CounterPath has long been known for its SIP softphone clients, Xlite and Bria. Xlite is a free PC-based softphone client which provides basic voice calling and instant messaging features.

Bria is their full-feature business grade offering which:

• Provides access to an IP-based telephone system or service from a PC (Windows, Mac and Linux), iPhone or Android
• Can communicate with contacts from multiple sources, such as Microsoft Outlook, mobile phone address books and company directories
• Provides presence status (currently PC editions only)
• Supports a wide range of business standard call management features
• Incorporates support for chat sessions, including group chat (currently PC editions only)
• Has security features that allow firewall traversal

Over the past year CounterPath has released its Bria iPhone (and iPod Touch) edition with several updates (current version 1.2.1) as well as Bria Android edition. Both work over 3G or WiFi connections. A key feature is the ability to use the iPhone or Android as an extension to a PBX. From their product description:

Using the iPhone or iPod’s existing contact list, Bria iPhone Edition facilitates easy and effective communication management with an intuitive interface that accommodates multiple calls. Call functionality includes the ability to swap between two calls, merge and split calls and perform attended and unattended transfers.

Yesterday CounterPath released Bria iPad Edition which basically can turn an iPad into an IP phone for use in business telephone systems that support SIP. Effectively it can replace a desktop IP phone but also allows you to take that phone off the desk and accompany you on your travels. Your extension becomes physically available wherever you have your iPad as long as it has Internet access via 3G/LTE or WiFi. From their product description:

Bria iPad Edition facilitates easy communication with an intuitive interface that includes all of the standard phone features such as call display, call history, voicemail indicator and multiple call support. Multitasking functionality also allows Bria iPad Edition to run in the background while you use your iPad, allowing you to reference other applications while on a call.

And from the press release, which lists in detail several key features:

Unlike other VoIP voice applications marketed for the iPad that were introduced primarily for the iPhone, Bria iPad Edition is designed specifically for all Apple iPads. This iPad-centric foundation means that Bria iPad Edition leverages the device’s large, high-resolution display, providing a richer user experience that enhances the features found in the Bria iPhone Edition.

Bria iPad Edition’s separated navigation panes make it effortless to find contact information and initiate calls. A one-touch popover dialpad is elegantly minimized yet easily accessible at all times, while the iPad’s native keyboard is also available for entering alphanumeric SIP URL/addresses.

During the past year I have set up Bria on a MacBook and iPhone, using it as one of my “phones” that is hooked up to my FREETALK Connect telephone system.  Yesterday I added Bria iPad Edition to my iPad and have done some inbound and outbound test calls through the FREETALK Connect. Effectively my iPad has become one more “phone” when using the FREETALK Connect’s “Find Me” feature where calling my extension rings a Linksys IP phone, my Skype client, my BlackBerry (via an external call) and my iPad.

I made a call with Alec Saunders who also has the same configuration; both iPads were connected via WiFi to our local LAN, each of which included a FREETALK Connect. During the call I was able to record our conversation; the screen had options for transferring the call, adding a third party and either accepting or placing another call.

With all three smartphone/tablet editions, Bria interfaces to the device’s local address book and runs in background to answer calls while running other applications. During a call I also confirmed that you can also reference other applications while the call is handled in the background. As shown in the images from the call screen it also includes features such as multi-call support, call transfer and three-way calling.

My only concern is that it requires some technical knowledge to configure with the FREETALK Connect but that is a one-time exercise. While my experience involved a business telephony system, Bria iPad Editon comes preconfigured to work with several SIP service providers and it can be manually configured for any SIP-based service.

During a call with Todd Carothers, CounterPath’s Senior Vice-President Marketing and Products, , he pointed out that one of their learning experiences with these Fixed-Mobile convergence clients was how to deal with bouncing between WiFi and 3G connections in, say, a multi-level building. Basically they will incorporate into Bria a button that provides control over this situation by moving the call between 3G and mobile at the user’s discretion. Also Bria will soon be incorporating features to support SMS messaging and video calling.

Bottom line is that with Bria iPad Edition, my iPad has become a fully-featured IP phone that can be used through an business-grade telephony system for small business from any location worldwide provided there is a wireless Internet connection.

Bria iPad Edition is available at the iPad App Store at a price of $14.99.

One final comment: I have Truphone for iPad and, now, Bria for iPad. When will we see a unique Skype for iPad? If you use Google’s keyword tool, you’ll find that “Skype iPad” (and variations) is one of the more voluminous Google search requests associated with Skype. Delivering Skype for iPad will demonstrate that Skype is continuing along its path of Skype Everywhere, even after the announcement of the pending Microsoft acquisition. (It should be noted that outbound calls made to try  out Bria iPad Edition were made over a SkypeOut service via the FREETALK Connect.)

Full disclosure: The producer of the FREETALK Connect has previously been a client of the publisher’s business development services; at this point, there is no business relationship. The publisher is opening a business providing consulting to small businesses who want to implement Skype and/or IP-based communications solutions. More details to follow next week. CounterPath’s Bria is simply one of the softphone products experienced over the past year while determining configurations that work with FREETALK Connect.

Related articles

• Bria iPad Edition 1.0 a winner! (saunderslog.com)
• Apple eases rules on iPad, iPhone subscriptions (seattlepi.com)
• Bria extends VoIP phone client to iPad (tuaw.com)

When I met Skype’s Vice President for Consumer Products, Neil Stevens, at CES 2011, one of his points was that he wanted to see more frequent Skype client upgrades, reducing the time between new upgrades from 12 to 18 months down to 2 to 3 months. Skype certainly demonstrated that last week when, two months after the launch of Skype 5.1 for Windows, Skype released Skype for Windows 5.2 with a set of subtle improvements that largely relate to the user experience when initiating calls.

The most obvious change is to the Call Bar. Whereas previously one would see:

the Call Bar has become:

The most obvious change is the switching of the order of the “Video Call” and (voice) “Call” buttons and the  elimination of a separate line for “Skype”, “Mobile”, “Office”, etc. numbers. No doubt the former is a result of two factors:

• the popularity of video calling where Skype claims that over 40% of all calls are now video calls and
• the recent introduction of Group Video calling as  a revenue generating premium service

Access to any type of voice call is now done via the Call Button, which has acquired an associated drop down menu. In turn this drop down menu provides the access to the contact’s various voice calling options. If the Contact’s presence is Online(), a Skype-to-Skype call would be the default.  Should be user not be available (Offline, Invisible or set for Call Forwarding ) but has entered a mobile or landline number into their Skype profile, there are three changes:

• the Call button has changed to read “Call Mobile” (or Office or Home)
• the Mobile, Home or Office number would be checked off as the default destination for placing a call.
• you have a “heads up” that a Skype-to-Skype call selection will result in reaching the contact’s voice mail

While the drop down menu shows a default based on presence, you can still select one of the other options to initiate a voice call but you are now forewarned that a Skype-to-Skype call to someone with one of the three “not present” statuses mentioned above could result in reaching their voicemail.

Note that the drop down menu also allows the addition of a phone number. Very handy when you know the contact’s phone number but they have not entered it into their Skype profile.

One more change to the Call Bar: the “Share Button” provides a ready access to sharing a Contact or File. If you are in a call, the Screen Sharing option becomes available.

Bottom line: while these changes can reduce the number of clicks to make a call or share information, they also provide, in a subtle way, readier access to Skype’s revenue generating Group Video Calling and SkypeOut services. With only 8% of Skype users actually using SkypeOut it would be interesting to see if these changes actually provide any more than slightly incremental revenues.

Watch for a post on the changes to the “Call Phones” menu.

Download Skype 5.2 for Windows here or go to Help | Check for Updates in your Skype for Windows client.

And should you even be making a voice call? Check out this New York TImes article: Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You. (Warning NYT may have initiated their pay wall.)

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A month ago at Mobile World Congress, Skype and Verizon stole the spotlight by announcing Verizon’s forthcoming Skype mobile service. This afternoon at CTIA in Las Vegas, Verizon and Skype announced that the service will launch in two days on Thursday, March 25 (think Christmas in March).

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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During my recent interview with Russ Shaw, Skype’s VP and GM for Mobile, he emphasized Skype’s focus on having a true Skype user experience when it comes to supporting Skype on mobile devices.

