Last week Skype announced some changes to their developer program. In that post I mentioned that the only application to date where one could experience SkypeKit Desktop in action was a beta version of Trillian for Windows. Earlier this week Trillian released version 5.1 to the Skype Apps Directory.

Trillian aspires to become a single client for all your conversation, messaging and social networking activity, whether on Skype, Google, Facebook, Live Messenger, Four Square, several email services and many others. And there are versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and the Web. Ideally it would replace several individual clients and be accessible across multiple platforms.

Having set up an account that has been active for about a week here are some observations:

• While it allows you to track and converse with several applications and services, each one remains siloed with respect to exchanging communications. In other words, Facebook converses with Facebook on any device but not with, say, a Google application. Skype conversations are established with other Skype contacts only.
• It is the first application that demonstrates the use of SkypeKit in a desktop application; as a result it not only supports chat conversations and voice calls but also provides support for Skype’s SILK codec providing crystal clear voice quality, file transfer and access to select audio devices.
• At the moment it does not support video calling but that is simply because Skype only released the appropriate Skype video API’s last week; there is no technical reason that video calling should not appear in a future release of Trillian.
• Voice call quality experience reflected the crispness and clarity expected of the SILK codec. On a Trillian to Skype for Windows call, the Call Technical Info confirmed use of the SILK codec.
• Trillian offers a “Pro” service where all your activity is stored in the cloud on their servers; cost is almost a “nobrainer” at $12 per year.

Trillian is well along the path of providing a single client for multiple applications and services. It runs on not only PC’s but also iOS5 and Android devices. Its Pro service allows you to track all your conversations on any of these devices. However, Trillian for Mac does not yet have any Skype support (even in a beta version) yet the SkypeKit API’s are available. One cannot expect Skype support any time soon on iOS5 and Android devices as Skype has yet to release any API’s for working with these devices.

Some screen shots:

Trillian for Windows 5.1 Preferences | Accounts screen provides an overview of how it may be set up:

The main Trillian menu showing all the applications and services to which I have logged in along with an example of my Twitter feed:

All the “Contacts” menus were compressed to demonstrate the various options available for messaging. Double clicking on any of the social networking accounts brings up the relevant feed in a separate window as shown.

As shown in the menu at the right Trillian is a good way to find a Contact’s “current” status on all their social networking and messaging applications. Simply filter down with a (partial) name and you get this. In this example Boston is online in Skype, GTalk and GMail and Facebook while Alex is offline in both.

Note that, while logged in, a Contact appears under the appropriate messaging application but once logged out the Contacts are all relegated to the Offline Contacts category. Also note the icon beside each Contact name to identify the relevant messaging application.

With Google applications, logging in and out can result is some strange identification such as “gmail.51AC27DE”. It simply indicates, in this case, that the contact can be accessed via GTalk or GMail simply when s/he is logged into either. In fact, this also happened with someone who contacted me through the new Google+ chat feature where the identification under Google Talk starts with “TalkGadetC85….”.

With Trillian open or running in background you also have the option to receive small notification windows at a designated corner of your desktop as a feed is updated or an IM message is received. This can be annoying and distracting; it requires some discipline to ignore it. There are options in the preferences for turning these notifications off.

During a Skype voice call the user interface contains all the features associated with Skype calls:

One final observation: when you go to Task Manager | Processes you see this when SkypeKit is being used:

Small footprint relative to Skype (which was also open when this screen capture happened). As a matter of interest trillian.exe is using about 29,000K of memory. But this is without any video support; it will be interesting to see any change once Skype video can be accessed via Trillian.

Bottom line: Trillian is certainly well down the road to becoming a universal messaging and social networking client. And it gives an initial feel for how SkypeKit can be deployed in a desktop application. For those who use multiple applications it can become the default IM/social networking client; in fact, “Boston” in the example above has done so as he follows both Skype and Facebook for chat. Currently he still needs to open Skype for video calls.

Check out the Skype App Directory to download.

The Big Brother feel: And if you were wondering where Dan York is active as I write this (he had Google+ open in two browser windows):

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When I made those initial Skype for iPhone calls last weekend, not only did I gain a quick appreciation of the voice quality but I also realized that the forthcoming multi-tasking feature of iPhone OS4 could offer new possibilities. Yes, multi-tasking would facilitate Skype’s Instant Messaging in an “always-on” mode but there could also be an even richer experience for business users.  Having attended eComm 2010 a couple of months ago, I recalled that Ringio, who introduced their offering at that event, may have that business-savvy application.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At his eComm America 2010 keynote presentation Monday morning, Skype’s recently appointed Chief Technology Strategist Jonathan Rosenberg provided his perspective on where Skype can introduce real time communications into “social sharing” activities.

