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Feb
7
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I've been a Skype fan since they started the service in North America. I use it most days when I'm working from home and we have a separate account for calling friends and family back in Europe (for free, with video). I just stumbled across an interesting article with 5 Skype tips for web workers - good stuff - I like the house spy idea - I've alway wondered what the cats do when we're out.
As an aside - telephony is one of those technologies that has a cultural and personal impact like few others - I remember from my own childhood - the monster of a phone you rented from BT (you had little choice - BT had a monopoly in the UK), "party lines" (you shared a line with your neighbour) and the first broad wave of mobile-phones (late 80's) which we're only really mobile if you had a car to transport it in. Then in the 90's - the mobile phone as a status symbol for the young upwardly mobile.
My kid's memories of telephones will be different - watching their Mother sitting at the breakfast table talking into her laptop and seeing their Aunty Nicky or Grandpops 6000 miles away; Wondering who I'm talking to when my thing that used to be a cell-phone is giving me driving directions (It's John Cleese by the way). The real-time synchronous communication with anyone, anywhere, anytime has given my five year old a good understanding of time zones - not something a 5-year old from a previous generation would have been bothered with. I'm guessing the world will seem smaller to her generation a consequence of this rapidly converging technology.
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Oct
6
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Live from the Web 2.0 conference.
Just heard some impressive stats. from Mary Meeker of MS-DW around Skype's adoption - it's achieved the quickest adoption of any application ever. In Denmark - there are now more Skype users than tradional land-line customers. If the growth continues then they should hit 100 million users in the first half of 2006. That said only a small percentage (I think about 14%) of Skype's customers are in the US (compared to 48% in Europe). NOW I understand why ebay paid $US 2 billion - the non-Euro potential is enormous to someone with the global reach of ebay.
Update : Thanks to Claire for the pointer to Mary's slides - just so you know I'm not making this stuff up :)
Technorati Tags : web2con, Web 2.0, VOIP
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Aug
31
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Image from Sharum's photostream
It seems that the consumer VOIP market is turning into a land-grab (or a subscriber grab). Three recent events really warm things up. The first was that Yahoo IM now includes VOIP, providing free IM to IM voice and voice mail and with their recent DialPad possibly a future premium (paid) service for calling land lines and cell phones. Basically that means that all the major Instant Messenger products (MSN, AIM and now Yahoo) support some form of voice service; though Yahoo's IM is different because it implements a standard protocol - SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) - this means adding additional future services (such as conference calling, video, etc.) should be easier in the future as should interoperability with existing phone network infrastructure.
The second event is that Google have also launched their Google talk beta - so Google are trying to get their share of the IM market *and* VOIP - quite how Google will attempt that (and how sucessful they'll be) remains to be seen. They are trying to enter two markets that already have some leadership - AIM in the IM market and Skype in the VOIP market. I'm not sure what will draw people to Google talk - maybe they'll leverage their GMail market share ?
The next piece of related news is that Microsoft have announced the acquisition of Teleo - this will give them the ability to take on Skype (from a feature perspective) - allowing PC -> land line or wireless handset VoIP - something that Google, and Yahoo don't offer today. To be fair though this was just a press release - Microsoft probably aren't releasing anything any time soon.
I should add, while writing this, I'm at home dialed into a 3 hour business review meeting using Skype.
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Jun
22
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After a couple fo attempts to get Video4Skype working I gave up - though early atttempts showed the tool had promise it seems the server infrastructure is either very unreliable or very overloaded. The people hosting this service should have realized than if even a small number of the Skype users decided to try it out - that would be a lot of people (right now Skype is showing 3 million users online).
Anyway, I'd signed up to be notified when the beta of vSkype became available - which it did last week - I downloaded it and yesterday noticed one of my Skype buddies in the UK was online so we decided to give it a quick spin.
Installation was simple and the app. found my web cam / headset with no problems. vSkype integrates reasonably well with Skype though the call initiation is a little kludgy - it uses Skype to send an IM with a URL that the other party needs to click and open in a browser - there they get the option to download and install vSkype or join the call - presumably this whole piece is temporary until they have better Skype integration. This is problematic if you drop off the call and quickly rejoin - depending on what your browser is doing you may get a new session Id. or you may get the old cached id. - so you may not be able to get back into the call.
Once you are in the call, things are pretty smooth - the quality was good (between the UK & California) with no noticable latency - I guess this is more about the quality of Skype's network. We did suffer from some annoying audio echo and didn't get to the bottom of it - I suspect there was some confusion between Skype / vSkype as to which Micorphone / Speaker to use.
One additional featuer that looked promising was the ability to have video conferences - I'll be trying this later when we do a "familly video call". Another not so useful feature (IMO) was the desktop sharing - I guess this is aimed at the enterprise market (not the consumer) but it wasn't a particularly good implementation (vs. say WebEx) and suffered from a 10 second update delay. So the feature maybe good enough for running through a preo. but no good for a real-time demo - and at the end of the day - if you want to share a preso. PDF is the universal format already.
One thing I don't quite understand is what Skype wan't to do with Video over IP - they seem to be aiming for the Enterprise market (with conferencing and desktop sharing features) - I wonder if the consumer market will be abandoned once this stuff is out of beta and has been sufficiently tested. I also don't understand the motivation behind the creators of vSkype and Video4Skype - noone is going to buy these clients nor pay for the service (IMO) - what's their business model ?
For more information - there is a fairly long article on the SkypeJournal.
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Jun
18
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Thanks to Pat for the link to an article in GMSV. Sandvine (a Broadband management company) predict that Skype will soon license their software to handset manufacturers and threaten wireless SPs - they are essentially saying that Skype will make money on IP not on service. I'm not sure why wireless SPs would go for this unless they could make money - there have been reports of SPs crippling handsets to remove competing features such as WiFi and Bluetooth already - why would this be viewed differently ?
Unless of course the wireless carriers view the future commoditization of voice as innevitable (which seems to be the modus operandi of the VOIP providers) and that the money will come from other value added services. I just can't see that - most of the IP multi-media services I have seen so far seem to be purely for the enterprise market and not the consumer (video, whiteboard) - so the revenue potential is somewhat limited.
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Jun
16
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The competition for IP based services got a little hotter, with Yahoo annoucing the acquisition of Dialpad on Tuesday. You can read what Dialpad are saying here and eweek has a pretty in-depth article here
While it is good to see a strong established brand like Yahoo! joining the fray I don't think this will change the market much - VOIP will continue to thrive in the niche PC-PC market - typically catering for the tech. savvy. I think the broad consumer introduction of VOIP will only happen when established phone companies roll out the infrastructure for all and make it completely transparent to the consumer. Geeks care about VOIP, SIP, IMS - consumers care about cheap, reliable phone calls.
Other IP Services related news this week (for Skype fans at least) is the beta release of VSkype. I haven't had a real play with it yet so can't compare it to Video4Skype but it looks like you can have multi-way video conferences and desktop sharing so that's possibly a hint at targetting the Enterprise market (consumers don't need to share desktops ?)
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May
19
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As a user of Skype - I found the recent ruling by the FCC (in the US) interesting - the FCC demands that VOIP service providers be able to route 911 calls correctly. There is good coverage on news.com and ComputerWorld.com highlighting the logistical and political issues the VOIP providers face.
Strange that the ruling is in the US only - I'm not sure why other countries don't have similar rulings - maybe it's because everyone else has a decent mobile-network and rely less on landlines in the first place ?