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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Yesterday’s announcement that Skype will become available as a supported service on Verizon Wireless has to have sent a tsunami through the wireless operator world. To review the offering:

• 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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Jaanus Kase, pictured right at eBay Developer Conference 2006, was a member of the Talinn-based Skype engineering team at the time, back in 2004, when Skype decided that they needed to create a unique Skype chat user experience. He subsequently become Skype’s most public face through his Skype blogging activity but left Skype in the summer of 2007 to pursue a degree related to human interactions with digital technology at Cargnie-Mellon.

Today he posted on his personal blog, “On Google Wave, and how we made Skype Chat”, outlining the Skype chat design exercise and many of the decisions they had to make in coming up with the instant messaging service that is available on Skype today.

So, it was somewhere in 2004 and Skype realized they need to revamp their text chat/conversation system. Skype actually had one from the very beginning, but it was one-to-one and not very nice. It did support the basic concept of queuing messages that is extensively used today as well; that is, you could write a message to someone regardless of whether they were online or not, and it would be delivered the next time you would both be online. True to Skype’s serverless architecture, the message would simply be queued in your computer.

Jaanus was tasked with leading the project. In the post he recognizes others who made a contribution and discusses the evolution under four headings:

• The Goal: “We set out to ‘fix the email problem’, and provide a convenient group collaboration tool that would first and foremost support our own organization of many ad hoc groups coming and going.”
• What’s the content model vis-a-vis people coming and going? What happens when you close the window? “I chose to make chats persistent because that is how teams work in an organization. A team tends to be consistent over time, and it is in the interest of the team that everybody is constantly filled in and knows the same information.”
• Are chats public or invite-only? How do you get in a chat and what do you see then? Answering questions such as “If you are added to a chat, do you see the whole history or only from that point onwards?” (And here he explains a major difference from Google Wave.)
• How will multiple devices/computers work?
  

  Skype’s architecture, though, was more complex than simple client-server. Everybody was a client and a server at the same time. What would “one client at a time” even mean? It would have created more problems than it would have solved. So, we realized that what were dealing with was not a messaging problem, but more of a distributed database problem. And through some brilliant engineering by Indrek, we created a system based on “synchronizing”. That is, each device signed in with a particular username has a local database of all chats, and when (re)connected to the Skype network, synchronizes the chats with the “Skype cloud”, posting messages created locally, and retrieves new ones from the cloud.

His overall conclusions:

I have not looked at Wave protocol guts, but it feels that our design and implementation was/is fairly similar to the gist of Wave federation, except that Wave is more complex, spanning multiple servers, networks and who knows what else. But all in all, you have a collection of waves, and in those, you post messages locally and retrieve remote ones, and it works quite nicely already today, e.g across multiple browsers.

One important thing that Skype and Wave do right, but that’s completely broken in Twitter, is the distribution of metadata, and in particular read/unread states. In Skype, we synchronize not only message content, but also the read/unread state, and Wave does the same. But in Twitter, it highly annoys me that there is no facility to synchronize read/unread state, and I have to read the same tweets ten times across different clients and devices.

Bottom line – especially if you are a heavy user of Skype chat – read the entire post to learn more about the thinking behind Skype chat, how it differentiates from other instant messaging products and how he feels it compares to Google Wave. And the post certainly explains the behavior I observe when logged into multiple devices.

Full disclosure: Skype Chat and the associated File Transfer probably constitutes over 80% of the author’s use of Skype. And is often logged into multiple devices (PC’s and iPhone being the most common).

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Canadian iPhone and iPod Touch users will be able to celebrate all 9’s day (today is 09-09-09) by participating in Skype conversations from their iPhone. At 12:01 a.m. the Canadian Apple App store will be making Skype for iPhone available.

Breaking news (12:04 a.m. Sept. 9): I have just successfully downloaded Skype for iPhone from the Canadian Apple App store and sent my first chat message to the Skype 5.x Public Chat session.

When Canadians woke up on the March 31 worldwide launch date of Skype for iPhone they learned they could not be amongst the over 6 million iPhone users who have since downloaded Skype for iPhone from Apple App stores worldwide, except, of course, in Canada. A shock to the country where Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first long distance call to Brantford, Ontario across a six kilometre wire from a nearby telegraph station back in 1876.

The Canadian launch of the Skype for iPhone was delayed while Skype and Apple Canada’s licensing teams worked out “ambiguity” issues related to Skype for iPhone’s use of the G729 codec in Canada. In an interview with Skype personnel yesterday I was advised these issues are now resolved with the Canadian launch set for 12:01 a.m. Sept. 9, 2009 when they will be able to download the recently released Skype for iPhone 1.2.

From the press release:

“We are delighted to bring the Skype for iPhone application to Canadian iPhone and iPod touch users as it opens up new ways for them to stay connected with family, friends and colleagues for free or minimal cost,” said Tom Yeung, Skype’s director of market development, Americas. “With more than 6 million downloads from the App Store so far, the Skype for iPhone application is one of our most popular mobile offerings so we’re delighted to say that Canadians can now also carry their Skype conversations with them wherever they go.”

Where can it be used: All Skype for iPhone features are available at any WiFi access point on both the iPhone and iPod Touch; however, when an iPhone is on a 3G wireless carrier the voice application is not available to be in compliance with the terms of Apple’s Software Development Kit licensing agreement. However, chat and presence activity can continue over a 3G carrier’s network.

To review Skype for iPhone’s feature set:

• What’s free:
  • Skype-to-Skype calls (only via a WiFi access point)
  • Skype IM: presence information and chat sessions between individuals or across groups
• What’s requires payments:
  • Calls to landline or mobile phones using either a Skype Calling Plan subscription or “pay-as-you-go” Skype Credits (requires WiFi access; connection fees may also apply)
  • Receiving calls at a Skype Online number (requires WiFi access)
  • Voicemail retrieval
  • Call Forwarding: (new in version 1.2) when the Skype for iPhone is not open on the iPhone, calls will be forwarded to the iPhone’s mobile number under the same terms as calls to landline or mobile phones.
  • SMS outbound messaging (new in version 1.2)

How useful is Skype for iPhone? when I was at a business meeting in Spain in early July, I found two North Americans using their Skype for iPhone as a “walkie-talkie” to communicate with each other while on the hotel property using its WiFi connection. Neat actually. With the rapid spread of WiFi access points as an alternative to using wireless carriers iPhone users should find many public and private (home, office) locations where they can use Skype for iPhone.

Rogers is ready to run Skype for iPhone’s voice calling over their 3G network whenever Apple removes their licensing restriction on VoIP applications employing 3G protocols. (But AT&T in the U.S. is probably nowhere near being able to handle the data traffic load that would result from lifting this restriction.)

Skype for iPhone suffers from one limitation of the iPhone: the lack of background processing. You must have the application open, not only to send and receive voice calls, but also to follow chat sessions. Hopefully the previously announced Skype for BlackBerry will address this issue where the BlackBerry supports background processing.

Bottom line: with Skype chat as over 80% of my Skype activity I look forward to being able to track chat sessions while riding buses and commuter trains (but not while driving a vehicle – text messaging while driving becomes illegal in Ontario this month). And making Skype voice calls from my home as well as hotels, restaurants and other myriad of locations with a WiFi access point.

P.S. – Is it coincidence that Skype for iPhone became legally available to Canadians so soon after the announcement that 17 million Canadians will have a shareholder interest in Skype? Probably not.

• Globe and Mail: Canadians, rejoice: Skype for iPhone is here
• CBC.ca: Skype finally hits iPhones in Canada includes a more detailed discussion about the licensing issue.

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In a story on VoIP Planet, Gerry Blackwell provides a case study of the implementation of OnState’s Virtual Call Center at CyberDefender Corp., an Internet security software and services firm.

CyberDefender’s new director of customer service, Jose Martinez, investigated a few solutions, including traditional Panasonic and Nortel automatic call distribution (ACD) systems. But in the end, Martinez chose a radical on-demand service from start-up OnState Communications, and coupled it with VoIP service from Skype.

“OnState was very competitive,” he says. “But not only was it priced right—and this was very important to us—they were able to implement very quickly.” It took barely a week to get agents up and running and trained.

Gerry goes on to talk about the cost savings over traditional premise-based and hosted call center solutions, the visibility and transparency of the call center activity in real time and the ability to rapidly scale the service as they add more staff. He then quotes OnState CEO Pat Kelly:

“Conversation management and knowing about people are the most important elements in our application,” says OnState CEO Pat Kelly. “We’re interested in phones, but the problems our customers come to us with are not really about phones.”