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

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

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

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

• involvement
• investment
• interactivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what are the implications for Skype:

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

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

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Over the past six weeks I have attended four local social media and technology events – a PodCamp, a monthly social networking seminar, an annual project management ski day and  WordCamp Toronto 2010. At each I was able to bring along a few Skype Everyman headsets to be given away as prizes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Voxeo has as its tagline “the fastest growing voice platform company”; however, with today’s acquisition of IMified, “the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform”, Voxeo has become a more encompassing, “fastest growing” conversation platform company. Complementing Voxeo’s widely respected provisioning and support of hosted voice applications, this acquisition recognizes the increasing importance of Instant Messaging as both a personal and business conversation medium, especially when it comes to issues such as presence and asynchronous conversations where the conversing parties may not simultaneously be available.

Certainly Instant Messaging’s ability to combine presence and text chat has become not simply a more useful tool for personal conversations but is a more “immediate” productivity tool for informal business conversations with its ability to:

• carry on asynchronous conversations – all participants are not always available but messages are persistent
• deliver real time presence information
• in many cases, archive conversations for later reference (especially useful for URL’s, email addresses and contact information)
• eliminate the etiquette need for a courtesy “how are you?”, “how’s the weather” overhead that usually accompanies the start of any voice conversation

From the press release:

The acquisition of IMified is part of Voxeo’s strategy to enable Unified Self-Service and live Unified Communications applications that work across voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM and the mobile web. As consumer preferences drive interaction trends, IM has become a preferred communication mode, moving outside the personal realm to include business interactions. Businesses have found IM to be a low-cost, in-demand method to facilitate both customer-facing and internal communications. On average, an IM interaction is 1/10 the cost of Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and 1/100 the cost of a live agent phone calls.

I asked Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, Dan York, about whether IMified was analogous to Voxeo’s recent Tropo announcement for voice application development. He pointed out that, whereas Tropo applications are hosted on Voxeo servers, IMified applications need to be hosted on “premise-based” servers. Otherwise, with respect to issues such as programming languages supported, yes, IMified does for IM what Tropo provides for voice. Note that anyone can develop applications for free using Voxeo’s developer platforms.

Bottom Line: Combining IMified’s platform with Voxeo’s experience in supporting voice application development opens new opportunities for innovation in self-service applications. Will we see IIMR (or ICR) as an acronym parallel to IVR, for which Voxeo has built its reputation?

Other Posts:

• IMified Blog Post: Voxeo Acquires IMified
• Voxilla: Voxeo Buys IMified, Opening New Channels for Self-Service Interactivity

We all know that Skype for iPhone currently requires that you be at a WiFi access point in order to make a Skype call from the iPhone, even though it supports 3G data. So, when highly respected technology reporter Larry Magid, attending today’s D:AllThingsDigital conference, sends out the Tweet, shown to the right, quoting AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, many questions arise:

• Has AT&T heard that Skype really provides communications software? I think that is the message that Skype President Josh Silverman has been trying to deliver when he states, “software will drive the future of real time communications innovation and efficiencies going forward, not the existing telcos”
• Is failure to allow Skype for iPhone to run over AT&T’s 3G network a tacit admission that AT&T continues to suffer from 3G data network capacity and quality issues? Once again my most recent trip roaming on AT&T in Chicago four weeks ago demonstrated nothing to say service availability and robustness has improved over my previous experiences in PA, WV, VA, NC, SC, CA and NV.
• Is AT&T’s response to SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone (or BlackBerry) one more challenge to, or subtle admission of, AT&T’s network quality and robustness issues. Is the following statement a cover-up for their failings:
  

  “Slingbox, which would use large amounts of wireless network capacity, could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network,” an AT&T representative said in e-mail to reporters. “The application does not run on our 3G wireless network. Applications like this, which redirect a TV signal to a personal computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service.”

I would invite Mr. Stephenson to Canada where I can demonstrate Rogers’ high quality 3G GSM data network that:

• has robust and reliable 3G data coverage in not only major population areas but also all our major tourist and recreation areas (Whistler, Central Ontario, Tremblant, etc.)
• is always there when I expect it
• has no issue with using SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry (and has made no issue with SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone either)
• Rogers is offering its Rocket Stick mobile data service over its  7.2Mbps 3.5G HSPA network, placing additional demand on their network capacity.

Bottom Line: Sorry, Randall, but AT&T has a long way to go to show that they understand the real potential of, and that they’re serious about, their mobile business.

