Weekly reading

Using Skype

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

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

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

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

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

Too Much Information.

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

Our community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download Skype for Windows 4.1 Gold

Download Skype for Windows 4.1.0.136. File size 22 MB. Official release. Release date: June 30, 2009. File name: SkypeSetup.exe. No features added from the 4.1 beta, launched a month ago, but it fixes bugs.

Dan York takes aim at Skype's product staging:

Skype's continued belief in a fragmented, fractured, siloed platform-specific product strategy is still a path of monumental stupidity, in my opinion. I've ranted about this before. It's still the same.

In contrast, Mozilla comes out with Firefox 3.5 on the same day across all three operating systems. For any given Firefox release, there is tons of attention and interest because everyone can download, try it out, write about it, tweet about it and generally use it. There's a good buzz that can happen.

tags: skype, windows, release, 4.1

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

Skype for Windows Mobile 3.0 Gold

Download Skype 3.0 for Windows Phones. Current version: 3.0.0.256 (gold). Release date: June 29, 2009 (beta started in March 2009). New features: Send files Skype-to-Skype, Send texts (SMS). WindowsForDevices summary.

tags: skype, windows, windows mobile, download, release

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.

Dryburgh: What's after Skype? Intent.

eBay is preparing to spin-out Skype, setting it free to steer its own course. Almost six years ago Skype redefined realtime communications and changed the industry. Lee Dryburgh, the man behind the Emerging Communications Conference, shared some thoughts with me about his vision for what comes next. – Phil Wolff

I spent many years thinking about telephony, seven days a week, in a way it “destroyed” my life in a mental health sense during those years trying to ascertain where it was going between 2005-2020. It was clear to me that what had existed for over a century and which today generates revenues that dwarf the Internet, was going to be surpassed and that we had already put one foot on the cliff edge. It’s the big reason I kicked off the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards, because no other event seemed to have enough inherent vision.

Where is it going?

First you’ve got the telephony application itself. Because of the exceptional widespread deployment of the telephone, it’s century long cultural embedment, extreme ease of use and very low barriers to usage, it’s not going away in a big way, at any time least soon. It’s far too big and you’ve got far too much inertia in and around it.

Relationships replaces Voice as the substrate in clients. 

However because its substantial list of deficiencies grows, what we are seeing emerging and what will gain ever further traction is software based voice-enabled, communication technologies. Interestingly voice may not be the “substrate” of these clients, “relationships” will be, both between people and things.

Second, we’ve got the economic model behind it. Even today, well over a hundred years since it’s original inception, we still have the same usage paradigms and economic models put in place at the time of the first electro-mechanical switches.

Now the keyword in all of this is “software.” Six years ago, the Skype software client was released. It was the harbinger of change to come. It called into question the need for very expensive dedicated underlying transport networks by pushing edge intelligence into the Codec layer to deal with less than ideal networks. It called into question the need for dedicated telecom hardware in the core network, by using the edge-clients to perform the work in a decentralised fashion. It called into question the inherent limited geographical structuring of telecom operators themselves; software does not face such physical and regulatory boundaries; distribution is relatively zero-cost; and worse still for the operator model, by it’s global footprint, it achieves unprecedented scale.

Looking forwards, we can consider Skype phase one.

Phase two is emerging on the horizon and it will have deeper impact yet. In fact, played out it will change social governance, market economics, how humans relate to each other and even the nature of geo-politics. It’s likely to have ramifications on all social order. In the long-term view, it will also be the “new” multi-trillion dollar market replacing much of what today is the multi-trillion-telephony market.

Phase two is built around an economic model that puts human time and attention at a premium as opposed to dedicated circuits, specialist hardware and personnel. It’s the opposite of what we experience today with telephony, where human time and attention is wasted; ringing, call queues, voice mail boxes, IVR trees, repetitious verbal transfer of static information such as credit card numbers, call transfers and such like.

And that’s just a quick C2B example. C2C has similar lunacy, for example needing to place a telephone call to request a single piece of discrete information or the other person’s location. The economic crisis experienced worldwide is likely to highlight such sources of great inefficiency.

Here is another angle to get you thinking, more and more calls originate from a number noted on a Website and yet when the call is placed, no information is passed with the call about what the context of the call. It’s lost, so each end has to orally work more at the beginning that would otherwise be necessary. Billions of minutes are needlessly wasted on a every day globally.

Phase two is about intention-based economics. It’s focused on fulfilling intentions and desires. Another way of putting it is we no longer need to care about network availability (i.e. “dial tone”), and reaching an endpoint (i.e. A telephone). Network availability and endpoint reachability is assumed. What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. I’m not saying we need to become psychologists and anthropologists. But what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

If any of this seems abstract at the moment, think about what makes Google money, Ad Words. Google provides search free to the consumer in order to gain eyeballs (mass attention) and takes the search parameter to try and deduce intention. It then sells that attention and intention data upstream to advertisers. Google even has machines reading your emails in order to deduce your possible intentions and desires, which is why you may often find an eerily relevant ad above your Gmail account inbox. The underlying reason for the Android initiative surely has to be to gain access to better intention deriving data in order to sell upstream to advertisers.

Yet telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

To make the situation even worse, telecoms today is still charging downstream to the consumer, ignores money and wishes of upstream parties (like retailers, media companies for example). Because the telecom business model and regulation is pretty much hard nailed like the network itself, the bulk of telecom operators are not likely to be able to transition in time before other entrants move in who appreciate the new economics and who don’t have ball and chain legacy. New entrants and probably a third of telecom operators will transition successfully around phase two.

You’re probably wondering what phase two looks like from the point of view of applications? This is where things get very abstract and potentially the prose could get long-winded. But this is not to be unexpected since the foundation is in the abstract with the word “intention.” To try and get a flavour of the phase two application direction, imagine for a start that the demarcation lines between content, information access, entertainment, ecommerce unravel ever further and the result is intrinsically tied to an ever smarter fusion of more communication modalities. Now underpin that with attention and intention based economics.

Now dream a little.

tags: skype, strategy, intent, intention, intentioneconomy, presence, richpresence, privacy

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

PamFax launches in Japan; lowers rates to China and 12 other countries

Send a fax for €0,09 per page (US$0.13) to Singapore, Israel, Aland Islands, Malaysia, Finland, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Venezuela, Cyprus, Argentina, and Estonia. PamFax Pro subscribers pay €0,06. (Seems to be part of a larger trend. Skype cut rates to Turkey.)

And in today's news, PamConsult is now selling a localized release of PamFax for the Japanese market. You can fax to Japan at the same rates. Here's PamFax's page operated by PamConsult's distribution partner, Fusion Network Services Corporation. 

tags: skype, japan, china, pamfax, pamconsult, fax, ipfax, fusiongol, fusion

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

Roundup – Skype news

Yugma desktop sharing still hosts multiparty Skype meetings. New CEO tells TMC's Patrick Bernard this Skype partner is restarting after layoffs and generally winding down the company. From happier times, Skype Journal wrote up: Yugma Skype Edition: Cross Platform Desktop Sharing, Yugma Skype Edition Version 3: Fluid Collaboration, Yugma Skype Becomes Skype Certified. Yugma may avoid Convenos' dismal fate. Skype offered its own 1-to-1 desktop sharing this year, throwing independent developers under the bus to pursue WebEx market.

PrettyMay partners with Sangoma, one of Skype's oldest independent software developers, announced Sangoma, a VoIP hardware manufacturer, will sell their Skype PBX Gateway running PrettyMay Skype trunking software. Excellent distribution for PrettyMay, new markets and 4/5 stars for saving money. Sangoma can now compete more directly with VoSKY's Skype trunking systems, some of which distributed partnership with Skype.

Truphone beats Skype to push notifications on the iPhone. Martin Bryant says the push service on iPhone 3.0 software lets people call you via truphone even if you're using another app. "If someone calls your Truphone number and you’re not using the app they’re prompted to leave a voicemail message. A notification is then pushed to your iPhone inviting you to listen to the recording."

NumberGarage does for phone numbers what domain hosts do for domains. "NumberGarage™ empowers people to manage their phone numbers, with or without phone service, all from the NumberGarage™ Web site." Park and forward phone numbers, just like at GoDaddy.

Google reserves a million phone numbers from Level 3. Probably for Google Voice customers. Is that a weekend supply, like Apple iPhone 3G S sales?

Courts uphold TiVo patents on playing, pausing, rewinding streaming video. Do TiVo patents apply to voicemail/videomail too? Many mobile phones now offer some TiVo-like features for voice and video messaging.

Skype cuts SkypeOut rates to Turkey mobiles and landlines. Turkey's landline prices are falling toward Skype's world rate of about €1 per hour. Meanwhile telcos in other countries raised rates a little: Albania – Mobile, Benin, Comoros and Mayotte, El Salvador – Mobile, Malawi and Malawi – Mobile, Swaziland, Togo, Wallis and Futuna.

eComm, The Emerging Communications Conference 2009b (Amsterdam), issued a Call For Speakers. It's a boring read, so they really need your creative, mind-blowing, insightful, world changing, quintessentially European, future bending proposals.

tags: skype, truphone, numbergarage, google, ecomm, sangoma, prettymay, yugma, tivo, million

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

Skype competitors suck. So says recruiting video.

meaningfulwork asks "Has your job expired?" in this video.

This leads to http://MyJobHasExpired.com.

Which leads to http://newjobs.skype.com/

The concept started with Skype alumnus Villu Arak (@villuarak), now CEO of Hill & Knowlton Estonia who brought the idea to Skype. The collaboration started then. Villu said "all actors, except for the evil dandruff-skiing boss, are Skype employees who volunteered to participate. The director is Andres Maimik, a young Estonian filmmaker who also does commercial work through the Kuukulgur production company."

I used to work in the staffing industry and it loves industrial metrics like time-to-fill-an-opening and average-cost-to-advertise-a-job.

This campaign seems focused on attracting people with Skype's personality traits. Quirky humor, curiosity, ambition, sense of self worth, a desire to have your work matter. Not to mention you're a YouTube user, you're socially active online, you're a knowledge worker. And maybe you're ready to be appreciated, to make a difference, to do something new and challenging. To be with people like you.

In other words, instead of driving traffic to the job site by keywords from skills ("Cocoa developer wanted"), Skype's recruiting from a smaller pool of people who might actually fit Skype's playful, rebellious culture. (Among other things, a culture where sharing videos is an easy, common social gesture.) This should be a much better return on everyone's time.

tags: skype, hr, staffing, humor, recruiting, advertising, branding, brand, hillandknowlton, ee, estonia, myjobhasexpired, newjobs.skype.com

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.

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.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

King of Broadband

FCC acting chairman Michael Copps just named Blair Levin to coordinate the construction of the FCC's broadband plan. Thank you, Chairman Copps! Mazel Tov, Mr. Levin!

Astoundingly great, ubiquitous, pervasive, cheap, uncensored, clean, accessible, fair and market-driven broadband might be possible with a national plan. A former commissioner, Levin understands the deeper tech, social, economic and political forces at play, and the players. Skype's Chris Libertelli told FierceVoIP last year that "Levin would make an excellent FCC chairman." (He didn't get the job.) Blair's a nice guy who knows the lyrics to Winnie the Pooh songs.

The first months of the Obama administration's broadband efforts focused on quick, temporary, job creating projects. In his new role, Levin focus on "the whole ballgame." The video is from January 2009's State of the Net Conference where he discusses some of the gaps a national broadband plan could discover and fill.

Great broadband makes Skype better, so this appointment is a hopeful portent.

tags: blairlevin, fcc, broadband, internetcaucus, usa

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.

Should Skype clients be Wave containers?

Last week Google announced Wave, a pre-alpha browser application project. The experience is like instant messaging but with the extensibility and variety you might find in facebook or OpenSocial applications. Wave can be highly decentralized, like email, with Wave servers hosted by any person or company that cares to. Wave clients run in browsers. (Good to know: Skype desktop clients have tiny browsers inside.)

Extensibility makes a container useful in more ways. Like adding new tools to your Swiss Army knife or multitool. Apps could change what goes on inside the chat. We will be able to combine them in interesting ways. To surround chat with useful information about people. To enrich ways we discover people to talk with, to initiate conversations, to conduct those conversations using the right tools for that conversation, and to use the history of those conversations meaningfully.

