“We’ll see. We don’t have a timeline for it. Our focus is to build a really great company. When we’re ready and the markets are ready, we’ll consider an IPO. At some point investors will want an exit, of course, but they’ re really taking  a long term point-of-view. This is not a quick flip; this is about building one of the great companies of technology.”

Today “long term” was defined as something between nine and fourteen months. Nine months after being taken private by an investment group lead by Silver Lake, Skype announced, through a blog post by Josh Silverman, they had filed a preliminary prospectus for an IPO. With a road show and other pre-IPO activities we’re probably three to five months from seeing the final transaction happen.

The prospectus makes for interesting read about both Skype’s business model and the communications infrastructure transition wrought by new technologies. Key Skype performance data includes:

• 2010 Jan-Jun revenues of $406.2MM vs same period 2009 of $324.8MM, an increase of 25.1%
• “Adjusted” EBITDA increase by 59.3% from $75.2MM to 115.8MM over the same periods
• $37MM in capital expenditures budgeted for 2010 vs $13.5MM spent in 2009

and some interesting user data:

One should really think of “Registered Users” as “Registered Accounts”. Especially with Skype for Business becoming more active, there will be a rise in accounts but lots of reasons for stagnant or dead accounts. (Personally I manage, via Skype Manager, over 25 accounts with about 15 users but really only use two of them for my own ongoing activities. The other users were created for one or more business activities and )

Most interesting are the “connected users” numbers, defined as “average monthly number for the three months ended [on] the date [shown on the x-axis]”. While Skype is showing a current number of 124 million“connected users” for the quarter ended Jun30, 2010  Hudson Barton’s “real users” number – which is more an indication of daily users on line is currently running at about 60 million.

The increase in paying users is the most significant number of interest. The prospectus confirms that SkypeOut represents Skype’s number one source of revenue and this number is the best indicator of how quickly these revenues can grow.

One other interesting metric relates to calling minutes, broken down as”

• Communications services billing minutes (SkypeOut minutes): from 5.0B in H1 2009 to 6.4B in H1 2010, a 28% increase somewhat consistent with the revenue increase, and
• Skype-to-Skype minutes: from 49.1 billion in H1 2009 to 88.4 billion in H1 2010, a 80% increase confirming that “free” really is the key marketing strategy for increasing Skype users and Skype usage.

Bottom line: Skype continues to grow at double digit rates but they are about to enter a phase where marketing activities and business communications services will become vital to sustaining its growth. Yet, regulatory and competitive issues will also become a significant factor and a real test of how willing governments are able to adapt to technological change as opposed to sustaining cost-inefficient legacy telecommunications operations whose fundamental business models are threatened. For the first time, we’ll be able to view quarterly the business success of Skype as an independent business operation.

There’s lots of other interesting marketing information and financial data in the prospectus but that leaves room for additional posts. And the statements re regulatory issues have the makings of several discussions.

Note that while $100MM has been put out as the amount to be raised, it was apparently only used as a metric to assist with determining SEC filing fees. The actual amount to be raised has yet to be announced.

Other posts:

• Dan York, Disruptive Communications: Skype, less than a year after eBay sale, files for $100 million IPO
• Business Insider SAI: Skype Spent $343.8 Million To Acquire Its P2P Software From Founders
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: Skype To Go Public makes a couple of interesing points:

Now, going public brings with it a whole new set of responsibilities, not only SEC quarterly reporting.

For Skype’s lead investors, Silver Lake Partners, this is their opportunity to cash out. For many of the employees at Skype this is their chance for a nice reward for all the hard work they’ve put in over the past year.

• GigaOm: Skype Files for IPO

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• Skype Going Public With $100 Million IPO (thenextweb.com)
• Skype files for IPO (theglobeandmail.com)
• Skype Files For $100 Million IPO (techcrunch.com) (This one includes a block diagram of the various companies involved)
• Internet calling service Skype files for IPO (sfgate.com)
• GIPS, Google and All That Co-opetition Jazz! (voiceontheweb.biz)
• SkypeKit: “Naked” Skype Support Arrives for Hardware-Embedded Skype and PC Applications (voiceontheweb.biz)

So I was skeptical about how that iPhone 4 antenna would work from the time of the initial announcement. And when fellow blogger and Twitter aficionado Luca Filigheddu took a poll earlier this week as to whether one would prefer a BlackBerry 9800 (the model that’s heavily speculated but not yet announced) or an iPhone 4 I could not resist the opportunity to  respond as shown above.

Three points:

• Mike’s comment when he saw me holding a BlackBerry 8700 a few years ago with my hand wrapped around the upper left corner was to the effect that I should avoid having my hand around that area as that is where the rf antennae are located. But it’s pretty easy to hold your BlackBerry while avoiding one corner of the device. Yesterday to check out the “Jobs test” I took up the “death grip” challenge presented by CrackBerry.com’s Kevin Michaluk and found “if I death grip my Bold 9700 the bars stay no matter what”. Seems like the rf engineering has improved going from the 8700 to 9700.
• From the rf physics point of view: Mike spent a lot of time at last year’s annual shareholders meeting (2009) talking about how RIM relies on internal basic physics research to assist in the design of BlackBerries, including an extensive discussion about their rf technology research. He is, after all, the energizer around the establishment of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; while its researchers are free to pursue whatever research they see appropriate this investment is probably not totally altruism when it comes to understanding the physics behind wireless smartphones.
• In my fifteen years’ experience with Magnetic Resonance instrumentation, perhaps the most frustrating aspect was to get the rf engineering right. You can get there (or we would not have the high quality images we see with today’s MRI studies) but you need to understand the physics behind it and have lots of patience.

After drafting the above commentary yesterday afternoon very late Friday CrackBerry.com put out a rather strongly worded statement from RIM co-CEO’s Jim Ballsille and Mike Lazaradis:

“Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.” [Author's bold]

Bottom line: Steve Jobs may be a marketing genius but he ain’t no rf engineer or Ph.D. physicist. It’s all coming out in the iPhone 4. But even his marketing genius is degraded when he endeavors to justify the iPhone 4’s current problem by attempting to demonstrate rf issues with competitor products. “Bumper physics” does not solve the problem; not to ignore the resulting degradation of the overall appearance. It’s time for Apple to do their own antenna research, Steve.

Once iPhone 4 is finally available in Canada I don’t know that I’ll be rushing out for any special upgrade offer Rogers may come up with. And by then, maybe we’ll be seeing some new BlackBerry models, including those that are the subject of speculation.

P.S. –“Sans” – the French expression for “without”.

Full disclosure: Both Kevin Michaluk and I are on Rogers for our wireless carrier which offers a highly reliable 3G/HSPA+ service. Is there also an AT&T infrastructure issue involved here? We’ll only find out when iPhone 4 launches in Canada July 30. For completeness, the author has been the owner of a minuscule number of RIM shares since 1998.

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• RIM: “Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable” (slashgear.com)
• Nokia And RIM Respond To Apple’s Antenna Issues (thenextweb.com)
• Steve Jobs Claims BlackBerry Bold 9700 Has Antenna Issues (blackberrycool.com)
• Apple Sets Up Cots for Engineers Solving iPhone Flaw (businessweek.com)

What does this mean for future deployment of Skype access?

Basically the ability to embed Skype within a third party Windows and/or Mac OS X application without the need for the Skype client to be open. Whereas the target developer audience for SkypeKit for Linux is probably hardware developers, there is now an offering available for software developers. From Jonathan’s post linked above:

Today, Skype is taking the next step by announcing a new version of the SkypeKit Beta SDK that works on Windows (x86) and Mac OS X. Now multiple desktop applications can offer Skype conversations — including video, voice, and text — without the need for users to separately download Skype software.

Look forward to seeing the innovation, especially with respect to video, in deploying Skype Everywhere within these future third party offerings.

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• SkypeKit to allow integration of Skype into all web-based devices (boygeniusreport.com)
• SkypeKit: Easily Building VoIP Into Any Application (fastcompany.com)
• It’s Been a Week for New Skype Video Experiences (voiceontheweb.biz)

Comment by Hudson Barton on Andy Abramson’s post: Fring Fumbles on Cross Platform Video Chat

In observing the evolution of Skype and third party access to it over the past few years I have often wondered how far Skype would go in allowing third party services to deploy Skype as one communications mode in a multi-service communications offering. Fring and Truphone are two examples. Usually these offerings figure out a way to put up a temporary Skype client on a “gateway” server and then build their own interface to the Skype client on that gateway.

There are issues of scalability, service quality (especially voice and video quality) and the overall user calling experience that could potentially compromise the user’s experience in taking advantage of the resulting Skype connection. It’s one thing to show that technically one can make the relevant voice and video connections but the challenges rise to a significantly higher level when taking into account the overall user experience.

Personally I look for services that allow me to easily find and select a contact, select the calling destination (Skype, Home, Mobile, Office, for example) and then click on either a soft button or the hardware green button and make the connection within a reasonable time (say, less than 30 seconds). I find the multi-service communications offerings to be a bit overbearing and almost too overwhelming for a non-technical business and consumer user.

Today there’s lots of coverage about Fring and its use of Skype (or now lack thereof); Dan York has provided an excellent summary of the various viewpoints in his post: Skype vs. Fring: Is Fring not telling the whole truth?. Very significant is the speed with which Skype’s Vice-President, Legal responded to get their side of the story out; their legal personnel usually have stayed out of the public discussion on any of Skype’s market-related issues.

But getting back to basics, there are three considerations:

Skype is Fundamentally Communications Software: we have heard this many times from Skype CEO Josh Silverman; he repeated and emphasized this during our CES conversation last January. As a result they own the intellectual property rights to their software. But they have been successful largely because they make much of their intellectual property available free – they can afford to do this since the capital overhead for Skype-to-Skype calling is so low. We as users provide the key piece by using Skype on our PC’s or other Skype-embedded hardware devices. On the other hand they need the intellectual property protection not only to defend potential revenues but just as importantly to defend their brand.

Best examples of this include:

• Skype video calling – here’s the 1964 AT&T World Fair concept now going out thirty-five years later with no charge for one-to-one video calling and being used on ~35% of Skype calls.
• Skype has also made their SILK codec available royalty-free provided the licensee meets performance criteria. As demonstrated with Skype for iPhone over 3G, SILK has the potential to revolutionize voice quality on mobile calling (and I’ll pay one or two dollars per month just to have the superior voice quality after many years of mobile phone calls with somewhat challenging audio quality ). Blabbelon provides an excellent example of incorporating SILK.
• Skype mobile on Verizon: here is a software development and licensing agreement that generates sustainable revenue streams for both parties while delivering a significant benefit, namely free calling to Skype contacts worldwide, to Verizon customers when calling from the U.S.
• With the success of Skype as a commercial TV production platform, Skype has developed special licensing terms for users of this application.

The bottom line is that all these, including making basic Skype-to-Skype calls using the standard Skype clients, involve some form of license agreement that is being adhered to.

Skype is Ultimately About The User Experience: Skype’s brand focuses well beyond the enabling technology to incorporate the entire user experience. It was ease of installation and use that allowed Skype to be adopted so readily such that over 600 million user accounts have been created with around 100 million active users. Skype’s VP for Mobile, Russ Shaw, re-emphasized this during our conversation at CES. We witness this in the recent launches of Skype mobile on Verizon and Skype for iPhone over 3G. While I can only rely on third party reporting about the former (not being in the U.S.) which has largely been positive, for the latter I simply installed the software, looked up a contact, clicked on the Call button and made this excellent quality call to the U.K. using Skype for iPhone over 3G. Woops, did I mention the quality of the call again? Overall both applications set a higher standard for the user experience.

Skype is Opening Up to Developers: Yes, there has been a rough ride for developers over the past four years. PamConsult, Netralia, InnerPass and OnState have persisted with their offerings and have demonstrated the potential for Skype and third party applications. But the recent launch of SkypeKit beta – in a phased program to ensure control over quality and service level issues as the program evolves – opens up significant opportunities for third party developers. Suffice it to say that I know we can expect not only significant software partner offerings but also some innovative hardware offerings based on SkypeKit. Once again, however, there are licensing guidelines to ensure the integrity of Skype’s brand.

But the bottom line is this: sure Skype reserves the right to generate revenues where they see a significant value-add market opportunity but even with their free offerings they want and need to preserve their brand image. It would appear from Skype’s legal executive’s comments that they have been trying to work out a way to interact with Fring without success; Fring has certainly been around for over three years in one form or another, including attending Skype-sponsored events. As Andy Abramson says:

As we all know there are three sides to every story, but given Fring took the shot first, an old rule of thumb in a legal battle is get the word out first. And Fring did. Now Skype, whose legal minds are based on the West Coast, as well as their platform team and video folks for the most part have gotten in and replied.

We now are starting to get a better handle on how Skype will establish the playing field for third party applications, hardware and services. The evolution of the Fring relationship (or lack thereof) will provide a concrete example of how far Skype will go in allowing third party affiliations.

Full disclosure: yes, I tried Fring several times in the past (when it had Skype access). Simply put, I never found a way to use it comfortably and abandoned it. I have used iSkoot successfully in the past; however, they no longer support current BlackBerry platforms. But all this flurry does generate the background for a future post on what I would look for in a mobile smartphone calling experience.

Re Truphone: I mentioned Truphone at the beginning of this post as another example of a third party service that offers Skype as one communication mode. I’ll have more to say on my Truphone experiences – both favorable and unfavorable in a separate post. At least I find it a reliable backup when I have no other choice for calling.

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• Skype, Fring throw punches over iPhone hang up (reviews.cnet.com)
• Fring removes Skype functionality, then says Skype blocked it (downloadsquad.com)
• Update: Fring removes Skype video call support, what is best in the US now? (zdnet.com)
• Fring for iPhone now blocked from Skype. (thenextweb.com)
• SkypeKit: “Naked” Skype Support Arrives for Hardware-Embedded Skype and PC Applications (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype for iPhone 2.0 Released: 3G Skype-to-Skype Calling to Require a Fee (voiceontheweb.biz)
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Enter Oak Horizons, an industry leader in medical transcription training, education, and curriculum development. Simply put they have leveraged Internet communications technology to make their programs available to healthcare facilities across the U.S., not only for the new medical imaging technician or transcriptionist but also ongoing training programs for experienced professionals who need to keep abreast of new developments within their field.

They found that they needed a collaboration resource where they could readily and persistently store lessons and complementary background information, lead training sessions in virtual meeting rooms, and activate tutorial sessions on demand. Enter InnerPass whose combination of online document management, desktop sharing and Skype communications provides an appropriate communications infrastructure that meets these needs. From the press release:

“When students first start their program, be it medical transcription, coding or billing, the course content tends to be very overwhelming,” says Kathryn Martin, owner and instructor at OAK Horizons. “The real-time introduction is very important and helpful, since the course content tends to overwhelm everyone at first. We set up an InnerPass meeting room and walk our students through the first lesson in real-time, and then throughout the semester hold check-in and help sessions. I think it really helps us to set the right tone with our students; that they’ll be learning the material through directed study, but there is real-time help and instruction if they need it,” says Martin.

As OAK Horizons looks to expand its roster of partnership and client organizations, Kathryn Martin realized she needed to set the organization apart from a growing field of competitors. She adopted InnerPass and leveraged the technology to implement a system that facilitates real-time collaboration, content sharing and tutorials between teachers and students. Instructors can invite students to small-group tutorials with a live-participation component, for those students who request extra time with an instructor.

InnerPass provides easy-to-use tools, including screen-sharing and “persistent” meeting rooms, which reduce the cost of online instruction, expand access to education and training opportunities, and bring client organizations to the leading edge of educational and training technology.

Bottom line: For an activity where medical practitioners can lose up to 20% of their potential income due to faulty insurance claims, InnerPass’s aggregation of document sharing and communications allows Oak Horizons’s clients to increase not only patient case integrity but also simplify the revenue recovery process from healthcare insurance companies.

Previous InnerPass posts.

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In summary:

• Most importantly, SkypeKit allows developers to embed all the functionality of Skype into their offering without the need for the end user to have the Skype client open. They call it a “Headless” Skype toolkit whereas the developer community had been using the term “Naked” Skype.
• Initially SkypeKit is available as an invitation-only beta.
• Today API’s are available for Linux; API’s for Windows and Mac OS/X will be available in three to four weeks.
• The current program is targeted to consumer electronics and other telephony device manufacturers as well as desktop software developers
• SkypeKit includes support for Skype’s royalty-free ultrawideband audio SILK codec.
• SkypeKit supports Skype functionality beyond simply voice, including Skype video and H.264 processors embedded within hardware (such as with the FREETALK Everyman webcam).
• Skype’s developers have put significant effort into both security and scalability to sustain two of Skype’s key features.
• Skype will be promoting SkypeKit developers offerings through a “plugged into Skype” logo as well as making them available via the Skype Store.
• SkypeKit provides a long requested complement to the legacy Skype Public API’s used in applications such as Pamela, VodBurner, OnState, InnerPass and others.

This morning I had the opportunity to discuss the SkypeKit beta launch with Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s General Manager and Head of Platform. It provided an opportunity to dig deeper into Skype’s goals and strategy for the SkypeKit platform.

Primary goals of SkypeKit are:

• To provide developers with a “naked” Skype such that a Skype client is not necessary for the deployment of Skype on a hardware platform or Skype-enhanced application
• To provide an SDK that supports ALL the functionality of the current Skype clients, including video and SILK.
• To promote the incorporation of SILK into end point devices, making possible high quality audio calling such as experienced with the recent release of Skype for iPhone 2.0.
• Make the adoption of Skype into a device or application as friendly and readily adaptable as possible while providing appropriate levels of security and scalability
• To provide developers with a robust, scalable and proven channel for readily marketing their devices and applications worldwide.

In our discussion Christensen pointed out that Skype had not only reviewed developer requests for a revitalized and enhanced SDK but also incorporated the need to support all Skype functionality as well as maintaining the level of security and scalability required to meet the demand levels of Skype’s user base.

Christensen emphasized that Skype will be aggressively pursuing hardware vendors to license and adopt SILK as a standard feature of their offerings and to effect interoperability for Skype. IP-phones such as those offered by Linksys, Aastra, Polycom, snom and Grandstream would certainly be good candidates; their adoption of SILK would contribute significantly to Skype’s efforts to make SILK a standard. But it also means we could see the incorporation of SILK into, for example, the Skype for TV offerings available for certain models of Panasonic, LG and Samsung TV sets.

On another topic, Christensen emphasized Skype’s intention to facilitate marketing of the resulting offerings through both Skype’s “plugged into Skype” designation and the option to have them carried on the Skype Store. While any vendor can develop and market an offering on their own, it only receives the “plugged into Skype” designation required to be offered on the Skype Store  by meeting two conditions:

• it was developed using SkypeKit
• it meets Skype Certification standards when it comes to establishing a baseline for audio and video quality

Finally he pointed out that Skype launched this new SDK platform effort with this approach because “having an SDK for devices and desktop applications are a natural place for us to start extending Skype capabilities today”. As for supporting web developers, Skype only said, “We know there is demand among web developers, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

To give a sense of developers intending to use SkypeKit, FREETALK (with their Webcam for Samsung TV), Panasonic, Litl with their Webbook and Grandstream are participating in the Skype booth at the CEA Line Show this week.

Bottom line: There’s quite a collection of legacy Skype hardware collected around my office over the past four years; most of it is no longer available due to  lack of ongoing support by previous Skype management, technology changes and vendor disappearance (who recalls US Robotics, for instance?). Frankly, if we look at Skype Certified hardware available on the Skype Store today, we only see offerings from FREETALK, Logitech, FaceVsion, RTX and some speakerphone vendors, such as Yamaha and ClearOne.

SkypeKit represents Skype’s first step in rebooting and revitalizing its hardware device support; it certainly fits in with Skype’s “Skype Everywhere” strategy. Last week at CommunicAsia, Skype CEO Josh Silverman was talking about his vision of “fixed-mobile convergence” for Skype where a user can transparently move from device to device and seamlessly continue a conversation without the need to even log on from one device to the next. But the final proof is in the execution:

• Has Skype made the business and ongoing support case for developers to employ SkypeKit and deploy offerings?
• Will SILK become an industry standard for audio quality? and will IP-phone vendors realize the value of SILK?

