoverability seems to be a common theme in a lot of the conferences we've been attending, the problem of finding both people or audiences for content. How are you guys approaching that problem?

JD. That's a very big question. It totally depends on what you're looking for, if you're looking for content or people.

We spend a lot of time helping you find people. it's a big deal for us to find someone you can communicate with. And linking people is a big deal for us because we're in the communication business.

Finding content is not our business. We'll definitely leverage third parties to do it. We'll let third parties get into Skype, to allow this to happen. We have for example the ability to attach a video mood message to your profile. So we worked with partners; you can attach a video to your message and if I'm connected to you I can click on that video and watch a video clip. That's the kind of thing we're going to do but it's mostly about driving and triggering conversation.

Future?

Q. So looking around the corner what should I anticipate from Skype?

JD. Great mobile applications, across platforms. I don't want to announce anything but look around all the key platforms are coming up. We'll be on there very soon with something pretty radical I think.

Expect the video and voice quality to improve significantly. So expect very very awesome video quality very very soon. And expect a few surprises. If you're a Mac user you'll have a few surprises pretty soon.

Q. Any announcements about the Apple platform?

JD. Come to MacWorld and you'll know more.

See also:

• ASUS PC-free Skype desk videophone, coming October, Skype Journal, September 2008.
• Hands On: ASUS's AiGuru SV1 Grandma-Friendly Skype Videophone, Gizmodo, September 2008.
• GMail Voice and Video Chat: Threading Voice and Video Into Email Dialogues, Skype Journal, November 2008
• Blogger interviews Julien Decot, Skype's director of strategy, Skype Journal, August 2008

tags: skype, trends, strategy, juliendecot, bizdev

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Skype Seeking Skype Developer Community Manager

If we go back to our early September interview with Josh Silverman where we discussed "The Way Ahead - Platforms and Partners", Josh stated in response to our question about addressing ongoing partner communications issues:

What I don't want to do is over promise. Step one is, when you get somebody good in, lay out a plan and then when we're ready to announce some more forward looking things we'll do that.

I take the partner program really seriously and we're aware that we've not invested adequately behind it and want to do more. The first thing we are going to do is hire an experienced, capable leader of that organization who will pull together for me a plan for what resources do we need to invest in -- engineering, partner support, evangelism, technical documentation -- to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly.

Skype is about to take "Step one" and has put up a job posting for a "Manager, Skype Developer Community".

Interested in an extraordinary opportunity to win the hearts and minds of developers all over the world? Are you passionate about the promise of rich Internet communications? If so, Skype needs you to come help change the industry. We are seeking an individual who can help provide knowledge, expertise, and charisma for partners building applications on the Skype Platform.

A comment about the Skype platform:

The Skype Platform provides developers with an open communications development environment with unparalleled richness and reach. With the Skype platform developers can build and deploy differentiated and revenue-generating communications applications, devices, and services for businesses and consumers alike. Since its launch 5 years ago, Skype has grown to over 330 [370] Million registered users across the globe. Skype provides a breadth of rich and integrated communications experiences. Now we are looking for developers to take those capabilities and experiences to another level by integrating Skype into applications, devices, and services on the web. If you are interested in voice over IP, mobile devices, audio coding, video services, rich collaboration, gaming, next generation internet / interactive TV, Location based services and experience as a leader within a community of developers... this is the role for you.

And the challenge:

Your challenge is to drive the Skype Community program that moves the new platform forward, compliments our platform product investments and ultimately delights our partner community and users. Your success will be measured by your ability to work closely with the product teams to develop a comprehensive developer marketing plan, and work with our marketing, product, and business development teams to evangelize Skype's tools, development environment, and unique value proposition to the development community.

You will be part of the newly formed Skype Platform team whose mission is to lead the adoption of Skype's Platform with developers and ISVs. The team is resourced and chartered to secure the future of the Skype Platform with developer audiences that span corporate and commercial developers, device developers, next generation developers in startups, students and social developers that writes plug-ins, widgets and mash-up applications today.