Wave solves several Skype problems:

1. One size doesn't fit all. People are diverse. So are the ways we want to talk. Skype is mastering the middle ground, ignoring the long tail of experience demand.
2. Skype is closed. Promoting the Skype namespace so non-Skype users can chat with Skypers should increase demand for access to Skype services. New blood to boost the number of people in the Skype network. 
3. Skype isn't developer-bait. Skype might siphon off Wave talent. Opening up Skype to developers gives them immediate access to a world market, a great opportunity to bring them in to the Skype developer program. Done well, you might do without giving up control of Skype's added value.
4. Skype doesn't run in browsers. Waving the Skype desktop client could lead to a browser-based rich Internet application, a Skype that runs in a browser without a 20MB download.

The flip side is opportunity:

1. Skype meets more needs (lock-in in more markets).
2. Skype attracts new customers (faster word of mouth).
3. Skype attracts developers (lighter platform, bigger market).
4. Skype runs everywhere (not just in Skype clients).

What would you like to see Skype become?

tags: skype, google, wave, ebay, design, im, chat, voip, voim

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

Why Oprah's Skype day was ineffective: tone and Skype

Skype earned market acceptance when Oprah said "I love Skype" in 2008. Skype started to become a household name as Oprah brought guests to her her weekday show.

Thursday, a year later, she spent an hour in Skype's honor. Nothing happened; Skype's download rate didn't budge.

The "Where the Skype Are You?" show aired Thursday, 05/21/09, at 4:00 pm in most US and Canada markets, rolling across time zones. U.S. Memorial Day weekend might have dampened the "Oprah Effect." A few weeks' earlier, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a Nielsen Television rating of 5.4, 6,197,000 audience, and 7,110,000 viewers for the week of 04/27 - 05/03 2009.

Why didn't Oprah's Skype day work?

The small problem: The tone was wrong. It felt like an infomercial more than a celebration of broadband Internet's ubiquity. Oprah's delivery was wooden, the Skype conversations banal, video quality variable.

This episode must have looked great on paper. Skype reinforces several Oprah themes: Surviving tough economic times by using free or cheaper tools. The importance of family and communication. That we live in a connected world and affect each other. 

Sadly, Oprah's regulars already knew the Skype basics, having seen dozens of guest appearances over Skype. Skype day became a "best of" show; not the most exciting format.

The huge problem: Fans could not Skype Oprah. Unlike twitter, where Oprah created an account that everyone could follow and message, Oprah did not give out a Skype account for fans to befriend. People want to be closer to their celebrities so, for example, they followed Oprah on twitter; 1,182,301 at last count.

Why couldn't a million fans Skype Oprah?

Twitter scales well for their news and celebrity users (ones with high TV ratings). Fame changes relationships from symmetrical (we friend each other) to off the charts. 1,182,301 twitterers follow Oprah, Oprah follows 14.

Could Skype handle an Oprah account? Or a Coke, a White House, or an American Idol account? What would happen if someone with a fan base used the web and television to invite a million people to befriend them in Skype?  No PSTN, just in-network Skype activity. One user with a million friends.

Skype is engineered for the average user, with a handful of contacts and modest levels of activity. For the most part, Skype's network is thin, flat, like the long tail in a power curve.

Power skypers, like Skype Journal readers and those who work at Skype or who use Skype for selling, may have a few hundred or a few thousand contacts.

Stressors come to mind:

1. Approval work flow. Can you imagine opening up your Skype client in the morning to approve a hundred new contacts? You might get through 100 in 15 minutes if you click 'add to contacts' blindly. 1000 per day at 6 seconds each? Almost two hours. A million? 1,666 hours, about nine months. For all practical purposes, this must be automated.
2. Client Account Storage. Can your Skype client hold a million contacts? No. Even if it was the only software running and you had all the memory in the world, your Skype client was never built to hold that large a contact list. While some enterprises have hundreds of thousands of employees and and millions of stakeholders, Skype for Windows or Mac will slow to a crawl and crash when loading that many contacts. Let's say each new contact's profile, avatar, and history uses .1 MB. The contact list alone would be 100k MB. Skype still thinks like a phone or mobile phone company, not like a social network.
3. Presence and Activity Streams. Skype updates your friends when you log on, log off, or otherwise change your presence. A Skype client would be very busy with hundreds of thousands of mood and availability updates. Presence data might be very useful to the celebrity if you want to narrowcast updates ("today's show is about puppies") only to people who are online; no need for you to see the message when you log in next week.
4. Navigation. Skype's UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
5. Filtering contact activity. If you friend them, they will IM, call, and send you files. I sometimes have a dozen public chats and private conversations going at once; dizzying. What happens when ten thousand people try to chat with you during today's financial conference call? You must automate your responses in ways that produce meaningful experiences and that route callers to relevant people and services.
6. Public vs. shades of private. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman revealed a deep flaw in Skype's identity system. Her MegAtWork Skype account was different than her personal account, and she could only log in to one at a time. Techniques vary, but a celebrity must be able to manage personal, family, workplace, acquaintances, and fans from one login, disclosing only as appropriate.
7. Swamping Skype supernodes and relays. What happens when one node on the Skype network connects with five to ten percent of the whole network? Can enough supernodes emerge in Chicago for Oprah, for example, to support all the new connections, updates and conversations? Will this hurt the experience of other Skype users in Chicagoland? How much of updating is done directly between a Skype client and Skype's presence and client-backup servers? Can that client-server connection be swamped as the volume rises four to five orders of magnitude over the norm?
8. No server side messaging, voice, video APIs. No software developer in their right mind wants to build and operate their own IM gateway. Think thousands of Skype clients running on hundreds of boxes, each needing careful administration. Instead they want to talk to a web service API. Services like IMified (congratulations, Voxeo!) let you design and run bots for the AIM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google networks in hours, and without your getting into the gateway business. Skype isn't on the list because it doesn't host a public web service interface to the Skype network.

Why would Oprah want a million Skype fans?

Why would a brand or celebrity want to have a Skype relationship with so many people? For companies on Cluetrain 1.0 (markets are conversations) and moving to Cluetrain 2.0 (markets are relationships), Skype offers opportunities for engagement and intimacy. Unlike blogs or services like twitter, Skype conversations are held privately.

How will Oprahs engage?

1. Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
2. Deliver services. You could sign up for Oprah's book club, update Oprah's magazine subscriptions, get the link for the episode you missed, get local show times for next week, or suggest a show topic. Harpo Productions could support those services through a blend of voice mashups and call centers. How about Skyping an Oprah account that played a Skype video of her last show, or a show on demand?
3. Bring fans together. Introduce fans with similar interests to each other. Host thousands of small salons in Skype public chats before or after a show, or about a theme or a magazine topic. Help the millions find others to solve problems, share burdens, and make sense of the world.

See also:

• Jim Courtney's great play-by-play of the Oprah show
• flickr set of photos from the show

tags: skype, tv, television, us, canada, marketing, promotion, tie-in, oprahwinfrey, oprah, theoprahwinfreyshow, scale, fame

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

eBay puts distance between Skype and Markets

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

Meanwhile, eBay forbids Skype links/buttons in listings.

Skype voice and chat buttons in listings are being discontinued

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

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

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

Sincerely,
eBay Seller Team

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

One more nail in "synergy."

tags: skype, ebay, integration, synergy

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

Why a Skype platform can lead to happiness

Here's a 2004 TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell about the importance of variability in product design.

He concludes with four points.

There's a disconnect between what people say they want when you ask them (in focus groups, for example) and what they really want and do. We all say we like dark, rich, roasted coffee but many of us like weak, creamy coffee.

Horizontal segmentation can reveal that there are many variations of a product, each with their own appeal to the many variations among people. I like chunky tomato sauce, you like spicy. Until you reveal and test the clusters across a zillion dimensions, you'll never know how you should extend your product family.

While chefs have an idea that there is one right way to make a particular dish, they are wrong. The Platonic Ideal of a product misses that everyone in that restaurant has a different experience, different tastes, and that the chef's perfection of poached halibut will only produce an "average" happiness.

By searching for human variability and embracing human diversity, we'll find a truer path to true happiness.

On to Skype.

Talk is a fundamental human activity and it's tough to create access to the Skype network from everywhere people talk (or would talk if they could).

So Skype gives us one Skype. It's squeezed into different shapes to adapt to different devices and operating systems, but it's the same Skype.

This is not enough. Skype knows it.

Skype is resource constrained. Everything they have is going into creating access to Skype dialtone. There is no way they can create 20 variations of Skype for Windows to serve different market segments. Let alone the thousands of variations by which people meet, engage, interact, play, learn, discover, fight, love, and experience each other.

So Skype needs a multiplier.

A multiplier that lets thousands of teams of developers fashion a Skype that meets their way of talking and being social.

We call that platforming. Giving a solid foundation, a platform, on which others can build.

Skype has several weak programming platforms now, all of them under review. The review is good.

Because for as big as Skype's market is now, it can be orders of magnitude larger. And Skype doesn't have the time or people or money to make Skypes for all those contexts.

Skype for WoW.

Skype for First Responders.

Skype for Shoppers.

Skype for Stock Brokers.

Skype for Grandparents.

Skype for the Hypersocial.

Skype for Twitterers.

Skype for Getting Things Done.

Skype for Lovers.

Skype for Musicians. (I met a company that has this as a business plan)

Skype for Projects.

Skype for Poken.

Skype for Sales.

Skype for Lawyers.

Skype for eBay Power Sellers.

Skype for Product Managers.

Skype for Hello Kitty.

Skype for IMDB and other movie lovers.

Skype for Manchester United.

And a thousand more.

Each with their own social and communication patterns, their own feature priorities, different measures of success, integration with different other systems, and support requirements.

What would they have in common? An underlying brand ("Skype inside"), one login, backup, in-network connection to other Skype users, encryption, contact lists, history.

And an ecosystem eager to pour a liquid Skype into the forms that make each community, each niche, each segment, each person very very happy. 

tags: skype, platforming, design, technology, malcolmgladwell, spaghetti, tedtalks, happiness

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

Download Gladwell's talk

• Audio to desktop (MP3)
• Audio to iTunes (MP3)
• Video to desktop (Zipped MP4)
• Video to iTunes (MP4)
• Watch this talk as high-res video (MP4)

Q. What are the Skype TechPolicy issues?

I'm heading out to a technology public policy conference today. Tuning my ear to listen for new issues. Some already on the Skype plate...

• Mobile Carterfone – freedom to use the device of your choice on a mobile network
• Mobile Net Neutrality – US mobile carriers are blocking Skype voice calls from data services. See iPhone and Windows Mobile store policies written by carriers.
• Net Neutrality – ISPs banned Skype. Should that be OK?
• P2P Freedom – As Skype shows, p2p has legitimate uses yet copyright industry groups draft laws banning the technology.
• Rural Access – Skype users needs cheap, capacious, ubiquitous, expandable broadband to the home and office.
• Telco Antitrust – The big mobile, landline, and cable carriers are very profitable, even in a horrid economy. Evidence of undue market power?
• Privacy – The US government is funding research to intercept Skype calls and uncover your Skype contacts
• E911 – When does Skype become responsible for helping people call emergency services?
• Unwanted Attention – Telemarketing, spam, spim, spit – we hate it all. What is government's role?
• Carbon Footprint – Can Skype-like communication lower our personal and national environmental impact? What can Skype engineers do to lower it further?

See today's Free Press analysis Dismantling Digital Deregulation: Toward a National Broadband Strategy (pdf). DDD suggests the US:

• Review every major FCC decision since the 1996 Act and reverse those that failed to promote broadband competition, openness and access. Congress should aid this process with a series of oversight hearings.
• Develop a data-driven standard to identify local areas where broadband providers are abusing their market power, and use the tools in the 1996 Act to promote competition.
• Expand and codify the FCC's "Internet Policy Statement" into permanent Net Neutrality rules. Congress should pass a Net Neutrality law to place these protections in the Communications Act.
• Reclassify broadband as a "telecommunications service," which will allow the FCC to promote competition by reinstating open access rules where appropriate.
• Transition the Universal Service Fund from supporting telephone service to supporting broadband infrastructure. Congress should aid this transition through oversight and legislation to provide a clear path for FCC action.
• Produce an honest assessment of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely fashion, as required by the 1996 Act.
• Conduct a thorough review of policies governing competition and pricing in the "special access" and "middle-mile" or "enterprise" markets -- the broadband lines that connect cell phone towers and local area networks to the Internet.
• Open more of the public airwaves to unlicensed use and promote shared spectrum for both low-power urban and high-power rural uses. Congress should instruct the FCC and the NTIA to identify spectrum that could be utilized.