“We’re more concerned with understanding the business presence of employees. What can they do—what skills do they have, what kinds of calls can they answer? And what are they doing at this moment. Are they at work today? Are they free? Are they involved in a chat? Are they on a phone call?”

Read the entire article to learn more about how OnState handles calls, its integration with Skype and Google Talk, the competition (such as it is), costs and OnState’s DNA that underlies its legitimacy as a call center solution.

Bottom Line: A win for CyberDefender and a win for their customers with improved customer service and an ability to scale appropriately as demand varies over time. And a a Voice 2.0 world application where Skype is contributing to business model disruption.

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• Skype’s Stefan Öberg @ Interop: Stealthing Skype Into Business, But Cover the Entire Skype Ecosystem (voiceontheweb.biz)
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Legion are the stories of small and medium businesses who are using Skype for their worldwide communications operations.

• Skype is the cornerstone for keeping Toronto-based  b5media’s worldwide staff of bloggers, editors, developers and executives in touch via both informal and formal conversations.
• SeeWorthy gets an assist from Skype when communicating with their Taiwanese supplier (via an Alberta-based translator), North American and Caribbean agents, and prospective European distributors as well as their customers.
• A Canadian-headquartered resource company is using Skype voice and IM for communications with their operations in Asia; their biggest challenge involves time-zone issues. Skype chat’s inherent asynchronous nature helps to address that issue.

Skype itself claims that about 30% of all its user activity is business related. I often encounter small businesses who have a wealth of stories about how Skype contributes to their business success.

But during a recent conversation with OnState CEO Pat Kelly I learned about how Skype is stealthing its way into medium to large enterprises. Pat discussed two examples (who will remain generic until case studies are available):

• OnState received an enquiry from a major North American parts distributor whose operations involve agents, resellers and business customers spread out across North America. While this company has an internal IT team, the CFO was focused on significant cost reductions for their call center operations. He has now contracted OnState to provide voice, chat and other customer relationship communications activities that do not simply save money but provide additional communications processes such as IM with its inherent presence and chat features. Once the contract was signed, the CFO mentioned he would guide his IT personnel with their role in the implementation.
• A European country manager for a worldwide, US-headquartered business found that he was getting charge-backs for “corporate” communications services that did not meet his particular needs. He had enough autonomy that he investigated OnState’s services, went through not only the technical specifications but also the legal reviews and business process requirements. He is now meeting the communications needs of his business ecosystem using Skype and OnState’s other auxiliary services for call center and virtual PBX requirements. Subsequently other European subsidiaries of the same company are implementing OnState’s services. Yet this is a situation where the U.S. head office has yet to be contacted about what additional opportunities for Skype and OnState may exist within their business.

Pat’s key point is that, in today’s economically stressed environments, there’s a trend where CFO’s and business unit managers are making the key communications services decisions in larger enterprises in order to meet their financial goals. IT personnel are playing little or no role in the decision making although they may be involved to a limited degree in the implementation. What are Pat’s key observations?

• The consumer experience with Skype is stealthing its way into business implementations, not only with prosumers and small businesses but also at the business unit level within larger enterprises.
• Why? Skype just plain works. There are no firewall issues; OnState’s SaaS model eliminates capital investment for PBX’s and related infrastructure.
• It’s relatively easy to implement.
• Economic pressures are driving adoption.
• Where a business partner or customer has Skype also, HD Voice, incorporating SILK, provide for more productive voice conversations.
• It’s not simply about using a technical mashup across multiple services (Skype, Google, and Voxbone, for example) involved in OnState implementations; it’s a “business mashup” involving business processes and employee acceptance.

It’s a repeat of a trend that drove personal computers into larger enterprises twenty-five years ago. I recall one story where a Canadian bank Vice President found an employee with a PC that had a modem attached (with, at best, a 1200 kbps speed). The modem was ordered disconnected! Bank security was going to be upheld despite technology progress. Four years later that same bank ordered over 10,000 PC cards from my employer of the day for inclusion in their new, at the time, teller terminal system.

Bottom Line: Even if it’s not totally free it’s the raw cost savings that are driving Skype adoption, sometimes in co-operation with their business software partners. It’s about not only lower calling costs but also the elimination of capital asset costs. For some business markets Skype is stealthing its way into business communications infrastructure.

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Yesterday’s announcement of the Skype for SIP beta created lots of commentary in the blogosphere; it remained the leading topic on Techmeme for several hours.

• Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal, in “Skype For SIP: Big Money, Skypeless, Brand Destroyer”, outlines some of the positioning with respect to Skype for Asterisk, channel schism issues and worries that it abandons Skype’s central tenants and could undermine the brand.
• Alec Saunders, in “Skype embraces SIP; announces beta service for business users”, talks about the impact on businesses using legacy PBX’s, the increased pressure on international long distance markets and a reminder that about 1/3 of all current Skype traffic is business related.
• Jason Goecke at Ahearsion, a Skype for Asterisk beta developer, worries about the impact on the market for Skype for Asterisk in “Skype for SIP = Skype for Asterisk DOA?”

But most interesting was the Voice On The Web Public Chat session that ensued. Being on a vacation I was away from my laptop for about seven hours (yes, it was a great day to be golfing) but when I returned I found a session that not only provided the flavor of the vibrant debate going on but also many answers. The key – Chris Moore, Skype’s Senior Product Manager responsible for Skype for SIP joined into the discussion to make several points:

• Most importantly – this is Skype for SIP beta; his team is looking for feedback from a range of beta testers, not only third party developers but also the IP PBX vendors themselves. To quote Chris:
  

  Yep, whole idea is to get feedback, see what people want/don’t want to help prioritize development of new features. Our group, Skype For Business, is getting a lot of focus and its a key strategic focal point for Skype now. We’ll never get it completely right at the start, but a start is still a start

• To qualify as a beta tester you need to have some experience with configuring IP PBX’s that are currently in the market. For instance, “you must have, and be able to configure, your own SIP Enabled PBX that supports G.729 codec.”
• Beta testers will need to create a temporary Skype name to use in the beta program; the issue of a separate SkypeID and how it was handled was hotly debated.
  One point to clarify:

  Skype for SIP actually can allow multiple Skype IDs to be mapped through to a single SIP identity. However, during the beta period, we are only supporting a 1 to 1 mapping due to the fact that Skype’s advanced Business Control Panel (BCP) configuration portal is not yet available at this time. If a company wishes to configure multiple Skype ID’s mapped to a SIP identity, we can accommodate this for a subset of the beta trial participants.

• The key connections made by Skype for SIP are:
  

  - PBX –> SkypeOut (PSTN)
  - SkypeIn/Online numbers (PSTN) –> PBX
  - Skype Clients –> PBX

• The business model, including pricing, has yet to be worked out. It will require Skype to determine a means to separate out business users from “consumer” users on both Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk. The principle here is that business benefits from the various features of these offerings; where such significant value-add exists there is a market for the services. But any pricing for either offering is yet to be determined, keeping in mind that both offerings’ desire to make significant market penetration will be a key moderator on pricing. Again quoting Chris:
  

  no new road is easy and enhancing our focus so Skype can support business users as a distinct group differently from consumers takes some work

• Differentiation from Skype for Asterisk will be an ongoing challenge. Initially Skype for Asterisk, which will be an Asterisk channel, includes handling SIP—>Skype calls, Skype-to-Skype calls and will incorporate presence information. (My comments on an ignored aspect differentiating these are below.)
• While SFS may incorporate some “Skype trunking” capability, SFS also offers the handling of inbound calling from Skype Online numbers.
• As for the current status of SFS, Chris says the focus at the moment is on getting voice connections right as this is the feature most demanded in the market:
  

  and this is baby steps for Skype, there are many more UC services to come, voice for SIP is the biggest ask from customers. Video/presence etc only make  sense when codecs are common between skype clients and SIP endpoints.Some work left there!

• Codecs are an issue. The initially supported G.729 codec requires licensing. The Skype for Business team is working on incorporation of G.711 within a few weeks but eventually hopes to assist with the adoption of the SILK codec across the industry by supporting SILK. But this also requires SILK support at the end points. Bottom line: codecs have both a technology and business issues to be resolved.
• Security is an issue that will probably provide one of the major challenges as Skype opens up access to its cloud from both Skype for Business offerings.