It's a senior management position with responsibilities for leading a renewed Skype Developer program - articulating the vision, analyzing the market space and established best practices, executing on building sustainable developer partnerships, driving the interface between internal Skype resource teams such as developers, business development, marketing and the external developer partners through various outreach activities.

After describing the skills and experience sought, the posting concludes with:

You will be responsible for managing a team of professionals that will support your programs and plans to create a significant and long lasting impact on the community of Skype Software developers. We are looking for a thought leader that can also motivate and raise the enthusiasm of all Skype developers. This is a position with lots of visibility outside of Skype and experience managing media and driving public events is critical.

Location: London, UK or San Jose, CA. (With lots of air miles guaranteed.)

As for Dan York's question about "the team is resourced and chartered", recall that earlier in the same early September interview, Josh mentioned:

Right now we have created the job of GM of Platform; I hope to very soon name a GM of Platform. That person is going to have to really work on what does the architecture need to look like to support this, what are the API's going to be - reference UI's, technical documentation - as well as evangelizing to the broader community forming some of our partnerships, so we have some work to do.

So, I have to ask, in the context of what we heard during the interview: Has Skype appointed the GM of Platform but not announced it yet?

Dan also comments:

For those of us watching the emerging communication/telephony space, we've seen Skype make several different attempts over the years to create a successful developer program. Given their incredible user base and platform, it's been curious to see that they haven't yet found the right formula.

The Developer Program has more or less stalled since my Primer series post last fall discussing the developer partner achievements to that point in time. Yet there remain some basic resources such as API's, a base of about 50 partner applications, and what continues to be world leading technology that gives Skype a head start in architecting and building a complete platform from which developer partners can build successful businesses.

In the meantime we have seen the evolution of the Apple Developer Program for the iPhone where, even with my bias towards the BlackBerry, I have to admit that we have seen some very interesting, innovative and impressive third party applications and mashups. They link voice, presence, location-based services, social networking, search. The results include obtaining real time information for traffic and transit, contributing to a successful US presidential political campaign and finding the nearest Tim Hortons or Starbucks. The most interesting has to be this week's launch of voice activated Google Search, often invoking location based information for assistance.

The overriding challenge for Skype's Developer Community Manager will be to create a winning environment that can foster a similar level of creativity and innovation while generating business wins for both Skype and the developer partners. Or to requote Josh's statement: "to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly."

From my viewpoint, it's the position that will ultimately make or break the restructured Skype. Partner innovation and successful business development are key to the sustainable and increasing revenues required to justify eBay's investment in Skype.

Hat tip to Dan York who first pointed this out in a Twitter tweet.

Tags: Skype, Developer, Skype Extras, Josh Silverman, iPhone, Dan York, Skype Partner Program

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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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Scar Search

"Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory... lasts forever." – Shane Falco, The Replacements

IPEVO's cute handheld pointercam inspired the Scar Search. IPEVO and Rockstar Energy Drinks held the contest this summer, the public voting on the best scar story video.

Winners:  

Jeremy (Grand Prize)

Danielle (Editor’s Choice)

I love this promotion. Intimate, direct, sub-cultural, social, bold. The cutting edge. Scraping the bottom of the elbow. Leaving your mark. Branding your customers; literally.

tags: skype, ipevo, webcam, pointercam, contest, scar, scars, injury, scar search, scarsearch, marketing, promotion, brand, branding

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Two more reasons why SightSpeed is good for Logitech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Logitech to Acquire SightSpeed. Questions Arise.

According to Tech Crunch and GigaOm posts late last night Logitech is about to spend $30 million to acquire SightSpeed, the video messaging and video conferencing service that recently was selected ot provide the infrastructure for Dell's Video Chat. Congratulations to Peter Csathy and his team. And to Andy Abramson and his team; another Comunicano client achieves success.

Seems like the video calling and video conferencing market is about to heat up. There will be another post later this morning involving an announcement that can bring video conferencing to a much broader user audience than Skype's (though it's not exactly insignificant) and SightSpeed's.
Questions that arise from this acquisition:

• How is Logitech able to continue to partner with services such as Skype when they are now entering the desktop video services market? Logitech's co-operation was vital to Skype's ability to provide High Quality Video.
  