Offline for a the afternoon, the better to pay attention and mingle.

tags: public policy, skype, carterfone, Mobile Net Neutrality, iPhone, apple, microsoft, netneutrality, p2p, fcc, access, broadband, monopoly, antitrust, privacy, e911, telemarketing, spam, spim, spit, deregulation, competition, openness, spectrum, NTIA

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

Skype for iPhone demo at the Apple store

Here's Justin, Captain Computer, demonstrating Skype for iPhone, at the Southpoint Apple Store in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

tags: skype, apple, iphone, demo, video, usa, durham

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.

Optimizing Skype.com for growth and sales

UPDATE: A Skype executive asked Omniture to ask Skype Journal to take down this post, said Kristi Knight, Omniture senior director of corporate communications. "It was information that wasn't meant to be made available to the general public" said Brian Watkins, Omniture's public relations manager. Omniture removed the Skype part of the webinar from the site after an employee accidentally sent a link to it to prospective customers in an email prospectus. Skype gave permission to use their story at The Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City this past February, a closed pre-sales pitch and customer education event. Someone at Skype was apparently very upset that this high level case showed up on our blog; enough to persuade Omniture to take a PR hit.

Before I explain what I'm going to do, let me explain why this information is blogworthy, maybe even newsworthy.

Skype Journal helps its readers understand the Skype universe. Skype's product features, business model, financials, performance, product strategy, technology, user stories, design philosophies, and everything that explains this rapidly changing, growing, influential company. This ongoing Skype story affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Today's story shows Skype uses state of the art practices to get more out of each customer visit. This is not rocket science (social science, actually) and we'd expect to learn a little about the active management of one of the most visited sites on Earth.

While the information was released by accident, it was released nevertheless. As a courtesy, I'm removing the slide screenshots. 

The post:

Omniture helps web sites get visitors to act by testing variations on a web page's design. (Omniture has a pretty great home page.) Skype.com was featured in a workshop that showed tests comparing different home page and returning page layouts and content. The slides are from a pre-sales briefing but they offer some insight into Skype's day-to-day operations.

The overall goals: improve downloads and sales by adding or subtracting "branding" intensity.

Test one was for the Skype.com home page:

Three versions of the page are offered randomly to users, their behavior is logged and compared. In this case, A was heavily branded (more screen space devoted to art, people, and slogans.

1A was the existing design, "Heavily Branded," used as a control. About half of the page was a large horizontal block with a lifestyle photo showing a young couple on a swing, a screenshot of Skype for Mac contacts list, and a "Download Skype" button.

1B was simpler, with a lighter branding touch. Everything "below the fold" was cleared off, the screenshot removed, and the lifestyle photo down to half its previous size. The number of words on the page was cut in half. 

1C was very light, no photography or screenshots, word count cut in half again, focused on the transaction ("Get Skype Now").

Test 1 showed less is more with newbies. Recipe B improved click throughs by 1.4%. Recipe C increased downloads 4.6%. If all you want to do is drive new visitors to download, then simple, elegant, and focused could work.

This adds up. By constantly optimizing site design, Skype's visits to download.Skype.com rose 235.76 % year/year, twice as fast as visits to www.Skype.com, which rose 93.59 % in the same time according to Compete.com. More than 3 million people visit Skype.com monthly, and most of them land on the home page.

So Skype is now doing a better job of converting prospects into users of free Skype services.

What's the best way to convert users of free into paying customers? Skype uses a landing page for returning users. 

For test 2, can design alternatives improve the sale of minutes and gear? Again, three flavors of the same page. 

2A is the control again, minutes in a big, dark Skype Pro block on the left, a Phillip cordless phone package ad on the right. Below the fold was a row with "download Skype" and "Skype SMS" ads, and a row with three columns beneath that with seven different offers for gear and services.

2B is all about the minutes. The dark "Skype Pro" block is lightened and expanded to two-thirds width of the page. To the block's right are Skype Credit and SkypeIn links. Gear ads below the fold were cut to three bigger ones with photos. 

2C also de-cluttered like 2B. The right hand credit and SkypeIn ads swapped places with below-the-fold gear ads.

Unlike the home page test, the results were mixed and had no confidence score. 

So they dug deeper by seeing how different segments behaved. 

It turned out that weekday users liked 2C a lot, improving click-throughs by nearly 14%. However weekend users disliked 2B and 2C so much they offset weekday users.

Segments behave differently, even when you compare something as mundane as day-of-week. So the big lesson is to test how customer segments react to design ideas. 

I haven't really thought of Skype.com as a product, but it's clearly part of the Skype experience and contributes directly to Skype's growth, customer retention, and sales.

tags: skype, design, testing, omniture, home page, landing page, statistics, trends, growth

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.

see also: flickr photo set

Skype Domination: Platform Agnostic Style

Guest post by Andy Yang, who blogs with The Mobile Experience team.

I never realized this but Skype is everywhere! Regardless if you are a PC, Mac or Linux user, you can grab a version at your convenience. In the smartphone world, Windows Mobile, iPhone/iPod Touch, and Android have their versions of Skype mobile; even non-officially supported phones has a solution. If you are still using your cordless home phone or going with dedicated Wi-Fi or Skype Phone, there is a solution to Skype for you. Lets not forget the Sony PSP and Nokia N800/810 integration.

Now that I've made my point and spent last 15 minutes hyper linking the references above, what I am trying to get at is how easy Skype has made itself to users of all walks. Being that this company has made its service completely platform agnostic, it has tremendous power to reach a wide range of users and become the de facto internet-based communications tool. I can't think of another IM or VOIP application with this broad reach across various hardware and software.

As for my family, Skype has been an indispensable tool when traveling abroad. Given all the available Skype options, we can easily keep in touch so long as internet is available never having to worry about having pre-paid SIM or phone cards.

Skype, in my opinion, may be the best mobile communication provider for a non telecom operator. Of course, with Gmail's Video and VOIP support over browser recently launched, it can pose a potential threat to Skype's territory as it would technically be platform agnostic. But until mobile browsers are powerful enough to take advantage, Skype is still much ahead of the game. Way to go Skype!

[Editor: See also: Skype Journal's product map]

tags: android, iphone, ipod touch, mobile apps, psp, skype, skype mobile, symbian, wifi, windows mobile, 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.

Skype 1.0.3 for iPhone - hotfix

Download the update. Three bugs fixed. Discuss in the Skype for iPhone forum.

tags: skype, iphone, hotfix, download

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

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.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

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

Can digital pipes handle swine flu epidemic spikes?

Pandemics change human behavior for millions of people. Our networks may not be ready for those changes.

Just stay home. Wash your hands. Advice from the US CDC for people at risk of the 2009 swine flu. Mexican authorities urge avoiding face-to-face contact in many-to-many places like hospitals, museums, theaters, cinemas (releases of X-Men Origins and Star Trek are postponed), churches, sports events, public markets.

 Working at Home. While television (or streaming video) might substitute in sports and music events, bringing other work home is harder.

• Can mobile phones and the Internet create alternatives for information, education, service, and entertainment workers?
• Can employers keep workers home?
• Can employers quickly offer full digital command, communications, collaboration, coordination, and control services to sites scattered throughout a city?

Online communities swarm in response to emergencies and threats. 9-11, Tsunami relief, Katrina, Mumbai invasion, Southern California wildfires had four stages.

1. Spreading alarms ("hey did you see?") through many online media to trigger swarming. today, this includes tags and #hashtags, improving discoverability and transmissibility of the event and the event's memes. People want to know more. As people flock to the news, they create an overwhelming amount of repetition and echo and noise. So people start... 
2. Organizing to improve/concentrate/filter information. People want to make sense of the spew. At the start people create new topical blogs, email lists, facebook forums, YouTube channels. Volunteers transcribe television and radio reports, retweet headlines and commentary, timelines of government responses. In short filtering, digestion, and meaning step in. Then people want to help other people (and themselves). So you see
3. Online serves offline. Volunteers build specific services connecting online news/community to local people/places/activities. For Tsunami relief I participated in an instant call center via Skype community volunteers. Other services put together online databases of victims, or geomashups of hotspots, or fundraising projects, or medical information.
4. Aftermath. People are helped, most of the online world goes back to their lives, and some of the legacy systems persist to serve those still concerned or affected by the event.

By contrast, people shun common places and take refuge in their homes in a biological outbreak/epidemic/pandemic.

This creates new problems.

• Stage Leapfrogging. Surprise! Step 1 (alarming, swarming) will take place in hours. You'll move immediately to Step 2, managing information overload. You could wake up having missed your chance to shape your community's and business's response. Or first access to preventive measures. 
• Social Infrastructure Demand Scales. While millions are affected by most major disasters, pandemics could affect hundreds of millions, especially those in big cities where people congregate. Is twitter ready for 100 million new users? Facebook? CDC.gov? Amazon and Google cloud computing?
• Infrastructure Demand Shifts Home. Capacity is in the wrong place. Are the nation's ISPs ready to move data to residential pipes at workplace speeds, without residential caps, all day, every day? How fast can mobile carriers supplement residential coverage? Who would fund this buildout? Can we beef up the last mile faster than an epidemic spreads? Can we allocate resources based on where an epidemic hits first and worst, instead of using pure market forces?
• Cannot Filter Meaningful Signal from Abundant Noise. Today's tools don't help people consistently and reliably pick the vital, life changing information from the ordinary. So you'll miss product recalls, medical updates, neighborhood alerts in the lossy spew of mailing lists, social updates, and newsfeeds. Would you trust your family's life to a #hashtag ?
• Local Focus Without Local Filters. Many of our systems depend on hundreds or thousands of people looking intently at one topic. What happens when we have must hyperlocalize news and community? The ratio of participants-per-topic falls fast as people focus on their own lives, their own work, their own neighborhoods. Does your block have enough people updating the network so the social network benefits kick in? We clearly don't have tough, accurate filters/readers to help us focus by:
  • Geography (streets, blocks, buildings, neighborhoods),
  • Topic (all those people who might have congregated at baseball games, pubs, museums, city hall), and
  • Occupation (by employer, workplace, team, process, project, agency)
  • Clinic (chains of information, care, supplies, volunteers, alerting)
• Service Gaps. The digital divide has dramatic health effects on the poor, homeless, and underclasses. Tens of millions of the vulnerable are without mobile phones, email, or any frequent internet access. How do you connect offline people to online services?

What can we do to prepare?

See also:

• Ushahidi: Emergency Information Patterns and Thoughts on Swine Flu
• US: PanedemicFlu.gov, CDC.gov/swineflu
• UK: Health Protection Agency
• NYTimes: Swine Flu Cases Map
• HufPo: Swine-Flu News Channel
• iPhone: Swine Flu Tracker
• Google: Flu Trends
• Flu Fashion N95 masks

photos credit cc:by Randal Sheppard 

tags: skype, H1N1, google, wireless, mobile, isp, breakout, epidemic, pandemic, disaster, disasterplanning, infrastructure, disasterpreparedness, scenarios, flu, influenza, swineflu, cdc, who, hyperlocal

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

Skype hiring a Terminator Accountant

Well, a termination accountant.

Not quite as cool as robot warrior accountants.

Based in Luxembourg.

Putting together all those SkypeIn and SkypeOut charges from termination service providers. Turning it into a stream of wisdom for managing partnerships, allocating resources, finding opportunities, keeping Skype competitive.  

Skype has more than 60 other job openings, most in Europe, none in the Americas.

tags: skype, jobs, careers, terminator, termination

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

Skype Offers 25% Discount On Annual Subscriptions

In an effort to boost sales of annual subscriptions, Skype is offering a 25% discount on a 12-month subscription. If you act between now and May 6th, you can cut 1/4th of the cost off an unlimited SkypeOut Plan.

I currently have the US and Canada plan that allows me to do "unlimited calls" to any landline or mobile phone in the US or Canada. Last December, when I want to Barcelona for Nokia World 2008, this plan was very worth-while. I make calls just about every day utilizing the plan and from personal experience, call quality is very good!

You can also subscribe to the Unlimited World Plan that gives you unlimited calls to many countries for $12.95/month, before the discount is applied.

Additionally, you can cancel any of these plans at any time and also transfer between plans depending on your calling needs.

Call me at +1-503-334-2574, Skype me, follow @harrisja on Twitter and my website - Techcraver.com

PamFax updates, adds FaxIn, distances from Skype

PamFax is keeping fax alive with its 2.0 update and release for Windows and Macintosh desktops. Big changes:

• Two-way functionality: FaxIn numbers in 27 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA.
• More platforms: Mac version!
• Skype independence: You don't need to be a Skype user, have a Skype account, or use Skype credits any more.
• Click-to-Fax: Extensions for facebook and Salesforce.com. 

