Skype Journal

Weekly reading

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:42:00 +0000

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

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Download Skype for Windows 4.1 Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:05:00 +0000

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

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Skype for iPhone 1.1

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Update. Skype for iPhone 1.1.0.91.

Adds voicemail, sending SMS, and localization for Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and Traditional Chinese as well as English. Skype displays the language in your iPhone-wide settings.

Download from the iTunes Store.

tags: skype, iphone, download, release, 1.1.0.91, sms, voicemail, mobile, apple

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Skype for Windows Mobile 3.0 Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:20:00 +0000

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

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Dryburgh: What's after Skype? Intent.

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:11:00 +0000

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:20:00 +0000

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

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Roundup – Skype news

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:11:00 +0000

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

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Skype competitors suck. So says recruiting video.

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:30:00 +0000

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

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iPhone tethering fees violate Carterfone principles

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:55:00 +0000

AT&T prohibits tethering unless they sell you permission. From Plan Terms, Prohibited and Permissible Uses:

"Furthermore, plans(unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to computer accessories, BLUETOOTH® or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose."
"Accordingly, AT&T reserves the right to (i) deny, disconnect, modify and/or terminate Service, without notice, to anyone it believes is using the Service in any manner prohibited"

Fine print in your contract extends AT&T control into all the devices you use.

Mobile Net Neutrality says neither your handset maker nor your wireless carrier should alter your service based on the content or endpoints of your communication. You wouldn't let your ISP dictate what software goes on your PC or which web sites your surf. Why should your mobile operator have that power?

Yet Apple supports AT&T's ban on VoIP in theory, and full Skype in practice.

Mobile Carterfone says mobile customers should be free to connect to mobile voice and data services without a mobile carrier approving or dictating the device. You wouldn't let your ISP dictate what PCs or printers you connect to your DSL or cable modem. Why would you give your mobile operator that power?

Yet Apple supports AT&T's upcoming iPhone tethering fees.

Tethering fees give AT&T the power to approve or disallow your use of your phone as a modem. This is unheard of in most of the world.

AT&T is expected to add a surcharge of 30% to 50% for the privilege of using your existing device and bandwidth you already bought.

Tethering fees feel strange. The charges should stop at the first device, the connecting device. An operator should charge for primary connectivity, not downstream connections.

What other imaginary services could your phone company bill?

Cell-handoffs. Get the first 5 free and then 10 cents a go. Neil Stratford
Secondary listening. Special speakerphone detection modes to charge you extra for other people overhearing the call. Neil Stratford
Voice by the word. Charge for voice the way they charge for SMS. 10 cents for 15 words.
Volume detection. Shouting must mean the message is very important so charge more for louder conversation. mort

photo credit: cc-by Holly Gramazio.

Thanks to the Voice on the Web chat room.

GigaOm: No Skype for Palm Pre yet.

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:20:00 +0000

"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

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Apple's iPhone 3G S: still no video calling

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:20:00 +0000

The new iPhone 3G S seems designed to prevent video calling applications.

The feature is called "Video Recording," not a webcam.

The phone sports a great new camera, built for video. But only the one camera, facing away from you, the wrong way for video calls. Video calling needs a camera next to the screen, something Nokia's N series phones do well.

This isn't great news for Skype users. iPhone programmers can use the webcam to store video to a file, but won't be able to write apps that manipulate or route the stream. This means Skype for iPhone won't be able to add video calling any time soon.

Why didn't Apple make that leap?

It could be simple manufacturing economics: it's too early in the iPhone's life to get the cost of video components down.
It could be learning curve: vid-to-file is easier to design and manage than streaming video.
It might be battery life: video eats up CPU and batteries quickly.
It may be a carrier issue: mobile operators have been hostile to anything that looks like VoIP. Anticompetitive behavior, anyone?

King of Broadband

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:13:00 +0000

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

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Should Skype clients be Wave containers?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:58:00 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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.
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:

Skype meets more needs (lock-in in more markets).
Skype attracts new customers (faster word of mouth).
Skype attracts developers (lighter platform, bigger market).
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

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Skype for Business: Interop2009 video

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Stefan Öberg spoke at Interop 2009 last month, as Jim Courtney reported and Öberg blogged.

Two key takeaways.

First, Skype plans to formalize and extend its premium (prioritized queue, private resources) online customer support for enterprises and to deliver local language, in-country customer support through channel partners.

Last, Stefan said survey results show Skype is making its way into US and UK workplaces.