My own observations, not having been around for the discussion:

• Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk: the discussion yesterday centered on technical issues but totally ignored the market channel issues.
• Skype for SIP requires working with the various IP PBX vendors who have their own distribution channels; Skype for Asterisk is a partnering project with Digium who has its own unique distribution channels. These channels are both looking for innovation that keeps them in business. Yes, the common issue is that SFS and SFA both threaten the long distance market, but the VAR’s and System Integrators in these channels will need new offerings that meet this challenge.
• A significant challenge for both SFA and SFS will be the User Interface. How much will either of these products make the installation,  configuration and operational aspects so user friendly that outside support requirements are minimized or eliminated. This is a huge challenge in the SMB market as many small business owners will simply not want to be involved with such issues; they have their own business specialty to focus on. The value-add of VAR’s and SI’s serving any business market comes in making business communications low cost, seamless to the business operation and five 9’s uptime for their customers.
• There is not one solution that will meet the complete world of business needs. Currently in this SMB space we have several vendors: Cisco, Microsoft Response Point, Avaya, Siemens, etc. The world would be up in arms if there were only one offering for providing the disruptive innovation for which Skype can provide support to these channels.
• The issue of addressing consumer users vs business issues recalls the PC market twenty years ago when PC hardware vendors, initially Compaq, finally figured out how to differentiate and address these markets. This was a major issue I had to deal with in setting up a PC reseller network at the time. Today we see Dell addressing these various markets as soon as you launch into their website.

The Skype-enabled world is only healthy if there are alternative offerings and channels. Recall the theme of Skype President Josh Silverman’s reminder to the analysts last week: “Skype is a software company but we plan to be everywhere”. The Skype for Business group is focusing on making the software required to support these offerings; this software will leverage the IP PBX vendors and Digium distribution channels to drive adoption through into the various regional business market channels worldwide.

Update: While Om’s post, Skype Now Means Business, Friends the SIP World, demonstrates that he has not been following very closely the strategy being laid out by Skype’s new executive team over the past few months, the comment stream it triggered  is well worth reading. For instance, check out SFA developer Tim Panton’s comment about the opportunity for innovation he has found in SFA:

That aside, I’m a huge fan of S4A and our experience to date has been positive. We leverage the improved identity management (vs PSTN or SIP) and low costs of Skype to do some very cool integration with business processes and web applications by routing Skype calls through the extensible and scriptable platform of Asterisk. [author’s bold]

Next Post: Why Skype needs to get Skype Public Chat back into the latest release of Skype for Windows 4.0. The discussion referenced above demonstrates that this is the major failing of this version.

Update: Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch: Skype and SIP Equals A Takeaway of Toll Free

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Thursday evening I was checking out Truphone’s latest release only to learn that their somewhat delayed version that provides access to Skype is still on hold. At that time I went browsing for other applications on the App Store and came across one that I have had previous experience with on the BlackBerry: IM+ for Skype for iPhone (and iPod Touch). And, on further investigation I also found an upgraded version of IM+ for Skype for BlackBerry.

From my iPhone I made a call to Ken Camp who received it on Skype on his PC. Call quality at my end was excellent, given the audio bandwidth limitations of any mobile phone. I also did some IM activity to check that it worked.

The latest release of IM+ for BlackBerry not only allows you to make SkypeOut calls but also to access the native BlackBerry address book. This is the first “Skype on Mobile” BlackBerry offering to have such deep integration. I will be looking to see what impact this application has on battery life as RIM has recently provided new API’s to incorporate battery management into third party applications. This version also has the ability to set up and participate in multi-party calls.

On initial glance, IM+ for Skype on the iPhone does not have the ability to access your Address Book for contacts’ landline/mobile phone numbers.

Given that I really need a few days to fully experience all the features and warts of these two applications, I’ll withhold further comment at this time; this situation does present a unique opportunity to evaluate how an application integrates into the iPhone and the BlackBerry platforms respectively. In the meantime, however, if you try out these applications and have some experiences to report, please post them in the Comments.

Keep in mind that, when making calls with IM+ for Skype, at a minimum you will be using local minutes on your mobile phone plan. The data channel is used for Instant Messaging activity, Contacts and setting up a voice call to a Skype or SkypeOut contact. Further information on charges. Especially be aware that calls made when “roaming” outside your home country or region may incur significant charges.

One caveat: all this access to Skype requires that you keep a handle on how many platforms are logged into Skype. At one point, being concurrently logged in on a laptop, a desktop, an iPhone, a BlackBerry and a Nokia E71 (using Skype Lite), I found that presence was not consistent across platforms and some IM chat messages were not getting to all the platforms. But then again coordination of presence and setting priorities for multiple login situations is something that I hope Skype is investigating as they roll out Skype Everywhere.

(Yes, I am aware that Skype can also be accessed on the iPhone via Fring; however, call quality has not been consistent enough to consider it a reliable service.)

Over the past few years we have seen the evolution of several conversation communities, some simply employing instant messaging; others employing both instant messaging and voice. Skype is the primary example with its support of IM, voice and video as well as auxiliary features such as file sharing (and, as announced tonight, basic screen sharing) but we are also seeing these services diffuse into Google, via GTalk’s voice and chat capability, MSN Live via Live Messenger, and, in spite of its trying to define who they are, Yahoo. Truphone is a mobile voice calling service that I have used for a couple of years from a Nokia N95-1; it became critical in a situation I encountered in Germany two years ago. I have liked both the quality of the voice calls as well as the user interface, especially its use of the device’s native address book for initiating a call. While they have had some hiccups with their recent product launches, Truphone has become the leader in providing low cost calling from the iPhone while breaking the carrier barrier via Apple’s App Store. I will soon be reporting on Truphone Anywhere for BlackBerry. Now, under recently appointed CEO Geraldine Wilson, Truphone is making a move to grow their user base rapidly by leveraging the user bases of other services.

This evening at the MacWorld Showstoppers event Truphone announced an enhanced Truphone for iPhone providing connectivity to these four conversation communities. Supporting both instant messaging and voice conversations, voice calls to, say, Skype contacts are free provided they go over a WiFi connection. Calls to these communities can also be made over a carrier’s 3G network, usually at the cost of a local call. In addition Truphone is providing access to Twitter as one additional messaging service accessible via Truphone’s iPhone application.

In my interview this evening with new Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson, she pointed out:

• Using Skype as an example, Truphone’s enhancements set up an appropriate Skype client on a Truphone gateway and complete the call to the Skype contact, taking advantage of Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture such that there are no resulting termination charges.
• By introducing instant messaging, Truphone is recognizing the key role IM is taking on in IP-based conversations where a conversation may start over a chat session and migrate to a voice session if deemed appropriate.
• Truphone sees the introduction of these enhancements as a key to building the Truphone user community; Truphone generates revenue through offering low cost calling to/from the landline and mobile PSTN network.
• Truphone is looking at adding BlackBerry and Android to their supported platforms for this service over the next few months. Key here are devices that support an application store in order to make user access to these services simple and trivial.
• To avoid high roaming charges it is recommended that Truphone for iPhone be used either over a WiFi connection anywhere worldwide but only over a user’s home country 3G carrier.
• These new features go live on next Monday, January 12.

Some outstanding questions:

• Given that the Truphone application needs to be active for conversations, how will this work when other applications are open? Currently if I have Truphone as the open application on my iPhone, I can receive free Truphone calls and my presence will be indicated to other Truphone for iPhone users if I am in their “Favorites” tab. However, if I am in another iPhone application, I cannot receive “free” Truphone calls over WiFi; nor is my presence indicated to others. I look forward to seeing how the enhanced Truphone handles Instant Messaging when Truphone is not the “open” application on the iPhone. This is where BlackBerry’s full multi-tasking capability is a major advantage over the iPhone.
• Calling Skype contacts involves providing your SkypeID and password. What security is in place to maintain the confidentiality of this information. What other security aspects are compromised as a result of placing the calls via a connection to a gateway that supports the caller’s Skype client.
• What is Skype’s reaction to having Truphone siphon off what could otherwise potentially be SkypeOut revenues while leveraging the Skype user base and using the “free” aspect of Skype? We know Skype is working to launch mobile phone applications, probably this week at CES. With iSkoot and the Skypephone on 3′s networks, as we learned at last year’s eComm 2008 iSkoot presentation, a portion of carrier revenues are shared between Skype and iSkoot.