Makes me wish I knew someone who used a fax.

PamFax 2.0 product announcement

View more presentations from evanwolf.

tags: skype, pamfax, mac, windows

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

Skype's 2009q1 showed IPO-worthy growth and profits

CORRECTION: Skype's year-over-year revenue growth is 38% after correcting for foreign exchange. We reported 28%. 

eBay announced quarterly reports today. Skype did well. Activity continues to go up, revenue goes up, people keep joining at a faster rate.

Skype's Freemium Rate (the blue line below) holds steady, showing people are still willing to pay to talk, finding value in Skype's paid services.

26.5 billion minutes called last quarter. 23.6 billion minutes free Skype-to-Skype, 2.9 billion minutes Skype-to-PSTN. 1 in 8 people paid for Skype calling (Freemium Rate: 8.1).

Revenues continue to rise at a rate about the same as new users trying Skype.  

Revenue: $153.2 million

• $613 million/year run rate
• 21% year-over-year growth in dollars, 38% yoy foreign exchange neutral
• $143 million from transactions, $10 million from marketing and other revenue
• 80% from international (non-USA) sources

37.9 million new accounts

• 416,484 new accounts per day
• 443.2 million accounts (cumulative)

Skype reports non-mobile users connected to the Skype cloud (Skype dialtone) throughout the day. On weekdays, this number is now ranging between 16-17 million at peak and 9-10 million. It rolls as different time zones come online. This puts the number of active users at between 100 and 150 million by Skype Journal estimates.

The growth in online users has been growing in a straight line for years. There's a summer slow-down for seasonality, but Skype could be at a weekday peak of 18 million simultaneous by 2009 year-end.

Skype is on page 16 of eBay's slides below.

eBay 2009q1 Earnings Slides

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tags: skype, ebay, financials, 2009q1, stats, statistics, trends

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Skype for Windows 4.0.0.226 hotfix

Download the update.

9 prominent bugs resolved:

• Extras Manager was not installed to some users
• Skype incorrectly advised users of new Audio Devices available
• When adding a new number the phone type was incorrectly labeled
• Re-adding contacts to a existing conversation did not display the contact in the Add contacts drop down menu
• Video did not always scale correctly
• Skype occasionally crashed when uPnP port forwarding failed
• Improved uPnP handling for Linksys WRTG54G owners
• When dialing certain numbers some digits were erased from the beginning and the number became invalid
• Audio device was reset for some users on each Skype start

tags: skype, download, downloads, windows, 4, hotfix

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.

NGN IMS Forum continues making dump pipes smarter with billing interop

The Internet was designed to be dumb pipes with smarts at the edge. The telecommunications industry hates that. So the industry has been building smarts into the network with services like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) since 1999. IMS is the phone industry's middleware between the transport layer (where data moves) and the application layer (where services like voicemail run on phone company servers). 

The Next Generation Network (NGN) and IMS Forum announced last Tuesday a new standards effort to inject IMS with business (billing, charging, policy control) and operations (provisioning, security, and reliability) services.  "The train has left the station; now we're jumping on the moving train" said the Forum's Michael Khalilian. The first deliverables are new functional requirements and architectural documents due later this year.

The telecom industry brought together Internet Protocol (IP) voice and data systems from regional phone companies, long distance carriers, mobile operators, cable companies, ISPs,  and others. Now that IP at the low end works, all the high end stuff is now a problem for interoperability, partnership and M&A.

Pulling together all this app functionality onto servers that live in phone company data centers will let carriers sell smartphone apps (think Apple + Skype + AT&T) and reconcile costs and revenue (walled garden 2.0). These IMS services will also replace the "best effort" approach of the Internet with the "quality of service" for streaming audio and video.

This project will be closed, limited to members of NGN IMS Forum, but you can email admin@imsforum.org for access to the listserv. 

So, my take:

1. Control. Telcos want to own the whole value chain. IMS is the walled garden's map. These extensions to IMS pull control over customer experiences, business models, and functionality from developers to carriers, from the application layer to the control layer.
2. Monetization. These particular standards will be used to meter every last bit customers use. After deployment, you won't be able to use "unlimited broadband" and "flat rate" in the same sentence.
3. Privacy. While intended for inter-service interop, there's a surveillance society element to this. Social consequences are not on the agenda.

Meanwhile, folks like Skype are building "over the top" services running on the edge, independent of pipes made smarter by NGN or IMS.

 

News release:

IMS Forum^® Launches BSS/OSS & Security Technical Working Group

To Establish Architectural Requirements for NGN BSS/OSS and Security

in Real-time Service Environments

Las Vegas, NV– April 14, 2009 -- The NGN and IMS Forum^®, the only industry associations dedicated to interoperability and certification of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Next Generation Network (NGN) applications and services, announced today at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo the creation of its BSS/OSS & Security Technical Working Group.

The working group will help guide industry momentum for an integrated BSS/OSS framework to enable cost-effective transition to IMS/NGN environments. NGN IMS Forum members have demonstrated billing interoperability in the past six Plugfests™ and through commercial deployments. This new working group will focus on the billing and charging, policy control and security functions required by service providers to capture the value promised by NGN networks. HP will chair the working group with support from vice-chairs, Comverse and Mu Dynamics. Other industry leaders such as, Acision, Aricent and Tekelec are also founding members.

“We have learned through the course of our last 6 Plugfests that billing OSS and security play an integral role in the successful implementation of integrated communications services utilizing NGN and IMS,” said Michael Khalilian, Chairman and President NGN and IMS Forum. “We look forward to including the input from this Technical and Business Working Group in our Plugfest 7 interoperability test event and in future Plugfests.”

“Service providers can re-use existing resources, lower costs, and increase revenue opportunities through an integrated BSS/OSS," said Nigel Upton, Director, Communications and Media, Solutions, HP. "With interoperability already demonstrated, our working group will strengthen the business and technical foundation that service providers need for a smooth transition to IMS and next-generation services.”

The Working Group will develop guidelines on the business and technical aspects of BSS/OSS and security in IMS and NGN services and will define the architecture and requirements for network interoperability and reliable real-time IP service application deployment. It will focus on the operational and management of converged IMS/NGN applications and services delivered over wireless (3G, LTE), wireline (DSL, optical) and cable broadband. The group will ensure that converged applications and services will have timely and complete support from provisioning, billing and management systems. A whitepaper describing BSS/OSS considerations of NGN will be the group’s first deliverable and is planned by mid-year. 

“This working group underscores the importance of ‘smart monetization’ approaches in creating successful business models to leverage the full potential of Next-Generation Networks,” said Gabriel Matsliach, General Manager, Billing & Active Customer Management at Comverse, who will serve as the Group’s vice chair. “The group will draw on our experience in supporting any combination of network, service and payment types, including true quad-play offers.”

“As a two-year veteran of the IMS/NGN Forum and their Plugfest events, Mu Dynamics is pleased to see the increased industry interest in secure Next-Generation Network deployments that prevent unexpected weaknesses in real-time networked applications,” said Adam Stein, vice president of Marketing for Mu Dynamics who will also serve as the group’s vice chair. “Many of our operator and vendor clients play an integral role in this important ecosystem with a high percent of their revenue dependent upon resilient, reliable and secure product development and continuous service deployment.”

About Plugfest 7

IMS OSS/BSS & Security Working Group will be an integral part of the IMS Forum’s Plugfest™ 7 interoperability test that will take place in June 1-5, 2009 at the InterOperability Lab (UNH IOL) in Durham, NH.  Participation in NGN IMS Plugfest 7 is open to all companies. For online registration and info contact the forum at: info@IMSforum.org or visit event at www.NGNforum.org.

About the NGN Forum™ and IMS Forum^®

The NGN and IMS Forum are the only global telecommunications associations devoted to Next Generation Networks (NGN) service delivery and interoperable IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services architectures and solutions. The Forum’s mission is to enable delivery of M-play™: rich multimedia, mobility and fixed services over wireline, cable, GSM, UMTS, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, LTE and fiber broadband networks. The Forum is the creator and organizer of the IMS Plugfests™ and NGN Plugfests™, the industry's only events focused on verification and certification of IMS and NGN service interoperability through the IMS Certified™ and NGN Certified™ programs.

Through organized Plugfests, technical working groups and other activities, Forum members develop cost-effective technical frameworks for revenue generating converged IP NGN solutions.  The combined organizations include over 2000 executives and technical, business development and marketing professionals from global and emerging equipment vendors, solution providers, integrators, service providers, and governmental agencies. For additional information or to join the NGN Forum, IMS Forum the IMS Plugfest, and/or the NGN Plugfest, please visit www.IMSforum.org or www.NGNforum.org.

tags: ngn, ims, plugfest, gsm, umts, wi-fi, wifi, wimax, lte, ngnforum, imsforum, bss, oss

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Skype's market value over time

By Jean Mercier, Skype Numerologist and regular contributor to Skype Journal.

Wandering over the Internet I found several comments on the value of Skype, for instance here and here.

Interesting to see an analyst predicted a revenue of $786 million (for 2010? I guess this was a typo, and they meant 2009) while I predicted $750 million for 2009 in a private chat with some Skype fanatics some days ago.

Well, lets wait to refine the predictions: eBay will divulge their results Wednesday for the first quarter of 2009!

[EDITED] Added on the graph the weighted average of the Skype Journal Poll based on 68 votes.

tags: skype, statistics, trends, marketcap, value, valuation, ipo, analysts, ebay

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Skype's Crypto Revolution

Mass encryption. 1.15 billion downloads. Hundreds of millions of people are using Skype's strong cryptography to talk. Encrypted for the very first time. Thanks to Skype. This is a notable achievement.

The last successful mass distribution of cryptography was SSL (secure sockets layer). Browsers alert you are talking securely to a web site by the little closed padlock icon. SSL let the world feel safe to share secrets. Banking. Taxes. Voting. Medical records. Divorce. School.

Skype's encryption gives people the same freedom to talk.

Most people don't know Skype safeguards their calls. There is no "padlock" to show that the other people in your conversation are also using secure Skype clients.

America's "founding fathers" would have liked cryptography a lot.  They would have viewed it as protected under the Second Amendment where "the People" are guaranteed the right to bear arms, not just for personal defense (which was obvious to them), but also because politicians prefer unarmed peasants. An unarmed populace is much easier to dominate. And so is a populace without the ability to have privacy.

— Hudson Barton

What data does Skype keep?

Clearly Skype has call records from SkypeIn and SkypeOut, so they can bill for time according to their tariffs and charge appropriate taxes. They also have records of when you log in through a client or the web to the authentication service.

Skype may keep a copy of the material in your account that's backed up onto Skype servers (profile, contacts, history, preferences like call forwarding). However that data may be encrypted so Skype wouldn't have the burden of sharing the data under a subpoena or be exposed to financial risks in the event of a security breach.

While it's not impossible for Skype to have engineered tattle-tale features into the client, reporting on p2p activity, there is no evidence of spyware in research done by independent researchers or by anyone else.

Skype has compelling business interests to assure customer privacy. Unless you're from China, you don't load Skype with the assumption your government, your employer, your priest, your ex's private detective, your insurance company, your political party, your local police department, or anyone else has the ability to know who you talk with or what you say to each other. You trust your phone company and Skype to keep your confidences as much as physically and legally possible. Unlike your phone company, Skype has done more to encrypt conversations.

Skype is legally better off not keeping any data it does not absolutely need to keep. And there is no technical reason for Skype to keep a log of your in-Skype-network chats or calls.

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

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Ping.fm takes updates from Skype IM

Ping.fm is a synch service in the social stack, mostly in microblogging and rich presence. Set up on Ping.fm:

Enable posting with Skype

To enable posting through Skype, request to add the bot "pingdotfm" by searching for the username and add it as a contact. When the bot appears on your contacts list, send it an IM with your verification code.

The ping.fm page will show your verification code once you log in to the site.

Ping.fm posts results in multiple places.

Twitter. (microblogging)

Vox. (blogging)

LinkedIn. (professional network updates)

This is one of many ways to update your Ping.fm account so Ping.fm can update your many online lifestreams. Ping.fm's bots also talk with AIM, jabber (including Google Talk), Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Hat tip to the Pacific IT chat.

tags: skype, ping.fm, synch, synchronization, dataportability, microblogging, im, chat, twitter, linkedin, vox

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Skype for iPhone 1.0.2 - hotfix

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

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

tags: skype, iphone, hotfix, bugfix

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Skype on the Web Trend Tokyo Train Map

I love these kinds of industry visualization projects. This is "the web industry" layered atop the Tokyo train system. 