The slides go by very fast, so here are screenshots on from the Stefan Öberg's Skype for Business presentation at Interop 2009 flickr set. The comments below are mine.

hmmm. "The future of business communications" is a pretty big scope.

Not much new about the consumerization of IT. Been going on for generations. Mobile phones were smuggled in. Wi-Fi, Macs, even PCs were first brought to work by employees. Here's a 2005 Gartner release saying "Consumerization Will Be Most Significant Trend Affecting IT During Next 10 Years."

Tough times call for desperate measures. Even "consumer grade" tools will do if they save lots of money.

We do have lots of connectivity, for now. Good enough for Skype video calls.

Not just by IT employees but by everyone. Darned employees, using strange software and connectivity in ways we didn't plan.

We have one life, and we spend it at home, at school, and working. Our tools are becoming closer to us, less tied to or provided by our employers.

Presence will be matter when people stop lying about their availability. Skype's presence service only lets you set one presence message for everyone. Yet you might be available to your best customer and not available for Bob from the accounting department.

More stats...

Oh, and Skype Lite is coming out for the Blackberry this month.

Harder questions: What percent of smartphone users in the UK and US have ever downloaded an application? What percentage of smartphones sold in the US and UK will come with Skype preloaded?

Less integrated than bolted on or sitting next to your existing workflow. With a few limited exceptions, you cannot build Skype into an enterprise application. Unless you consider Outlook an enterprise workflow app.

Of the nine applications shown above, five were made by Skype, and three were made by one Skype developer. Not exactly a robust ecosystem.

The "tools" talking points are real accomplishments, although far from complete. Skype offers a version specifically for easy configuration (networking options and feature crippling) by IT. The readable admin guide to Skype has been useful in explaining how to make Skype installations conform to company security policies and assert control over users. Skype's business control panel is a first stab at letting companies manage user accounts and distribute account funds.

"Enhanced service" as used here means customer service and technical support. Interoperability, well, Skype's not there yet but it's nice to hear executives acknowledge it as an opportunity.

The closing slides say Skype is good wherever you work (office, travelling, at home).

Critique: A friend in the audience told me it was too salesy for the Interop IT crowd. Everyone there knew Skype already and they generally appreciate live demos more than PowerPoint. I tend to agree. The best parts of the talk were the hard numbers and the real world stories of companies putting Skype to work. Using real company names and showing photos or video of people using the tools at work would have been more meaningful.

Barack tethered

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Sat, 30 May 2009 13:28:00 +0000

Have you noticed President Obama is never photographed using a mobile anymore? Here are some pics from The Official White House Photostream on flickr by Pete Souza.

Given how many hours the President must spend on a phone, is a Bluetooth or other wireless headset out of the question?

tags: barackobama, whitehouse, gov, phone, telephone, telephony, mobile, landline, government

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

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:15:00 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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.
Navigation. Skype's UI is not designed to let search, sort, browse, discover, organize a million contacts. Not even ten thousand contacts.
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.
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.
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?
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?

Broadcast alerts and information. IM news relevant to fans based on language, interests, location, and length of relationship.
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?
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.

eBay puts distance between Skype and Markets

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:42:00 +0000

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

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Tune in to the Revolution. Live.

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:32:00 +0000

Anything with Susan Crawford has my attention. Tune in now.

hashtag: #fpdc

Tune In, Agenda, Speakers, Resources, News, FAQ

News release:

Michael Copps, Vivian Schiller, Susan Crawford to Keynote Free Press Summit

Event to highlight public interest policies on Internet, journalism and public media

WASHINGTON -- The Free Press Summit: Changing Media in Washington, D.C., tomorrow will feature keynote speeches by Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Copps, Vivian Schiller, president of National Public Radio, and Susan Crawford of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council.

What: Free Press Summit: Changing Media
When: Tomorrow, May 14, 2009, 9:30 a.m. -- 5 p.m.
Where: Newseum, 6th St. and Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C.

*** The Free Press Summit will be streamed live at http://www.freepress.net/summit

The one-day event will highlight the policies to reshape the future of the Internet, journalism and public media. Free Press will also release a new book, Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age. The full agenda is included below.