As for other Questions and Answers, check out that section at the end of Jonathan’s post today.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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I have always been a bit frustrated by SIP-based connectivity – my one learning across several attempts over the years to configure SIP-based softphones was that it’s not a simple exercise but rather requires a certain level of technical expertise.

But the team at CounterPath persisted. Much like Global IP Solutions (“GIPS”) they found a market for their software in the enterprise space as well as an OEM for telecomm carriers, such as Verizon and BT, and telecommunications hardware vendors, such as Cisco and Mitel. From their website:

CounterPath Corporation is a leading provider of innovative desktop and mobile VoIP software products and solutions. The Company’s product suite includes SIP-based softphones, server applications and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) solutions that enable service providers, enterprises and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to cost-effectively integrate voice, video, presence and Instant Messaging (IM) applications into their VoIP offerings and extend functionality across both fixed and mobile networks.

Recently I have been setting up a prototype FREETALK Connect PBX in preparation for its launch later this summer and found that CounterPath’s Bria softphone for PC and Mac could be one way to access the FREETALK Connect (in addition to Skype clients and IP-based phone sets). Let’s say it was not a totally trivial process but I now have it working. In the course of getting it to work I learned more about where CounterPath positions their software as outlined above.

Basically larger enterprises and carriers are looking for a softphone client that they can incorporate into various IP-based communications service offerings. CounterPath’s original x-Lite and recently released Bria for Windows and Mac are filling that gap. Sticking solely to being an infrastructure software developer, CounterPath does not provide a full telecommunications service such as Skype but rather integrates into VoIP service offerings of other VoIP service providers. Their focus is on providing a platform that supports Fixed-Mobile Convergence and Unified Communications activities within these third party services.

So it was not a total surprise last week, when, in addition to supporting PC’s and Mac’s as end points, they announced Bria for iPhone, available for $3.99 at the Apple App store. Two of my blogging colleagues provided lots of details:

Alec Saunders at Saunderslog: CounterPath Launches Bria on iPhone:

Today CounterPath has launched Bria iPhone Edition, their first softphone for Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  Think of this feature-rich VoIP client for iPhone as being the mobile equivalent of a business desk phone.  With enterprise class features ranging from speaker phone to hold/unhold, swap, mute, conference, and security, this softphone is a credible tool for the road warrior. Moreover, with a strong focus on usability as well, CounterPath VP Todd Carothers proudly says “it could have been developed by Apple themselves!”.

Dan York does a great video explanation in Emerging Tech Talk #51 – Review of CounterPath’s Bria SIP softphone for iPhone and iPad:

Have you wanted to use a VoIP softphone from your iPhone or iPad? Sure, Skype is available, but what if you want to use a softphone that works with SIP and can connect to a corporate IP-PBX? In this episode, host Dan York reviews the new Bria softphone for the iPhone that was released this week by CounterPath Corp. He shows how it works, how it can connect to applications running on Voxeo’s Prophecy Hosting or Tropo platforms and offers some other comments about the app.

As a result I installed Bria for iPhone on my iPhone (but look for “CounterPath” in the App store, not “Bria”) and made the connection to the FREETALK Connect PBX. It certainly worked for making outbound calls to the PSTN. Ironically the call was via Bria as the calling client into the FREETALK Connect and then going out over SkypeOut to the called phone number.

(Note, however, that my Skype for iPhone client can also call into the FREETALK Connect from anywhere worldwide; it’s really becomes a matter of what client is convenient for the individual user’s situation. Taking inbound calls does currently require that you have the relevant client open on the iPhone, whether it’s Skype or Bria.)

In talking with CounterPath VP Todd Carothers, he pointed out how much effort had been put into the user interface to make it much easier to configure. Fortunately I had my Bria for Mac configuration available from which I copied the key parameters required. The FREETALK Connect uses the same “phone” configuration for Bria for iPhone as used with Bria for Mac.

Once configured you have access to a “familiar” iPhone calling interface from which you can call any of your iPhone contacts; most obviously the colors have been slightly modified to give it some “branding”. (Personally I find the amber numbers easier on the eyes than the traditional white.) Other screens provide access to call history, additional settings and your iPhone contacts.

And why did CounterPath start with support of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad? Basically they had watched as Apple gradually introduced features, such as full Microsoft Exchange support with the upgrade to iOS3 earlier this year, and felt now was the time that their customers’ end user base would need access to their IP-based services from the iPhone, etc. Later this year they intend to introduce Bria for Android. Given CounterPath’s focus on the enterprise/operator market, a BlackBerry offering would be an obvious one. However, for similar reasons to the lack of a carrier agnostic Skype for BlackBerry, they are not in a position to produce such an offering now.

Bottom Line: Within its target market, CounterPath appears to be ready to play a role in the enterprise IP-based communications market, providing infrastructure to IP-based communications services that are quickly infiltrating this market space. Whereas Skype’s high level of adoption by consumers and small business results from its ease-of installation and configuration, Bria is an offering that definitely needs a level of technical expertise, usually a resource available in larger enterprises, for configuration but, once configured, fulfils a need within its target market space.

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But wait –that’s not all! Being the geek that he is, he has to try other USB devices in the USB dongle that comes as part of the Camera Connection kit. First choice: a FREETALK Everyman USB Headset. And – it works with the Skype Test Call.

Check out Dan’s video: Emerging Tech Talk #52 – Unboxing the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit

and follow his version of “Adventures with Skype Test Calls on iPad” using the FREETALK® Everyman USB Headset. (Does anyone have a report confirming the use of the FREETALK® Wireless Stereo Headset? – imagine wireless rock, roll and rap from your iTunes library, freed from the tether of a wired headset.)

Two future expectations for iPad support from Skype:

• running Skype in Background with iOS 4’s multi-tasking making Skype a true “always on” service (will this become available with the launch of iOS4 next week?), and
• Skype for iPad – a version of Skype for iPhone that takes advantage of the larger iPad screen format (will this await the launch of iOS4 for iPad later this fall?).

I assume it runs with these headsets over both 3G wireless and WiFi delivering the crystal clear sound of Skype’s SILK codec. Andy called me from an iPad when we did the freeway-to-freeway calling two weeks ago reported in the post linked in this paragraph.

And corroborating Dan’s success using the FREETALK Everyman USB Headset is Steve Garfield over at “Off On A Tanget”: Skype Voice Calls Work on iPad with Freetalk Everyman Headset.

Both the FREETALK Everyman USB Headset and the FREETALK Wireless Stereo Headset are available at the Skype Store. Don’t forget this configuration also requires the iPad Camera Connection kit which Dan appears to have ordered from the Apple store on the Internet.

Extrapolating from a number released of 100,000 sold in the last five months of 2009, it would appear to be safe to assume that over 150,000 FREETALK Everyman Headsets have been sold since its launch last July; some other posts linking to blogger reviews:

• FREETALK® Everyman USB Headset: The Bloggers Speak Out
• FREETALK® Everyman uSB Headset: From Twitterville and More Bloggers
• FREETALK Everyman USB Headset for Skype: A Reprise (includes a video demonstration by jkontherun’s Kevin Tofel)

FREETALK Customer Support is available for any questions re your order and using these headsets.

Note: while Dan has demonstrated that the FREETALK Everyman USB Headset works with the iPad, it should also mean that any Skype-certified USB headset should also work for this configuration.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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Basically think of Ringio as providing a “lite” customer relationship manager for businesses relying heavily on mobile communications. When you either call a contact or receive a call from a “known” contact, Ringio can bring up contextual information that provides background information that may assist both your conversation and team productivity. In fact, they recently demonstrated this concept with their announcement of Ringio Mobile PBX for Android. Fellow Voyces.com blogger Larry Lisser positions Ringio in All hail the Mobile PBX. Ringio calls it like it is:

To be clear, Ringio’s not expecting you to have desk phone. The focus of their innovation is to drive context into phone conversations, leveraging the information we already store about a given inbound caller (ie. when they called last, who they spoke to, what they bought last, when they were last served, and so on). Ringio is one amongst many moving quickly to bring far more context, than simply Caller ID, to a phone call.

With its aggregation of background notes, conversation outcomes, voice mail messages, online presence status and call logs, Ringio appears to bring elements of enterprise level computer-telephone integration to the small business entrepreneur. While only launched six weeks ago, according to a recent interview with Ringio CEO Sam Aparicio, they are already gaining traction with consultants as well as small business sales and tech support teams. Joining Google Market Place, with integration into Google Contacts and GMail, certainly assists in building awareness.

Sam went on to explain that Ringio can bring a unique form of team building and collaboration for a small business. When job descriptions and responsibilities can have a lot of gray areas as the business builds its revenues and customer base and any team member could be answering the phones, with Ringio any member answering a contact’s call can readily be aware of previous conversations with other team members.

While they have delivered an application for Android, Ringio needs to consider offering not only an iPhone application, potentially supporting Skype for iPhone (and iPad?), but also a BlackBerry Super App to support the largest North American business smartphone vendor today.

Here’s the other challenge for these applications – whether it’s the iPhone, BlackBerry or one of many Android offerings, holding the phone up to the ear of course makes it impossible to see this information during a voice conversation. Aside from using the speakerphone mode, would this be an ideal application for having a full headset (mic plus speakers) for the various smartphones?

Bottom line: Ringio should provide a good gage on how readily the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, with its focus on “applications as the value creators”, will be implemented into the mobile smartphone market space. Where generating awareness can be a larger challenge than delivering the appropriate technology, users in the broad small business market space need to see user interfaces and to have user experiences that encourage adoption. Calling a product a mobile PBX and actually delivering with a broadly accepted solution is the execution challenge for Ringio.

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Why do I say for two years? Last fall In Store Solutions introduced an upgrade – the TALK-5192 FreeTalk Freedom Wireless Stereo headset with improved overall headset design, including a more robust “head size” adjustment and more comfortable ear pads. There is a more complete description, including a comparison with the FreeTalk Everyman Headset and a discussion of its unique wireless features in my post at the time of its introduction: FreeTalk Freedom Wireless Stereo Headset “2.0? – When You Just Can’t Sit Still During a Skype Call.

But, frankly, it’s not not my opinion you should be relying on; here’s some other blogger feedback:

Jonathan Jensen at sevendotzero:

Call quality is fantastic – being wireless makes no difference to the quality of Skype calls. Plus, the headset is very comfortable to wear. The range is good and allows me to stay connected a couple of rooms away. The sheer convenience has certainly encouraged me to use Skype even more.

….

Overall this is a great device that makes Skype calling even better and means I can fix myself another Nespresso in the middle of a conference call! Although not cheap at £79.99 from the Skype store, I don’t think anyone buying one will be disappointed.

Over at the PhoneBoy Blog, Dameon Welch-Abernathy reports:

Like its wired cousin, the Freetalk Everyman Headset, which I reviewed a while back, the focus is on audio quality. It rocks, even without wires! Skype-to-Skype audio quality is just like being there! It’s light and comfortable to boot.

….

While this headset is clearly geared at Skype (or other desktop VoIP usage), you can also use the headset to listen to music. Just like with Skype, the music sounds great!

Unlike the Freetalk Everyman Headset, which is priced absurdly inexpensively, the Everyman Wireless is more pricey but still respectable at $79.99 from the Skype store (prices vary outside the US). It comes with the dongle, a mini-USB cable, the headset, and the carrying case, as shown in the picture above. People looking for great audio quality without wires should seriously consider picking one of these headsets up.

For more product information and another viewpoint check out Skype Gear blogger Andrew Brennan: Skype Gear Roadtest: FREETALK Freedom Wireless USB Headset. One of the most telling proofs of its popularity is the number of calls I have made testing Skype HD video calling where the other party is wearing this headset.

So why do I bring up a post about the TALK-5192 FreeTalk Freedom Wireless Stereo Headset now?

Because for the month of June, 2010 you can purchase the TALK-5192 Wireless Stereo Headset at the Skype Store and take advantage of not only a 15% discount but also the inclusion of one free month of Skype “Unlimited World” calling plan. And it comes with FreeTalk customer support with a 24 hour response time,  as well as a one year warranty and a 14-day “no questions asked” return policy.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

Since its release late Saturday

Re the “small fee” (now set to start at the beginning of 2011), I simply say this is one more sign that Skype is a business with investors who are looking for a return. Nobody can argue about its value-add, both in terms of providing international mobile calling convenience but also by delivering a significantly enhanced user experience through establishing a new benchmark for mobile call quality. This outcome definitely justifies a “small fee”, provided it is not obsessive. Alec Saunders, author of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, positions this issue appropriately in “Skype’s “small fee” is noise, guys”:

Sometimes you have to really shake your head at the quality of the commentary on the internet.  Fact: Skype has finally released a version of Skype for iPhone that supports calling over 3G networks.  Never mind the fly in the ointment that all the commentary is  stuck on – the fact that Skype wants to charge a “small fee” for you to use it on a 3G network.  Frankly, that’s noise.  People will pay for the ability to make a high quality Skype call on 3G, and not pay their carriers long distance termination charges in foreign markets.  So long as the fee is reasonable, nobody is going to object.

Alec goes on to make several points about what the launch of Skype for iPhone 2.0 really means; his post is well worth the read. (Full disclosure: as Canadians who participate in the Canada Pension Plan, Alec and I each have a $17.50 investment in Skype.)

As for the new benchmark for mobile phone call quality, there are several impacts. But first, if you have not heard it already, click here to hear Skype for iPhone 2.0’s “near CD-quality” call first hand between myself and Dean Elwood in the U.K.

Andy Abramson comments on how deeply Skype developers may have gone into the iPhone hardware to achieve this result in “Skype on 3G-Something Borrowed, Something New”; he concludes with:

How good? Well put it this way..why would anyone with an iPhone want to call over old AT&T after their first Skype over 3G call. Oh, and yes, it makes Skype on Verizon sound like, well, a plain old telephone call…..Ma Bell, you’re back sounding like you’re old self. The way the boys in the labs have always dreamed and said you could.

Over at Voyces.com, in “Skype for iPhone over 3G: An Industry Benchmark Game Changer for Skype”, I have commented on the broader impact of Skype for iPhone’s support of SiLK. Simply put, it has the potential to place Skype as a key mobile communications software infrastructure supplier across the entire mobile phone industry. Not simply because of the technology itself but rather as a result of demonstrating high quality voice calls accessible to Skype’s several million users through a single application for the iPhone resulting in several million end user experience – the “Skype network effect”.

With the support of SILK in a smartphone application that runs over both 3G and WiFi, calling costs become almost secondary to an exceptional end user experience with voice quality on mobile devices.

SILK has now become not only a benchmark but also a key communications infrastructure element. End users will pay for a quality experience, especially when it impacts business productivity. Both wireless carriers and smartphone vendors need to rush to ensure they have incorporated Skype’s SILK technology into their offerings. Otherwise the iPhone (iPad and iPod Touch) have one more key feature that sets them apart from the remainder of the smartphone users.

Dean Elwood sums up this “Skype network effect” best when he talks about the Skype “on-net” calling:

The proposition for Skype’s shareholders is the fact that you have to be on the Skype network in order to get the “near CD-quality”. Because you don’t get hi-def when you call a regular landline or mobile, only another Skype-enabled device. So if you want to make free calls to your friends, they all need to get on the Skype net.

and concludes with…….

It’s the mass-market adoption of Skype that makes it work. You need to be on their network, along with other contacts you call regularly, to make it work for you. So in the absence of interconnect, which Skype do not do, your a. n. other mobile VoIP carrier of the future has to start from the ground up.

Bottom line: Dean backs up his observations by telling me that he will be making most of his voice calls using Skype for iPhone when away from his office. It would be most interesting to see not only if this drives more users to using Skype as opposed to the carriers’ voice channels but also the fallout for the transition of communications from a very hardware-oriented infrastructure to a complete software infrastructure operating totally “in the cloud”.

Next: the questions that remain to be answered going forward.

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Launching the application

First, we are still dealing with an iPhone that does not allow multi-tasking but Skype for iPhone only serves to build the anticipation of iPhone OS 4.0 and its multi-tasking feature. As a result you currently must be logged into the application to receive a call; not only that, each time you log in, it can take 30 – 45 seconds for your Contacts’ current “presence” status to appear. (And you need to ensure your own status is set to “Online”.)

“Near CD-quality voice”

Once the presence information is current, however, select a contact, make a call, get an answer and start the conversation. What follows is a recording of one of my first calls where Voxygen’s Dean Elwood set up a three party conference call via Skype for Windows on a PC. (Skype for iPhone itself cannot set up a multi=party conference call.) Pamela’s Call Recorder was used to make the recording. Listen for yourself.

Dean makes an important point during the call about how Skype’s SILK-based superwideband audio makes it much easier for him to understand all the various and several English accents he needs to deal with in the normal course of his business activity.

Note that, in order to maintain the audio integrity of the recording, no audio editors were used to filter out “ah’s” and “eh’s”, etc.

Moving Along the Freeway with Skype

First, for all those concerned safety advocates, I was not driving my car during these calls.

From Ontario’s 401 freeway (the main route between Toronto and Ottawa/Montreal) between Trenton and Cobourg, Ontario I made a 25 minute call to Andy Abramson who was on the I-5 in and around San Diego, California. At one point both sides had speakerphones going such that we had a four-party car-to-car conversation.

While providing the same crystal clear voice quality reported yesterday, the call also was sustained as we both passed through several cells of our respective networks (I could see the cell towers alongside the freeway). Let’s just say we were both traveling at or near the legal limit and there was no degradation of voice quality.

There was one point where we noticed a bit of fuzziness (along with an appropriate warning on the call quality indicator) but it recovered very quickly and the call connection was not lost. The other issue was not really a Skype issue but the volume had to be turned up a bit to overcome the automobile’s inherent background noise.

Battery Life

It’s still an issue. I found that leaving Skype for iPhone open continuously for over three to four hours would drain the battery. A significant challenge for iPhone OS 4.0 will continue to be battery life. It’s the one significant shortcoming I find with respect to overall iPhone performance.

Data Use

From initial observation, it would appear that about 2 minutes of a voice call will take up 1MB of data transfer. Simply a guideline but it can start to get a handle on what your data costs will be. I still would only recommend using Skype for iPhone over WiFi when roaming outside your home network.

Bluetooth

Andy Abramson reports that his attempts to use a Bluetooth adapter while making a Skype for iPhone call have failed. More investigation and feedback required.

Bottom line: Skype for iPhone 2.0 has brings new performance benchmarks to the mobile voice calling experience, especially when it comes to voice quality. However, lack of background processing and improved battery life management still make it questionable as to whether one would rely totally on Skype for iPhone for all one’s mobile calling.

But it’s impeccable for making outbound calls to all your Skype contacts where you as the user have total control of the calling activity. And, of course, the call cost is also right.

It’s an Always-On Life

But the most difficult aspect to become accustomed to, especially as I was driving along the freeway today, was to be aware that one could always be connected to Skype whether via a WiFi access point or a wireless carrier, provided the battery had not been drained. I could follow Skype chat conversations, see others’ presence information and mood messages and, if appropriate, make a (currently free) voice call. There’s a psychological shift in thinking that has to be made.

Note:: Ontario has recently introduced laws that prohibit texting while driving as well as making voice calls other than handsfree calls. And the stats showed that texting while driving can be as dangerous as impaired driving. Pull over to the side of the road or turn over the driving to another party if you absolutely have to engage in or continue “that conversation”.

What have been your experiences with Skype for iPhone 2.0? Put them in the Comments and join the discussion.

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Turns out that I had updated my Skype apps earlier today with no sign of a new version of Skype for iPhone. But when I checked again a few moments ago, sure enough, there was a new version of Skype for iPhone ready to download – the long awaited and much anticipated Skype for iPhone that works over 3G. But most interesting is the lack of the usual Skype blog post(s) announcing the availability of this release. Given that Skype does not have final control over Apple App Store releases, it should not be a total surprise that this has happened during the “quiet period” of a weekend. .