Here's a close-up of the Skype station on the Money line, with Janus Friis standing by. Serving Harajuku. Sharing a line with eBay and PayPal this year.

Skype is looking more successful than eBay, less than PayPal, comparably stable.

There are no lines for Conversation, Talk, Communication, Collaboration, or Getting Things Done. Where would you put an independent Skype post-IPO? The Application Line with other platform plays like Google, Adobe, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Mozilla and Facebook? 2010 looks interesting.

Art by Information Architects.

tags: skype, ecosystem, datavisualization, mapping, maps, dataviz, industry, ebay

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Skype To Be Spun Off, Makes Plans for IPO

A huge shock in the Internet telephony world today, as Skype parent company eBay has announced plans to spin Skype off into it's own separate company. Additionally, Skype will be taken public with an Initial Public Offering in 2010.

As their blog states:

"Skype is a great stand-alone business with strong fundamentals and accelerating momentum," said eBay Inc.'s President and CEO, John Donahoe. "But it's clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential. This will give Skype the focus and resources required to continue its growth and effectively compete in online voice and video communications. In addition, separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth engine - e-commerce and online payments - and deliver long-term value to our stockholders."

This is huge news, as rumors have been swirling for the past few weeks surrounding Skype's future. Many thought Skype might be sold off to another firm. Also, there were other rumors that the founders of Skype might try to buy the company back from eBay, after eBay spent $3.1 Billion a few years ago to acquire Skype.

I've never thought eBay would sell off Skype to another entity as the company has reliable profits (around $551 million last year) and is strongly positioned in the VoIP telephony market.

Also, Josh Silverman is an excellent CEO thus far and Skype has a fantastic management team all around.

Skype has had great successes in the last few month, including the introduction of their iPhone application, which had amazing download numbers. The app had been downloaded more than 1 million times within 26 hours of it's debut on the the iTunes store.

I'm anxious to see what's next out of Skype, the granddaddy of VoIP today.

[Official Press Release]

Call me at +1-503-334-2574, Skype me, follow @harrisja and my website - Techcraver.com

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

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"The founders’ offer fell on deaf ears"

From the WSJ.com Deal Blog [links and emphases mine]:

A group including KKR, Warburg Pincus, Providence* and Elevation Partners recently teamed up to back the founders of Skype in an attempt to buy back their free Internet calling service from Ebay, according to people familiar with the bid.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis originally approached Ebay about repurchasing Skype, which acquired the service for $2.6 billion in 2005. Ebay encouraged them to make an offer, and the Scandinavian billionaires rounded up a group of private-equity firms to back them, the person familiar with the bid said. News of the Skype’s founders’ offer was earlier reported in the New York Times, but names of the private-equity firms have not yet been reported.

The proposal involved private-equity firms contributing some $1 billion to the deal, according to people familiar with the situation, though a full deal price could not be learned. The transaction also involved Ebay providing financing for the deal.

The founders’ offer fell on deaf ears, as it was well below the price at which Ebay was willing to sell the business. The two sides are far apart and at this stage a deal involving the private-equity firms is unlikely to be completed, said people familiar with the matter.

*I suspect it was Provident Bankshares, not Providence; Provident is about to be purchased by KKR.

So this gets back to valuation. Survey: What's a fair price for Skype?

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

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

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

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What's a good price for Skype Ltd?

New York Times reports Skype founders Zennstrom and Friis are raising about $1 billion to buy back Skype. The article says some analysts think eBay would want at least Skype's book value: $1.7 billion.

So what would a good market value be? Skype are profitable to the tune of $100+ million/year. Ten times earnings seems lowball to me.

Two years from now Skype could easily have $1 billion in revenue. At current 20% profits, that's $200 million in free cash per year. 10x suggests a $2 billion value.

Unless there's a premium for growth. Skype might easily step into adjacent markets. $1 billion run rate in three years for a light version of WebEx-style conferencing. $1 billion in two years for a cloud computing platform that lets you build Skype into your web apps and enterprise systems. $1 billion in four years for Skype inside of televisions and set top boxes.

Despite eBay's protestations, there are also massive opportunities for eBay-Skype-PayPal synergy. What eBay and PayPal do for markets that bring together buyers and sellers of atoms, eBay+Skype+PayPal could do for markets of service, information, education, and entertainment, a much larger market. Sadly, every eBay alum I've talked with in the last six months says eBay execs are incapable of that much innovation, head stuck firmly inside the 1999 eCommerce box.

Which leaves us with the price.

At what price will eBay sell?

tags: skype, ebay, financials, marketvalue

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1 in 10 iPhone users downloaded iSkype

Skype crossed the two million download mark in a week. Apple's sold roughly 20 million iPhones. So 1 in 10 iPhone users downloaded Skype. A happy way to start the quarter.

Meanwhile, just for context, Apple is counting up to its one billionth download. So Skype's all-time share is 1 in 500. In the US it's already down to #3 among free downloads, behind #1 Awesome Ball and #2 iFighter (congrats on one million downloads!).

Note: Skype isn't including iPhone or other mobile application store downloads in its realtime stats feed. I'm sure they'll be add in for financial statements, but the Skype.com download statistics are no longer complete.

tags: skype, iphone, iskype, apple, mobile, downloads, statistics

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Skype for Mac 2.8 Beta 2 (2.8.0.324)

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

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

tags: skype, apple, beta, mac, download

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Skype Mobile Battle: iPhone vs. PSP

Guest Post by Andy Yang of The Mobile Experience Blog

Skype, one of the most used IM/Chat/VOIP/Video-Conferencing application for PC and Mac is slowly working its dominance up the mobile alley and we love it! I've always known it's support for Windows Mobile, Nokia devices and Wi-Fi Phones (Skype Phones) but it was the recent integration with Sony's Playstation Portable firmware upgrade as well as the hot-off-the-press Skype for iPhone/iPod Touch that is really cooking up some serious mobile progress. With Skype application for BlackBerry phones coming soon, Skype is in a very good position to become one of the leaders in mobile application. Having Skype on the go across multiple platform is definitely going to enhance our mobile experience, this is very exciting indeed.

In this article, I will attempt to compare Skype for iPhone vs. Skype for Playstation Portable. I'll update this entry when the BlackBerry version becomes available.

The iPhone (iPod Touch) and Playstation Portable is arguably two of the most popular gadgets for travelers on the go. When I review communication gadgets or software, I always like to imagine myself traveling abroad where I would not have access to a local cell phone and would like to keep in touch with friends or family at the luxury of my own mobile gadget. The appeal of Skype has always been there for me for that reason, that is why a laptop has been essential for all my travels until smartphones started to feature applications to support various communication needs such as Fring. That said, I think iPhone or Playstation Portable (PSP) are two of the most carried devices for travelers. I can just see myself in an airport lounge dialing international long distance over Wi-Fi to keep in touch with loved ones via either device.

Skype for iPhone

The iPhone and iPod Touch needs very little introduction. With a large touch screen display and portrait layout, it makes a very good UI candidate for Skype (much like its desktop counterpart).

Everything is integrated so well together on this handy little app. For example, your contacts from your iPhone is automatically hooked up with Skype in addition to its default contact list. To see who is online, you can easily toggle the software button towards the top of the screen.

One of the big advantage of iPhone is it's integrated microphone that Skype can take advantage of without the need of additional headset. The VOIP function will only work in a Wi-Fi environment (at home, coffee house, airport lounges, etc...) whereas the text Chats can work over your phone's standard data plan.

I love the fact that this little app does everything its desktop counter part can do, including editing one's profile or add more Skype-out funds over the handset. Overall, its an amazing application that has been done right, I love it and its free to download!

Pros: Excellent UI and layout, very easy to use and intuitive. Perfect integration to leverage iPhone's hardware (buttons, camera, etc...) Everything your desktop Skype can do can be done here!

Cons: No VOIP over 3G data, no web-cam video conference, app must be installed separately (only mentioning this because PSP is part of firmware OS)

Skype for Playstation Portable (PSP)

I love the convenience of having my beloved PSP-3000 as a gaming device and knowing it can also surf the web with Flash while keeping up with the communications needs via Skype.

No application to install here, its part of the firmware 3.90+ upgrade. While the PSP doesn't have a touchscreen UI and the horizontal layout is not taking advantage of the screen real estate as much, it does offer a full suite of Skype features. The SkypeOut and VOIP PC calls are there along with text chat.

Because the onscreen keyboard is driven by the directional keys and based on the 12-button numeric pad, it can be frustrating when compared to the overall iPhone experience.

The one part I have to gripe about is the need of an external microphone. My Griffin Tune Buds Mobile with integrated mic works great but if I forgot my headphones at home then I am stuck with only text chats capabilities. While Sony and Skype recommend you buy their official headset/mic kit, the iPhone OEM headset with mic should work as well. Sony should have integrated a mic solution, after all, this is their 3rd revision to the PSP franchise.

Lets hope Skype will be available for the DS or DSi someday. Overall, I still enjoy having the option of running Skype on my PSP. While its unlikely I'll be traveling only the PSP, I can see myself using the PSP for Skype to conserve the battery life for my iPhone while traveling abroad. Due to the nature of not having any data connection, the entire operation is rendered useless if I am not nearby a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Pros: Fully integrated as part of PSP firmware, no application install required. PSP's large display is great for Skype.

Cons: Lack of integrated Mic (and Camera for profile picture, etc...) Wi-Fi is required all the time for any communications (including text chat)

Winner: Skype for iPhone! With voice call quality being relatively the same, I have to go with iPhone because you just can't beat the convenience of having your iPhone with Skype with you at all times. The integrated mic makes the entire package there and ready to go 24/7. The touchscreen plays well with the UI and it has instantly become one of those default applications I must have on my iPhone.

tags: skype, psp, sony, playstation, apple, iphone, iskype

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Skype Rates and Least Cost Routing

Guest post by Jason Goecke, Adhearsion

Now that Skype is coming to the enterprise with Skype for Asterisk and Skype for SIP, they will need to enhance the data available for their calling rates. Enabling Least Cost Routing (LCR) is a must for any VoIP provider to the enterprise. LCR allows a phone system to determine, on a call by call basis, which VoIP provider to use based on the best rates associated to the country code or prefix being dialed.

As of now Skype publishes a web page of calling rates based on the country name and the per minute rate including or excluding the tax. A few additional items are needed to make this usable for LCR systems:

• The associated country code for each country (i.e. - ‘34′ for Spain, ‘1′ for the US, etc)
• More granular prefixes where calling rates may differ (i.e. - ‘346′ for Spanish mobiles, ‘336′ for French mobiles, ‘1212′ for NYC, ‘1712′ for Iowa, etc)
• Billing intervals
• A file download in CSV, or similar format, for import into LCR systems

Of course, in the meantime it is easy enough to scrape the website and convert the available data into a more appropriate format. Here is an example, in Ruby, of how this may be done in a trivial way:

1. require 'rubygems'
2. require 'open-uri'
3. require 'nokogiri'
4. require 'json'
6. skype_rates = Hash.new
7. skype_url = 'http://www.skype.com/prices/callrates/#allRatesTab'
8. skype_htmldoc = Nokogiri::Hpricot(open(skype_url).read) 
9. (skype_htmldoc/'table.listing//tr.r1').each do |country| 
10.   country_name = country.at('td').inner_html 
11.   skype_rates.merge!({ country_name => { 'amount' => country.at('span.amount').inner_html.split('<!')[0].gsub('$ ', '').to_f, 
12. 'vat' => country.at('span.vat').inner_html.split('<!')[0].gsub('$ ', '').to_f } }) 
13. end
15. p skype_rates.to_json 

Which produces JSON output as follows:

1. { 
2. "Bolivia-La Paz": { 
3. "amount":0.122, 
4. "vat":0.14 
5.   }, 
6. "Sweden - Mobile": { 
7. "amount":0.292, 
8. "vat":0.336 
9.   }, 
10. "Hong Kong": { 
11. "amount":0.021, 
12. "vat":0.024 
13.   } 
14. } 

You may then perform a Regular Expression against another data source to derive the appropriate country codes/prefixes and store those in your LCR system. A good example of the additional detail needed is provided by Flowroute.