• Or is it a produce marketing acquisition? Is Logitech acquiring SightSpeed simply to have additional collateral software to provide with their webcam offerings? Will we start to see Logitech's Carl-Zeiss optics in embedded webcams on Dell PC's?

The economy may be in recession; it's driving less travel and more audio and video conferencing. They're seeing a rise in customers and use of audio conferencing at both HiDef Conferencing and Calliflower. It will be an interesting winter for expanding user experiences involving desktop video.

Logitech Press Release

Update: Alec Saunders comments on the same theme here.
Tags: Logitech, SightSpeed, Skype, Peter Csathy, Tech Crunc, GigaOm, HiDef Conferencing, Calliflower

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iSkoot Available Through Android Market on T-Mobile's Newly Launched G-1

The new G-1 phone based on Google's Android platform is slowing getting out to market this week through T-Mobile stores in U.S. locations where T-Mobile supports the 3G wireless protocol. At launch there appear to be about 50 third party applications available for download to the G-1 via Android Market.
One of those applications is iSkoot for Skype. From iSkoot's description at Android Market:

iSkoot for Skype puts the features of Skype in your Android handset. Acess your Skype contacts, make & receive Skype calls, chat, and place SkypeOut calls to phone numbers all over the world. iSkoot delivers unsurpassed mobile Skype call quality and does not require a WiFi connection.

From the iSkoot press release:

iSkoot for Skype makes it easy and affordable for people to keep in touch with friends, family and contacts with an always-on-the-go lifestyle. iSkoot for Skype leverages the voice-optimized circuit-switched wireless networks of mobile carriers, allowing for full operation even without access to WiFi or 3G networks and ensuring the best possible call quality. Normal carrier voice and data charges always apply.

Make SkypeOut calls? Seems like T-Mobile is the first North America carrier to tolerate SkypeOut calling from a mobile handset over a 3G network. (3 recently added SkypeOut calling to the various Skype/iSkoot-enabled services they support, including Skypephone; Truphone for iPhone only works over a WiFi connection.) T-Mobile will make their revenue through the "local" minutes required to place a Skype call via iSkoot.
VoIP over 3G? Not really, recall that the iSkoot model is to use the data channel for chat messaging and call setup information. The voice call itself is handled over the much more robust and voice-friendly GSM voice channel.
And why iSkoot on the Android platform before on the iPhone? Seems that the Android platform fully supports the background multi-tasking requirement of any Skype-enabled product where you want to have Skype chat sessions running in background - while using any other Android application - and only want to bring them forward when a new message appears. That's my experience when using iSkoot on my Blackberry Bold.

• iSkoot for Skype on Android Market made Tech Crunch's Top 10 Android Launch Apps.
• Android Developers Blog: Android Market: Now available for users.

Tags: iSkoot, Android, T-Moible, G-1, SkypeOut, Skype

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HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

HiDef Conferencing, a leading audio conferencing service that incorporates HD Voice when accessed via Skype, but can also be accessed via designated country-specific numbers and toll-free 800 numbers, wants to assist those businesses and professionals who can save travel and meeting costs in today's economic environment through teleconferencing services. As its key differentiator HiDef Conferencing is a server-supported business grade conferencing service with full host/moderator support as opposed to Skype's multi-party conversation service (mistakenly called "Conference Calling").
For their current customers they have waived their monthly subscription fees for the balance of 2008; new subscribers can now have a free trial that lasts until December 31, 2008.
As a free trial subscriber, what do you get?

• Up to 25 participants in a conference.
• Free Web Controls, Recording and Hand-raising
• No reservations required
• Unlimited Skype access duration
• Participants responsible for long distance charges to the country's HiDef Conferencing access number

Recall that not only do Skype-enabled participants have unlimited access to calls, they also have the benefit of Skype's inherent high quality HD Voice wideband audio when both speaker and listener are participating via Skype. To quote Tom Evslin's experience earlier this year:

I used to think the reason I have a hard time understanding people on the phone is because I can’t see their lips and their expressions. Now I realize much of the problem is the terrible audio quality – which we’re so accustomed to – of a traditional phone call.