A major step forward in making low cost calls worldwide, Truphone’s moves once again emphasize that WiFi is becoming an ever growing alternative connection option to making wireless calls. At the same time it will be interesting to see how the business model plays out in a world where the cost of voice calling continues to move towards zero.

GigaOm: Truphone Brings Skype to iPhone and iPod Touch

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In a simplistic world, it is easy to view the mobile phone as the PC in your pocket when the truth is the mobile phone is not the PC in your pocket. The path to low cost or free mobile calling to our friends and business colleagues worldwide is not necessarily through a replication of what works on an PC.

Meanwhile carriers have been using VoIP in their backend, transparently to the caller and called party, for about a decade in order to lower their cost of carrying long distance calls between legacy PSTN phones – both landline and wireless. Adoption of wireless VoIP at the end points with the five nines (99.999%) reliability, call quality and scalability of the current circuit-switched TDM wireless networks requires significant infrastructure advances and developments not only at the device level but also at the network level. The wireless VoIP goal remains fraught with obstacles and barriers that are inhibiting its deployment:

• Mobile devices do not have the internal resources of a desktop or laptop PC. Battery life, memory and CPU speeds are all too underperforming at this time to be able to provide a consumer friendly, high quality service. Even the ability to multi-task with multiple applications becomes an issue.
• Robust, scalable network connections are an issue. Current carrier backhaul capacity, especially in North America, is insufficient to support a scalable service at the level required for the demands VoIP would place on data transmission.
• Call quality issues, especially inherent latency and availability of open sockets, still do not make for a consistent call quality.
• Inherent codecs and other support at both the network and device level within the wireless TDM infrastructure address otherwise device resource hogging issues such as echo cancellation and error correction.
• And, most importantly, it does not provide a carrier-friendly business model. Filling the data pipe while attempting to reduce the billable “minutes of use” (MOU) is not appealing to a carrier executive who’s responsible for increasing average revenue per user (ARPU).

So what is the architecture for a carrier friendly system that would allow low cost or free calling to your Skype contacts (or contacts on other VoIP services). The key here is to move the resource intensive processes off the device and network onto a gateway server. It’s implied in my previous post about learning lessons from SS7: Take advantage of the currently deployed robust, scalable wireless voice channel and build the infrastructure to complete the call via the Skype cloud using the Internet as a signaling system. Envisioned by founders Jacob and David Guedalia and working from a 2006 co-marketing Agreement with Skype, iSkoot, has built the necessary clients and infrastructure to realize upon this architecture.

In this architecture, the login, text chat, presence status and call setup information are all transmitted over the wireless data channel to an iSkoot gateway server. The “last mile” for the connection to the mobile device’s voice channel uses the proven, robust TDM wireless voice service to connect to a cell tower. Note that the actual voice connection passes through a SIP Media Gateway. And for each logged in user, there is a Skype client running, on the caller’s behalf, on the iSkoot gateway server.

The process for the user is almost as simple as making a normal call:

• Install the iSkoot client on your mobile smartphone
• Answer questions about your setup, including SkypeID, password and mobile phone number.
• Sign in – it takes a moment or two to download all your Skype contacts with their status
• Select a contact and launch either a voice or chat conversation.

A key to iSkoot’s user friendliness comes from the way it handles a voice call. As with any cell phone call, you simply want to enter a number or select an address book entry, push the “Call” button and have the call completed with no other intervention. When you initiate a Skype call via iSkoot, you follow the same process to complete a call to a Skype or SkypeOut contact. While there is a callback to your mobile phone, it is transparently auto-answered with no user intervention required. iSkoot is available for many smartphones, including Blackberry, Nokia N- and E-series phones, several Sony Ericsson models and Windows Mobile platforms.

But iSkoot has worked actively with Hutcheson-Whampoa’s 3 Service to implement the Skype architecture on a carrier. In December, 2006 3 initially offered an iSkoot-based service as one component of its X-Series service; this allowed iSkoot to develop experience with building out the back end components required to manage Skype clients on their servers in a scalable environment. And, as discussed in previous posts, 3 launched a fully configured Skypephone in the U.K. market last November; its acceptance was at a level such that 3 accelerated the launch of the Skypephone in its other eight markets.

In an interview with recently appointed iSkoot CEO Mark Jacobstein, who sponsored a lunch at eComm 2008, Mark took me through the evolution of iSkoot’s ecosystem that resulted in its availability through either 3 as a carrier or iSkoot’s website for other mobile devices. Simply put, the various clients were the easy part to build; the backend infrastructure was the real and ongoing development challenge:

• Building scalable servers that could manage multiple Skype sessions, not only for placing Skype phone calls but also for handling Skype chat sessions. Currently iSkoot’s servers are located in the Boston area and Israel¹.
• Building, with the help of Voxbone, a worldwide network of “local” points of presence such that users can access the iSkoot servers at minimal cost, if any. For instance, from my Rogers service I can call to local servers in major cities across Canada such that only my “local” minutes are charged during a call.

So what are the features of implementing an iSkoot-based solution that appeal to a carrier? From both Mark’s talk at eComm 2008 and my interview:

• Increase MOU and ARPU:
  • Drives up minutes-of-use; even though your call is placed to a local point-of-presence the minutes are counted against the “local” component of your carrier’s plan.
  • Outside North America, where the caller pays for calls into a mobile phone, it drives additional mobile minutes.
• Reduce operating and marketing costs
  • No termination charges for completing a call to a Skype contact. Termination charges are the carriers’ third largest cost item after network infrastructure and personnel. This is why 3 can offer Skype calling for effectively no additional charge to the end user beyond their monthly commitment for outbound calls to the PSTN (landline or mobile).
  • Low customer acquisition costs. Whereas most carriers need to subsidize new customer acquisition through subsidies for the mobile phone device itself driving hard customer acquisition costs into the range of $150 to $300, hard customer acquisition costs for a Skypephone customer, including the cost of a handset, are much less than $150 and no subsidy is required.

It should be noted that while iSkoot solves the international long distance calling problem, solving the roaming problem requires a multi-carrier SIM chip such as those provided by MaxRoam. For instance, when I go to the U.S. and make an iSkoot call I am charged the $0.95 per minute roaming charge independent of whether I make a long distance or local call in the U.S. I hope to test out the MaxRoam service on my next trip to the U.S.

Yesterday iSkoot announced an extended partnership with Skype along with additional carrier relationships where they expect to implement the Skypephone in countries where 3 is not available including Argentina, Greece, Israel, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland and Turkey.

Where does iSkoot get its revenue? As Mark mentioned at his eComm 2008 talk, they and Skype each receive a royalty for the monthly customer subscriptions to 3. In addition, of course, iSkoot receives revenue associated with the phone hardware.

And, if you’ve got a supported handset you can start benefiting from iSkoot’s services directly. I have been using it on my Blackberry 8820 for the past two weeks with good success (especially when I am away from my office) with three caveats:

• Skype needs to provide additional presence and chat support such that dual logins (PC and iSkoot) provide consistent results in terms of where a chat message will go.
• iSkoot needs to ensure that closing a chat session on the mobile device also closes it on their server such that the session does not return to the device. At the moment the only solution for this issue is to actually Sign Off (to shut down your chat sessions on the iSkoot server) and sign back in again — at least once a day.
• While you can readily make SkypeOut calls to SkypeOut contacts in your Skype contacts, there needs to be integration into the device’s native address book to allow one step calling of your native address book’s contacts. (This is already a feature on the Skypephone.)

If you don’t have a Skype phone you can sign up for the iSkoot experience here (supported devices are listed). Keep in mind, while it appears to work quite satisfactorily, it is still in beta trials so your feedback is appreciated.

Mark raised many additional points in his interview; I will bring them out in a future post. And, finally, no there is no iPhone support at the moment; even doing an iPhone client is still under investigation, given all the constraints associated with the iphone’s SDK release.

¹ Note that 3 has positioned servers within their own Network Operations Centers to support their iSkoot-based Skypehone activity. Subscribers can access them at no charge via any 3 cell tower.

Tags: iSkoot, Skype, Skypephone, 3 Skypephone, Mark Jacobstein, Blackberry, Nokia N-Series, Nokia E-Series, Sony Ericsson

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• Startup lessons – iSkoot style (startupcfo.ca)
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Having reflected on Skype’s accomplishments in 2007 and some of the more interesting devices and technologies that have crossed my way, now for my projections for 2008. (In the interest of enhanced objectivity — not that I can be totally objective — I have yet to read Phil’s 37 Sketchy 2008 Skype Predictions or Andy’s The Road in 2008 (links below after you have read this <gr>).