On downloading Skype for iPhone version 2.0 I found the overview screen shown on the right. Most interesting is the comment:

“Call using your 3G connection. Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G are free until at least the end of August 2010, after which there will be a small monthly fee (operator charges for data will still apply).” Update: according to the eventual press release, the free period has been extended to the end of December 2010.

Here’s the probable explanation: For Skype on 3 and Verizon’s “Skype mobile”, you need to be on a carrier voice and data plan that incorporates Skype calling, including free Skype-to-Skype calls. As was explained by iSkoot (who wrote the original code for Skype on 3) at eComm 2008, Skype receives a monthly royalty for each data and voice plan subscriber; effectively it is a royalty for licensing the Skype software.

But Skype for iPhone 2.0 is carrier-agnostic and involves no agreements with the various individual GSM/HSPA+ carriers. As a result it appears that Skype intends to charge a “small fee” for Skype-to-Skype calls after September 1, 2010. Some points:

• this eliminates the need for Skype to make agreements with individual carriers, who will already have the potential to benefit from the extra data usage (and new service subscribers) Skype for iPhone over 3G will generate.
• Skype already has a billing engine in place for acquiring Skype credits and Skype calling plans
• Skype for iPhone over 3G should also support SkypeOut calls over 3G with Skype using a Skype calling plan or Skype credits but paying no “affiliate commission” back to the carriers.
• Will the current calling plans incorporate an option for Skype over 3G?
• Question: will we see similar charges for Skype-to-Skype calls made using Skype for Symbian (which runs over 3G), a much rumored Skype for Android or, if we ever see it, a Skype for BlackBerry?
• Will be seeing a “less small” for Skype video calling over 3G, such as I experienced from a Nokia N900 user a few days ago?
• Be wary of using Skype for iPhone over 3G when roaming. Remember that those relatively expensive roaming charges will run up quickly during a Skype-to-Skype call made over 3G. This would even apply when you answer a Skype-to-Skype call via your 3G service.
• Stay with using Skype for iPhone over WiFi when roaming; after all WiFi is becoming the stealth carrier of choice.
• Skype for iPhone 2.0 with 3G support will be the true test of carriers’ willingness to allow IP-based voice communications services.  My local test will be Rogers’ adherence to its previously announced support of Skype operating over any of their services.

Of course attempting to make a Skype-to-Skype call late Saturday evening presents one other challenge – most of my Skype contacts whom I would call at this hour (11:00 p.m. GMT-4 or EDT) are offline. But I’ll make an attempt during the day Sunday and report on the actual call experience and the other new features mentioned in the App Store overview screen.

Meanwhile you can download Skype for iPhone 2.0 at the Apple App Store.

Note: This post has been mildly updated from the original posting made at midnight Saturday; a few hours’ sleep tends to generate a couple of additional points.

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Jason is a fan of the Nokia N900 mobile computer which has always supported Skype voice and chat; he had just downloaded the PR 1.2 version of firmware and learned that it included support for Skype video.

So he called me; I answered on my Skype for Windows 4.2 client and found that it was initiating a Skype video call. Very shortly Jason appeared in full motion video using the N900’s front facing camera with VGA resolution. Occasionally the picture froze but quickly recovered. At my end I was using the new FREETALK Everyman HD webcam.

Here’s what impressed:

• coming from such a small device the video quality was certainly acceptable – from the Call Technical Info I was receiving him at 320 x 240 resolution
• the call was supported by the G729 voice codec, the same voice codec used by the currently available version of Skype for iPhone.
• the N900 was using a H264 video codec sending me 320 x 240 at 14 fps – obviously embedded in the new firmware (if not in earlier firmware);
• My video was also going out over the H264 video processor embedded in the Everyman HD at 160 x 120 resolution at 19 fps. When you look at the image Jason was receiving you can see why it would be at such a low resolution.
• the call was being handled at his end by T-Mobile’s 3G network

Now the Skype for Windows Call Quality Indicator was showing a poor quality network connection; that has to be a result of the 3G wireless end as I had just completed an HD video call to Europe with its demands for a minimum 1.2 Mbps upload speed.

Bottom line: For personal video calling this certainly is a good start. As mentioned in a previous post we should be seeing such calling on the iPhone (and iPad) later this year. It certainly has to open the question as to whether Skype is now developing a Skype video calling feature for Skype for iPhone (especially given the new features available in iPhone OS 4.0, such as multi-tasking). And will the new version of iPhone support H264 video codecs?

And my thanks to Jason for asking me to participate in this quasi-history making 3G mobile Skype call.

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Over the past week Scendix, producer of the cloud-based PamFax service launched PamFax 3.0 with a focus on improving delivery speed, scalability, robustness and access. But to meet these goals they had to start over from scratch, building a newly architected back end that also incorporated new hardware to meet the growing demand for the service.

New features include:

• Faster fax delivery – in my recent experience, the new service was delivering faxes in one to three minutes as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes under the previous setup
• More registration/login options: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and several others
• Two plans for fax-in numbers:
  • Basic: provides fax-in number for 12 months that allows you to receive an unlimited number of faxes
  • Professional: provides fax-in number for twelve months, 20 fax pages to Zone 1 recipients per month and 33% discount for additional pages, unlimited storage of send and received faxes and “My Company” PamFax Manager to sign up employees and delegate PamFax credits as well as report on company fax activities.
• Three free fax pages upon sign-up to check out the service
• Every new registrant will receive a free Basic Plan for three months, including a fax-in number
• Free faxing from PamFax to a PamFax fax-in number.
• PamFax API’s – allows you to fully embed the PamFax functionality easily and quickly into your application or device

PamFax continues to offer:

• A simple, straight forward five or six step process for sending a fax
• Fax from a Windows/Mac/Linux client or online via a web browser
• Operation from any web browser worldwide with no additional hardware requirement.
• A portal to manage your fax activity
• Fax status messages to e-mail, SMS and/or Skype chat
• No minimum commitments
• Support for over 100 file formats
• Payment either pay-as-you-go or via PamFax Credit packs
• No contracts or ongoing obligations

Often my posts on PamFax bring up the question of “who’s using faxes today”? With various alternatives for exchanging documents electronically, one would think that faxing is becoming passé. However, with billions of fax machines still attached to phone lines and the ongoing need for “recognized originals”, such as contract execution signatures, Scendix reports that their monthly page volumes continues to grow at a significant pace. And, were the market not still a significant one, Scendix would not have invested their resources since last summer in the  very extensive development of the PamFax 3.0 platform.

Yet, with PamFax, fax activity can become paperless and “totally green”. Sending documents involves simply attaching a document (in over 100 formats) during the fax set up process unless it is one that has to be scanned in. While there are options for printing received faxes, they can also simply be read on the user’s PamFax portal and printed only when absolutely necessary.

The Scendix team has prepared an “office drama” introductory video about how PamFax brings relief to the frustrations of faxing:

An introduction to PamFax from PamFax on Vimeo.

Voice On The Web posts about PamFax

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Combine this acquisition with Google’s experience with Google Talk and Google Video Chat, its acquisition of Grand Central to become Google Voice, of On2 for its video codec (used by Skype amongst others) and of Gizmo, Google now has a full set of the underlying tools required to bring out some interesting communications offerings. Can Google integrate these tools, and overcome the inherent management and organization integration issues, to deliver a coherent and effective communications offering? What will we see as end user offerings? And how will Google work with the competition?

After all four weeks ago I had a demonstration at GIPS of a video call received on an iPad (notice I only said “to”). And, as I reported at the time, they basically affirmed that we should be seeing video calling supported on mobile smartphones before year end. Perhaps with a GIPS mobile video engine. Will this now simply be an Android offering or will their offerings also involve smartphone video calling support for Apple’s iPhone/iPad and, say, RIM’s BlackBerry?

It’s interesting to note that I’m already observing the Skype – Google competition in my GMail window. Hover your cursor over the appropriate location at a sender’s name and I get one of two “click-to-call” options: to converse with a contact using Google Talk/Video or to converse directly with the same contact in Skype voice, chat or video:

Google has long been a customer of GIPS for its voice technology and more recently for its video technology on Android. As have Nortel, Cisco (Webex), Communigate (one of the world’s largest suppliers of enterprise email services), Yahoo, IBM/Lotus and many others for both its voice and video technology. It will make for an interesting world of co-opetition.

Other bloggers have made some interesting points:

Thomas Howe, Voyces.com in Tick, Tock, Core, Edge implies that, with the pendulum swinging from the core to the edge, IP-communications infrastructure is going to be supported primarily by two players, Skype and Google:

More important, though, is what these battle lines say about the other players. Which is to say, these guys aren’t even on the battlefield. If fellow Cape Codder David Isenberg is right, and we are in the era of the dumb network, then anyone not-Skype and not-Google is not in the running. Although I agree, appreciate and applaud Orange’s work with their core (in particular, the API program), where are they in this battle? Where is AT&T? Now, doesn’t Verizon’s deal with Skype seem much smarter? To me, it does.

Voxeo’s Dan York, in Google buys GIPS for $68 million – to take on Skype? Apple? Microsoft? gives a short course in IP Communications 101 to explain Google’s motives for this acquisition by pointing out where the real battleground lies:

The issue is that while the control channel is increasingly around the open standard of SIP, which anyone can implement, the “codecs” used in sending media from one endpoint to another have long been a proprietary battleground, particularly with regard to wideband (or “HD audio” as some call it). Yes, there have been and are standards, but usually there have been intellectual property or licensing issues. Now, there is work within the IETF to create a standard wideband codec (and as I wrote earlier, Skype is involved with this effort) but that may take some time and the outcome is not known right now.

But there’s one aspect to this acquisition that can tend to get overlooked – cross licensing. When I worked in the NMR spectroscopy industry during its early evolution in the 1970’s, the two major players (Varian and Bruker) would be filing and acquiring patents and then suing each other. But the final outcome was that both players set up cross licensing arrangements such that the entire NMR spectrometer market benefited by always being able to benefit from the best of both companies’ innovation. And it all subsequently contributed to the rise of Magnetic Resonance imaging that plays such an important role in today’s medical imaging space across six or seven vendors. Will we see Google and Skype cross-licensing their technologies so that overall IP-based communications offerings can ultimately provide best-of-breed services to both their customer bases?

Bottom line: What I see emerging is a communications market where each of Google and Skype will continue to bring forth unique communications offerings that may appear somewhat competitive to their respective customers. Recall the final value add is in the customer benefits exposed by the user interface, not the underlying technology. As a result we can expect a world of co-opetition and cross licensing such that customer offerings by either party are not held back by some intellectual property dispute that really relates to technology and infrastructure in which the customer has no interest. In the end its about growing a bigger market for the benefit of all.

Other posts:

• Alec Saunders on Voyces.com: Google Targets Skype
• Alec Saunders on Saunderslog: GIPS acquired by Google. How does Abramson pick them?
• Rich Tehrani on TMCNet: Google Buys GIPS – Here’s Why where he provides a short history of GIPS and then analyzes some interesting reasons behind what may have motivated Google.
• Garrett Smith on Smith on VoIP: Google the service provider

Update: Andy has written Congrats to The Great Team At GIPS – it’s his 18th client who has been acquired and the second acquisition by Google. He has also given me credit for the small role I played in introducing him to GIPS:

And with this acquisition, for me and my agency, Comunicano, the number of companies to “exit” or in this case “get bought” in the last 8 years now has hit 18. Alec Saunders referenced that feat in his very well written post yesterday. GIPS came to my agency and I in the same way the other 17 had. We were asked to work with them. In this case the door opener was trusted friend and colleague, Jim Courtney, who has known Emerick Woods for longer than most dating back to their days at Quarterdeck. Jim always said that Emerick is the consummate professional, and someone who knows how to win. Looks like Jim’s matchmaking ability came through.

Full disclosure: GIPS CEO Emerick Woods was the Vice-President, Internet of Quarterdeck Corporation in the mid-1990’s who became a mentor to the author on several business development projects at Quarterdeck involving partnerships with ISP’s of the time. Over the past 14 years, Emerick, in his capacity as CEO of several startups, which have gone on to be sold, has hired the author at various times for his business development services. The author, however, has no business relationship with Global IP Sound.

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• Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing (Larry Dignan/ZDNet) (techmeme.com)
• It’s Been a Week for New Skype Video Experiences (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Skype mobile on Verizon Launch: It’s About the User Experience (voiceontheweb.biz)
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• Skype’s SILK Codec: Working Towards Adoption as a Standard (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Google buys a VoIP company, might build a Skype competitor (downloadsquad.com)

• HD video using the recently released FREETALK® TALK-7140 HD webcam and Skype for Windows 4.2
• Skype Group calling using the beta release of Skype for Windows 5.0

FREETALK^® TALK-7140 HD Webcam

At a price point that makes it attractive even for Skype High Quality Video calls (VGA resolution @ 30 fps), the FREETALK^® TALK-7140 HD Webcam:

• Enhances the video image quality to HD’s 720p resolution at frame rates up to 22 fps, provided the Sender has sufficient Internet upload bandwidth (>1.2 Mbps).
• Requires 30 seconds to four minutes at the beginning of a call to come up to HD resolution; after some initial “network negotiation” by the connecting software the aspect ratio changes from 4: 3 to HD’s 16:9.
• Works with Skype’s High Quality Video calling where end point conditions do not provide sufficient bandwidth for HD calling.
• Falls back to lower resolutions when network conditions degrade as a result of Skype’s network bandwidth adaptation feature that adjusts video resolution to network conditions. But the image will self-restore to the maximum resolution if the network conditions recover and return to improved quality.
• Is Skype certified for HD Video and High Quality Video calling.
• Is recognized as a webcam by MacBooks and iMacs; however, currently will only operate on MacBooks at up to VGA resolution at up to 30 fps until Skype releases a new version of Skype for Mac that supports HD video calling.

The image to the right comes from a half hour, two-way HD call with TechCraver’s Jason Harris who had an upload speed in excess of 4Mbps while I was supported by a network upload speed of 1.8Mbps using Rogers recently introduced DOCSIS 3.0 Ultimate service (50 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload). Expanding the image to a full screen display (22” in my case) gives a close-to-Telepresence experience.

Note that if only one Sender on a one-to-one video call has the upload speed to support sending HD video, the recipient, if also using Skype for Windows 4.2 or later, will be able to receive and view the full 720p HD image provided his/her download speed is above 1.2 Mbps – well below the download bandwidth maximum for most broadband Internet services.

So this brings up the issue of upload bandwidth speeds available to consumers. Om Malik had something to say on this subject in a recent post, Faster Upstream Speeds for Cable Broadband:

U.S. cable companies expect that by 2015, nearly 100 million of the nation’s homes will be able to send data upstream at speeds of around 20 Mbps. This will eventually be followed by further upgrades to 50 Mbps, by way of enhancements to DOCSIS 3.0 tech. That compares to current upstream speeds of 6-28 Mbps (shared).

So we don’t need to wait for Fibre-to-the-Home if you’re on cable. As mentioned above, Rogers now offers a 50Mbps download/2 Mbps upload DOCSIS 3.0 service for which they recently reduced the price by 1/3 to under $100 per month with a 175 GB/month cap. Bell Canada is introducing a 25/7 fibre-to-the-home service for $54 per month but with only a 75 GB cap; their current issue is coverage. Whereas it’s available in central Toronto, there is only limited availability around the suburban Toronto area. In the U.S., where available, Comcast is offering DOCSIS 3.0 services with up to 10 Mbps upload speeds but have services at 2 and 3 Mbps upload as well; also Verizon offers its FIOS Fibre-to-the-Home service. This scenario recalls the era ten years ago when broadband Internet services were rolling out sporadically over a three to four year period.

I’m still experimenting with the HD webcam and will have a more complete report once I have experience with a wider range of user endpoint conditions. The TALK-7140 HD webcam is available at the Skype Store.

Skype Multi-Party Video Chat (beta!)

In a separate post I’ll deal with Skype Multi-Party Video Calling; in the meantime check out Phil Wolff’s posts on this subject at Skype Journal and Andy Abramson begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting’s Skype Multi Party Video Makes Others A Thing of The Past at VoIP Watch. As shown in one of Phil’s posts, I participated in a five party call for about fifteen minutes simply to ensure I had a configuration where it would work.

Caveat: Skype for Windows 5.0 is still beta software and needs user feedback and some work prior to any final release; it’s not suitable for ongoing production use at this time.

Bottom line: we’re seeing how far video calling can be pushed with respect to video resolution and multi-party video chat sessions; it’s still early days. For full realization of the potential of video calling we need implementation of faster Internet services for both consumers and SMB’s with reasonable pricing. Also we need more experience and development of the underlying video calling software and hardware, especially when it comes to the User Interface. In the meantime VGA resolution video calling (High Quality Video) remains a quite acceptable user experience – especially when it’s free.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

Some posts from the High Quality Video launch in late 2007:

• Installing a Logitech High Quality Video Camera: The Experience.
• High Quality Video: What’s the Benchmark?
• High Quality Video: Definitely a Winner for Skype
• Click here for more…

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The initial two posts:

Has “Social Sharing” Become the “Nom du Jour”? provides a follow up to my previous Voice On The Web post on Jonathan Rosenberg’s keynote presentation at eComm 2010, The Rise of Real Time Sharing. Suddenly I was finding a rash of uses of the term “social sharing” and conclude with:

In six to nine months’ time maybe we’ll have a more pragmatic handle on what “social sharing” really means in terms of the emotions generated and the degree of interaction attained in practice.

• Is it turning a “me” experience into a “we” experience?
• Is it simply an emotion inducing “Kodak moment” or does it require more interactivity?
• Is it an extension of the concept of a “family agent” to our friends and followers on our social networks?
• Or is it simply another “nom du jour” catch phrase?

In the meantime social sharing remains an academic concept whose real value-add needs to be proven through real world experience incorporating real time communications .

The Missing BlackBerry SuperApp talks about RIM’s quest for SuperApps and how the most prominent missing SuperApp is the Skype for BlackBerry “direct to consumer” application. Just having it work over WiFi would meet my needs but more importantly for BlackBerry it would remove one more major negative to acquiring a competitive smartphone for which Skype has written a SuperApp. In conclusion:

…. if FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter are pervasive enough to trigger development of a BlackBerry SuperApp, Skype for BlackBerry has to be the one major “social sharing” SuperApp that is required to help RIM fight the smartphone battles currently being waged in the consumer and business markets.

It’s not a case where its presence would necessarily be winning sales at this point but rather it’s the absence of this application that contributes to losing BlackBerry sales across the consumer smartphone distribution channels. If, as stated at his WES 2010 presentation, Mike Lazaradis is looking to have 100 million BlackBerry users in the next couple of years,  and if Skype CEO Josh Silverman wants to make good on his “Skype Everywhere” goal, Skype for BlackBerry will have to be available soon.

Head over to the post for the details.

I look forward to working with Alec Saunders, Larry Lisser, Andy Abramson, Luca Filigheddu, Jamie Siminoff and Thomas Howe as Voyces.com develops its own “voice”.

Going forward Voice On The Web will continue to be my primary blog, with the goal of providing two to three posts a week on issues as well as hardware and software offerings in the Skype, IP-based communications and smartphone world. I’ll continue to post pointers to Voyces.com posts as well. Stay tuned for the ride.