Landline and wireless participants remain limited to the audio bandwidth inherent to the underlying landline or wireless service.
With an Outlook plug-in it's easy to set up a call from Outlook; calls can also be set up via the HiDef Conferencing website.

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

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Skype Journal Interviews Josh Silverman: The Way Ahead - Markets

This is the fifth in a series of posts resulting from an interview a week ago Friday with Josh Silverman, Skype's recently appointed President. In this post we talk about addressing the small-to-medium business market as well as various geographical markets.
Over its five years, Skype has built up, almost totally virally, a significant base of users who take advantage of Skype to not only reduce their business communications costs but also to communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers around the world. At the same time various Skype software partners have built offerings, such as Pamela, PamFax and Skylook, that either focus on Skype as a business communications tool or include Skype amongst their options for calling. Within Skype's own offerings, the Business Control Panel provides the tools for a system administrator to handle both the deployment of Skype and the administration of Skype accounts within a business's operations.
OnState is a primary example of the latter. They have built up a call center offering that takes full advantage of both instant messaging chat and voice in dealing with both inbound and outbound calls; they also take advantage of the three founders' combined over sixty years' experience participating in the call center market. Yet, they encountered many opportunities where they had to go back to Skype for assistance since, for one reason or another, Skype's program were insufficient to address business users' requirement. The result is that today OnState offers their customers "one stop shopping" whereby, on acquiring a customer, OnState takes on responsibility for addressing Skype subscription needs, hardware requirements (headsets and handsets, implementation issues and first level technical support.
The Business Control Panel has had its limitations also; the main fear has been to mitigate potential for fraudulent or unauthorized activity through transaction value and volume licensing limits.
As for geographical markets, Skype met a much larger need for communications cost reductions in Europe and Asia than in North America. As a result over 80% of Skype's revenues continue to come from outside the U.S. The two primary needs met in North America are for "Friends and Family" calling outside North America and small businesses who are working to grow internationally - both internally and with their suppliers and customers.
In growing internationally, there has been the challenge of building user bases in widely diverse markets; "free", "easy-to-install" and a whole lot of viral marketing action have introduced significant adoption around the world. But this success has led to more business-oriented challenges in working out termination agreements, establishing effective multi-currency transaction systems (although being an eBay co-unit of PayPal certainly helps), multiple language versions of software (27 at last count) and providing multi-lingual, internationally available technical support. (We'll talk about marketing and more about technical support in future posts in this series.)
We asked Josh about the Skype's approach to the business market:

JS: Skype in the business market. There's more that needs to be done. (you guys are smart, you're asking all the right questions). Platform is a huge opportunity for us; business is another big opportunity for us. About half of the communications market is business; we have a great solution, especially for small-to-medium size businesses. We haven't tailored that solution to businesses very much; we haven't communicated to businesses that we have that solution. In the new organizational design one of the pieces of that will be to build out a business unit focused on small-to-medium size businesses where we'll have some resources available to tailor our product and some sales and marketing resources to work ... I don't think that we'll be directly selling to small-to-medium size businesses but we can work with VAR's to help support them in bringing Skype to businesses.

(Note this interview occurred two weeks prior to last week's announcement of Skype for Asterisk, a program that leverages Digium's Asterisk reseller channel for sales, implementation and ongoing support requirements.)
We then moved on to ask about various geographical markets:
SJ: North America. (Thank God for Oprah!) Skype has become much more a household name this past year (with an acknowledgement to Don Albert, GM North America). What does it take to keep that business going forward in U.S. and Canada and what are the strategies for U.S. and Canada?