I have on my list of actions to create an Adhearsion component to provide LCR capabilities for any Adhearsion application. The plan is to support a wide number of VoIP providers and other data inputs as a part of this plug-in.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how Skype goes about publishing their rates with additional details and formats for download.

UPDATE @JimCanuck points out it is not just about least cost, but also about quality of termination. Skype has some interesting approaches to call quality. More here.

tags: skype, lcr, cost, routing, asterisk, adhearsion, voip

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Power, Freedom And Money: Skype, Apple, and the Carriers

Power, Freedom And Money

View more presentations from evanwolf.

My thoughts on Skype's political strategy at CTIA 2009. It builds on my Monday post, Apple, AT&T hobble Skype for iPhone 3 Ways (Skype Journal), Robert Miller's Is Deutsche Telekom playing an April's Fool joke at the expense of Skype users in Germany? (Skype), Rob Topolski's AT&T Quietly Updates its Wireless Plans (Public Knowledge), Lesley Cauley's Skype's iPhone limits irk some consumer advocates (USA Today).

Maybe a three minute read, flip quickly Lessig style.

del.icio.us tags: skype, apple, iphone, att, regulation, carterfone.

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Skype for Vampires: Making the business case

[Editor: From an internal report.]

Is there a market?

There is clearly an underserved market with different needs.

Can Skype serve that market?

Vampires use phones. Here are some shots of Bill pulling a mobile from his pocket in True Blood, Season 2 Episode 1. Stands to reason that if they talk and use phones, they could use Skype.

Will these users spread Skype faster than the Skype average?

Vampires are persuasive.

With so many still in-the-coffin, they value trusted and private connections. Like other underground subcultures, tools that help them stay connected help them survive.

Will this segment use Skype more than average?

We don't know. We suspect most of their communications are short, frequent, and bursty vs. long, occasional, and regular. The challenge will be to uncover sub-subcultures and patterns of use within the vampire communities.

Will this improve our brand?

Skype's brand is so happy, cheerful, laughing, blue skies. A hint of smoke, a touch of dark, might make Skype a more vivid, cutting brand.

How will rivals respond?

Microsoft: Ballmer will re-launch Live.com by buying and launching Dead.com. 

Google: Android and iPhone apps that blend Wave and Maps with GPS to find the nearest blood banks, Trublood retailers, vampire bars, graveyards, and college campuses. Starting with Stanford. 

AT&T: Lawyers and lobbyists to criminalize VoIP (Vampire over Internet Protocol).

Deutsche Telekom: New fees for calls to dead people.

What's the cheapest way to test our assumptions?

We tried focus groups, but we kept getting goths from Whitby.

We tried ethnographers to live among vampires and report their behavior, but they kept getting turned. or disappeared.

Maybe we should just put something out there and see what happens?

tags: skype, s4v, vampires, skype for vampires, branding, strategy

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.

Trueblood photo credit: copyright HBO.

Time: a Skype Red Software Design Challenge

Skype for Vampires is Time Aware.

Making the most of every night is not enough. Vampires want to make the most of every day too.

German Skype partner PamConsult announced Pamela V software that turns on automatic voice mail and IM attendants before dawn. You never need to miss a daylight message from humans or from vampires in other time zones.

A new clock counts down the minutes until dawn, with alerts at the –60 and –30 minute marks. For early risers, the clock also reports the wait until dark.

Because sunrise and sunset times depend on longitude, Skype now gathers location information from IP addresses on laptops and desktops and more accurate GPS data for S4V Mobile users.

Five Digit Years

S4V resolve bugs that bothered vampire Skypers for years. Skype now holds birth dates going back 100,000 years. The big change was changing age in profiles to support five digits, complying with IETF RFC 2550.

Still on the wishlist: Century. Many senior vampires were raised in eras when calendar dates were less standardized and education less common. You should be able to pick your origin century as an alternative to Julian calendars dates.

Skype restores birthday alerts. Adds death day alerts.

The first release of Skype for Windows 4 left out contact birthday reminders. Skype for Vampires restores them. Skype added two new fields to profiles. First Death Date is your date of conversion to vampire status, or a rebirth as some call it. Last Death Date is when you are really, truly, completely dead. So now Skype helps you celebrate two lifecycle milestones with your friends.

Last death date turns out to be very useful in managing your relationships but hard to get people to fill out.

tags: skype, s4v, skype for vampires, skypeforvampires, pamconsult, time, years, centuries, ui, ue, ux, vampire, vampires, skypered

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.

Slides from the Skype iPhone press conference

Scott Durschlag presenting at CTIA Mobile 2009 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. A nice mix of

• Skype rhetoric (enabling conversation, Skype everywhere, person centric vs. network or device centric),
• dazzling numbers (kabillions of minutes served, a million new users every three days, the next 100 million users are in China),
• some product stuff (Skype for iPhone number one download in markets around the world, Skype Lite for Blackberry coming in May)
• ended with a pitch to carriers. Dear Mobile Carriers, we're here, we're staying, we're growing, partner with us.

Skype Alien stalks reporters

The reporters, queued for yesterday's Skype press conference, are more interesting. than the circus performer. Blasé, reflexive shutterbugs, won't interrupt conversations despite looming monster, while others pose for portraits. 

Technorati tags: skype, pr, publicity, clown, circus

Skype Red: Ground Penetrating Wi-Fi

Just because you're dormant doesn't mean you're offline. New advances in Ground Penetrating Wi-Fi (802.11gp) let your mobile phone or laptop stay connected to Skype and the rest of the Internet while you're six feet under. Your persistent Skype chats and voice mails will be all queued for you at dusk.

Cemeteries are a growing market for Skype partners Linksys, Cisco, and others making routers supporting the new technology. The gold standard is the D-Link Red, above, able to deliver 100Mbps two meters under soil at a distance of 25 meters.

Coffin makers are also equipping their products with batteries and uninterruptable power supplies. Laptop and smartphone batteries still have trouble making it from sunrise to sunset without a charge.

Cemeteries are racing to zone plots with Wi-Fi coverage, hoping to charge tenants a premium.

On the down side, privacy advocates urge caution, warning most graveyards have lax security, even online. 

cc-by: TheeErin

The Social Vampire: A Skype Red Design Challenge

When vampires tweet, follow, friend, and bite

Vampires vary more than humans in the degree of social connectedness and styles of social interaction. Skype for Vampires brings several features built on their social behavior.

Groups in Groups. Groups of vampires are called different things in different countries and subcultures. Depending on size and strength of ties, they have been called nests, clans, families, tribes. Skype "contact categories" now let you nest contact categories.

Unflattening Social Graphs. Skype contact groups are flat and democratic, unlike pecking orders among vampires. S4V lets you define hierarchy within contact groups. So you know who's the master.

Instant Cabal. A Skype preference automatically form groups by clan/bloodline affiliation. This can be a big time saver and better models real vampire-vampire relationships.

People Rank. S4V can sort your contacts using bloodline social proximity calculations. Social proximity shows how close you are to someone within a social graph, answering the questions "how many contacts do you share?" "how strong/active are those connections?" LinkedIn shows social proximity in a business context; Skype in the vampiric context. 

My Vampire(s). With a nod to twitter, Skype now lets non-vampires "follow" a vampire, and a vampire "claim" a non-vampire. Vampire affiliation and custody of non-vampires now shows up in search and search results, profiles, and automatic contact lists. Unclaimed humans can set their profile to the "BiteMe!" option in the My Species field.

Dating. Skype partnered with Lovebitten, a portal partnership for interspecies dating. The bitecurious can launch Skype chats and voice/video calls from the Lovebitten site. 

tags: lovebitten, bitecurious, biteme, skype, sociology, social, linkedin, twitter

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

Skype averages 150k concurrent voice/video calls

Skype reported 20 billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype and Skype-to-PSTN calling in 2008-Q4. With 131k minutes in a quarter, that means Skype averages 152,625 active person-minutes at any given time.

The 20 billion figure counts two people in a one minute Skype call as two minutes.

I'm assuming this included minutes from mobile callers.

Skype for Vampires: New Emoticons

Skype's designers had a unique brief: enrich Skype IM conversation for vampires. Notes from the original design specification:

Title

vampire IM emoticons

Short Summary

We're building an IM product for vampires. One visual element are the emoticons vampires might use in ordinary conversation. We're looking for a few, well crafted emoticons in small size and larger display size.

Description

User Considerations:

• vampires are real, having coming out of the coffin in 2006;
• vampires drink TruBlood, the product featured on the HBO show;
• vampires vary in age from teenager to ancient (think centuries); 
• vampires are social with tribes, territory, and "bloodlines". 
• vampires, like Skype, are global with social connections that cross national borders.

Emoticons used for feelings are typically derived from the smiley face.

Potential emoticons from our Thursday brainstorming session (and we're open if you have other suggestions):

• Vampire, V''''V
• Thirsty
• Bite
• Smiley Fang
• Blood
• Garlic
• TruBlood bottle (first emoticon product placement, see http://www.trubeverage.com/)
• TruBlood Type O - hearty and satisfying
• TruBlood Type A - light and delicate
• TruBlood Type B - aggressive and energizing
• TruBlood Type AB - smooth and refined
• Plasma (weak blood)
• Stake
• Holy Water (H2O with a halo)
• Sunrise (when we go to sleep)
• Sun Glasses
• Sun Block (SPF-1000)
• Toothbrush, dental floss
• Sunset (when we get up)
• Sire (the vampire that brought you over)
• vampire, Vampiir (eesti spelling) ,veripard, vere-imeja
• Coffin/Sleep

What I Want

• Be consistent with our Skype emoticon library(http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/emoticons/), not Yahoo!'s or Microsoft's or QQ's. 
• Files for each emoticon, on white background
• Skype's emoticon size is 19x19px.
• Bonus points if you have time or imagination for animated versions for one or more. 
• Character. This is for the everyday use by millions of people, so it better have heart. A bleeding, pulsing heart. Have fun, show the gist.
• Gender Balance.

What I Don't Want

• Too cute. Put on your Skype design hat; you don't want to belittle or offend our vampire customers or employees. 

Prior art:

• A Yahoo! style emoticon.
  
• 3-D treatments
   

tags: skype, emoticons, s4v, skypeforvampires, design, ui, ue, ux, smileys, trublood, trueblood, bloodtype, branding

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.

Vampire Identity: a Skype Red Software Design Challenge

Skype for Vampires offers the first Vampire-Ready Digital Identity System

Along with Skype for Vampires comes a new ID system, reflecting deep research into vampire market needs.

Multiple Pseudonyms, Persistent Identity. As you might imagine, vampires may wish to remain closeted. S4V now lets you define multiple aliases. You can apply aliases to individual contacts and contact groups. Your core digital identity should last as you shed aliases over the decades.

My Species. Each alias may have its own species indicators. You can choose from Human, Vampire, Dhampir, Werewolf, Pixie, Decline To State, BiteMe! We can only guess what  BiteMe! presence means.

Profile attribute: MyType™. Vampires can share their personal tastes using the common ABO blood group system (A, B, AB, O). Humans will be able to share their blood types in their profiles. You will be able to search the Skype directory for people according to MyType.

Real Vampire™. Is this contact really undead? Skype partnered with the American Vampire League to certify Skypers users as AVL members in good standing. Building on technologies like OpenID and OAuth, this is Skype's second use of third-party authentication after its MySpaceIM partnership. They are promoting VoID, the Vampires over Open ID protocol.

These features should also be useful to humans. We all want to share ourselves differently with different people, applying the appropriate social context. Your boss shouldn't know you hang out at vampire bars, your bloody friends shouldn't know you go to church, and your church committee shouldn't know how you voted. Skype now makes that possible.

See also:

• Your MySpaceIM account dies when you do. Skype Journal, 2007.
• WhoAmI - A Web2.0 Platform for Faceted Identity Management through Aggregation of Social Media. Stephan Baumann, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
• Faceted Id/entity: Managing representation in a digital world, danah boyd's thesis on contextualization of identity.

tags: skype, skypejournal, bloodtype, realvampire, mytype, myspecies, biteme, vampire, dhampir, werewolf, pixie, presence, aliases, facedtedidentity, identity, id, trublood, trueblood

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.

Mobile Skype for Vampires

From the product pitch: "We'll bundle apps for the market to sweeten the attraction of mobile Skype for Vampires."

tags: skype, vampires, mobile, location, skypeforvampires, skype4vampires, s4v

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.

Vampires work Skype's graveyard shift

Like many companies, Skype learned trusted, valued employees were vampires. Gilles Annespie, HR director, affirmed Skype's commitment to workforce diversity and equal opportunity extended to all employees, even the undead.