1. eBay will appoint a new Skype CEO in the first quarter. Andy has his insights into the search.

2. The new CEO will focus on “Delight the User”

• Introduce customer support plans (limited free and premium paid)
• Provide <24 hour response time on customer support requests
• Hire a Chief Marketing Officer who understands the role of, and process for, marketing a technology platform to both consumers and small businesses.
• Provide guidelines on optimizing end user configurations for highest quality voice and video.
• Set challenging goals for increasing SkypeIn and SkypeOut minutes used.
• Change Skype business and management structure to support the development and marketing of platforms as opposed to services
• Build a “Skype Inside” marketing program for Skype hardware
• Build a blogger relations program
• Improve dialogues with Developer Partners

3. Skype will introduce multi-party video conferencing (may initially only be three party)

4. Skype will focus on licensing two platforms:

• Skype real time conversation infrastructure (to additional social networking platforms beyond MySpace)
• Skype Developer API Toolkit: to include web services support

5. Skype users will rush out to replace their PC’s with Dual Core processors and their webcams with Logitech Carl-Zeiss optics webcams to take full advantage of Skype High Quality Video.

6. Skype will revitalize the Skype hardware program, improving hardware partner relationships, building a more effective hardware distribution channel (especially in North America) and building consumer awareness of Skype as a premium real time conversation offering.

• Skype will figure out how to open a Skype store for the 3.5 million Canadians.who have registered on Skype.

7. Skype will have to support emergency services for customers with SkypeIn numbers in countries requiring this.

• SkypeIn numbers for Canada will become available within three months of providing emergency services access for UK SkypeIn numbers.

8. The Skype Partner program’s business solutions providers will start to gain significant traction amongst the small and professional services business community.

9. Skype will execute on some form of significantly enhanced business relationship with Google.

10. Skypephone will become available in the U.S. via T-Mobile (and the Skypephone will be modified to support the required additional 850 MHz GSM band.)

11. Skype will upgrade its presence engine to deal with the fact that we may have multiple concurrent logins, especially on at least one PC and one mobile device.

12. Skype will gain significant placement on mobile devices.

• How extensively this goes depends on the (low cost) availability of “public” WiFi and./or 3G network access.
• note that I did not necessarily say there will be a mobile device Skype VoIP client.
• Should more (GSM) carriers invoke UMA/GAN we will see Skype continue the current “mobile” trend of IM over the data network with voice connectivity over the carrier’s inherent voice network.

13. Skype will conclude deals for local termination services in many more countries to improve SkypeIn and SkypeOut call quality.

14. Someone at Skype will review all the SkypeIn provider contracts to ensure we can keep our SkypeIn numbers permanently. (And Londoners will learn that their area code is simply “020″, not “020n”.)

15.eBay will begin reporting Skype usage numbers that are meaningful, such as number of users who actually made at least one Skype call in the previous quarter.

Will be interesting to see how much of these predictions actually play out but one can always hope for the best.

Happy New Year and Happy Skyping in 2008!

And for other predictions:

• Phil Wolff’s 37 Sketchy 2008 Skype Predictions
• Andy Abramson: The Road in 2008
• Ken Camp articulates his perspectives on Mobility, VoIP, Video, SOAP/SaaS and Social Media/Social Networking in his Unified Communications Watch List 2008. Well worth a read, especially for his comments on the decline of Windows Mobile — a trend I have also noticed.

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Alec Saunders, of iotum, Talk Now and Voice 2.0 Manifesto fame, has written one of his high level overview posts, Aikido, Retreat or War. What’s Your Microsoft Strategy? Alec brings a unique perspective to the table because he has moved from being a program manager within Microsoft when their real time communications strategy was in its infancy several years ago to one who must now find his way in a real time communications space threatened by Microsoft dominance. His key thesis is that, as we transition to a Voice 2.0 world where applications are king, Microsoft, with its software heritage, is best positioned, both culturally and resource-wise, to provide the key infrastructure software for a communications world connected solely by “pipes” with the intelligence at the end points.

Before I could fully understand his thesis, I had to Google Aikido. OK, I’m quite familiar with Judo and Karate, but Aikido? Turns out to be a good choice:

Aikido focuses not on punching or kicking opponents, but rather on using their own energy to gain control of them or to throw them away from you.

O Sensei [the developer of this martial art] emphasized the moral and spiritual aspects of this art, placing great weight on the development of harmony and peace. “The Way of Harmony of the Spirit” is one way that “Aikido” may be translated into English.

Having spoken earlier this week with Kyle Marsh, Microsoft’s Unified Communications program manager, Alec outlines how Microsoft is quietly but gradually building itself to become a key infrastructure player in the real time communications space. Not only within the enterprise sector but also in the embedded and mobile sectors. (Andy does like to remind us occasionally that Cisco and Microsoft are at odds.) Alec then goes on to outline three alternative strategies to avoid becoming roadkill in this environment:

• Aikido: launching a complementary business that’s “in harmony” with Microsoft yet leverages their momentum
• Building vertical market applications, or
• War: being the second or third player in the market.

He then outlines iotum’s Aikido strategy, positioning itself within a gap created by Microsoft’s momentum. As evidenced in practice by Talk Now’s links to, yet independence from, the Blackberry in its role as a key presence infrastructure tool, their Relevance Engine has the potential to become “the central, global presence platform for converged networks”.

So where does Skype enter into this picture? What is their “Microsoft strategy” in this scenario? Skype already provides the basic tools for effective real time conversations; simplicity of implementation and operation is one of its most effective features. As Alec states, Microsoft’s long term game involves Office integration to their communications platforms. We see the beginnings of Skype’s Office integration with its Email Toolbar for Outlook and Office Toolbar. We see Extras partner Netralia’s Skylook now being offered in the Extras Gallery as “MS Outlook Office Integration”. And Pamela 3.5 provides some Outlook integration. Certainly all of these could integrate into a global presence platform that invokes New Presence.

Are these types of offerings that enhance the user experience sufficient for Skype’s prosumer and SMB markets? Or do these markets need the overhead and complexity of Microsoft’s Unified Communications software platforms to achieve their business goals and profitability? Underlying all these considerations is also the need to build an infrastructure that has the five nines (99.999%) reliability of the current PSTN.

While these applications definitely reinforce the role of software in real time communications from another player outside Microsoft, only the evolution of accepted consumer usage and business practices will provide the final answer. As Alec states: “Microsoft’s plan is a 10 to 15 year view of the market, which is only starting to be visible today.”

Alec started his conclusion by quoting a summary statement in my recent Interruption Manifesto and I stick with the statement as a final thought here:

Bottom line: I want to be able to participate in the conversations essential to my lifestyle and my business operations – when, where and how I choose.

Two of the Release Note items for Skype 3.2 beta piqued my curiosity:

• feature: Multi-Device presence

• feature: Call Quality feedback in client

Yesterday I spoke with Mike Bartlett, Product Manager of Skype for Windows, to obtain more details behind these features..

The need for Multi-Device Presence has arisen with the arrival of PC Free phones such as the Skype WiFi phones and the “Embedded” Skype Cordless Dual Phones. In this case a user could be logged in on his/her desktop/laptop PC and then log in on the PC Free phone, creating potential for conflict of the user’s presence status as broadcast to his/her Contacts (and you never know from which device). This is complicated by the fact that Skype can “auto change” status to “Away” or “Not Available” if there is no keyboard activity on the desktop/laptop for a pre-configured time period (default 10 to 20 min.)

Also it means that chat messages sent to the user may end up on different but not all logged-in platforms. Or the message may not get there at all if an attempt is made to send it to a PC Free phone that does not support chat — recall those times you send a chat message and get the response that the recipient is “not on a device that supports chat”.

A team at Skype has been reviewing a variety of use cases related to this problem and developed an algorithm to have a truer reflection of a user’s Skype presence status. As a result Skype is launching “Multi-Device Presence” as a feature that ensures all “logged-in” instances of a user’s account (on up to five devices) are synchronized back to the most recently logged in device’s status. While introduced initially with the Skype 3.2 for Windows beta client, it is a feature that must also be migrated to the various hardware platforms’ firmware and to Skype for Mac to be fully effective. If you have a PC Free phone, keep checking (in the Settings menu) for firmware updates.