JS: We're very aware that the number one way to grow Skype is to build products the users love. That is our first mandate always. Once you have a product users love, we can accelerate it by some smart marketing programs. (By the way if you don't have a product that users love no amount of marketing on earth will save you, right?) So we do have a product that users love and I don't think we have done as much as we could to communicate that.
Oprah is a great example. It is not our intention and people should not expect massive multi-million dollar marketing budgets from Skype. But there are some smart tactical things we can do working together with evangelists like Oprah to build awareness. It's our belief that once you've grown awareness, people will try it; once they try it they'll love it. and the rest takes care of itself. At the Democratic national convention we were quite happy to see many of the national broadcasters using Skype as a way to expand their coverage and you should be looking for more programs like that in the United States in the year to come.

SJ: China is your biggest market?

JS: In terms of total users it's one of our top markets; the answer is yes.

SJ: QQ is still kicking butt in China? What strategy do you have in your existing partnership with Tom?

JS: We have a great partnership with Tom who knows the local market very well. Tom is also a very entrepreneurial, innovative, fast moving company. We're very pleased to be partnering with them; they're the right partner to continue building our presence in China.

SJ: Do you have your own people in Asia?

JS: A couple of people in Asia who work with our partners to make sure they're getting the support they need and also giving us real feedback from the market on what we need to be doing on [our] core platform to be able to support Asia better.

SJ: How about India?

JS: We don't have anyone working in India. We don't have a partnership in India to announce but we are seeing good growth in India but we think it's a terrific market and we are expecting to have more focus on that in 2009
My observation, five months in, [is that] markets where Skype has the most power are markets where you have high broadband connectivity, you have a large ex-pat population, and where the local telephony system is not as efficient as it could be. Many of the developing markets meet that profile so we think we have a huge opportunity in developing markets such as India and it's our intention to focus more on that in the coming year.

SJ: To succeed in the mobile market place, mobile device manufacturers have had to build carrier relationships. What does Skype need to do with either handset manufacturers and/ or carriers to succeed in the mobile market?

JS: I don't think the carriers should be able to dictate what software the users get to use. any company, the smallest startup in the world, if it has really outstanding software ought to be able to take on the whole world and not have to hire 50 people to develop relationships with 300 carriers.

Skype Journal Interviews Josh Silverman: The Way Ahead - Platform and Partners

This is the fourth in a series of posts resulting from an interview a week ago Friday with Josh Silverman, Skype's recently appointed President. In this post we talk about directions for the Skype platform and partner programs.
When I first attended a Skype developer event in June 2006, there was lots of enthusiasm for the Skype partner program and for its integration into various third party applications and service offerings. Several of the feature requests, such as call transfer and access to the voice stream, that had come to the surface by the time of this event, have since been implemented. In December 2006 Skype announced the Skype Extras program for which there are over 100 offerings available, mostly for the consumer user but the list also includes about ten in the small-to-medium business space. Most importantly, partners have been asking not only for a platform roadmap but also for execution on that roadmap.
Skype Extras included a publishing and transaction platform, yet to date, only PamConsult has taken full advantage of these feature for its well received (and award winning) PamFax offering. On the other hand, OnState has been able to figure out how to provide a friction-free full services program for its call center customer base. However, over the past eight months market visibility of any significance for the entire Skype partner program has just not been there. Yet we see "Skype access" continue to be built into various platforms such as Ribbit and Voxeo. Skype Certification exists for only seventeen offerings. InnerPass has received Skype Certification two weeks ago (review coming). At IT Expo last week in Los Angeles I came across several service providers and application developers who wanted to have a Skype presence in their offerings.
On the hardware side there have been many innovative offerings; I have experienced many of them. As confirmed by 3 executives at last Thursday's Mobilize 08 event, the Skypephone has met with phenomenal acceptance in the nine countries serviced by 3. Yet several hardware partners have drifted away to the point where we only see limited visibility for Philips, GE and IPevo dual mode (Skype and landline) phones and a few accessory products, such as the FreeTalk Wireless Stereo Headset, from InStoreSolutions (who largely address the European market). Beyond the Skype Store availability, WalMart is carrying Skype hardware in the U.S. (and I found some at Fry's in Sunnyvale this past Saturday).
Frankly, sorting out its platform strategy and partner relationships, and giving them appropriate visibility, is perhaps one of the biggest challenges that Josh and his team face in sustaining Skype's presence in the IP-based conversation space. In our interview with Josh it became quite apparent that these issues have not missed Josh's scrutiny leading up to the business reorganization we have been discussing in the various posts in this series:
SJ: In your interview with Om Malik yesterday you mentioned as one of your key growth initiatives "Skype as a platform, embedding Skype as the conversation infrastructure for devices and services". Tell use more:

JS: We're incredibly lucky that almost everyone in the world wants to do something with us. That's fortunate because we need to be everywhere. For Skype to be successful and to fulfill its full potential we need to be part of every device and every communications experience. We can't do that on our own. We need a really robust platform that allows us to be part of other people's experiences or devices and allow other people to be part of us. We all recognize that we have a long way to get from where we are today to there. With the relatively small program we have and small investment we have made we have 15,000 partners who have signed up for our program today. I think that's a great indication that if we really invest behind this we can do something magical.

SJ: What would that future platform look like?

JS: What we want to do is lay out a set of principles around the platform that say:

• we want people to be able to incorporate Skype into their experience.
• It should be the full Skype stack of functionality
• it should include all of our feature set and not just hive off one piece or two pieces.
• When you use Skype you should know you're using Skype and
• you should have a SkypeID which works across all of our experiences,

So somebody who wants to take Skype and build it into their experience but create a walled garden of "only within their experience" doesn't build value for the greater ecosystem. If you start with Skype on one experience and then you go to another experience with another platform partner, you still need to be able to communicate. There needs to be one SkypeID that works everywhere and then it needs to hold true to some basic sense of brand principles around what the Skype brand should be. Beyond those principles we really want to allow people to innovate and use Skype and do what they will to extend the functionality for our users.

SJ: Has the architecture for this started?

JS: Right now we have created the job of GM of Platform; I hope to very soon name a GM of Platform. That person is going to have to really work on what does the architecture need to look like to support this, what are the API's going to be - reference UI's, technical documentation - as well as evangelizing to the broader community forming some of our partnerships, so we have some work to do.

SJ: Is the job posted on your job board?

JS: Not yet, we have some candidates; but if there are folks in your community that are excited by this and we haven't already filled this in the coming days [faded away but implication was to apply].

SJ: Is there a timeline?

JS: I don't want to speculate too much. We do have a API [set] today, we do have lots of people working with the API's so we have something to build from. I'm not an expert. I wouldn't be able to lay out a timeline but we are going to get an expert who can lay out a timeline. ... As with everything at Skype, we want to be fast but also make sure we do it well, in particular with a platform. It's got to be well thought through so we support our partners really well. We know there's a big responsibility in there and we take it seriously.

SJ: Would you be looking at getting the partners involved in helping design that platform and getting some feedback on it?

JS:I think that would be essential. One of the things I'm pretty passionate about is always bringing the voice of the customer in early to anything we're trying to do and I think that, for the platform, that would be absolutely essential.

SJ: What are you looking at to address ongoing partner communications issues with respect to the partner program?

JS: I take the partner program really seriously and we're aware that we've not invested adequately behind it and want to do more. The first thing we are going to do is hire an experienced, capable leader of that organization who will pull together for me a plan for what resources do we need to invest in -- engineering, partner support, evangelism, technical documentation -- to make sure we build an organization that can support our partners robustly.
What I don't want to do is over promise. Step one is, when you get somebody good in, lay out a plan and then when we're ready to announce some more forward looking things we'll do that.

Changes are not going to happen overnight when Skype is acquiring 300,000 new registrations per day and profitable. But, based on the strategy and principles outlined by Josh in this interview, going forward we should be looking to see within a three to six month timeframe:

• Announcements of the appointment of two key senior executives who bring along experience in building platforms and partnerships
• A platform architecture and developer roadmap
• Revamped plans for Skype's hardware and software partner programs