9:45 a.m. Welcome to the Free Press Summit

Josh Silver, Free Press

Alberto Ibargüen, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

10:15 a.m. Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age

S. Derek Turner, Free Press, discussing Dismantling Digital Deregulation: Toward a National Broadband Strategy

Craig Aaron, Free Press, discussing Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy

11:00 a.m. Morning Keynote

Michael J. Copps, Acting FCC Chairman

11:45 a.m. A View from the White House

Introduction: Tim Wu, Free Press

Susan Crawford, President Barack Obama's National Economic Council

12:00 p.m. Roundtable Discussion on Changing Media

Ray Suarez, The NewsHour (moderator)

Reed Hundt, Former FCC Chairman

Michael Powell, Former FCC Chairman

Jessica Rosenworcel, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Ben Scott, Free Press

Ram Shriram, Sherpalo Ventures

1:00 p.m. Interactive Discussion: The Future of the Internet

2:15 p.m. Afternoon Keynote

Introduction: Alexandra Russell, Free Press

Vivian Schiller, National Public Radio

2:30 p.m. Interactive Discussion: The Crisis in Journalism

3:30 p.m. Interactive Discussion: Public Media’s Moment

4:45 p.m. Closing the Free Press Summit

For more information about the Free Press Summit: Changing Media, visit http://www.freepress.net/summit

###

Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications. Learn more at www.freepress.net

Why a Skype platform can lead to happiness

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:21:00 +0000

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.
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Download Gladwell's talk

Q. What are the Skype TechPolicy issues?

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Sat, 09 May 2009 21:56:00 +0000

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.
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Weekend Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:37:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Globetrotting investor Joi Ito describes his VoIP setup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kantara Initiative from nethawk interactive on Vimeo.

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

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

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

Open Arms: a data portability approach

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:07:00 +0000

Caveat Lector: this is a rough draft of my thinking on what a Portability EULA /TOS should say/do/include. Please comment. - Phil

We've discussed Graceful Exit, the ability for people to control their departure from a site or service.

Open Arms starts at the beginning of your relationship with a service. Let's summarize it, break it apart, and explain why this is a powerful way to do business.

Open Arms is a combination of policy and technology.

The policy says:

When you come to our site,
bring all of yourself.
We'll help you put it to use
in our context.
We'll make it easy to come.
We'll keep it safe.
We'll respect ownership as you see it.

What you add while you are here
will join your collection
and be portable in turn.

The elements.

All of yourself.

Bring your identity, your contacts, your history with your contacts, your photos and videos, your playlists, everything digital.

We'll ignore what we cannot use.

Put it to use in our context.

Every site has a context.

Things it does
Purposes people share
Community standards of behavior.

For example:

Monster brings work and workers together.
Flickr helps people manage what comes out of their cameras.
YouTube is a community of video.
QuickBooks helps you manage your business.
Chemistry helps you find true love.
Amazon and eBay bring buyers and sellers together.

We need your data. These sites could help you do more and do it smarter with more and fresher and truer information from you. Monster could create team job search features if it knew your social graph. Chemistry could be more accurate if it had your music and video playlists.

Our sites are verbs. We do things. The more data you bring, the richer the data, the fresher and more standardized the data, the more we can do, the more creative we can be.

Most people don't try new sites because it's hard to recreate data. Especially for every site you visit.

Easy.

So for Open Arms to work, bringing your onlife to each site you join must be fast, simple, easy, and obvious. And correct.

Safe.

We will protect everything you share. We will protect it from damage, theft, natural disaster, financial ruin, legal physical threats, from legal threats, from Martian invasion. As best we can. And we'll explain the threats we perceive and how we're protecting you and your onlife from them.

Ownership as you see it.

"Ownership" is a tricky word: it means one thing to lawyers, something else to most people. Our online and mobile social experiences are a little ahead of the law. So all we can do is try to the right thing for you and for all of our guests.

We'll respect that your stuff is only "mostly" yours and that you may not have permission to share them with strangers. You may not have permission from the subject of a photo, or their parents. You may have clipped a blog post to share under fair use, but not for general distribution. You may have a confidential email that could endanger lives if leaked.

We will assume everything you bring is private to you and that you will tell us what can be shared, with whom, and under what conditions.

We'll make it easy for you to re-use your choices, so you don't have to explain yourself everywhere you go.

Portable in turn

Reciprocity works. So we're going to share with other sites the part of your onlife you spend with us, as you see fit. So you never feel we're holding your data hostage.

What's next?

So, we've "Open Arms" at the start of our relationship and "Graceful Exit" at the end. Next up "Ever Fresh" in between.

tags: dpp, dataportability, openarms, everfresh, gracefulexit

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Optimizing Skype.com for growth and sales

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:09:00 +0000

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

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Skype Domination: Platform Agnostic Style

noreply@blogger.com (Phil Wolff) — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:39:00 +0000

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.