One more challenge as this process evolves: ensuring that “Multi-Device Presence” co-operates with Skype’s Partners’ software such as Pamela Personal Assistant for Skype that has the ability to automatically change your Skype status while on a call.

A logical extension of this activity would be to have Skype presence managed in context via iotum’s Relevance Engine to provide a more complete and thorough method for both presence and interruption management. Such a feature would assist both the Skype user and the called party, especially as users transition to using multiple Skype “end point” devices. More in a future post when I report on the Cordless PC Free phones currently being evaluated.

In previous versions of Skype, upon completion of a SkypeOut call, you may have noticed that, once every 10 or so SkypeOut calls, a browser window popped up asking about the quality of your calling experience. With “Call Quality feedback in client” this feature has been moved into the Skype client such that you may get a query once every seven calls. It will pop up as a blue tooltip in a Call window just above the line for entering phone numbers/Skype Names where you also find the ability to change Sound Device settings, warnings that your microphone has not detected any sound, etc. However, a major difference is that, being embedded in the client, your responses are also accompanied by technical information about your call to facilitate issue and problem tracking (such as the information you see if you have set the “Display technical call info during calls” feature in Tools | Options | Advanced).

One irritation about the previous feature was that it would usually only come up when I had good call experiences (which is my case over 95% of the time). Skype is looking for a way to allow the user to activate this feature whenever s/he wants to report a poor call experience.

Seemingly small features but atttention to this type of detail will lead to a smoother, more productive and effective Skype calling experience.

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In a previous post I presented an Interruptions 2.0 Manifesto, outlining issues that need to be considered in the course of real time communications activity in an AlwaysOn world which, in turn, exposes us as users to being Always Available. And it’s not simply a matter of exchanging bits and bytes to manage interruptions; higher level consideration needs to be given to incorporating workflow paradigms, social etiquette, and management policies in building a sustainable business model.

Specifically I wrote about the need for a protocol to make it possible to know when it is appropriate to make a (ad hoc) communications connection and how one can deliver intelligent availability in a real time context to facilitate more effective and more productive real time ad hoc interpersonal communications. iotum’s Alec Saunders calls this New Presence:

New Presence is a user-centric view of presence. Instead of merely reflecting the crude, device specific “availability awareness” of today, New Presence systems understand our context, relationships, wants and desires. The New Presence model reflects the integrated conversation web we live in today.

iotum’s Talk-Now application for the Blackberry is a technology preview platform which has provided an opportunity to work with the New Presence concept in practice. Talk-Now is built around iotum’s Relevance Engine technology which understands the user’s preferences and behavior to change the way people communicate. To give a practical example:

A recent study done at Cap Gemini points out that 82% of all phone calls end up in voice mail. Lots of wasted time leaving voice mail messages; lots of lost productivity as two parties attempt to make an initial voice contact. With Talk-Now I can simply look at my Talk-Now client and see who is currently available to take a Call; based on preview user feedback a future build will also allow me to set a flag to notify me when an currently unavailable contact becomes available. And I avoid making the average 3.15 calls prior to establishing real time voice communication with my contacts. Definitely a productivity enhancer.

Sounds simplistic but behind Talk-Now’s availability status lies iotum’s Relevance Engine that computes your availability based not on a single preset status but on your previously designated contact preferences (VIP, family, friend, customer, etc.), your previous communications with that party, your current Calendar activity and even your future calendared activity. In other words your New Presence is delivered in the context of what you have done (your history), your relationship with each individual contact, what you are currently doing and what you intend to do. Conversely your various contacts’ New Presence reflects their individual uniqueness when combining his/her history, relationship and current/future activity. The following logic diagram, provided at a recent briefing by iotum executives Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, puts iotum’s implementation of New Presence in perspective:

Talk-Now’s real value is delivered through its ability to help me make contact in real time — without voice mail or any other “third party” proxy call redirector. Talk-Now provides insight into how we may go down the path of bringing back control of your real time communications in an AlwaysOn world.

Its value is enhanced through its email notification process that sends a Blackberry-originated email to a currently unavailable contact not only indicating that your desire to talk to the contact but also when you are available for a call. And this process works not only with your Talk-Now contacts but also with any of your Blackberry contacts. In a subtle way this feature drives Talk-Now adoption virally.

The challenge for Talk-Now (or any other service purporting to deliver New Presence) is to (i) to refine the service to reflect a readily acceptable etiquette and user-intuitive protocol for establishing a voice connection and (ii) to extend its capability beyond voice to include other forms of real time communication such as text chat, SMS messaging and, with the introduction of GPS on mobile platforms, location-based services. For instance, while I may want to follow several chat sessions concurrently on a mobile device, I may only want to be notified of activity for those sessions with designated “mission critical” contacts.

If you want to experience Talk-Now and provide your own feedback go to iotum’s sign-up site. It does require that you have a Blackberry Pearl, 870x or, as of today, 8800 or are running Blackberry OS 4.1 or later..Or, for a preview of the Talk-Now experience, watch Alec’s demonstration video.

In my upcoming post on experience with the Skype PC-Free phones I will mention why a variation on Talk Now but still using the iotum Relevance Engine is needed to manage the multiple accounts that will be needed to manage, say, the Skype account duality required to keep “home” Skype calls separated from “business” Skype calls. Just as in the legacy phone world, one Skype account will no longer suffice.

{Note for those wishing to produce their own demo videos: check out Alec’s experience producing and mounting this video here and here.)

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Taking back control of your real time communications in the AlwaysOn world.

(While this post was published originally  inFebruary 2007, it still has even more relevance in a very active Social Networking world; see the Update note at the end of the post).

When reporting on my visit last summer to an Alexander Graham Bell museum near his summer home, I discovered an interesting facet to his lifestyle:

In all his homes he had a separate office/laboratory room where he could be a night owl geek writing, experimenting and thinking. But he never had a telephone installed in any of his offices/labs.

Dr. Bell did not want his experimentation activities interrupted during his time in his home offices. Local folklore (I live less than an hour from RIM’s headquarters) has it that when Jim Balsillie, CEO of Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion, enters his home, his family has asked him to leave his Blackberry at the door. And for years we have been searching for solutions to the dinner-time interruptions of those persistent telemarketers. In the Skype world we have those who seem to think a simple “Hi” in a chat window is sufficient introduction to start a conversation with a total stranger from the other side of the world. The potential for interruptions has become prolific with the introduction of each new technology and/or service, especially those that are “AlwaysOn”. In turn these AlwaysOn services expose us, as users, to being “Always Available”.

Yet we build our lives around communication with friends, lifestyle service providers and business colleagues who need to communicate at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner. In today’s AlwaysOn world, made possible through both broadband Internet connectivity and mobile phones, there has arisen a crying need to manage our interruptions based on our interpersonal relationships and the real time context of our current activities. We want to ensure our communications efforts and time are spent more effectively with friends and family and spent more productively with the lifestyle service providers, business colleagues and clientele with whom we need to converse to carry on both our personal life and business activities. But such a demand requires a more intelligent algorithm for providing presence and availability information.

Over the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to evaluate many real time communications modes on new platforms such as the Blackberry 8700, Nokia N80i (selected since it runs on both WiFi and all four GSM bands) and a couple of models of the newly released “PC-Free” Skype phones. As a result I have had the opportunity to experience many modes of interruption of my activities and many modes of generating interruptions of my Contacts’ activities. They all have an element of providing basic presence information prior to making a phone call and, in some cases, also provide an ability to Chat through an IM client. And through these devices we also have new modes of real time communication: SMS messaging, email, and, with the arrival of embedded GPS, location-based services. More AlwaysOn services that simply increase the potential to be “Always Available”.