It will also be most interesting to see what forums or other means Skype provides for input into the platform architecture and developer roadmap strategy. Execution is everything, especially at this stage of Skype's growth within the IP-based conversation space.
(For background on Skype's partner program history check out: A Primer for Skype's Direction - Skype's Extras Gallery and Developer Partner Program. And for an example of what attracts developers to Skype as an ecosystem check out "On Spotlight: Don Kennedy AKA TheUberOverLord".)
Next: Markets: Business and Geographical

eBay - Skype Synergy: The Missed Viral Opportunity - Post 2 of 2

To: Meg Whitman,
CEO, eBay

That was quite the quarterly report; lots of good news. Congratulations to the entire eBay team (including Skype, of course). But there is the Skype monetization issue to address. Following up on my other post Wednesday, I think I found one way to contribute to this while at CES. Bottom line: it can bring in more Skype registrations of eBay members (@ $0.38 Skype revenue per account per quarter), increase the fun and enthusiasm associated with participating in eBay auctions while minimizing desktop real estate and probably is the most virally intuitive way to justify the Skype acquisition.

In Wednesday's post I drew attention to the eBay Tab for Skype available for eBay U.S. members. It has significant usability issues and definitely results in a negative user experience. You mentioned in the analyst conference call Wednesday that priorities for 2007 include a focus on improving the user experience and experimenting with Skype to increase the fun and excitement associated with an auction. (BTW, Jordan Banks, Managing Director for Canada, at a presentation in Toronto last night, reinforced that theme when he talked about the importance of understanding user behavior and finding an action point within 2 clicks.)

One of your eBay and Skype developer partners, Germany-based PamConsult, has already developed a solution. (Their Pamela-Systems Call Recorder is ranked third in terms of Skype Extras Downloads.) In fact, their eBay Skype Tab has been licensed by eBay Germany, eBay France and eBay U.K. Based on the slide show of screen shots below enhanced by an accompanying video and a discussion with one of the principles of PamConsult at CES, their eBay Tab for Skype:

• provides a positive user experience,
• allows an eBay member to carry out ALL their major eBay activities within a Skype Tab and
• basically elevates their eBay activity to the level of Skype IM activity within the Skype client both in terms of delivering real time information and creating a truly interactive experience
• has the potential to virally drive Skype subscriptions by eBay members.

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

The user experience provided by this version of an eBay Skype Tab brings to the table:

• a user login that is accessible and visible -- note the same screen also shows the day's top auctions
• an eBay search capability for logged-in members
• complete item descriptions with the Tab itself (no need to open a web browser)
• a bid confirmation screen
• real time notification of the upcoming end of an auction
• options for user determined parameters
• as well as access to My eBay
• appeals directly to both buyers and sellers (whereas SkypeMe buttons are targeted at sellers to install on their listings)

To provide a more real time experience (pardon the German but you get the flavor):

Bottom line is that all eBay members can participate interactively in the full eBay auction process within the Skype client, obtain real time information and switch quickly between eBay and Skype activities. Did I mention it also saves on desktop real estate? And, most importantly, it has viral potential.

Merging and integrating acquisitions is not trivial; been there, participated in that! But, aside from generating more revenue for both Skype and eBay, this situation demonstrates: the developers of a product must be passionate about what they are doing. The Pamela team understands both eBay and Skype infrastructure as well as the Skype and eBay user cultures in a way that would take months if not years for an internal synergy between eBay and Skype to develop. (I have had experience with situations where "big" companies thought they could do a better job than a dedicated solution provider on an infrastructure task and eventually came back to the solution provider to get the job done right.) And it did not go unnoticed that this solution has been licensed by the two eBay European subsidiaries whom you highlighted in the analyst conference call Wednesday.

Let me do a calculation associated with monetization: Skype generates $0.38 per registered account per quarter (~$1.52 per year). With 97 million eBay U.S. members that represents a minimum sustainable market size of $148 million for Skype. Now, if one could just raise the revenue per registered account! Or considering the North American Unlimited Plan, at $29.95 per year, the market size to consider booms to over $1.4B!

BTW, PamConsult was participating in the AMD booth demonstrating eBay auctions through an ATI set top box via the Windows Media shell within Windows Vista. Imagine eBay auctions for the SuperBowl championship clothing immediately after the game!

Have a great Weekend-Before-SuperBowl!

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