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Ongoing Plans

The previous local country, regional and worldwide calling plans remain in place with three two changes that I have encountered:

• some price increases: for instance, while “Unlimited US and Canada” remains unchanged, “Unlimited North America” and “Unlimited World” have gone up by $1.00/€1.00 per month
• acknowledgment that the Canadian dollar is now close to or at par with the U.S. dollar
  • effectively a cost reduction for C$-denominated purchases
  • in the example below C$=US$ when changing currency
• continuation of the 15% discount for a 12-month subscription
  • not changed; discount applied during the purchase process
  • also 5% discount for a 3-month subscription

New Plans

The new plans offer three new options that have the potential to reduce calling costs for specific user segments:

• select an individual (termination) country from over 170 countries (would be useful for Canadians with family ties back to one specific country outside North America, such as India, Italy or Argentina)
• time caps (for example calling to Spain offers 60, 120, 400 minutes or unlimited per month) that provide reductions from the ad hoc pay-per-minute rates using Skype credits
• addition of time-capped mobile phone subscriptions for individual “caller pays”countries (again with a reduction from the pay-per-minute rates)

Bottom line:

• There are $1.00 or €1.00 increases for some of the previous calling plans
• Choices to be made by the individual:
  • What country(ies) or regions do I want to call?
  • Do I want a “time cap” or unlimited calling?
  • Do I want to call landlines only  or “landlines and mobile”
• When my Unlimited World is renewed later this month:
  • $12 per year increase in basic 12-month cost
  • $23 increase with loss of 15% discount (no change discount applied during purchase process)
    
  • $20 saving due to exchange rate fluctuations
  • it’s still a bargain relative to legacy PSTN long distance charges for calls outside North America

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While still awaiting to see the details (the plans will be rolled out tomorrow, May 6), it will be most interesting to see what the changes will be when calling mobile phones terminated in “caller pays” countries. According to the press release:

Skype’s range of subscriptions start from as little as €0.89* ($1.09/£.69) per month and offer effective rates as low as €0.01 ($.01/£.01) per minute to almost any destination around the globe.

With the new subscriptions, Skype users have the flexibility to customize their calling plans in just three easy steps:

1. Select the countries you want to call
2. Decide whether you want to call mobile phones, landlines or both
3. Choose the plan that best suits your needs from 1-month to 12-months or 60 minutes to unlimited

Note that these are consumer calling plans. Dan York reports that we should also see some changes for Skype for Business tomorrow, according to an email he received from Skype.

Once there has been a chance to see the details when rolled out tomorrow, I’ll probably have more commentary.

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• bring down barriers, such as different calendar programs, between companies and work teams
• share availability (Busy/Free status only)
• respect privacy and user control

In summary Tungle wants to be “the last mile” for booking a meeting.

Since my last report a year ago on the introduction of the Tungle.me feature, Tungle has added several features including:

• a BlackBerry client available via the BlackBerry app store,
• participation in Google Apps Market Place
• addition of Plancast to its existing social networking integrations with Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn, Ning, etc. and
• integration into Lotus Notes.

Basically Tungle has been building up an infrastructure and partner relationships that accelerate meeting scheduling across your email contacts and social networks. Key to its success is that individual users of Tungle can be agnostic with respect to their calendaring program. Tungle works with Outlook, Google Calendar and Lotus Notes as well as iCal and Entourage on the Mac. And it adapts to a user’s local time zone; Tungle has users in over 100 countries across all the world’s time zones.

At the same time Tungle has evolved its various user interfaces to make Tungle much more readily accepted by both the meeting organizer and the invitees. Key here was the removal of the need for an invitee to actually be registered with Tungle. Simply receive a Tungle invitation via email, click on a link, show your available times and the meeting organizer can move ahead with scheduling a meeting, including sending meeting time confirmation emails.

But there were still many opportunities to improve Tungle and further accelerate meetings. Today Tungle is announcing Tungle.me 2.0 with several new features that “extend the application’s social networking features with the addition of a public directory, search functionality, and group meeting capabilities”.

Modify Your “Weekly Availability”

A year ago Tungle introduced Tungle.me where you could, at your discretion, show times you are available for meetings on a “weekly” basis from a URL, “tungle.me/username”, that could become, say, part of an email signature. Your Tungle.Me availability would automatically be modified as you reserved times slots in your calendar application. As the first of several new features introduced today, users can also edit or customize those availabilities on a daily basis should you decide to take time off for a golf game, have a “must attend” family event or have the boss second you into a short term project.

Tungle.Me Public Directory and Search

Since introducing Tungle.me Tungle has also discretely developed a Tungle.Me public directory accompanied by Tungle.me Search. Provided a user gives appropriate permission, you can now search Tungle’s public directory for a particular user and see if they have made their availability information accessible to schedule one-on-one meetings. Over 85% of Tungle users have given the appropriate permission; recall that only your “Free/Busy” time availability is shown – with no details of why a time slot is tied up or an associated meeting location. But Tungle Search simply becomes one more contributor to a key new feature.

Accelerating Meeting Scheduling Through Aggregation

A major issue that has held up the time taken to schedule multi-participant meetings was the need to have responses from at least a significant portion of the potential participants. This could take two or three days waiting for responses while others are tentatively holding time slots open in the back-of-their-minds if not on their calendar.

Yet, as mentioned above, the information of their availability, if a registered Tungle.me user, is accessible. Today’s announcement is about accelerating meetings through aggregation. Simply go to your Tungle.me Home page (www.tungle.me/username), select contacts who have made their information available and you have an overlay showing what time slots are available. Bingo! Set either the suggestions for a meeting time and send an invite email with pre-qualified time slots or just set a meeting time, if appropriate in context. (Another hint: cursor over an individual contact’s name to overlay a view of the individual’s availability.)

In the graphic below, purple represent my own committed time slots for this week, light blue represent committed time slots of three other invitees to the prospective meeting.

Tungle.Me Groups

While the above process helps to set up one-time meetings, for teams or groups that meet frequently, Tungle.me’s most powerful new feature is the creation of contact Groups. Much like the Group Contact feature in Skype you can designate the members of a group and create the Group as an additional contact. Want to see when your group can get together, simply click on the Group’s name in your Tungle Contact list. You will immediately see the available times at which your Group can come together. Best part of Groups: you can create a URL, “www.tungle.me/username/groupname”, so that all members of your group can quickly see the group’s availability from any web browser.

Two overriding guidelines to Tungle.me’s new features:

1. Privacy – you only make public your available times. No information is provided about why your time slots are tied up or where you will be physically.

2. Aggregate availability to show common times available for meetings with one or two mouse clicks.

Tungle CEO Marc Gingras has provided a short demonstration video to provide a more dynamic introduction:

Bottom Line (and Full Disclosure): I have been using Tungle and Tungle.me for the past two years, witnessing its evolution into a fully featured, easy-to-use service. Consistently their goal has been to improve the user interface, making it a “no-brainer” service to use whether a meeting participant is a registered user or not.

Fifteen years  ago I was taking up to a week to schedule cross-company meetings via emails. Tungle brings the process down to a few easy to follow steps that pull together readily accessible user information and time slots through one service platform such that a meeting can be scheduled within hours, if not minutes. No longer simply an aggregator of user availability, Tungle, incorporating its own social networking ecosystem, has become a key social networking tool that can facilitate the real time “social sharing” envisioned by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg at his recent eComm keynote.

Tungle CEO Marc Gingras has also put up a few blog posts with more details on these new features:

• Search and Directory
• Tungle.me Groups
• More new features
• Concerned about privacy? Don’t be

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We’ve heard a lot of speculation about video calling on the next generation iPhone. Global IP Solutions has been offering their GIPS Video Engine Mobile to iPhone developers for the past several months. When the iPad came along they were able to port it quite readily to the iPad as announced in the press release linked above:

GIPS VideoEngine Mobile supplies iPad developers with a simple to integrate, high-level software API that contains the complex video conferencing/video chat capabilities [that can be embedded] into applications running on Apple’s iPad operating system.

Of course without a camera of any type on the iPad a video conversation involving the iPad would have to be one way (receive) video and two-way voice. One had to wonder why would there be interest in video calling using the iPad?

Yesterday the answer came home loud and clear. I had a demonstration of a video call received on an iPad over the GIPS internal WiFi network. Having experienced lots of video on the iPhone and BlackBerry Bolds (usually You Tube) and video calling using Skype, one aspect of this experience turned me from skeptic to advocate for using iPad for video calls.

The iPad form factor is an ideal format for receiving video calls. Its medium “family” picture frame size is very familiar to consumers. Propped up in a vertical position on a coffee table or physical desktop, it would be receiving video in a format and size that is quite suitable for family participation in a video call. With the accompanying (wideband and superwideband) HD voice, it delivered a perfectly natural conversation. Overall, the iPad is a natural size for video calling.

Where will we see this? Keep in mind that Global IP Solutions delivers engines that take voice and video input and transmit it efficiently over the Internet to a final destination. Their customers, who specify and provide the end user interface to the GIPS engines, include Yahoo, Lotus/IBM, Communigate, Nimbuzz (with an iPhone app), Citrix Online and many other vendors of IP-based voice and video services. And, again from the press release:

As video access becomes available from Apple, GIPS VideoEngine will support 2-way video chat/conferencing.

Bottom line: From this demonstration, and listening to the sessions at this past week’s eComm America 2010, by year end I expect low cost and mobile video calling and conferencing services will be breaking out in a big way:

• We’ll see mobile smartphone video calling not only on iPhone but also on Android devices, (RIM, BlackBerry?). Read through the GIPS blog to get more in-depth perspective on why I say this.
• Where feasible with the device display screen, the video calling standard will become HD over consumer broadband connections with the launch of the HD webcams for Skype in the next month or so.
• But the resolution standard for smartphones and tablets will actually be determined by the individual device’s screen properties; in general they will require less wireless data bandwidth than HD video calling over (cable, DSL) consumer broadband.
• We’ll be seeing low cost multi-party video conferencing solutions from a variety of vendors bringing onsite telepresence to small business.
• And there is reason to justify a built-in video camera on the next generation of iPad (but on the dipslay side a la MacBook Pro).

Update: San Francisco’s KRON-TV also visited Global IP Solutions last week and witnessed prototype video calls using mobile phones:

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Positioning the current state of social networking as personal broadcasting where a Twitter or Facebook message “broadcasts” your information out to a selected set of Followers or Friends, he went on to outline how these “broadcasts” were missing two key elements: emotion and interaction. And these broadcasts have a “random” aspect in terms of who receives them:

• Followers and Friends could cover a random mix of interest groups: family, work colleagues, special interest groups
• It’s a bit of a gamble as to who sees your ‘broadcast” message; some may follow every Tweet while others may be selective in what they see and take a few days to see a Tweet; others, for whatever reason, may never see it.

Bottom line is that current social networking is missing the emotion and interactivity associated with “social”.

Jonathan sees three “i’s” that need to be added for social networking to become totally social:

• involvement
• investment
• interactivity

And sees real time communications, integrated into a web property, as the infrastructure required to bring these to the table.

Jonathan then proceeded to give an example of each of the three “i’s”:

Real time and involvement: The quality of the real time call experience matters, as supported by statistics that Skype has mined out from their call detail records. It turns out that Skype’s SILK superwideband codec not only provides a higher quality, more readily understood voice conversation but also has been demonstrated to result, on average, in ~45% longer conversations, based on real Skype call detail records data. Phil Wolfe over at Skype Journal has more to say about this.

Real time and investment: here the example involved multiple people planning a trip together by sharing a desktop browsing travel web sites while carrying on a voice or video conversation.

Real time and interactivity – the virtual couch potato. While Jonathan gave an example, my own experience occurred a few years ago during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy when I was on a Skype call with a person in Sweden. We were both watching the ceremonies on our local television networks while discussing them in Skype voice and chat conversations.

This also brings to mind the couple who used Skype a few years ago for a remote courtship a few years ago; not only did a marriage result after a year of courtship via Skype but also a family with a couple of young ones.

According to Jonathan the bottom line is about turning a “me” experience into a “we” experience by escalating an asynchronous conversation (an initiating email or chat message) into a synchronous experience that can involve voice, chat, video and desktop sharing. And it involves bringing emotional and interactive elements into social sharing activities.

So what are the implications for Skype:

• These experiences need to be easy to invoke. What does it take to make users realize they can easily have these experiences?
• According to Jonathan, creating these experiences would involve invoking a web-based infrastructure into the Skype software offerings. Sounds like something we can expect to see later this year.
• What role would multi-party video play in these experiences? Can we expect to see multi-party video later this year?

Bottom Line: Is this all a precursor to some new Skype experiences or features that will be launched over the next few months?

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For example:

Erik Winkler, CEO of Bit Torrent, whose  peer-to-peer file transfer service gets caught up in the Net Neutrality debate since their service has the potential to take over all the traffic to an end user during a download, talked about management of congestion and differentiated it as an issue that is independent of management of content issues. Offering a solution that represented a win for consumers, the communications industry and publishers, he talked about taking a “congestion control approach” to address the problem with recommendations that leave management of content out of the issue:

• manage for congestion
• manage in a protocol agnostic manner
• meter fairly
• re-think download caps since they have no obvious link to congestion
• incent network friendly behavior

Next up was Craig Walker, Group Product Manager, Google Voice who talked about moving communications into the cloud. (As a hint to Google’s overall tactics, I had attended a Mobile Monday event in Toronto two weeks ago; the feature presentation talked about “moving communications into the cloud” from a mobile device perspective.) Craig started out with the economic arguments for this shift, eliminating server hardware and oversight resources from a business’s communications costs. As a result a startup can generate interesting communications applications without having to deal with the capital cost overhead of a traditional telco. And he concluded with an overview of Google Voice and how it can provide a person with a “Find Me, Follow Me” single number to reach the person at any of multiple end point devices, while at the same time managing the voice mail that can arise from having multiple “numbers” to reach those end points.

Next we learned some insight into the U.S. National Broadband plan from Carlos Kirjner, Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. His three major discussion points: “Why the Plan?”, “The ‘Aha’ Moments” and “How to Make It Better”:

Why: Congress mandated it but there’s really a fundamental revolution, at a level similar to the introduction of the printing press and electricity, taking place that will impact the U.S. economy

The Aha’s: The need to consider the entire ecosystem that brings together a national broadband infrastructure: not simply connectivity but also devices, applications, network, consumer issues, regulatory issues and legal constraints. He went on to define what FCC sees as the role of government including competition policy that will drive and foster innovation, assets to be managed such as spectrum allocation, universal service mechanisms and, not to be overlooked, laws, rules and standards for key sectors.

With respect to competition he emphasized the importance of tracking and benchmarking actual behavior, lowering barriers to entry, device competition, application innovation and empowering consumers. In closing his third major point was to ask for feedback while noting that real data beats analyses which, in turn, beats out opinions when it comes to setting policies.

After the morning break, we heard from Jonathan Rosenberg, Skype’s Chief Technology Strategist, whose presentation on Social Sharing 2.0 and the role of Real Time Communications will be the subject of a separate post.

Jonathan was followed by one of his former Cisco colleagues, Cullen Jennings, a Distinguised Engineer in the CTO office at Cisco, on the subject of Identity for Global Communications and that least common denominator of voice calling identity, the phone number. Cisco’s proposed ViPR technology combines a Distributed Hash Table, the PSTN and SIP to provide “Blue Sky Computing” that can validate that a number being called is actually reaching the party whom one really wants to communicate with for privacy or security reasons. It’s a peer-to-peer solution that has implications for communications business models.

The morning session concluded with two product announcements; both designed to provide intelligent business communications solutions that facilitate PBX-type functionality for managing calls to the appropriate end point within a business’s ecosystem: Ringio (a startup launched yesterday) and CounterPath’s new Nomadic PBX. Both could be represented as solutions for a mobile Call Center with different approaches to the issue and target markets.

Bottom Line: Overall I came out this session with a lot to absorb but impressed with not simply the thinking behind these offerings but also the execution that is taking place to make these solutions a reality.

Note re photos: Photo by James Duncan Davidson, the show photographer.

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Apple left out the “Phone” application for a reason: iPad is not a suitable form factor for consumers experienced with traditional handset-size (smart)phone devices. But I have received voice calls and engaged in chat discussions via acquaintances who have been using Skype for iPhone on the iPad. In addition Truphone was first out of the blocks to launch a VoIP client specifically for the iPad.

As for Skype running on the iPad:

• It runs the legacy Skype for iPhone application with an option to view it in “double resolution” mode applicable to running all iPhone apps on the iPad.
• Skype has released, via the App store, an interim upgrade that addresses a couple of “iPad teething problems”. (Downloaded it to my iPhone this morning.)
• Skype intends to release an iPad-specific version that makes better use of the additional real estate available on the iPad’s larger display; this would be especially useful for chat sessions.

Questions:

• Will the Skype for iPad release be accompanied by the forthcoming release of Skype for iPhone that incorporates the Skype SILK codec to take full advantage of the associated voice quality?
• Will AT&T’s network be sufficiently robust to run Skype for iPad reliably over 3G?
• Leaving Skype for iPhone open on my iPhone will drain the battery within three to four hours; how much will Skype for iPad impact the iPad’s acclaimed and confirmed much longer battery life? (In this regard, the lack of multi-tasking probably will act as a governor on battery consumption as soon as one goes to another iPad application).

As for Truphone for iPad, John Biggs has a video over at Crunch Gear and concludes:

The app worked quite well and if you’ve used it on the iPod Touch you’re familiar with the call quality – standard – and ease of use – standard. It’s great for making quick calls from abroad, however, and until Skype goes iPad we’re kind of stuck with it.

Obviously this doesn’t match a real calling application that I doubt will be included in the 3G version of the iPad. However, for calls in a pinch this is a great solution.

One final comment and an unabashed plug for the FreeTalk Everyman headset: using the iPad’s native speakers for voice conversations will make your session “public” to anyone within hearing distance. Should you wish more privacy or not to annoy those nearby you, use the FreeTalk Everyman for Skype’s 3.5 mm speaker jack plugged into the iPad. You’ll still need to use the iPad mic and there’s no need to reset any Audio settings since it’s simply the speaker output being used.

Bottom line: Skype and Truphone will allow users to determine the conditions and market size under which they wish to conduct voice and chat conversations using the iPad as an end point device. And it sure fits as one more device for Skype Everywhere.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FreeTalk Everyman headset, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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Inc.com: Technology for the Virtual CEO referenced the FREETALK Everyman as its choice of headset:

A Skype headset will give you better sound quality than a landline phone, not to mention the use of both hands. We like the Freetalk Everyman.

Dee over at Cocktails with Mom gives the FREETALK Everyman a review with some interesting comments on the overall design (yes, my own headset has stood the test of many trips in a briefcase):

It uses a USB connection, but allows you to disconnect the speakers in order to connect the headset to any MP3 player or phone that supports a 3.5mm jack! The speakers rotate and fold up into the headset which is great when you’re on the go because it doesn’t take up much space in a suitcase or laptop bag. The design actually seems to protect the headset in the sense that it makes it less likely to break simply because it is so compact. It folds totally flat. (Very nice!) I have broken many headsets along the part leading down to the speakers! Or, maybe that is one of those things I can blame on my kids. The microphone is completely flexible. It can be bent, folded, twisted, turned… you can position it any way you like and it swivels 360 degrees so you can have it on the left or right side of your face.

As of this writing there are only nine entrants to her contest, ending April 12, 2010 for her U.S. readers to receive five headsets. (Full disclosure: note that, as she solicits products to give away to help promote her blog, she was supplied with the prizes but received no monetary compensation for her review.)

Click here for other posts tagged with FreeTalk Everyman, including several others that link to reviews of the headset.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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Over the past year Skype has added Skype Access as a feature of the latest versions of both Skype for Windows (4.2) and Skype for Mac (2.8) which provides another WiFi access option at the same 125,000 Boingo access points. It’s what I would call a “last resort” option in that its convenience also comes at a premium price starting at over $0.20 per minute. Obviously it is limited to work over PC’s, whether Windows or Mac.

Today there is a new option for Apple iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch owners only: purchase “Boingo WiFi Credits” via the Apple App Store. For $1.99 you get one hour of iPad, iPhone (or iPod Touch) connectivity over WiFi. Ideal for those who do not have a Boingo mobile account but occasionally need WiFi access at an airport or hotel to make a Skype or Truphone call. From the press release:

Consumers can purchase the $1.99 Wi-Fi credits in advance or at the time of connect simply by confirming the purchase using their iTunes account login. The credits can be redeemed for 60 consecutive minutes of Wi-Fi access at a single Boingo hotspot, and can be used at any of the more than 125,000 Boingo hotspots worldwide.