• While at CES, I used Blackberry Messenger to communicate directly (PIN to PIN) with key business contacts as I toured the exhibition floor and as we approached the time for key meetings. This “direct” channel was instantaneous and improved our “conference” productivity in a very crowded and noisy environment where voice communications was not only relatively expensive but also almost physically impossible due to background noise. Through its “Open Conversation” mode, one has an element of presence (Available/Not Available//Online/Offline) of user-designated remote contacts.
• Truphone on the N80i allows me to make calls from any WiFi hotspot (provided I have or can readily obtain authentication) but has no ability to tell me if my remote contact is readily available for a real time conversation.
• Fring (also on the Nokia N80i) provides both traditional presence and chat capability with my Skype, Gmail and/or MSN Messenger contacts but its “fringing ringing” with every chat session entry becomes overbearing and very annoying, especially once when I was in five concurrent chat sessions.
• “PC-Free” Skype phones provide Skype’s basic presence but no chat capability. So one cannot invoke the standard VoIM protocol of texting a Contact to enquire if s/he is available to take a Skype call.
• My Blackberry email messages are restricted, via a web-based service from my Service Provider, such that only those email addresses I have designated will find their emails forwarded from my legacy email to my Blackberry.
• Over the past several weeks I have been participating in the technology preview of iotum’s Talk-Now for Blackberry.This testing has provided plenty of opportunity to think about (i) when I want to be interrupted for a real time conversation and (ii) when I want simply to to be able to access presence or availability information in the context of not only my Contacts’ current “status” but also his/her current work activity and even previous communications activity.

Concurrent with managing interruptions I also need the intelligence to manage multiple phone connections (and, potentially, multiple IM connections). For instance,

• “PC-Free” Skype phones potentially put the user in the position of effectively having two phones, especially if one wants to continue to use Skype for business via a legacy PC Skype interface but the “PC-Free” phone is to be used in conjunction with, say, a home phone line. This creates the need to sign up for an additional Skype account for the “PC Free” phone. (More in a separate post.)
• My Fring installation is on a separate device which is the only one that supports both WiFi and GSM connectivity.

Bottom line is that I want to manage my availability for real time communications taking into account:

• Whom I want to be interrupted by in real time? whether the communications mode is chat, voice, SMS, video calls, etc.
• How do I triage my incoming calls to determine if I need to answer immediately or should wait until time permits a callback.
• What is the context of the interruption? Am I in a meeting? Is the caller someone whom I will be meeting later in the day and may want to discuss arrangements for that meeting?
• What is the relationship between me and the Contact? Is s/he a customer, a work colleague, a friend or a family member?
• What hours am I available for business activities? for personal activities?
• What is the context of the Contact’s current situation? Is s/he occupied by a meeting or willing to accept business calls at this time? What are her/his personal/business hours?
• How do we avoid voice mail tag? A recent study of calls placed at CAP Gemini showed that 82% of all calls end up in voice mail and it takes 3.15 attempts to make a voice connection.
• How do I ensure that I don’t miss either business or personal opportunities through ad hoc calls?
• How do I want to be notified of an interruption: a loud ringing phone? a silent vibrating phone?, a ring tone in my Bluetooth headset?
• What is important enough in context to trigger a notification (and therefore an interruption)?
• On what device (or service) do I want to be interrupted at any given point in time and physical location?
• How can my real time communications activity make my day more productive?

What are the implications for the developers and providers of new services?

• While the ability to open the same Skype account on several platforms can be convenient, it raises issues of currency of presence information on any device, including which platform should be considered the “primary” platform for, say, chat messages? How does one keep all the open clients in sync, especially with respect to presence information?
• How can I share my real time availability information with my critical business colleagues to ensure ad hoc access while reducing voice mail’s “running interference” and/or inappropriate interruptions?
• How does a service provide maximum end user flexibility with respect to issues such notification method, desired device at the time, hour of the day, designating Contacts’ relationships, etc.
• How can a service maintain an element of personal privacy in this era where identity theft and aberrant personal exposure can change your life forever?
• How does a service prejudice my interruption management towards those whom the user really wants to communicate with, yet not miss personal and business opportunities that arise from new introductions?

At this point in time there is no single answer. But through technology preview platforms such as Talk-Now, Fring, Truphone and new types of products, such as the “PC-Free” embedded Skype phones, we are getting a chance to experience in practice when, where and how we want to be interrupted. Hopefully these experiences will build the etiquette and protocols for implementing what Alec Saunders at iotum has labeled “New Presence” – delivering intelligent availability in a real time context to facilitate ad hoc interpersonal communications.

Bottom line: I want to be able to participate in the conversations essential to my lifestyle and my business operations – when, where and how I choose. And the service(s) of choice will only rise above the noise (and become a revenue generator) when I can take back control of my life – through a focus on restoring my privacy and my prejudices to my communications activity.

Update April 12, 2011: While iotum’s Talk Now service has gone away and iotum now offers their CallifFlower Conferencing service, the concepts of this Interruption Manifesto actually apply more deeply given all the approaches available in a Social Networking world.

Monday afternoon’s first Fall VON 2006 plenary session, IM: The State of Presence, featuring a panel of executives and managers from the GYMAS-five representing over 90% of the IM usage worldwide:

• Dan Casey, Director, Windows Live VoIP and Messenger Product Management, Microsoft
• Jeff Bonforte, Director of Voice Product Management, Yahoo!
• Nitzan Shaer, Director, Mobile Devices, Skype
• Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager, Real Time Communications & Google Talk, Google
• Ragui Kamel, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, AOL Voice Services, America Online.

As mentioned previously Carl Ford ran his usual vibrant Q&A format, offering each member of the panel an opportunity to provide commentary on several topics surrounding IM and where it is going. It was a very informative and stimulating discussion overall. Carl’s questioning covered why IM, video usage, the role of presence, mobile reach, business models and projections in for the future.

Why do users want Voice with Instant Messaging? From the students avoiding contention when sharing one phone line in a five-student apartment to business productivity enhancement, we heard stories about new scenarios enabled where IM and voice facilitate social networking to newly announced collaborative applications that share spreadsheets. Oh, and for the younger generation, IM allows students to avoid being seen holding discussions in the classroom; did I say to allow private discussion sessions in the boardroom? The new challenge arises when a group of youth want to do a conference call but Stephanie is is not on IM but at the mall shopping for new shoes.

Nitzan talked about how IM with Skype allows users to create one centralized ID that can be used across weblogs, sharing pictures, and enhancing a discussion using video.

While Carl was looking for any data on usage of different modalities associated with IM, the discussion largely centered on video. The consensus is that about 20% to 30% of IM users use video but mostly as recipients of “broadcast” video; the ratio of “broadcast” users to users doing two-way video sessions is 10:1. Jeff pointed out that, while it is an older application, there is still significant use made of Yahoo Messenger’s legacy Webcam service.

Nitzan made the following points about Skype usage:

• “free” has seen international voice minutes skyrocket
• “free” video has found many users leaving their video camera and microphone on continuously in personal reality video
• there is a level of usage driven significant grandparent-grandchild video
• the opportunity that still exists is shown by some 2005 numbers for voice communications:
• 40 billion minutes of PC-to-PC VoIP
• on landline PSTN: 3.8 trillion minutes
• on wireless: 5 trillion minutes
• the ratio of wireless to wired minutes continues to rise
• the challenge for all VoIP player is to increase awareness and installation of VoIP across the 99% of voice users who still rely solely on PSTN or wireless.

Carl then turned the discussion to “Presence: an addiction or a turn-off”. Jeff pointed out that presence is a blessing and a curse for power users. He then brought into the picture iotum and its Relevance Engine, pointing out that this is the next level of sophistication for presence. Dan finds Windows Live Messenger is caught between supporting social networks and providing a communications platform. Nitzan sees a scenario where users will be able to expose different elements of presence to different groups of Contacts. However, the general consensus is that Presence will be evolve to a platform whereby it is embedded into applications via API’s such that users can choose those features they personally wish to use and not be burdened by unwanted features.

The discussion then turned to mobility issues which will become the subject of another post.

Later there was a discussion of business models; here there was general agreement that advertising provides the primary acceptable business model for IM. Supporting this was the fact that AOL recently made its client freely available to any Internet user, eliminating their monthly subscription fee (which also included dialup).

Most telling was Nitsan’s comment; he pointed out that currently SkypeOut is free for calls within Canada and U.S. and for landline calls within France to the end of the year “but that’s only the beginning”. I guess we can expect to hear more on the subject between now and December 31. Skype is partnering on Click-to-Call; in this regard, it is known that advertisers will pay a premium to have such a call go through to close on a prospect’s enquiry.

When asked about where they see IM in eighteen months Ragui of AOL had the most concise response with his five points – which also seemed to be the consensus of the discussions:

• greater internetworking
• more open platforms for third party partners
• a move towards nomadic (wireless) devices to give IM broader reach and access
• integration of IM and voice into applications
• all five would be on the same panel at Spring VON 2008

Alec Saunders has provided a detailed report and his perspective on the session.

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