 
Vampire-ready jobs are tagged "graveyardshift" on the Skype jobs blog.

Embracing change. Workshops at Skype offices helped employees who wanted to "come out of the coffin" to their colleagues. "Beyond the normal anxieties of people acknowledging something new, we wanted to deal constructively with change" said Annespie.

"Some of our best developers worked late and missed meetings. Now we know why" said a Tallinn team leader. Half the quality assurance team came out at the evening sessions. "It's the focused, ruthless pursuit of bugs that makes them so good. That's why we're pretty sure most of our private beta testers are vampires too."

To become a more vampire-friendly workplace, Skype's bigger offices turned a few wire closets into emergency sleep spaces. The light-proof "day bunks" have beanbags, locks from the inside, atomic clocks, and wi-fi. All Skype offices are now open around the clock. Refrigerators in every lounge stock Trublood in all the popular types.

Staffing up. Skype actively recruits vampire programmers, both for its staff and for its third-party developer program. Skype named Bertoine Antout Manager of Vampire Community Relations. The team will host VampDevCamp, an unconference for undead hackers at Skype House London on 31 October 2009. 

Miller Roberts, Skype's general counsel, said it was hard extending health, disability, and life insurance to vampires. Coverage used to end with death. Skype's legal affairs team rewrote contracts with more than forty insurers, in a dozen countries, to cover all current and future undead employees within the first 30 days.

Some paychecks were briefly stopped during the transition when newly added "first death" dates were added to legacy payroll software. 

tags: skype, vampires, hr, payroll, skypeforvampires, s4v, skype4vampires, graveyardshift, trublood, trueblood

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

Download Skype app for iPhone 1.0.1 from iTunes

Download from iTunes app store.

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

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

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

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

Apple, AT&T hobble Skype for iPhone 3 Ways

BBC News' Rory Cellan-Jones is right when he asks Is Skype on the iPhone a big deal? 

1. No-VoIP Clause (Wi-Fi tethered). Apple's deal with AT&T (and presumably Apple's other carrier partners) forces Apple to force Skype off of mobile networks for voice or video calls. So Skype can only make or take calls when connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi.
2. No background apps (no Skype dialtone). Apple's iPhone OS prevents multiple apps from running. So I can only have Skype dialtone when it is in the foreground. You need Skype dialtone, connection to the Skype network, to share presence, to get chat updates, to receive Skype calls. When iPhone OS 3 launches at the Apple WWDC, this may get better.
3. No eye (no video). Apple doesn't have a camera looking at the user. Needed for video calls.

So Skype for iPhone is less than what it could be. Will customer pressure change AT&T's and Apple's attitudes? 

See the only Skype for iPhone video demo, courtesy of the BBC.

tags: skype, apple, iphone, att

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.

+iPhone: Updating the Skype Product Family mindmap

Added Skype for iPhone to the Mobile Software branch of the Skype Products mind map.

UPDATE: 30 March 2009: Added Skype For SIP, Skype for iPhone, Skype co-brand clients, Skype for Asterisk SDK. Changed from eBay extension to eBay toolbar.

tags: skype, iphone, products

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

Skype for iPhone – the screenshots

Slide show: (screenshots below)

Splash screen:

Connecting:

Contact list:

Contact profile:

Recent conversations:  

A chat:

Calling:

In a call, speaker on:

In conference call:

Conversation history:

My profile:

Set profile picture:

screenshot credit: Skype.

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

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

16 Skype Mobile @ CTIA fantasies

1. iPhone gets a Skype Lite client.
• [Hat tip to Om Malik's creative? sources.]
2. Apple buys Skype.
• Skype is what iChat could have become with funding and management support. Although we're still waiting on multiparty video.
3. Skype Lite For iPhone OS 3, later this year.
• The best Skype experiences need push and sync services you'll find in 3.
4. Verizon buys Skype.
• Or another US mobile carrier. 0% growth in wireless minutes, 20% growth in data; time to sell services that drive data growth.
5. Three US carriers will sell low end Skypephones this year.
• Maybe if carriers won't spend a few billion to buy Skype, they'll partner to build data plan sales and consumption.
6. Skype asks the new FCC to force mobile Carterfone rules on US carriers.
• A new administration could be very interested in the political appeal of consumer-friendly rules.
7. Google buys Skype.
• Would complement Google Voice, Goog411, Google Talk, Android and all the other realtime conversation projects, filling in gaps and serving non-Google customers. Skype's new evidence-based management culture might fit too.
8. Cisco buys Skype.
• Telepresence at the high end, WebEx in the bigco, Skype everywhere else.
9. Skype Lite now supports video.
• I wish. Completely depends on the handset, on features turned off/on by carriers, on the quality/capacity of 3G.
10. Rupert Murdoch buys Skype.
• Skype already partners with MySpace, a NewsCorp company. Could Skype branded mobile and desktop tools help sell other NewsCorp television, sports, business, and games content?
11. Skype launches DENIM, a new video codec for mobiles.
• Skype depends on On2 for video codecs. How long before Skype decides it's better to own than to rent? Skype's SILK codec proves they've decided that before.
12. Microsoft buys Skype.
• MSN and Windows Live Messenger are both insanely popular IM products, but neither of the ad-supported products convinced people to use voice, video, or PSTN features. After Microsoft buys Yahoo!, they may have enough loose cash to pick up Skype. Skype has a newly upgraded client for Windows Mobile.
13. Skype mobile clients support video calls.
• An oft requested feature.  
14. Nokia buys Skype.
• Just a long ferry ride from Tallinn. It would explain Nokia's Barcelona announcement to ship smartphones with Skype later this year. Skype has mobile products all three Nokia OS's: Symbian, Maemo/Linux, and java.
15. Skype becomes location-aware.
• Sort those contact lists by proximity. Update mood messages automatically by zone ("leaving the office"). Filter directory search results. 
16. Oprah buys Skype.

We'll see what really happens.

tags: skype, ctia, ctia09

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.

Wishlist: Solve Skype SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony)

Guest post by Katherine Robinson in response to SkypeIn number used by con artists, Skype Journal, 24 March 2008.

I just got a Skype online number and I love it. I want to use it for both business and personal. But there is no way to opt out of allowing my number to be given out to complete strangers by Skype or some Skype affiliate or provider (21st century telco? Level 3 Communications?) other than to say "only people in my contacts can use my number." Business users to whom I have given the number may not yet be in my contacts —  I don't want them to have problems reaching me, so I am forced to leave my number "open for all takers."

I have already gotten a spam call (voice mail recording — arrived at 5AM! — stating that I am pre-approved for a credit card) and I have only had this number ten days. Another friend of mine who has one also gets spam calls regularly — and in the middle of the night!

I can't agree about support tickets. I think Skype purposely answers them so badly (late, inappropriate, canned responses) as to intentionally discourage people from submitting support requests. I am exhausted — just like they want me to be — from my efforts to get questions answered or fix problems via Skype "support."

Skype's parent company, eBay, is just notorious for not caring what works for their customers and only about what works easiest and cheapest for them. What a shame! I really want to increase my use of Skype and am very wiling to pay for services from them. I just am waiting in hopes that the new Google phone features are managed with a bit more consumer respect.

Thanks again!

Katherine Robinson
Determined But Discouraged Skype User

see also:

• The Skype Journal Evil Genius Award: Sexy SPIM for Skype, March 2008
• Skype Spam, February 2005

tags: skype, spam, telemarketing, demon dialing, customer service, google, ebay inc

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.

Community Wishlist: Skype Chat to Email Listserv gateway

@PacificIT community leader Robert Sanzalone and I have been chatting about Skype and its use as social software. Robert penned this blogworthy bit that started about a Skype client on the iPhone. Robert:

As you saw me mention, I have literally been OFF SKYPE waiting for this client to appear from SOMEONE and it still hasn't arrived.

About half a dozen apps exist to do various basic functions of Skype such as one-to-one text and voice. A few can now also connect with the Skype Out/In services as well.

With the recent development of the latest client focusing on video, it looks once again that "sexy" wins over practicality and what is really needed to keep this service at the front line. I'm almost expecting announcements for new deals with Friendster and Plaxo any day now (yes, it's that bad).

Regardless, my hope is time, money and effort isn't being put into making a VIDEO CLIENT for the iPhone before group chat is solved. I think building community around the client is far more important and the fans keep coming even though Skype seems to be telling them to go away.

My alternative challenge to the community is to look at other common technologies which can bridge this gap.

My crosshairs are on email. Understood and common.

One of the most attractive features of Chatterous was the ability to completely interact in a dynamic IM group discussion exclusively by email. It was (and is) amazing.

BUT.. the name recognition and trust is not as well established as Skype. I PERSONALLY found out people would rather stay with the tried and true recognized name than to move a whole community to a platform or service no one has heard of or is interested in experimenting with.

How to interact with email?

Again, the lesson comes from Chatterous. Essentially, you can choose how to have digested messages sent from a group chat to your email account which you can then react to, or not.

The email sent in completely blends in with the rest of the chat. I was amazed even with the latency of tapping out an email minutes after the initial digest was sent me that the conversation wasn't completely backward (since there are frequent delays, even with real time IM chats).

Now, apply this capability to a mobile device with email capability, and you have the whole issues of a "Skype group chat client" solved. You CAN interact with a group chat even without a specific client on the iPhone, or ANY mobile device anywhere in the world. A sweet solution.

Though I'm not a developer, I'm told time and time again the API in Skype does give the ability to make these types of toys. I have no way to verify this one way or another.

All I know is, it's JUST NOT HAPPENING. I was looking for a few smart people to get on the ball and do something about it.

Turn off your darn video cams and let's get the community together first.

tags: skype, email, wishlist, listserv, mailing list, community, collaboration, chatterous, webmail, bbs, chat

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.

TV commercial from Skype

 

sfx:

soft sound of fast typing on a computer keyboard

text:

Sarah had a baby girl at 6:30am

sfx:

Skype water drop, into music

father's voice over animation:

She's beautiful, so beautiful. We're calling her Laura. We think she looks like a Laura. She already has a full head of hair.

animation fades to father's face, pulling back revealing father, Sarah and Laura are on a wide-screen video call being watched by grandparents

father

and she's got my eyes. luckily for her, everything else is pure Sarah.

announcer:

With free Skype-to-Skype video calls, you can be right there with them, wherever they are.

fade to slide:

Skype logo + "Free at Skype.com"

The ad reinforces existing brand elements: sounds of people using the product, the transition from IM to voice to video, family connections, and life events. Oh, and clouds.

We won't know for a while where or how much air time Skype is buying. English accents suggest this ad is targeted to the UK.

One thing: the Skype video used by the family has a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, not available with today's consumer webcams. Is that a buried product announcement or a vision of the future?

Hat tips to Dan Furrier and Kara Swisher.

tags: skype, ad, ads, advert, advertising, tv, television, video, marketing, promotion

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.

BCP Management by Role: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Business Control Panel (BCP) Management by Role.

When a manager leaves the company and takes her Skype account with her, will the company lose access to its control panel? To its funds? To its records? To its control over control panel membership?

BCP "ownership" should belong to a defined role, an alias, perhaps even a shared alias.

A manager, their manager, the telecom manager, someone from HR and someone reporting to the front line manager could share that role.

Skype's current architecture prevents proper:

• Succession
• Delegation
• Supervision
• Audit 

Without management through roles, powered by aliases, Skype's BCP will create problems outside of very tiny, unusually stable organizations.

 

See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases 
• Multiple Companies per Account

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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

Multiple Business Control Panels Per Company: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Multiple Business Control Panels Per Company.

The power in Skype for Business lies in Skype's Business Control Panel (BCP). The BCP is where Skype gives you fund multiple Skype accounts and manage SkypeIn phone numbers for your organization.

Today, you are allowed only one BCP per company.

It's time to decentralize authority.

• Give authority to managers and team leaders closer to the people who use the service.
• Permit companies to create BCPs to match their formal organizational structure.
• Permit teams to create BCPs to match their informal organizational structure.

Benefits to Skype:

• More customer eyes on spending and activity.
• More awareness by first line managers of Skype and it's uses at work.

Benefits to Business:

• Allows sponsors to respect privacy expectations within a company by limiting the size of BCP membership and visibility of BCP activity data and billing details.
• Roll up aggregate statistics and financials across a company to better understand spending and activity by department.

 

See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases 
• Multiple Companies per Account

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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

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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Skype for SIP == Skype for Asterisk DOA?