Apple mobile device owners can purchase as many credits as they want. Those users who buy credits in blocks of ten will be rewarded with an additional free credit.  The credits are good for up to one full year after purchase.

Available under “Boingo WiFi Credits”, initially on the U.S. and Canadian Apple App Stores. An interesting alternative for those who do not need the ongoing access available through Boingo’s Mobile WiFi offering.

To summarize the various Boingo offerings:

• For PC’s: Boingo Unlimited Americas, Boingo Global (subscriptions) or Skype Access (occasional use)
• For iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch:  Boingo Mobile (subscription) or Boingo WiFi credits (occasional use)
• For all other WiFi enabled smartphones: Boingo Mobile (subscription).

Bottom Line: one more option to connect via unregulated wireless access.

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Prior to selecting the prize winners I had two or three minutes to talk about how the Everyman worked and their affiliation with Skype; the outcome was not simply a mere handing out of hardware but rather became an opportunity to learn about how broadly and enthusiastically Skype is accepted and used across a range of personal and business communications activities. I started by asking how many in the audience use Skype – usually about 50% to 60% raise their hands but at WordCamp Toronto Saturday about 95% of the 400 attendees raised their hands; three who came up to talk with me later said they had to start using it.

But here’s the best part – it was the spontaneous emotional enthusiasm they exhibited for their use of Skype. Not only when handing out the prizes but by the questions and inquiries I received during subsequent networking breaks. It was the smile on their faces telling about the success they had experienced.

I heard stories of weekly family calls back to South Africa, Europe and the Far East, often with video. I heard stories of how small business entrepreneurs depend on Skype for weekly conference calls to manage their projects and the use of screen sharing to build business relationships around the world.

On the other hand, some conversations would become a mini-training session. Skype has so many features of which users are unaware. Editing chat messages, one-to-one screen sharing and using the FireFox and Internet Explorer Skype toolbars were some of the subjects of conversations during networking breaks at WordCamp Toronto.

As a result Voice On The Web will be introducing two new features:

• Skype in My Life: how users use Skype to support their personal and business life.
• SkypeHints: a twitter feed that will provide daily tips and hints reminding users of the many individual features that are available within Skype with links back to more details at the Voice On The Web reference guide.

If you have a story, tip or hint that you would like to share send your suggestions to me at jim dot courtney at voiceontheweb dot biz or contact me on Skype (mention Skype Hints or Skype Stories in the chat message or contact request).

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If there was one overriding theme that came out of the press conference today, it was “it’s about the user experience”. Skype’s Russ Shaw emphasized this during our CES interview in January; Josh Silverman, Skype CEO and John Stratton, Verizon Wireless Chief Marketing Officer, reinforced this during the Mobile World Congress press conference.

So what is this “user experience” that “it’s all about”?

• Make it as easy to make a Skype call as to make a circuit switched wireless call.
  • Find a name in the address book and press a “Call” button.
• Provide free Skype-to-Skype voice and IM conversations to any Skype contact worldwide
  • Without any charge against voice minutes or data usage
• Provide an “always on” experience by allowing the application to run in background
  • Receive IM chat messages and Skype voice calls while running other applications
  • Provide ongoing “presence” status via Skype IM
• Merge the device address book with your Skype contacts to ensure ready availability for both making and receiving a call
  • whether a normal voice call, a Skype-to-Skype call or an international call via SkypeOut
• Run the voice conversation over a proven, scalable, reliable voice network
  • that also has maximum geographical coverage
  • receive calls anywhere, anytime – not tethered to a PC for Skype conversations
• Optimize for longer battery life
• Make the download and installation a default with minimal, if any, user intervention
• Make it available to all your existing customers who have bought either BlackBerry or Android smartphones in the past
  • going back to the original 8830 BlackBerry World Edition and the Curve 8330
  • also available on the BlackBerry Storm, Storm 2, Curve 8530, Tour 9630 and three Android models
• Two other points made: the service is CALEA-compliant and E911 access remains available via the Verizon voice channel.

Customers will be able to access and install Skype mobile in one of four ways:

• For existing BlackBerry customers the application will be pushed to their BlackBerry’s home screen over the next few days after launch
  • New BlackBerry customers will find the application on their home screen
• Android users will be able to install the application from the Google App store
• The application can also be downloaded by going to www.skype.com/go/mobile
• Text “SKYPE” to 2255 to receive a download link

While there is no universal Skype for BlackBerry yet, the Verizon offering demonstrates how Skype can take advantage of the BlackBerry’s feature set:

• optimize for battery usage
• “always on” Skype connection by running the Skype mobile client in background
• using BlackBerry’s “push” technology to push the Skype application to all (existing) Verizon customers on BlackBerry

There are some limitations:

• No WiFi; must be in a location where Verizon signal is available
  • not deep in an underground location
• No roaming with Skype;
  • Skype calls can only be made while on the “Home” Verizon network in the U.S.
• Limited audio bandwidth using the inherent Verizon voice network
  • No SILK codecs involved; probably G.729

One final note: When asked about exclusivity, Skype’s Russ Shaw, GM for Mobile replied to the effect that “the Skype mobile experience is exclusive to Verizon” and that “features and functionality won’t be elsewhere”. Leaves a lot open to interpreation; we’ll see as Skype for Symbian and Skype for iPhone evolve.

Bottom line: While it will be a great service for Verizon’s customers wherever they are in the U.S., there are limitations such that the service is not available for international travel. It’s a service that is not only available to new customers but to their entire legacy base of BlackBerry and Android users.

The service, however, provides an initial step for getting Skype onto a mobile service with revenue generation for both Verizon and Skype. The big question is “Will it drive new users for Verizon?”

Yes, this post only covers the basics; more commentary to follow.

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To repeat: the purpose and goals of Skype for SIP are:

• to allow small-to-medium businesses to reduce their international calling cost to over 180 countries through use of Skype Out business subscriptions (without the need to negotiate and manage country-specific contracts with the telcos in each country)
• to provide a free, optionally international, click-to-call inbound calling capability through Skype Online numbers
• to allow integration of these elements of Skype into legacy PBX systems that support SIP

Recalling that Skype for SIP is still at a public open beta stage, Skype participated in four announcements yesterday that expand this ecosystem and the open beta activity with a “third party” Skype for SIP certification partner and three new PBX Gateway partners:

• Skype Selects tekVizion Labs to Manage Skype for SIP Interoperability Certification Program

tekVizion Labs has been introduced to the Skype partner community as the interoperability experts to help expedite Skype for SIP interoperability testing and certification. In addition to Skype for SIP interoperability testing, tekVizion Labs can provide consulting, integration and support services to Skype’s customers and partners and the systems integrators and value added resellers they work with.

• Grandstream Achieves Skype for SIP Interoperability Certification

Interoperability with Skype for SIP gives SMBs the ability to receive inbound calls through their Grandstream GXE IP PBX or related gateways from more than 521 million registered Skype users around the world at no additional cost to the Skype user when calling through Skype. Businesses can leverage the investment in their corporate website even further by enabling Skype users to simply click on a global click-to-call button on the website to place immediate calls to sales or support via Skype. Skype calls received through the Grandstream IP PBX are handled by the PBX in the same way as other inbound calls. For outbound calling, Grandstream customers can realize significant cost savings to landlines and mobile phones around the world using Skype’s low-cost calling rates.

• Skype for SIP now Interoperable with AudioCodes Mediant 1000 Multi-Service Business Gateways

By certifying the AudioCodes Multi-Service Business Gateways with Skype for SIP, customers can benefit from interoperability with hundreds of TDM PBXs, Key Systems, and IP-PBXs that have not been able to connect to Skype so far. In addition, if a company buys and associates an online Skype number with their AudioCodes Mediant 1000 Multi-Service Business Gateway solution, it can then receive inbound calls via Skype from business contacts and customers calling from landline and mobile phones.

• VoSKY’s New PBX Gateway Is [Amongst] Industry’s First to Achieve Skype for SIP Certification

The VoSKY SSG is available in two versions, supporting either 4 or 8 channels. It offers seamless integration with Skype for SIP Open Beta with any analog PBX or key system, connecting via a conventional (FXS) analog port. It allows businesses to take advantage of Skype’s cost savings and enhanced business features without restructuring their existing communications network and infrastructure.

As a result the Skype for SIP ecosystem grows beyond the initial partnerships announced with Shoretel, SIP Foundry and Cisco. Skype for SIP Certification ensures that Skype’s partners meet established standards not only for the technology behind the implicit interoperability required but also the user experience. And these partnerships allow Skype to leverage each vendor’s existing customer base to build awareness and revenues while disintermediating and disrupting legacy long distance business models.

Bottom line: With all the various Skype for Business activities coming this year, including the launch later this spring of the FREETALK Connect PBX incorporating both Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk (which also supports free Skype-to-Skype calling), small-to-medium businesses will have several options to both lower their communications cost, have customer calls directed to appropriate employees and/or end points, and expand their markets through low cost communications to new international markets.

Link to a list of all Voice On The Web posts discussing Skype for SIP.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FreeTalk Connect PBX, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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Call Quality Indicator

This is what I have found the most useful new feature; it simply provides quick access to determine the conditions under which a call is being made. Before a call you can check your audio/video setup; click on “Check Settings” to bring up the device bar; click on a device to check that each of the mic, speakers, webcam (only if the Contact has a webcam) and computer speed are appropriately configured for making a call.

During a call you can continue to track call quality in the Call Bar; the network quality indicator on the right will also become active:

Should network connection conditions change the network quality indicator will turn orange or red and the number of bars will reduce. If you get a red exclamation mark you have a serious issue with your setup that most likely needs to be addressed. (The call in this case was to Skype Test Call; thus the gray “video” icon as Skype Test Call does not have a webcam.)

Note also that, at the end of every call, there is an opportunity presented to report on call quality. Responding, especially with less than best quality calls, certainly helps Skype to get a statistical handle on their performance.

But there’s one other unannounced feature associated with the Call Quality Indicator; click on the drop-down arrow to the right of the volume control in the Call Bar and you’ll find a menu that can lead to assistance with call diagnostics.  Select “Call Technical Info” and a separate window will open up with a wide range of diagnostic information including the other party’s SkypeID, codec being used, jitter, packet loss information and, for some calls, the version of Skype being used by the other party. Some of this information has been readily available in previous 3.x versions of Skype; however, in earlier versions of Skype 4.x it always operated in a “flicker” mode which made it difficult to read. Only a portion of the information available is shown here; the “24000” sample rate means the call is taking full advantage of the 12KHz audio bandwidth supported by Skype’s SILK codec.

Skype Access

Skype Access was first introduced on Skype for Mac 2.8; now it’s available in Skype for Windows 4.2. When you enter a WiFi zone supported by Boingo (there are over 100,000 125,000¹ worldwide with the SSID’s shown at this link), a window will pop up indicating that Skype Access is available (simply by having the appropriate client on your laptop). While it’s not exactly the least expensive way to connect to the Internet (including Skype) via a WiFi access point, it does come in handy for those 15 to 30 free minutes during airport stopovers or in “urgent” situations where there is no other alternative.

(Full disclosure: the author has a Boingo account which is available at the same locations as Skype Access as it has proven to be a cost saver at hotels that have the alternative of an expensive daily fee or using Boingo. On the other hand even at these locations, the Skype Access window will pop open.)

From time-to-time Skype has a Skype Access promotion; one is occurring the weekend during which this post was published; the promotion offers free Skype Access from 00:01 GMT Saturday, March 20 to 23:59 GMT Sunday, March 21, 2010 (extended to 23:59 Monday, March 22 in the U.K. to assist travelers stranded by the British Airways labor disruption).

Ready for HD Video

Ready, yes, but we’re not there yet; the HD webcams equipped for this feature will not be available until later this spring. However, I have received some test calls demonstrating that Skype 4.2 for Windows does support HD Video calling using appropriately compliant Skype-certified HD video cameras from FreeTalk and faceVsion. To the right is captured a frame from a test call using a faceVsion camera; below is the call diagnostic information from a recent test call using a prototype FreeTalk webcam – 1280 x 720 is the key parameter indicating HD Video support. (Once again, these webcams will only be available later this spring on the Skype Store). That we are all going to love the experience of these HD Video calls is all I can say at the moment. Note the reference to the H.264 video codec that is embedded in the webcam; the associated video compression is done on the webcam itself to reduce the load on the host PC’s CPU during a call and the associated network bandwidth requirements.

Update: While the FreeTalk webcam call reported above was made Tuesday, March 16, Jason Harris reports on an HD Video call from Andy two days later using the same webcam in Coming Soon: High Quality Skype Video Calls With Everyman HD. (I did not want to embarrass Andy by showing the details of his facial stubble in the one frame that I captured during our call; recall that many actresses were wary of HD video when first introduced as it could show intimate details of facial blemishes. I’m sure the make-up industry has compensated by now.)

Call Transfer: Simply stated, Call Transfer, a popular feature of many Skype 3.x versions, has finally re-appeared in Skype 4.2 for Windows.

Brower Toolbars: Since the release of Skype for Windows 3.0 a Skype Toolbar icon for Firefox was available; concurrently there has also been available a Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Basically it uses a Phone Number Recognition algorithm to locate phone numbers within a web page and Skype-enable them (essentially a Click-to-Call using Skype or SkypeOut). With Skype for Windows 4.2 this feature has finally become stable within Firefox (full disclosure – the author has been an external beta tester for this toolbar). In a subsequent post I’ll discuss how it can also be used to Skype-enable Skype contact names within a web page. Suffice it to say it has become a very handy tool, especially with telephone directory services.

Additional features: The release notes for Skype 4.2 also list several less significant but helpful changes that assist with the user call experience. For instance:

• The video call button remains available even if there is no webcam detected
• Improvements in video quality in low bandwidth conditions
• Improved contact importers, including from GMail, Facebook, Hotmail and Outlook

But it’s still not “perfect”. The Release Notes and Release Notes Document include details of not only improvements and bug fixes but also a list of known issues that the Developer team continues to assess and track down. But there’s one 3.x feature for which I still would like to see support in 4.x – namely Skype Public Chats.

Bottom Line: With three weeks of usage, Skype 4.2 for Windows definitely brings an enhanced user experience, especially with respect to providing diagnostic information to help with call quality issues. Skype Access opens up one more option for road warriors to have Internet access for short sessions at airports or ‘’urgent” situations where no other option is available. And we still have to wait a few weeks for the webcams that will support HD Video support, setting new standards for video calling, but the final outcome will be well worth the wait.

Of course, now that I have a MacBook Pro as my primary laptop, I have joined those asking when the equivalent features (Call Quality Indicator and HD Video calling) will be available in Skype for Mac².

¹Shortly after publishing this post I received my monthly email advising me that Boingo is now supporting 125000 access points worldwide.
² I can continue to use Skype for Windows on my desktop PC or via Windows 7 running as a virtual PC on Parallels for Mac.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FreeTalk HD Video webcams, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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What does the SILK bring? Basically the best quality “in-your-head” audio available for voice conversations. To recall Jonathan Christensen’s highlights at the time the SILK codec was first introduced, the focus was on:

improving the audio bandwidth out to 12,000 Hz (12KHz)

providing bandwidth management to deal in real time with degraded  network conditions

balancing the codec optimization between voice, music and background noise, each of which can have an impact on the overall user experience

overall robustness to provide a more consistent user experience, regardless of network conditions and an individual caller’s voice signature.

From a user perspective, one will notice crisper conversations, easier interpretation of accents and an overall high quality “in-your-head” voice experience.

But there have been other consequences of SILK’s availability:

• The FREETALK Everyman Headset for Skype ensures that users get the full benefit of SILK by providing an audio chip that effectively replaces the PC’s native audio chip to bring consistently the full benefits of the audio quality available with SILK.
• Similarly the more recently introduced FREETALK Freedom Wireless Stereo Headset also supports SILK’s audio bandwidth.
• A push-to-talk offering, Blabbelon, which provides the ability for gamers to communicate in a multi-party voice algorithm used by gamers, has incorporated the SILK codec, setting a new standard for gaming voice sessions.

But here’s the bigger picture: in order to have a voice conversation that takes full advantage of SILK, the end points of the conversation must incorporate the SILK codec and the telecom infrastructure must support the transmission of SILK conversations.

• The three Skype clients make this possible for end-to-end Skype-to-Skype calls between PC’s (and iPhones with the next Skype for iPhone release);
• Invoking SILK in Blabbelon by default results in every call participant’s taking full advantage of SILK since it is incorporated into the SILK client.

Incorporation into Skype for iPhone will only take advantage of SILK should the other party also be on a Skype client. But:

• SILK is not currently supported in the recently released Skype for Symbian.
• Nor will it be used in the Skype clients being developed for use by Verizon customers due to the need to link the user’s smartphone to Verizon’s Skype gateway using the underlying 3G wireless voice channel.
• SILK cannot be invoked on SkypeOut calls to the PSTN.
• Nor is it supported yet on any other third party smartphone or other end point handset or phoneset hardware.

And therein lies the challenge: how does one propagate SILK such that it becomes available beyond the Skype and Blabbelon worlds? Skype has taken the first step by making the SILK codec available royalty-free and publishing the source code. However, for broadest adoption it needs to become a recognized international standard.

Recently Skype has been working with the IETF’s “CODEC Working Group” as one candidate to be considered in the working group’s effort to identify and standardize a superwideband audio codec that could be widely used across IP-based conversations. In a “Speaking of Standards” post earlier today, Skype releases source code for SILK super wideband audio codec – the details…, Voxeo’s Dan York has provided an excellent detailed background, including both the political and technical considerations leading up to the adoption of such a codec as an IETF standard for interoperability across service providers and end point software and hardware suppliers. He concludes with:

Still to be seen is if there are any additional licensing terms from Skype, but overall this is a great step forward for those of us who want to see better overall audio quality on the Internet. Obviously it’s in Skype’s interest to do this so that the CODEC WG might consider SILK as the codec to standardize on versus the others or creating a new one… but still… it’s great to see. What do you all think?

And it sure helps Skype’s case that Skype has recently hired executives who have IETF working group experience such as Director of Developer Relations, Jason Frischl and Chief Technology Strategist Dr. Julian Rosenberg.

Bottom Line: Ever since the launch of SILK, it’s very noticeable when one is not on a SILK call. SILK can bring significant business productivity advantages when there’s less of “can you repeat that?” or simply misunderstanding of the speaking party. It makes everyone in the family more readily understood during those grandparent Skype video calls. It’s all about improving the end user experience.

There are many efforts to incorporate “wideband (8 Khz)” HD Voice into the telecom infrastructure. GIPS has some excellent wideband codecs; Jeff Pulver is running HD Voice conferences. While HD Voice is definitely an improvement on today’s standard PSTN voice calls it is not up to the quality of SILK-supported calls.

However, spreading SILK’s quality of conversation requires not only the appropriate hardware or client software, as described above, but also support of SILK in the telecom back end infrastructure. Having a standard that every player making the conversation connection possible can work towards would be a major step forward in “clearing up the conversation” when on a voice call.

Update: Skype’s Jonathan Christensen provides an update summary about the SILK codec in his Skype blog post “Advances in audio”. He reiterates the focus he described a year ago:

• improving audio bandwidth going from 8 kHz to 12 kHz, meaning that a SILK conversation sounds like you are in the same room as the person you are speaking with
• providing real-time bandwidth scalability to deal with degraded network conditions
• balancing codec optimization between voice, music and background noise, each of which can have an impact on the overall user experience
• delivering a robust solution that delivers a more consistent audio experience, regardless of network conditions and an individual’s voice signature

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A Winter Olympics record 14 Gold Medals for some really dedicated, yet enthralling, Canadian athletes (and 26 medals in total), gold medal hockey championships for both the men and women and, let me say, as never before – Canada rocks! At one point two gold medals were earned within five minutes; Canada used to wait between five Olympics to win a gold medal (well, at least, three) and none had been won when Canada hosted the 1976 Summer Games (Montreal) or the 1988 Winter Games (Calgary).