For more amusement check out John Paczkowski’s report on Walt Mossberg’s Q&A with Randall Stephenson at D7.

Update: Om Malik reports this afternoon at GigaOm: AT&T Moves Up Its LTE Rollout, Admits To Network Issues. Seems that AT&T is finally admitting they have some issues to address.

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Thomas Howe has long been noted for his expertise in developing “Communications Enhanced Business Processes” (“CEBP”). Fundamentally this involves embedding communications facilitation into a legacy business process such as to reduce operating overheads and/or increase employee productivity. From many of the examples I have seen, I would call it eliminating the “intrinsically mundane” from any requirements for human intervention or participation at a given stage in a business process.

Enriched with his unique sense of humor Thomas has spent the past three years evangelizing CEBP through consulting contracts, speaking at seminars and forums and his personal weblog. Today, Jaduka, a provider of business process optimization through “blending real-time communications into critical workflows”, announced that Thomas has been appointed as CEO of Jaduka. Through this appointment Thomas gets to execute on his passion by seeing his vision implemented across a wide range of enterprises of all sizes.

In a Calliflower conference call this morning Thomas provided more details about where he sees Jaduka heading:

“My focus will be on helping our enterprise software partners and customers employ communications to improve efficiency, employee productivity and customer experience. With an API accessed by companies a million times daily and a platform with 1 billion user accounts, Jaduka is well positioned to serve both the $250 billion BPO and $350 billion Telco 2.0 marketplaces.”

• Jaduka is focused on embedding voice into existing enterprise applications; they are NOT a provider of voice applications (see Voxeo for these)
• the Jaduka API is already called upon over one million times per day demonstrating that it is a solid, tested, robust service
• Jaduka has solved the problem of scalability; this is perhaps Jaduka’s leading differentiation from any competitors
• Jaduka is looking to launch a new service that will make it radically easy to integrate voice into current enterprise applications
• Jaduka focuses its marketing efforts on enterprise developers (and not telephony or voice developers); they look to partner opportunities with enterprise software vendors such as Oracle and SAP as well as system integrators.

Thomas was another of Andy Abramson’s “draft picks” for leading change in the conversation and communications space. From my own personal experience interacting with Thomas over the past eighteen months, Jaduka has a winner at the top who can now deliver cost savings and productivity enhancements to many, many enterprises in these economically challenging times.

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As indicated in previous posts, Voxeo has become a leader in the development and hosting of voice applications. From their website:

Voxeo helps enterprises improve service and lower costs by automating and connecting their most common phone calls with our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions.

Our IVR and VoIP hosting, turnkey platforms, and developer services – powered by VoiceXML and CCXML – are used by over 35,600 companies to create and deploy any telephone application they desire.

Historically Voxeo has provided, at no charge, resources for C++/Java and Web Developers to produce customized IVR applications that are then hosted at their network operations center. Their developer community has grown to over 35,000 participants. As their expertise has grown they have also developed their licensable Prophecy SIP platform for those enterprises that wish to host their own services using Voxeo’s tools.

Until now their voice applications required the use of the VoiceXML standard which placed limitations on their appeal to the broader developer community. Today, an announcement at eComm 2009 removes this limitation; Voxeo will be providing the tools to support the creation of voice applications in five languages: Python Ruby, PHP, Groovy and ecmaScript:

Tropo is an application platform that enables web developers to write communication applications in the languages they already use: Groovy, Ruby, PHP, Python and JavaScript. Tropo is in the cloud, so we manage the headaches of dealing with infrastructure and keeping applications up and running at enterprise-grade. Tropo is simple to deploy, requires no contracts and no up-front setup costs. With Tropo developers can build and deploy voice and telephony applications, or add voice to existing applications.

Via Voxeo’s new Tropo platform built on their existing infrastructure, developers can then deploy their applications on Voxeo’s hosted offerings via their Tropo.com portal. Applications can incorporate inbound calling via PSTN, SIP, Skype and iNum while also providing appropriate connections for outbound calling.

Voxeo’s business models simply runs at a cost of 3 cents per minute for use of the service. There are no setup charges or contracts required; payment is via credit card. CEO Jonathan Taylor claims it takes five minutes to set up and deploy via Tropo.com.

Additionally Voxeo announced that the  developers of Adhearsion, a Ruby-based rapid application development framework, will be making their framework support the Tropo platform.

For developers who want to have a deeper look, check out the Tropo launch site where there are incentives for developer participation. One more relevant Voxeo blog post: Get the Tropo sample applications – via git and Github.

Voxeo’s announcement is a major contributor to the evolution of the Voice 2.0 world, opening up opportunities for a much broader community of developers and integrators.