Guest post by Jason Goecke, Adhearsion

Today Skype announced Skype for SIP (SFS). Put simply, enterprise telephone systems may now interconnect with the Skype network to receive calls from the Skype network and place calls to SkypeOut. All without the need to install any special hardware or software on most modern enterprise phone systems (IP-PBXs to be more specific). Skype’s new enterprise targeted connectivity uses SIP, the industry standard for VoIP interconnection. SIP already powers the bulk of Skype’s revenue, via SkypeIn/SkypeOut, so this is a logical progression to take advantage of the large scale infrastructure already in place at Skype.

This is a tremendous move by Skype and one I have contended for years was necessary for them to make headway in the enterprise. I applaud this step. There are plenty of great posts out there covering this already, including the one by @danyork on Disruptive Telephony.

What does this mean for Skype for Asterisk (SFA) announced last September? At best the value of SFA has been significantly reduced by this announcement.

Previously SIP interconnection to the Skype cloud was given to the rarified group of larger players such as Voxeo, Tellme, Genesys and others. SFA was the first time this access was going to be brought to the world of open source telephony developers through Asterisk. This provided an immense opportunity for the Asterisk developer community to create new applications to take advantage of this, which lead me to invest time to participate in the closed beta for SFA still underway.

The SFS announcement this morning has just marginalized SFA to applications that benefit from direct dialing of Skype users from Asterisk and from basic presence updates from the Skype network. Gone are the benefits of providing Skype/SkypeIn inbound calls to the enterprise, SkypeOut trunking, etc. More so, SFA is at a disadvantage since you will have to pay a per channel (simultaneous call) license fee on top of any SkypeIn/SkypeOut costs. Further, I suspect that the number of SFA channels available to a single account will be limited for the same reason that SFS does not do SIP to Skype dialing, so that no one may provide large scale alternatives to SkypeIn.

All of this has really taken the wind out of the SFA sails before it even had a chance to make it to a public beta. Digium must now look to quickly add new features. Such as advanced presence information, instant messaging, the SILK codec and others, if they hope to salvage their own investment in the development of SFA to date. While I understand these things take time, the lethargy of getting the SFA to market does not bode well for rapidly trumping the SFS announcement.

Time will tell.

tags: asterisk, ip-pbx, sfa, sfs, sip, skype, skypeforasterisk, skypeforsip, voiceoverip, VoIP, jasongoecke

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

Skype dial tone: 17 million simultaneous online

Guest post by Jean Mercier, the Skype Numerologist

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

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

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

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

Skyecandy: The Whole World Can Speed Date For Free

OK, this looks fun. A team from NSW opened their beta to Skyecandy, a speed dating site that uses Skype video. "The more you share, the better you pair."

I really like the "Skyecandy" name but hope they have a decent IP attorney.

tags: skype, voip, dating, speeddating, skyecandy, au, australia

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

Skype For SIP: Big Money, Skypeless, Brand Destroyer

Skype For SIP (SFS), announced today, is really two Skype for Business services.

And a huge problem.

The services:

Skype-Name-to-SIP-Address. Skype for Business users map one Skype name to one IP address. So people can Skype your Skype name but your SIP PBX rings.

SIP-Switch-to-SkypeOut. Use SkypeOut for all the calls going out of your SIP telephone system. Billed at Skype's typical per-minute rates: higher than what you can buy in bulk, much cheaper than what you get from your local phone company.

Both are controlled through the Skype.com web site and setting on your telephone switch. Business Control Panels let organizations distribute money to multiple Skype accounts.

Between the two parts, SFS gives Skype an excuse to get in front of small business telecom buyers. It offers cost savings and predictability on outbound calling. It provides simple routing of incoming Skype calls to your call center. No hardware beyond your SIP PBX. No software to install. You don't even need to use Skype.

SFS is the second workplace product Skype is launching this year. Skype For Asterisk (SFA), still in closed Beta testing, is Asterisk add-on software running on your Asterisk telephone switch. SFA gives your phone switch the ability to send and recognize Skype instant messages and presence. SFA also lets programmers integrate Skype into other Asterisk programs, like phone trees and speech recognition.

Distribution.

SFS will be distributed on Skype.com and by Skype "service partners", local firms that install and repair phone systems. Service partners will receive commissions from Skype on minutes purchased by customers they refer to Skype. Skype will send referrals to authorized service partners.

Skype does not have a service partner network now. A 2007 project tried to distribute Skype for Business starter packs. 

The Strategic Opportunity.

Skype For SIP home page on launch day, 23 March 2009

Skype is opening doors with SFS.

They're setting up a distribution channel and meeting enterprise IT/telecom people. Skype's brand may entitle it to sell Skype-flavored minutes at a premium. All of this should be good for Skype's sales.

How big is the opportunity?

The normal VC math: 100 partners worldwide (could be 1000 easily) x 100 small companies per partner (could take time) x 1000 minutes/month (an extremely low number) * $0.20 per minute = $2 million/month. This run rate could grow easily to $20 million/month in a year. 

That's the quarter billion dollar per year upside.

The Strategic Downside.

The downside is huge.

Skype For SIP is barren of everything that makes Skype meaningful and invaluable in the workplace.  

Skype is selling cheap, convenient minutes to enterprise plumbers. Legacy audio quality. No audio, video, conferencing, buddy lists, file sharing, presence, or software extensions. SFS is the commoditized low end of VoIP.

With SFS, Skype defines itself to the channel and to its business customers as a "value" provider, helping companies shave pennies, competing with the "minute stealer" industry. While there's money to be had, Skype For SIP

This abandons Skype's central tenets: 

• Be a live, realtime social network.
• Enrich the quality of conversation through higher quality and multiple modes.
• Build Skype Dial Tone by having more individuals log in for more time each day, earning network effects.
• Be the tool people use for workplace collaboration and coordination. 

Skype For SIP is a Skypeless product.

Nobody at a company which uses SFS needs to use Skype. Nobody needs to turn on a client or use an embedded Skype phone or download Skype Lite for a mobile.

In short: SFS undermines Skype's brand.

Warnings for 2009.

• No Emergency Calls. Calls to paramedics, police, and fire will not go through. Standard blocking by the Skype network. So configure your IP-PBX to keep a non-Skype connection open.
• Security sucks. No encryption for now. A Skype spokesperson wrote "at the start of beta, we do not support encryption due to the lack of support among most IP-PBX vendors. We will be adding TLS (encrypted signaling) and SRTP (encrypted media) during the beta period."
• ID Schism sucks. No way for users to tell if a Skype account is a "consumer" or a "business" or a robot account. No way to tell if a Skype user is seeing your IM or your presence or can see your video.
• English-only. One language for the web site and documentation. No internationalization for a while.
• Digital Identity Lifecycle sucks. No way to transfer a Skype account (in the event of M&A, personnel change, for example) or to integrate this with your network/server management systems.
• Only One Skype ID per Company. So if you have more than one trademark, you're out of luck. If you've already secured your trademarked Skype name, you're in worse luck. Only Skype names created through the new service will work. This contradicts what a Skype source told Dan York.

See also:

• Skype Now Means Business, Friends The SIP World, Om Malik, GigaOM
• Skype Targets Businesses to Ring Up New Revenue, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Wall Street Journal
• Skype tears down more walls with "Skype For SIP", Dan York, Disruptive Telephony
• Business Long Distance: Death by 1,000,000 PBX's, Jim Courtney, VooW
• Techmeme coverage.

 

Thanks to Ian Robin, who runs sales and marketing for Skype for Business, for the briefing.

And, as we often do, the full text of the news release.

Skype opens up to corporate SIP communications

New beta program brings Skype voice calling to SIP-based PBX systems

LUXEMBOURG, March 23, 2009 — Skype today announced the beta version of Skype For SIP for Business users. SIP, short for Session Initiation Protocol, is an open standard and the leading voice over Internet protocol used in businesses telephony networks at millions of locations globally. According to IDC, 438,000 IP PBXes were shipped worldwide in 2008.^*

Skype For SIP allows SIP PBX owners to benefit from Skype’s low cost calls to fixed phones and mobiles around the world, and to receive calls from Skype users directly into their PBX system.

Businesses can now be reached by the community of over 405 million Skype registered users through click-to-call from their business Web sites. The calls will be received through their existing office system at no cost to the customer. At the same time, businesses can benefit from Skype’s low-cost global calling rates when placing calls to landlines and mobiles worldwide from devices connected to their PBX systems. In addition, they can choose to purchase online Skype numbers available in over 20 countries to receive calls from business contacts and customers who are using traditional fixed lines or mobile phones.

“The introduction of Skype for SIP is a significant move for Skype and for any communication intensive business around the world,” said Stefan Oberg, VP and General Manager of Skype for Business. “It effectively combines the obvious cost savings and reach of Skype with its large user base, with the call handling functionality, statistics and integration capabilities of traditional office PBX systems, providing great economical savings and increased productivity for the modern business.”

"Businesses have been waiting for Skype to make a concerted push into the business space for a while,” said Rebecca Swensen, IDC’s Research Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IP Communications Services. “Connecting to existing standards-based SIP PBXes is a good way for Skype to start doing so. It will be interesting to see how large companies change their thinking about the deployment of Skype within the network.”

Key Features

The beta version of Skype For SIP will enable business users to:

• Receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users worldwide on SIP-enabled PBX systems; connecting the company Web site to the PBX system via click-to-call
• Place calls with Skype to landlines and mobile phones worldwide from any connected SIP-enabled PBX; reducing costs with Skype’s low-cost global rates
• Purchase Skype’s online numbers, to receive calls to the corporate PBX from landlines or mobile phones
• Manage Skype calls using their existing hardware and system applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voicemail; no additional downloads or training are required

How to participate

The Skype For SIP beta program for business users opens today. SIP users, phone system administrators, developers and service partners are invited to apply at www.skypeforsip.com. Applicants will need to be businesses, have an installed SIP based IP-PBX system, as well as a level of technical competency to configure their own SIP-enabled PBX. The initial beta is available to a limited number of participants.

During the beta period all calls will be charged at standard Skype rates. Further pricing details will be announced when the product is fully launched later this year.

tags: sfs, sfa, skype for asterisk, skype for business, skype for sip, sip, skype

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

Multiple Companies per Account: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Multiple Companies Per Account.

A Skype account is a person.

Let me be affiliated with more than one company.

I may have:

• a full time day job,
• bake cookies under my own name,
• help a friend's business on weekends,
• sit on the fundraising committee of my mosque,
• edit my professional association's newsletter, and
• support my kid's virtual lemonade stand.

No place in the real world does someone have just one enterprise affiliation.

We live in a buzzing swarm of many connections and groups.

When you ask people to choose just one, you shove them into the welcoming arms of competitors for every other relationship.

 

See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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

Share Aliases: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Sharing Aliases.

Nobody works 24 hours a day.

Companies still need to serve customers all day, every day.

They do this by sharing roles.

• On call neurosurgeon for a hospital.
• Help desk operator.
• Even the receptionist who takes a lunch break needs to hand off the role to another person.

The virtual equivalent:

• multiple people
• with their unique Skype accounts (account=person)
• able to share and use
• one or more common aliases (alias=role).

Let workers share roles and responsibilities through a Skype alias.

 

See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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

Provisioning: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Integrate and automate provisioning of Skype business control panel (BCP), Skype account, and Skype aliases.

So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a quarter on per-seat-licenses for email, accounting, virtualization, commerce, manufacturing systems, tech support, operating systems, security systems, HR software, and the home-grown systems that make your business work.

Provisioning systems automate user account lifecycles across all those systems. You'll want to support lifecycles for:

• Skype accounts
• Skype aliases
• Skype control panels and company

Skype must integrate with the top provisioning products to make provisioning fast, cheap, reliable, thorough and automatic.

 

See also:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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

Alias Transfer: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Transferability of Aliases.

I wear many hats at work. A Skype account's aliases should hold all my hats.

I should be able to:

• define a role (the person who orders office supplies, for example),
• use it (call and IM suppliers, build a contact list of suppliers, accumulate a call/chat history), and
• hand it off to another person when I'm no longer in that role.

This preserves continuity of relationships so work is not interrupted when I change roles or change jobs.

Enterprises spend billions and mount great efforts to define workflows that survive an individual's path through the organization. Skype, even with aliases, will break proven and well-automated roles, relationships, and contact channels if Skype aliases cannot be transferred as needed.

Web domains can be transferred. Email accounts can be transferred.

Let me easily get and give my aliases to other Skype users. 

 

See also:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

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