It is estimated that over 22 million Canadians (out of 34 million) watched portions of the gold medal men’s hockey game – ending dramatically with an overtime “golden” goal; it was the most watched Canadian television event ever. There’s not a Canadian now who does not know the words to O Canada! (and a government proposal this past week to change one sentence to be more “politically correct” was shot down in a hurry…)

Last fall I wrote Skype: the “Unofficial” Personal Communications Software for the 2010 Winter Olympics? where I included some background on the telecommunications infrastructure build-out for the Olympics. But what was the experience and the outcome?

Personally I stayed at home and followed the action on television and the Internet. All events were originated with HD video and 5.1 channel surround sound; CTV ran a marathon Olympics program that commenced at 9 a.m. on opening day (Feb. 12, starting with the last day of the torch run) and continued 24/7 without a break, other than for the occasional five minute newscasts, through to midnight after the closing ceremony (Feb. 28). The broadcast consortium comprised CTV, TSN, both of which are Bell Globemedia properties, and Rogers Sportsnet (and their French language counterparts) in order to have sufficient resources to cover all the events.

Decisions, Decisions! It was not a case of tuning into one station and having the network choose which events you were allowed to watch; rather the viewer had to decide which sport they wanted to watch at any one time and choose one of three or four channels running different events. For instance, in the evenings one could select between figure skating, curling and bobsled (or hockey or freestyle skiing) – or go out and buy a couple of additional TV sets to watch them all concurrently. (Now if they could all just not  run commercials at the same time, channel surfing would have been more enjoyable.)

But that was only half the story. This broadcast coverage was complemented on the Internet where CTVOlympics.ca provided not only schedules and event participant information but also over 2300 hours of content, including real time streaming. Watch events live (with no commentary but lots of crowd noise and announcer pick-up) but, more interesting was that they accompanied the streaming with detailed event schedules and real time result tables so you could follow the evolution of an event towards determining the winners and where individual participants were placing, especially as the “individual performance” events proceeded.

For example, watching figure skating you knew when each skater would skate, the details of their individual programs (so you knew when a “triple lutz, double toe loop” was about to happen) and then a detailed result table (with more scoring information than I could handle in real time). Combining this while watching the telecast changed the entire event viewing experience and how I chose to watch the games. Same for the downhill skiing and those crazy snow cross events in the freestyle category, amongst all the other events.

My first exposure to Olympics ‘”saturation” coverage was watching the 1972 Munich Olympics while working in Germany. Sixteen hours a day of coverage by the German network was thought to be ground breaking at the time. But combining multi-network broadcast coverage with the Internet resulted in an entirely different and unique Olympics event viewing experience. And following my Twitter contacts during events made for a much more amusing time; it was hard to take too many of the more “cynical” tweets seriously. Unfortunately international arrangements were such that much of the CTVOlympics.ca activity could only be accessed from Canadian IP addresses. Political and copyright barriers are still an impediment to fully open international communications.

As for the effort that went into delivering the Olympics worldwide, the official telecommunications carrier Bell Canada reported:

“The Bell team rose to the extraordinary challenge of connecting the 2010 Winter Games and bringing these 17 glorious Canadian days to the billions of people watching around the world too,” said George Cope, President and CEO of Bell Canada. “The leadership role Bell played in delivering Canada’s Games drove communications innovation in this country to new heights. By exceeding the immensely high communications standards of an Olympic event, we’ve provided an incredible legacy of increased broadband connectivity for British Columbia.”

As the first telecommunications partner to deliver both wireless and wireline connectivity to an Olympic Games, Bell successfully executed all critical network and communications services at Vancouver 2010, including enhanced high-speed wireless data and fibre broadband networking, complete broadcast support, extensive Internet portal services and full network security.

The 2010 Winter Games network supported the communications needs of an estimated 250,000 visitors, almost 6,500 athletes and officials, 50,000 staff and volunteers, and more than 10,000 members of the Canadian and international media. Bell’s Olympic network delivered over 24,000 hours of broadcast coverage to more than three and a half billion viewers around the world according to the International Olympic Committee – the most in Olympic history, and a 50 per cent increase over the 2006 Winter Games in Torino and a 25 per cent increase over the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

When a customer first drove me to his Whistler chalet in 1974, it was a bit of a nervously challenging drive on a narrow two lane “Sea-to-Sky” highway that, for one stretch, went out from a canyon wall on wooden platforms. My host had a telephone connection – two wires under his unit connected to the neighbor’s phone line – literally in open air. Today, with a few exceptions it’s a four lane, fully paved highway and Whistler is connected to the world by the most advanced communications technology available.

One outcome for the Canadian wireless telecomm market: Bell, in co-operation with Telus, has built out a full HSPA+ network reaching over 90% of the Canadian population. Canada now has three wireless carriers, the original being Rogers, offering not only HSPA+ speeds but also the Apple iPhone and three candidates capable of offering the forthcoming iPad. But this is  just one example of how building an infrastructure for the Olympics has created a much more competitive telecommunications market within Canada. And each of them has the capacity to handle the smartphone data load growth reliably, not only for iPhone/iPad but also for BlackBerry and a selection of Nokia and Android products.

The one statistic we’re missing: how much of that traffic involved Skype calling?

Bottom Line: Not only did we have a great Winter Olympics party but there is a telecommunications legacy that will help to bring this country even closer going forward.

Congratulations to VANOC, the athletes and all those businesses – and the 25,000 volunteers- who help make it happen (and so successfully).

Now to deal with my case of Olympic Withdrawal Syndrome….

Full disclosure; the author was born and raised in Canada (Ontario and Saskatchewan) and has lived in Canada (and paid the taxes) for all but three years of his life. And he remains a Saskatchewan Roughriders fan.

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But maybe Scendix, publisher of PamFax and Pamela, is showing us how to make applications OS-agnostic such that all versions of an application get new features concurrently.

Since its launch in December 2007, although it was not obvious to the end users at the time, PamFax has been largely a web-based application, starting with PamFax for Windows. For the next sixteen months, the Scendix PamFax team worked not only to release PamFax 2.0 but also put resources into building a more robust back end, adding support of Fax-in numbers in 26 countries and extending their OS support to make available PamFax for Mac OS X. And subsequent upgrades have made it a more robust, lower cost and multi-lingual service.

Earlier this week Scendix announced the release of PamFax for Linux, bringing low cost, worldwide faxing to all those rabid Linux users who espouse the virtues of a very robust, yet open and feature rich operating system. In so doing, Scendix has, in practice, demonstrated how to make an application OS-agnostic, essentially by building a single website dedicated to the application.

So what did Scendix need to do to make their application run under Linux? After all, they had a core web-based engine supporting the entire feature set. Three steps:

• Build an installer package for each version of Linux supported
• test PamFax’s operation in each operating system environment, and
• perform integration with Skype for Linux (there is an option to send notifications to a Skype chat session)

But there was no need to build a new application or backend – as shown on the left, even the user interface is the same. Its web-services architecture simply needed the modifications described above. Bottom line: PamFax is basically an OS-agnostic “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) application. And limited developer resources are required to migrate support between OS’s. Effectively the operating system becomes secondary to the more universal web browser.

As their next step, the experience of bringing PamFax to this level has led Scendix to start work on PamFax 3.0, due for release later this spring. The major change here will be to migrate the PamFax web-based infrastructure to an API-based architecture such that PamFax can be readily embedded into third party applications – for instance, a WordPress plug-in that puts a “Fax This” icon on a web page would be one such potential application.

Bottom line: As we await Skype’s new developer platform, PamFax serves as a proxy for demonstrating why a web-services architecture would be an ideal transformation into providing Skype client access not only from Skype-specific clients but also from Skype embedded into a third party’s offering that incorporates Skype access without the need for opening a separate Skype client. In other words, another key link towards building “Skype Everywhere”.

Note: Skype CEO Josh Silverman talks about this topic towards the end of the first half of our recent CES conversation.

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The DECT 6.0-compliant RTX 3088 Dualphone allows North American consumers to continue to use their legacy PSTN phone service while seamlessly incorporating Skype into their routine “home phone” activities. And it’s one reason why you will see those Skype Mood Messages that say “Using Skype without my computer”.

Last fall In Store Solutions released a North American version¹ of the popular RTX Dualphone 3088, available on the U.S. Skype Shop. Its uniqueness results from its ability to work concurrently with both a PSTN line and a Skype account. Since then a few U.S.-based bloggers have taken the North American version of the Dualphone for a road test and provided some reviews.

First, a couple of general comments:

The DualPhone allows you to use Skype without a computer. This opens up new use cases that may require you to think about how you want to configure its use. In particular you may want to consider using a different Skype account from your primary Skype account for two reasons:

• If it’s to be a “home” phone, you probably do not want to have your “business” Skype calls going to every phone handset in the house
• It’s limited to handling 200 contacts on a buddylist. As pointed out by Stuart Henshall, if you have over 200 contacts in your primary Skype account, you want to think about whom you want to have in the Skype Contact list associated with use of the Dualphone. In my home phone deployment case, we use a separate account which only has about 25 contacts whom we call frequently. (Apparently the average number of Contacts per Skype Account is somewhat below 25.)

The Dualphone is limited to voice calling (over either Skype or the PSTN) and Skype presence information; it supports both a Skype Online number and SkypeOut services. However, as Stuart points out, there are situations where this suffices:

Who’s the DualPhone for?

I think you purchase it when….

• You want your wife/home to have an always on Skype connection when you travel a lot and they never became really Skype savvy. That also covers the use case where there isn’t an always-on Skype enabled PC.
• Small business perhaps? May make sense to dedicate another account to this phone and call forward your own Skype account (s) to it. This “shared” option could be useful but there’s no way to transfer from the phone to someone else. So don’t expect to make it a PBX.
• You want your parents to be on Skype but they are barely computer literate and again won’t have it on all the time. It’s a good way to keep them connected globally. The device is familiar and the technology disappears.
• You just love Skype to death, and cannot do without a traditional handset for yacking. This may be the best motivation for many, although the motivation to buy this handset is also tied into saving money and cheap calls. We’ll come to cost and investment later.
• You want to make Skype your landline equivalent (no 911) and get an account with SkypeOut and SkypeIn. Now your telephony is based on Skype costs and not the old style costs of the PSTN. The phone would payout in six months for most people. Unfortunately, landline numbers don’t seem to be portable or transferable. A variation on this. You could use Ribbit for your SkypeIn number and get addtional benefits and functionality while also staying in touch with your Skype buddies.

Jason Harris in his TechCraver review, mentions:

From a usability point of view, the Dualphone is pretty easy.  Techies will handle it just fine and I think most non-technical people can use it without issue as well.  Screen options allow you to add Skype contacts, adjust your online status and other routine Skype functions.

As for the static-y background sound quality issue raised by Jason, PhoneBoy says:

At home, I have this set up both with my landline and my personal Skype account. Calls to my landline and calls to my Skype account are set up with different rings (yes, you can do that). I have used it both for Skype and for PSTN calls and the sound quality is excellent. The connection between the base and the handset is DECT, making it both secure and WiFi friendly.

And Dameon (PhoneBoy) goes on to conclude:

If you’re looking for a way to make calls on Skype without using a computer and tie into your normal landline, this is a great device. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The pricing, though, presents a challenge: $170 for the base unit and handset, another $100 each extra handset. At half the price, it would almost be a no-brainer.

My own personal experience, using the Philips VoIP841 dualphone (same firmware as RTX model but no longer available), is (i) no issue with sound quality, (ii) the speakerphone is really handy for “family-participation” calls, (iii) having four handsets that are wirelessly connected removed the need to fix some phone line wiring when hit by a lightning strike last year – one RJ-11 jack for connection to the base station suffices and (iv) it’s “just worked” since I installed it almost two years ago.

Bottom line: When I see Skype mood messages that say “Using Skype without a PC”, it usually means they are using a dual phone; the RTX 3088 solves this issue. It’s probably targeted best at the home phone or home office market. The use cases, as quoted above, are definitely different from using Skype on your PC (or a mobile phone, for that matter).

And for the future: an ideal future Skype dual phone would incorporate the SILK codec (for crisp audio on Skype-to-Skype calls), a WiFi network connection, limited text messaging and a mute button. Is there a hardware vendor up to the challenge?

Note 1: What is meant by “North American” version? An appropriate power plug as well as support for the North American standard for a DECT 6.0 rf band.

Note 2: The RTX 3088 base station includes support for up to four DECT-connected cordless handsets; additional handsets are now also available at the U.S. Skype Shop.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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What is meant by a “true Skype user experience” on a mobile device? Some examples, based largely on my own experience with several applications that support Skype via a mobile device:

• Find a person in an address book; press the “Green” Call button on the device and have the option to call via Skype or SkypeOut with a single click.
• Ensure access to ALL your Skype contacts with no limitation on the number of contacts displayed on the device
• Search for, and add, new contacts
• Support for Skype Contact groups
• Access and manage Skype voicemails
• Ensure that Group Chat threads are maintained on a mobile device; whereas many attempts at supporting Skype on mobile result in losing the “group thread” aspect of a Group Chat.
• Easily sign up for a new Skype account and manage Skype Credits
• Support for call forwarding (to three Skype ID’s and/or numbers)
• Chat history and call history log
• A consistent call quality
• and many more

Now that Skype is becoming mainstream on mobile via Skype for iPhone, Skype mobile^TM over Verizon and the recently released Skype for Symbian where these and many other Skype features are fully supported, Skype has decided to remove download access for two older Skype on mobile offerings: Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile.

So what happened? According to Skype’s FAQ on Skype for Windows Mobile their crime was “…. Skype Lite and Skype for Windows phones were not offering the best possible Skype experience”.

• Skype Lite served as a beta product for building expertise with the architecture and user experience that is now about to be implemented by Skype mobile over Verizon. But Skype Lite, as offered, had no formal carrier support. However, a key business aspect of this architecture is how it can be used to allow Skype to be adopted by carriers such that both Skype and a carrier partner win. And, frankly, I doubt many were using Skype Lite as it really requires:
  • carrier support at the Skype-PSTN gateway inherent to this architecture to provide the robustness and scalability required to ensure consistency of both call completion and call quality.
  • the hardware and intelligence resources of a smartphone to run reliably
• Skype for Windows Mobile – dropping support here is simply a reflection of the market statistics where iPhone, BlackBerry and Android have become the major players in the smartphone market, especially in North America. Its operation over carrier networks were a gamble; it was a battery hog and did not offer a consistently reliable voice calling experience. And the drain on Skype developer resources to continue support simply would take away talent required to support platforms with broader market acceptance. Maybe a review of this decision is in order once the recently announced Windows Mobile 7 becomes available down the road.
• As for Nokia, still the world leader in smartphone devices sold, Skype recently released Skype for Symbian where one gets a complete Skype voice, Instant Messaging (presence and chat), SMS and file transfer experience over both 3G and WiFi using a VoIP client on the device. (Warning, when using Skype for Symbian over 3G, ensure you have a data plan that will not clean out your wallet in one or two calls. )

Going Forward: So what are the options for Skype on mobile:

To further enhance the user experience, three other factors come into play:

• Ideally a Skype application on a mobile device allows multitasking such that IM activities (presence and chat) are being handled in real time in the background while using other applications on the smartphone. Skype for Symbian provides this experience while it has been highlighted as one of the key features of the forthcoming BlackBerry and Android Skype clients for Skype mobile over Verizon.
• Battery Life: while providing higher speed data services both 3G and WiFi have tendency to drain batteries more rapidly. These are issues that are also being addressed in Skype over Verizon client; this is especially easy to execute on BlackBerry with its API’s that facilitate battery management.
• Use of superwideband Skype SILK codec: this really requires a full VoIP client that supports SILK. The first mobile Skype client to support SILK will be the next release of Skype for iPhone.

Bottom line: Skype has set new performance and user experience standards for its supported use on mobile smartphones and handsets. Recall that Skype’s initial adoption on PC’s resulted largely from its straight forward ease of installation and configuration; they are now looking to replicate and enhance that ease-of-use experience in the rapidly expanding mobile smartphone space. And, finally, it appears that we can look forward to additional carrier agreements, modeled on the 3 and Verizon experience.

Update: Skype Journal’s Phil Wolff, Orphaning Skype for Windows Mobile users shows Leadership:

Practicing product management sometimes feels like raising livestock. We have great hopes, spend time nurturing them, and get the most out of them during their productive life. When that productive life is over? Take them to the slaughterhouse and kill them. Make room for the next generation.

Update, March 3, 2010: Say hello to Skype for Symbian – now available via the web or the Nokia Ovi store. Includes video interview with Mark Douglas, Product Manager for Skype Mobile.

Update, March 6, 2010: Jason Harris over at TechCraver has been making multi-party Skype calls from his Nokia N900

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Co-hosted by Carl Ford and myself, participants on the call were Andy Abramson (who had been listening to the jungle drums on-site at MWC), Hudson Barton, James Body, William Volk, Alec Saunders, Thomas Howe and Moishe Maier.

Topics covered included:

• Verizon’s history of invoking VoIP; the “game” for Verizon (Carl Ford 00:30)
• Why Verizon finally had no choice but to do the deal. (Andy Abramson 02:15)
• What were the competitive drivers? (Andy Abramson 03:20)
• How does Verizon benefit from this agreement? (Andy Abramson 04:20)
• Who are the real winners (and losers) from this agreement? (Andy Abramson 05:00)
• How does this differ from what 3 is doing with Skype in nine countries (Andy Abramson 06:50)
• Lost in the announcement: final release of Skype for Symbian (Andy Abramson 07:50)
• Applications implications I: initial thoughts from Thomas Howe (08:15)
• Is Verizon missing a market segment through their smartphone offerings (James Body 09:05)
• Is this net neutral and no risk for Verizon? (Alec Saunders 11:00)
• How this agreement is a win for RIM (Andy Abramson 12:50)
• Dumb pipe or embedded intelligence: (Andy Abramson, Alec Saunders 13:50_ [Note that my last question to Russ Shaw was meant to be quoted as “When can I say ’Call Russ Shaw on Skype’?”, not “on mobile” as stated in this conversation; all four carrier friendly points referenced in this discussion can be found here.)
• Perhaps the most informative commentary: Applications implications II: a very interesting perspective on the mobile application store market from William Volk who has several of the top selling games on the iPhone. Backed up with comments by Mr. Mashup, Thomas Howe  (17:25) Terminology: ECPM – effective CPM. Bill makes some very poignant points about the uniqueness of Apple’s app store and why Verizon’s Get-It-Now app store that has no appeal to developers.

Download

Posts referenced during the call or subsequently relevant:

• Carl Ford: Jim Courtney & Carl Ford Converse about Skype & VZW
• Om Malik, GigaOm: Skype & Verizon’s Fear of the iPhone
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: Skype, Verizon (and Andy) In the News
• Om Malik, GigaOm: Skype CEO: Skype Over 3G on iPhone Soon
• Om Malik, GigaOm: Skype-Verizon Deal: More Details
• Andy Abramson, VoIP Watch: Todd Carothers Point of View on Skype-Defining The Battleground

Thanks to Angelo Mandato at RawVoice for his assistance with getting my first “podcast” up and running using the BluBrry PowerPress WordPress plug-in. And, of course, our thanks to all who participated in the call.

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Yesterday’s announcement

• A Skype client will be included on nine models of BlackBerry and Android smartphones in late March; current customers with these devices will be able to download the application
• Free Skype-to-Skype voice calling, both inbound and outbound, worldwide
• send and receive instant messaging (chat and presence) worldwide at no charge
• International SkypeOut calling; domestic calls come out of the customer’s voice plan
• Requires a Verizon voice and data plan
• Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls as well as Skype IM activity will not impact a customer’s voice plan minutes and data plan usage.

The Background. Yesterday I wrote about the market environment and technology infrastructure that led to the ability to make this announcement

• It’s Verizon’s answer to AT&T’s forthcoming Skype for iPhone over 3G; however, given that planning and development activity have been ongoing for the past year, it’s a well thought out response with a focus on the user experience.
• The client will be a customized version of Skype Lite where the voice conversation is carried over the Verizon voice channel while presence indication, chat messages, mood messages and voice call signaling will be carried over the Verizon data channel.
• Launching a Skype voice call or chat session will be the same process as launching a traditional call.
• It’s integrated with the Address Book of the device such that all contacts can become Skype or SkypeOut contacts.
• Both the BlackBerry and Android smartphones can handle multi-tasking such that Skype “data” activity can continue to operate in the background while using other applications on the device.
• Client is optimized to take advantage of any battery life conservation features, certainly one of BlackBerry’s well known strengths.
• In response to one question at the press conference, Verizon stated they will not allow network quality to erode as a result of the additional load created by this service.
• Currently no video calling, file transfer, SMS messaging or WiFi access

Show me the money! Based on information provided by iSkoot at eComm 2008 and 3’s gradual expansion of Skype availability, it would appear at first glance that the business model involves:

• Verizon receiving a percentage of SkypeOut revenues (Skype has an affiliate program that provides referrers with 25% of SkypeOut revenues – an indicator of Skype’s margin for this service; 3 has offered SkypeOut since summer 2008)
• Skype receiving software licensing revenue associated with smartphone revenues (sales or lease) and Verizon voice/data plan revenues
• No termination charges for Skype-to-Skype calls (explains why Verizon can offer this as a free service to their data plan customers)

The implications:

• Has the potential to add 90 million Verizon customers to Skype’s user base
• Verizon customers can call over 500 million Skype accounts worldwide at no cost (probably about 100 million active accounts)
• SkypeOut becomes the de facto replacement for all Verizon’s other consumer international calling activity, especially for calls to those 44 countries on Skype’s Unlimited World Calling plans.
• Provides a subtle but significant carrier endorsement of BlackBerry and Android devices.
• Multi-tasking allows an “always on” user experience; the challenge will be when and how notifications are made of a Skype activity (presence status change, new chat message, etc.) when using other applications
• the underlying architecture takes advantage of the existing robust and scalable voice architecture while exchanging data over a wireless data service that is widely perceived as the best in the U.S due to the combination of its reliability and coverage.
• requires the installation of “Skype gateway” servers within Verizon’s infrastructure to terminate Skype calls under Verizon’s management and control, offset by the fact that there are no termination charges for Skype-to-Skype calls.

The downside: The architecture does not allow for WiFi access to Skype. As a result:

• one cannot readily make calls from WiFi access points outside the U.S. without paying roaming charges which can tend to be expensive. (Skype for iPhone on AT&T or T-Mobile’s @ Home service provide this capability.)
• calls cannot be made from locations without carrier network coverage (to a large extent Verizon’s U.S. geographical coverage addresses this issue but one can also be deep in a building with WiFi but no carrier).

The Questions:

• Will Skype Instant Messaging become a replacement for SMS messaging and cannibalize SMS revenues? Skype IM messages simply go out over the data channel as one application for the data plan.
• What happens when a Verizon customer is roaming in other countries?  Can visitors to Canada or Europe continue to use Skype at no additional cost while in Canada? or will a roaming charge apply?
• Verizon is currently offering these devices with a “Buy One Now, Get One Free” feature and a two year contract at prices ranging from $29.99 (Storm 1, 8530 Curve)to $179.99 (Storm 2). Will the lack of a low cost phone, such as 3’s Skypephone2, with Pay-As-You-Go impact adoption?
• What is the level of carrier exclusivity in the deal? Will we be seeing similar offers from T-Mobile US or AT&T any time soon? What portions of the embedded Skype software in the devices are  exclusive to Verizon?
• Who will be the first Canadian carrier to adopt the Verizon-Skype model? This will be interesting to follow given that:
  • there are no network quality issues with any of the three
  • the Bell Canada/Telus networks can not only support EVDO (same BlackBerries as offered by Verizon) but also GSM/LTE supported devices with their new HSPA+ network launched in time for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
  • all three carriers now offer the iPhone; in this case Rogers was the original carrier with it.
• What level of support will Verizon provide for BlackBerry’s app store and Android’s market? Will Verizon facilitate and promote them or even provide an aggregated app store?

Final question: Skype stealthed its way onto AT&T 3G through the combination of supporting calling over WiFi access points (worldwide) and FCC lobbying; Skype is certainly helping to drive iPhone sales at AT&T. Can the combination of carrier-supported “free international calling”, full multi-tasking, a more robust and reliable network and the currently top selling smartphone brand in the U.S. sustain and build Verizon’s user base?

Bottom line: carriers are recognizing that Skype needs to incorporated into their infrastructure as a key element providing both uninhibited access and the network resources to ensure a high quality, positive user conversation experience. Most importantly they are discovering that Skype can become a marketing tool that drives market differentiation and user adoption.

For further commentary Carl Ford and I recorded a podcast conversation yesterday: Jim Courtney & Carl Ford Converse about Skype & VZW.

Update: Andy Abramson has been on-site at MWC and picked up some feedback: Skype, Verizon (and Andy) In the News

Photo: John Stratton, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless, and Josh Silverman, Skype’s CEO, announcing their strategic relationship to bring Skype to Verizon Wireless smartphones during a press conference at the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain earlier today. (Via Business Wire, accreditat[on not provided)

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Full disclosure: This post was prepared prior to today’s press conference using information that was publicly available prior to the conference. In the second post I’ll discuss the service as announced at CES today.

When you can advertise “Free phone calling internationally”, they will come! In the CES interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman, Josh makes the point about how Skype draws in customers by offering a free service that is easily adopted by consumers and then offering “premium” services, such as SkypeOut calling, to generate revenues. This model has led to:

• over 580MM registered Skype accounts (probably 100MM are currently active)
• over 12% of international long distance calling minutes are Skype-to-Skype calls
• and revenues approaching $1B per year.

As mentioned in the recent CES interview with Russ Shaw, Skype’s VP & GM for Mobile and EMEA, Skype’s partnership with Hutcheson Whampoa’s 3 service in nine countries has delivered interesting carrier-friendly results from 3’s customers who take advantage of its free Skype-to-Skype calling:

• 20% higher margin
• 17% additional traditional voice minutes
• lower churn rate
• high ARPU (average revenue per user)
• over 1 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes delivered in the UK since Nov. 2007

Results that should get all wireless carriers’ attention! And Russ did emphasize these results to reinforce where some of Skype for Mobile’s current activities and resources are being directed.

Setting the stage in the U.S. market for today’s Skype-Verizon announcement:

• Verizon has a reputation as offering the best high speed (3G and faster) wireless data services within the U.S. and nobody’s complaining about their voice quality.
• AT&T’s major strength appears to be its iPhone arrangements
• AT&T’s network performance issues, especially with their data service, are well documented (even their voice channel failed me on my last two trips to the U.S.)
• The major failing of the iPhone that impacts Skype for iPhone is its lack of multi-tasking capability
• Skype has announced they will be making available Skype for iPhone running over 3G – a service that will only be available on AT&T for the duration of the current Apple-AT&T agreement
• Verizon needs an offering and drawing card that will compete with AT&T’s forthcoming ability to offer a Skype-based service on the iPhone.

So it should come as no surprise that Verizon is announcing an agreement to offer Skype on several devices including the BlackBerry line and the Android phones they support.

The Service Architecture

Based on information that has come out over the weekend and content archived on this weblog, this service is modeled on an architecture similar to the iSkoot architecture used for 3’s service whereby data (Skype chat messages, presence and call signaling information) go over Verizon’s data channel but the actual voice calls are connected to the phone via Verizon’s (robust and readily scalable) voice channel. As a result:

• Call quality is limited by the (3.7KHz) audio bandwidth of the voice channel (in particular, no SILK superwideband quality calls)
• Verizon has no termination charges for calls to Skype contacts (or what amounts to being a Skype-to-Skype call – a key factor in making this service cost effective from the Verizon perspective)
• There is no loading of Verizon’s wireless data network (and the associated backhaul demands) with the heavy demand that would be placed on it via a true VoIP client.
• The resulting “Skype for Verizon” Skype Lite client on the BlackBerry and Android devices  has no support of calls via WiFi access points.

So the Verizon-Skype announcement certainly builds on previous Skype technology and business model experience; it will take advantage of proven and demonstrably reliable carrier voice and data services. I’ll have more in the follow-up post covering the actual announcement.

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However, when I arrived for the interview I realized it would also be a good occasion to try out the HD video recording feature of a relatively new Canon SD980 camera. Over the past week I have been using a new MacBook’s iMovie and found I could edit it down to a fairly succinct outcome, having eliminated much of my own nervous glitches, personal comments and humming and hawing. Most importantly, Josh makes a much better presenter of Skype’s case than I could ever hope to do in reporting on the interview. The result follows.

In this first portion we talk about

• Skype operating as an independent, private company and the role the new board members can play,
• the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s participation as an investor (full disclosure – about 17 million employed or formerly employed Canadians have an interest in CPPIB investments),
• what performance numbers can we expect to see going forward
• the prospects for an IPO
• what’s on the CEO’s radar as priorities for Skype
• what’s going to be available for developer partners

(My apologies to fellow Canadians for not asking about Skype Online numbers in Canada but, given there are regulatory issues involved, I’d probably get the standard “we’d love to do it but…” response. For mention of a Skype service that is being expanded into Canada, see the second portion of the interview with Skype for Mobile VP & GM Russ Shaw.)

In the second portion of the conversation we covered issues such as

• the growth of the Skype developer team
• Skype’s evolving mobile presence, including Skype for BlackBerry and video calling on mobile devices
• the launch of a formal Skype for Business program
• Skype’s video calling as a new pop culture
• Skype and the broadcast television market

Complementary to the “pop culture” discussion here, at Josh’s keynote presentation to the CES Innovation Leaders dinner, he spoke about how Skype video calling has brought to consumers the most effective realization of AT&T’s 1964 World’s Fair video calling vision where they introduced a very primitive video calling setup.

Bottom line: what can we expect to see from Skype in 2010?

• a revitalized developer program built around a more comprehensive platform from which developers can, amongst other features, embed Skype into their applications
• Skype access on many more mobile platforms as well as taking advantage of wireless carriers’ recognition of Skype as a mainstream telecommunications environment
• expansion of video calling services, including a strong role in the introduction of Internet services as a feature on a new generation of television sets;
• launch of a formal comprehensive Skype for Business program targeted at small-to-medium businesses
• many more Skype video interviews on broadcast media – for example, Skype video (and voice) calling has been used quite extensively by several networks to facilitate communications with Haiti following the earthquake

This is the third of three Skype executive interviews that took place at CES 2010; the others:

• Skype for Mobile: An Interview with Skype’s Russ Shaw
• Skype for Business: An Interview with Skype’s Matt Jordan

Other relevant posts:

• FREETALK Connect: Liberating Small Business from the Telco Oligopoly
• FREETALK’s New Webcam Product Line: Delivering 720p HD to Skype Video Calling
• Skype Video Calling on Your TV? Maybe, Maybe Not: It’s Your Call

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of hardware for Skype, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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In this second interview Russ Shaw covers a wide range of questions about Skype on different mobile phones, the business model that complements wireless carriers’ goals and other challenges as Skype executes on its mobile component of “Skype Everywhere”.

In the first segment Russ discusses revenues from Skype for Mobile activities, execution on the Nokia agreement and the Sony Xperia, the challenges of working in the mobile ecosystem and carrier partnerships. Russ emphasizes that Skype for Mobile’s main goal is to get usage on as many mobile devices as possible as part of the Skype Everywhere goal.

In the second segment Russ discusses Skype for BlackBerry (announced last spring but still running a beta trial), their learnings from the beta and how to ensure a positive user experience. He then goes on to explain how Skype can provide a carrier partnership business model that, based on Skype’s experience with 3, can be a complement that builds a wireless carrier’s overall business. He then provides an analogy of how O2 used a freemium model to build their business around free offerings of music; free Skype-to-Skype calling is the basis of a freemium model for carriers. We go on to discuss Skype for Android in the next segment. This is followed by asking Russ to sum up what’s ahead for Skype on mobile smartphones.

But then I ask one closing question that would really support “Skype Everywhere” in a very common user situation; I can only supplement the discussion by pointing out that, when I get into my car, a Bluetooth-enabled BlackBerry is on my belt (with my Otter Box Defender case). And, during the discussion, Canadians will learn about one more Skype service coming soon to Canada.

Bottom line: Is 2010 the year we can access our Skype contacts worldwide from the majority of smartphones? How many carriers will really catch onto the “3” business model and adopt Skype as a formal offering? And will I be able to get into my car and simply say: “Call Russ Shaw on Skype” to make a hands-free Skype call from my mobile smartphone?

Update: As mentioned above Russ talks about the success with 3 using Skype and the Skypephone. Just prior to posting I learned that 3 has now logged 1 billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype calling. In their summary notes 3 states also that “Over 2m people use internet services like Skype on 3” out of their 4 million active UK customers. (BTW, this is not the only story I have heard about how Skype is helping to maintain communications with Haiti; I have seen a few Skype video calls as television interviews as well; probably makes for another story.)

Of interest: Russ has authored an article at Connect World, Mobile operators should co-operate with application and content providers to take advantage of the mobile Internet boom, where he discusses the  issue of mobile operators working with VoIP providers to build their overall business where he supports the success with 3:

There is already some evidence that the entire discussion is based on a misconception, and that, in reality, using the Internet to make calls does not cannibalize the revenues of operators. Some operators, like Three in the UK, have already changed their business model. They are challenging their competitors by partnering with a software company, offering a popular application that allows mobile VoIP calls at no extra cost, providing their customers with a very tangible extra value and comprehensive user experience by integrating the application into a range of mobile handsets. As a result, the group of customers using these services generate 20 per cent higher margins than non-users, voice revenue being a key contribution to this. A survey undertaken in August 2009 revealed that users of this application used on average 17 percent more traditional voice minutes than non-users. Next to this, a comparatively lower churn rate and higher ARPU (average revenue per user) was one of the positive outcomes as well. [Author's bolds]

Other Skype executive interviews from CES 2010:

• Skype for Business: An Interview with Skype’s Matt Jordan
• A Conversation with Skype CEO Josh Silverman

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• WiFi: The Real Threat to the Mobile Carriers
• Is WiFi Becoming the Unregulated Stealth Carrier of the Future?
• Traveling in a Bipolar Mobile Mode

Basically, in my recent travels I have found that WiFi access is becoming more readily available at home, in the office and, as I travel, in hotels, airports and restaurants. Especially when in countries where roaming charges can be excessive, I seek out WiFi access points when on my BlackBerry and iPhone to minimize roaming expense for data.

Now that Apple is allowing VoIP over 3G, this strategy will become even more critical when using the Skype and Truphone applications for the  iPhone where the conversation uses VoIP technology over the data channel. While my home network data plan has sufficient monthly capacity for making these calls from within Canada, I’m not sure I want to be paying $1/MB when roaming in, say, the U.S. for a Skype call.

Brough Turner has built up an immense wealth of knowledge about Internet infrastructure and wireless carriers, not only from the technology perspective but also the business implications, including costs. He has recently published a post, WiFi Offload, not Femtocells, where, while postulating that Femtocell technology is too complex and costly become mainstream, he supports his argument by pointing out the business reasons for relying on WiFi as a primary “carrier” for wireless:

• “most mobile data is destined for the open Internet, not for someplace on the mobile operator’s network” Apparently 96% to 99%. Yet, relative to a direct broadband Internet connection, it’s much more costly per user (and more complex) for a wireless carrier to provide the tower and backhaul infrastructure required to connect a mobile phone to the Internet.
• “the primary sources of mobile data demand are laptops, notebooks and smart phones”. It’s become reality that most mobile devices these days support WiFi in addition to 3G/LTE/4G. And the iPad is a “data only” device. Demand for wireless connections will continue to grow rapidly; carriers need to look at the cost of new towers vs encouraging installation of WiFi access points (for which they have zero cost if the subscriber installs the access point).
• “WiFi access points cost less than femtocells” When end users can set up a WiFi access point for around $100 whereas the carriers’ towers can run $1MM to $2MM per tower and require a backhaul Internet link, it is actually to the carrier’s capital cost advantage to support the build out of WiFi access points, whether private (home, office) or public (hotels, restaurants, airports, etc.).
• “WiFi access points are showing up everywhere”. Yep, see the posts referenced above.

Three instances where WiFi has “bailed me out” recently:

• On both my January trips to CES and IT Expo, I had set up voice roaming with Rogers. Just one complication – over 80% of the calls I received, via roaming partner AT&T, had such poor call quality I had to ask the party to hang up and call them back. But when I called them back it was using Skype for iPhone over WiFi connections to have a more than acceptable call quality. AT&T simply failed, big time.
• At one recent hotel the hotel wanted to charge $14.95 per day per PC or smartphone for a WiFi connection. However, the hotel chain involved also had an arrangement with Boingo. Once I got the Boingo availability reminder I simply upgraded my mobile Boingo plan to a combined plan at $17.95 per month, connected my laptop, BlackBerry and iPhone and bypassed the hotel charges. As a bonus, I was also able to use the plan while waiting for my flights at two airports, amongst other Boingo-supported locations.
• During my trips to Spain last fall I ended up in situations where no public carrier access was available but there was WiFi access – once in an office with no 3G signal and once in a hotel in an ancient building with WiFi but no landline phone. Once again in these situations WiFi was the path to get data and Skype for iPhone or Truphone was used for voice calls.

The Bottom Line: Brough says it best in answering his own question “What should an operator do?”:

Mobile operators need to focus on providing bundles of connectivity, not on whether its 3G/4G or Wi-Fi. They should be encouraging Wi-Fi offload by bundling “free” public Wi-Fi access with their mobile data plans.

In the long term, it’s likely most mobile data bytes will go over Wi-Fi.  The 3G/4G network is still necessary to provide a backup path when no Wi-Fi is available. Mobile operators who recognize this can still come out on top, if they focus on facilitating connectivity for their customers regardless of the technology involved.

Note to Rogers: while Andy makes great use of UMA from T-Mobile’s @Home service during his overseas travels, Canadians would appreciate the same level of support for Rogers’ UMA-based services, which are currently limited to access from WiFi hotspots within Canada.

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In this first interview Matt Jordan talks about the evolving Skype for Business Program. After giving an overview of the program, Matt talks about the revamped Business Control Panel (“BCP”) and how it allows an administrator to manage Skype usage across an enterprise.

While some of the BCP discussion gets a bit technical he does cover issues of security and management of individual Skype activities (such as file transfer). BCP also facilitates delegation of Skype credits for making SkypeOut calls, setting up Skype online numbers, using Skype for SIP voice channels and Skype Access. Fundamentally BCP is a central tool from which an administrator can manage the spend, report on the spend and receive call detail reports.

In the second part of the interview, Matt talks about the business model behind Skype for Business, the charges associated with using Skype for Business services. He talks about Maxim Integrated Products and how they use Skype and BCP for over 2000 paid users within an ecosystem of 5000 Skype users in 70 countries.

Matt goes on to provide some initial feedback on the Skype for SIP public beta program as well as Skype for Asterisk.

Businesses adopting the recently announced FREETALK Connect PBX will need a SkypeID generated via the Business Control Panel as their PBX identifier. In addition a FREETALK Connect administrator can then use the BCP to manage Skype credits allocation, security issues and reporting. Calls coming into a FREETALK Connect PBX via a Skype online number or Skype itself continue have no charge as well as outbound calls to a Skype user.

The entire Skype for Business program will roll out over the next few months such that by the time summer arrives all the various features should be widely available. FREETALK Connect should be available on the Skype Store at the beginning of April.

Other Skype executive interviews from CES 2010:

• Skype for Mobile: An Interview with Skype’s Russ Shaw
• A Conversation with Skype CEO Josh Silverman

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK Connect PBX, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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In a Share Skype post, An update on Skype for iPhone and calling over 3G, Peter Parkes interviews Skype for Mobile team member David Ponsford making a few points:

• Skype’s high quality audio SILK technology will be embedded in the next version of Skype for iPhone (for both the latest model iPhone 3G S and iPod Touch)
• “Real soon now” (quoting David in the video) we’ll be able to make Skype for iPhone voice calls over a carrier’s 3G network using Skype for iPhone.
• The next version will also incorporate the call quality indicator, a very useful tool found currently in the Skype for Windows 4.2 beta release.
• Skype for iPad is under consideration; given Apple’s claim that all current third party iPhone apps should run on the iPad, this should not involve too much change other than adapting to the larger screen size.

Here’s the video:

Skype for iPhone has bailed me out for voice calling on my recent trips to the U.S. for CES 2010 and IT Expo. During both events several calls from outside parties to my BlackBerry resulted in very poor call quality when roaming over the AT&T network. As a result I had to ask the calling party to hang up and called them back using Skype for iPhone (fortunately I was in a WiFi access point’s range). And the call quality was more than acceptable in each case. Just reinforces my point last spring about WiFi becoming a stealth carrier.

What will be real interesting is how much data traffic is generated by calls over 3G:

• Will it be the application to cause me to take full advantage of the 6GB data plan (for Canadian access) on my iPhone where my usage currently runs under 100MB per month?
• What will be the impact on roaming data plans and the resultant charges?
• While there is no doubt that Rogers, Bell and Telus will be able to handle the additional data traffic load in Canada, will Skype for iPhone over 3G be the application that brings down AT&T’s network in the U.S? (Especially if they can’t deliver good quality voice calls on their voice channel – see above.)

One final question: Does “real soon now” mean prior to or during the upcoming Vancouver/Whistler 2010 Winter Olympics that start in nine days (Feb. 12)?

Thanks to Skype’s Chief Blogging Officer Peter Parkes and David Ponsford for the update.

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All the hype leading up to Wednesday’s announcement of Apple’s new iPad has been complemented by all the post-launch posts and reviews. Many are disappointed that it’s not Apple’s implementation of a “netbook” PC while others for some strange reason think it should include a phone.

But it’s neither – it’s not a PC; it’s not a phone; it simply uses Apple’s technology, content and transaction resources developed for its PC and iPhone to launch a new category of electronic devices. In reality it’s an electronic version of a briefcase (or attaché case) which can contain everything we carry around with a roughly 8.5″ x 11″ (or A4) form factor. Consider the items we would carry around in a briefcase:

• newspapers and magazines
• books
• a binder or notebook containing contact information, appointment calendar, notes, logs, etc.
• business and personal documents
• letters and other mail items/packages
• reference documents such as maps, timetables, schedules, dictionaries
• clipboard
• 8.5″ x 11″ (or A4) notepad (blank, lined or grid)
• writing instruments: pens, pencils
• photographs (often in frames)
• single purpose DVD, Video and audio media players

So when we look at the features of the iPad presented yesterday, it appears a more appropriately descriptive name of the device would have been iAttaché:

• New York Times news media application
• iBooks
• Safari browser to access news, reference content and other web-based information
• email support
• personal information manager (contacts, calendar, tasks)
• Adobe reader
• iWorks (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations)
• Google Maps (3G supported version includes a cellular assisted GPS)
• multi-touch screen incorporating a touch keyboard
• Photo Manager (and serves as a photo frame)
• Media Players (video including YouTube, iTunes – but no Flash player)
• support of third party iPod and iPhone applications of which many include reference information

And for my $0.02 worth, this is where Steve Jobs and the Apple team have found their market niche:

• It’s an application specific device – an interactive electronic briefcase
• It’s not, and was never intended to be, a PC; it’s definitely not a phone (it just takes advantage of many technologies and features initially developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch devices)
• Its 10″ display is a very familiar size for many of the applications mentioned above
• with the either of the two dock options it can sit on a table top as a picture or document frame or or for watching videos conveniently
• It’s developed around Apple’s technology expertise with displays, graphics, multi-touch screens; it’s built around their iPhone OS, iTunes, iPod and App Store resources. However, it continues Apple’s philosophy of providing devices that are real easy for users with little or no technical expertise to set up and use.
• It was never intended to be a smartphone or a PC – it’s an electronic attaché case

The Phone Issue: To Skype or Not To Skype?Many are disappointed by the fact it’s not a phone; however, that issue was best addressed by this photo and an accompanying comment found on an acquaintance’s social networking:

Look at this picture of Steve Jobs holding his iPad. How would he hold it up to his ear to be a phone handset?

The iPad form factor definitely is not appropriate as a phone handset. One does not put a traditional attaché case up to the ear; a briefcase is designed to be carried with the arms down.

However, with the iPad’s built-in mic and speakers and placing it into one of its docks, it is anticipated that it can become a speaker phone where one can make Skype voice calls over a WiFi access point, using Skype for iPhone – given the claim that all iPhone applications are supported. For more privacy the user could also put the FREETALK Everyman headset’s speaker plug into the iPad’s 3.5 mm headset jack. It’s also worth recalling Skype for iPhone’s ability to support Skype chat sessions. (Did anyone notice the absence of iChat support?)

(And we’ll have to see if Skype calls could also be made over the 3G data connection supported by iPad now that Apple has supposedly removed its restriction on making VoIP calls over a (3G/HSPA+) carrier network. But also there may be a caveat.)

The Camera Issue:

How would you hold this up to be either a photo or video camera? iPad comes nowhere near an appropriate form factor for any type of camera. I already have enough trouble holding my Canon Digital Elph steady to do an HD video; that’s why I have a tripod.

And cameras on mobile phone handsets and other handheld mobile devices are largely a compromise when it comes to more than low quality photos suitable for web use. iPad lets you do your photography on dedicated cameras, which produce high quality results, and then process and store them on your electronic attaché case which incorporates a high quality display.

Bottom Line : iPad is a misleading name for this device; it should have been called iAttaché. Why?

• It’s designed to create an entire new device category and the “pad” analogy only represents a portion of what it really is – an electronic briefcase or attaché case
• It actually positions the product much better with the target consumer market, especially as a prestige device deserving of a premium price. Definitely “iAttaché” has more cachet in the prosumer market.
• Whereas the iPhone is primarily an information delivery device, the iPad does add the ability to create documents but then a briefcase will often hold pen/pencil and paper for the same purpose.
• Third party applications along with the Safari browser will often serve the same reference function as items such as maps, schedules and timetables but incorporating much more intelligence and, obviously, a worldwide range of content
• How many times will the names iPad and iPod cause confusion, especially when dealing with Apple for both purchases and support?
• There would be no jokes about association with certain feminine products.

Update: iPhone games publisher Ethan Nicholas has a guest post at Tech Crunch: Why My Mom’s Next Computer Is Going To Be An iPad:

The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers. People who don’t like the idea of upgrading their 3D drivers, or adjusting their screen resolution, or installing new memory. Who don’t understand why their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it, who have 25 icons in their system tray and have to wait ten minutes for their system to boot up every day.

Read on…..

And it’s not just my Mom who used to expend hours of my time with these issues.

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Skype could advance the best collaboration practices and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and building economic security.

While I am not holding out any hope for the full collaboration amongst Skype, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking platforms that many would like to see, I have long seen the potential for a product that supports Skype voice, chat and video conversations, presence, persistent file transfer and document management along with desktop or screen sharing – all managed from a single client. Of course with any collaboration a degree of enhanced Contact management also helps simplify a worker’s daily activities.

My original exposure to online collaboration goes back to my Quarterdeck days when they had developed VoIP software and whiteboarding services. (The latter later became the foundation technology for Webex.) In the early 2000’s I did some work with a desktop sharing service; more recently, over my four years of covering Skype, I have seen a few collaboration services come and go. Unyte has become integrated into IBM’s LotusLive while a couple of Skype-enabled offerings have gone out of business (not for lack of support from Skype). Citrix “Go To” services (Go To Meeting, Go To Assist) have become popular collaboration services at $49.95 per month per host (in fact, last year Citrix Online acquired HiDef Conferencing to have a consistent audio component for these services).

Yet, business’s appetites for collaboration services continues to grow, probably accelerated by not only the cost of travel but also the security issues surrounding air travel today. And they are certainly looking at cost versus value-add in the feature set as one component of their decision making.

A year ago January InnerPass launched their collaboration offering that integrated Skype with basic business-class hosted document management services targeted at business and work teams. In one sense InnerPass could be considered a persistent version of Skype’s file transfer feature; recipient users do not have to be present when files are added, modified or downloaded. They can readily be accessed at any time by any of the designated participants in a Room. The service provides more value-add through the ability to manage multi-party team calls via Skype and/or the PSTN complemented by the ready availability of the team’s documents during the call.

The recently launched InnerPass 2.1 expanded on these services with:

• a new user interface that improves navigation, especially when it comes to working with document “rooms”, their associated user groups and screen sharing
• contact import integration with Skype, Outlook and 50 other services such as GMail, Hotmail, LinkedIn and MySpace.
• call scheduling and management, incorporating the ability to access a multi-party conference call via Skype or a conference bridge

But the launch of InnerPass 2.0 last fall appears to have accelerated growth of the user base; last week InnerPass passed above the 2 million downloads mark, about one year after launching their service. While initially attracting many downloads via the Skype Extras program, viral adoption as users invite participants into rooms and meetings now has taken over as the leading source of new users.

While there is a free “Personal” service, any serious user will easily pass its 2 room, 5 guests per room limit; this service basically serves as a trial offering. In fact, I purchased a $4.95 per month Professional plan some time ago and quickly ran my usage up to its limits. As result any serious user should expect to quickly get to the $14.95 per month Business plan where business teams have more flexibility for both managing and operating both their dynamic and ongoing collaboration activities.

Bottom line: InnerPass provides a low cost collaboration service for work teams who need to be persistently in contact across team members via shared documents, text chat and voice. Definitely a tool to consider when it comes to increasing team productivity while keeping sharing costs under control.

Click here to download InnerPass for either Windows or Mac.

Thursday saw the announcement of the FREETALK Connect Alliance, comprising thirteen charter members plus FREETALK that covers applications from conference calling to communications enhanced business processes.

Charter members include:

• AbbeyNet/Sitofono (Italy)
• Cloudvox (USA)
• FlatPlanet Phone Company (Israel)
• FREETALK (Spain)
• IfByPhone (USA)
• In Store Solutions (Hong Kong)
• Iotum/Calliflower (Canada)
• Jazinga (Canada)
• Skype (Luxembourg)
• Tatung (Taiwan)
• Thomas Howe’s Light and Electric (USA)
• Voxeo (US)
• Voxygen (UK)
• Voxbone (Belgium)

What stands out amongst all these members is their previous experience either contributing to, or developing, applications envisioned by Alec Saunders’ Voice 2.0 Manifesto more than three years ago. IVR infrastructure, conference calling, worldwide DID number provisioning, voice broadcasting and other hosted services are amongst the strengths brought into the consortium. FREETALK is continuing to recruit additional members whose bottom line is to deliver innovative applications that deliver new business opportunities to their customers.

Expect to see an entire ecosystem of products evolve around the FREETALK Connect with its inherent support of Asterisk, SIP, Skype and Skype for SIP working with the members’ existing API sets.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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• access via the PSTN in over 100 cities in 30 countries (using phone numbers supplied by Voxbone)
• ability to display (and share) documents supporting the conference call’s agenda
• a common chat window, often used to share URL’s, provide information complementary to the primary discussion or even ensure all participants have correct spellings of key words used in the discussion
• a complete service that supports the entire conference call process from initial invitations to the final archiving of the call
• an iPhone client for setting up and accessing a CalliFlower session
• sessions can be either private requiring invitations or public; the archived content of public sessions is searchable

Today iotum has announced the addition of Skype as a way to access Calliflower conference calls; from the press release:

Previously, participants could only dial into Calliflower conferences through PSTN access numbers, potentially incurring local charges.  In regions or countries where no such access numbers are available, customers would incur long-distance and even international charges, or use up Skype-out minutes calling access numbers overseas.  Now callers can access Calliflower through a Skype ID – CalliflowerSkype – or via a web button in the Calliflower UI, overcoming this disadvantage.

“We’ve had many requests from potential Calliflower customers who had no local access numbers, especially from  parts of Africa, India, China and the Middle East,” said Alec Saunders, iotum CEO. “Now, as long as they have Skype, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

In addition, users gain from the better audio quality they will enjoy through direct Skype access¹, as well as from all the visual information, documents and presentations that are shared through Calliflower’s interactive dashboard. These tools go a long way toward improving understanding on international conference calls.

Available on PC, Mac and iPhone, Calliflower makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging.  It allows participants to see the status of other callers and raise hands to request the floor, while also providing interactive chat, document sharing, intuitive conference controls, call recording, invitations and reminders, integration with calendars, and more.

On your initial access to a CalliFlower call you will need to add CalliFlowerSkype as a Skype Contact. But then recall that Skype allows you the option of using your Skype Online number or a designated mobile phone number as your caller ID for SkypeOut calls. When accessing a CalliFlower conference call on Skype, CalliFlower will look at your callerID in place of entering a PIN number to provide authentication for your access. iotum is looking at adding the ability to use your SkypeID as a participant identifier.

As with access in over 30 countries via the PSTN, Skype Access in CalliFlower is included in the monthly Premium service with a monthly charge of $50 for the first two moderators or organizers within a company and $25 per additional organizer.

Bottom line: Skype Access opens up lower cost access for participation in a CalliFlower conference call in every country where Skype is available. Incorporation of Skype access also fits into Skype’s “Skype Everywhere” goal. In this case calls can be accessed not only via Skype on a PC but also from any Skype offering on a mobile platform. This is enhanced for iPhone users where they will also find an iPhone client for setting up and managing a CalliFlower conference call.

¹I asked iotum CEO Alec Saunders to clarify the statement re improved auido quality; his response:

1. Better quality hardware. Skype users tend to be using better quality equipment than POTS callers.  In particular most PC headsets have a better microphone than the cheap microphones in telephone handsets.
2. 2. Fewer transcoding losses. Internally, Calliflower is VoIP.  When a user calls Calliflower from the PSTN, those calls transit a media gateway where the media is transcoded and presented as G.711.  Prior to the direct connection we’ve initiated, media coming from Skype would be transcoded at least twice – from Skype to the PSTN, and then PSTN to G.711.  The result was a noticeable degradation in quality.  Now Skype presents the media to us directly as G.711.

Other posts:

Check out Tom Keating’s post over at his VoIP and Gadgets blog on TMCNet where he interviews iotum CEO Alec Saunders about how CalliFlower implemented its Skype access via Skype for SIP, involving Skype for SIP’s addition of IP address authentication.

Full disclosure: the author has followed the evolution of CalliFlower over its three year development process, and was a frequent participant in iotum’s SquawkBox calls where not only did we discuss technology news of the day but also contributed ideas and suggestions for improvements and enhancements to the CalliFlower service. You can access the archive of the SquawkBox call discussing the FREETALK Everyman headset at the time of its launch here.

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Back in 1992 my employer of the day paid $28,000 for a PBX that would service our local Canadian office of six to ten employees – and all the extensions had to be physically in the same office. Of course we would also be paying significant long distance charges, especially for out-of-country calls. The same employer was paying about $10,000 per month for a T1 line between California and their European office in Ireland. The economics of worldwide communications has changed somewhat since then; today’s announcement from In Store Solutions of the FREETALK Connect small business PBX takes small businesses further down that path.

About six weeks ago, while visiting In Store Solutions head office in Spain, using Skype for iPhone in a WiFi zone at my hotel room, I called a SkypeID that gave me the options to press 1 for Jim, 2 for another person and 3 for another person. I pressed 1 and a few seconds later my BlackBerry was ringing me back in Spain, But the PBX was at my home near Toronto, Canada as was an attached Linksys VoIP phone that the PBX also rang simultaneously with my BlackBerry in Spain. Had I answered my BlackBerry the only charge would have been my voice roaming package $1.25 per minute. Had somebody else originated that call in the way I did, I also would have had the option to answer the call, with no resulting charges for either party, on my PC’s Skype client which at the time was also in my hotel room in Spain¹.

Bottom line: any Skype user worldwide could have reached me via this PBX on a “local” or “remote” phone, a mobile smartphone or my Skype client with minimal, if any, costs for the call. And, in practice, geography as a factor to Find Me or Follow Me was not in the equation.

Today In Store Solutions announced FREETALK Connect, a small business PBX that changes the algorithm and business model for small business voice communications. With FREETALK Connect a business can benefit from:

• accepting inbound calls made via Skype, a Skype Online number, a SIP client, Asterisk (IAX2) or the PSTN, via either an analog line or a VoIP service provider.
  • incorporating Find Me, Follow Me features
• accept calls on local analog phone lines, local or remote VoIP phones, mobile phones anywhere or remote PSTN-accessed phones – all provisioned within the PBX.
• placing outbound calls over Skype, SkypeOut, a SIP-connected VoIP service or an analog PSTN line.
• managed voice mail including consolidation of voice mail and email into one mailbox

As I experienced the different communications paths this product opened up, I realized that this box can revolutionize how small business communicates with their suppliers, customers and business partners – worldwide.

The press release lists all the services that will be on board the FREETALK Connect when it becomes available for purchase by U.S. registered Skype users in March on the Skype Store:

Some of the key features from the Jazinga platform found in the FREETALK Connect include:

• Callback / Dial-around
• Access to Skype Buddy lists
• Auto Attendant / IVR
• Paging
• Call Parking
• Remote Extensions
• Music on Hold
• Conferencing

The FREETALK Connect also has an easily configured and updated:

• Managing routes to users, telephone services, and applications
• Providing SIP/Skype telephone service management
• Router management (networking, port forwarding, DNS, DHCP)

“Jazinga’s products consistently ensure call integrity by integrating quality of service and prioritizing voice traffic on the network into an affordable, simple product,” said In Store Solutions COO Craig Smith. “There was no question that FREETALK wanted to partner with Jazinga to develop the FREETALK Connect, because it continues our goal of working with the best providers to distribute outstanding products around the world.”

“FREETALK Connect is designed for small businesses with between 2 and 49 users, an undersold market that desperately needs UC functionality,” said Randy Busch, CEO of Jazinga Inc. “As a result of our partnership with In Store Solutions, the telecom technology playing field is much more level between larger enterprises and their smaller competitors.”

In terms of the technology within FREETALK Connect it incorporates both Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk to provide an optimum level of Skype-based services but at the same time providing inbound calling flexibility and optimizing outbound calling expenses, all combined with the call integrity features quoted above.

FREETALK Connect will requires users to have a Skype for Business account, available through the Skype Business Control Panel, associated with each unit. More on this aspect of FREETALK Connect is the subject of a future post.

Bottom line: Targeted at small businesses with 2 to 25 employees and/or business partners with its wide range of inbound and outbound calling options, an attractive price point, incorporation of Skype for Business infrastructure and the ability to self-configure via wizards, FREETALK Connect represents a game changer in the small business communications market. Lots more will be written about this product as the applications experiences evolve.

¹In this situation I could not have the Skype client answering option since I was using my Skype account to originate the call.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

Other posts:

Saunderslog: FREETALK Connect, the worlds first Skype-enabled Unified Communications system.

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Two key new features:

Landscape Mode for Skype IM:	Call Quality Indicator

The Call Quality Indicator builds on the experience gained with the call quality indicator in Skype for Windows 4.2 beta – a tool I have found most useful in sorting out call quality issues.

Check out Skype’s Peter Parkes post where he also discusses what the roadblock is for “Calling over 3G” as well as progress with incorporating push notification. C’mon Apple – it’s time to allow Calling over 3G: AT&T says Yes, Rogers does not have an issue. What’s the hold-up (iPhone 4?)? Maybe it’s a hardware performance issue?

The first thing I noticed after downloading the update was that the application appears to operate much more “snappily” in that wait times for chat sessions to appear or even to recognize you are Online appear to be much shorter. But I need more usage experience to confirm this perception further.

With the proliferation of WiFi access points in hotels, conference sites, offices, restaurants, airports and other public places, Skype for iPhone has become a very useful calling option for me with the extensive traveling I have been doing recently. And tomorrow I will put up a post about how I use Skype for iPhone to call my BlackBerry. Eh?

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