http://glimfeather.com/borderless/ The Borderless Communicator: views on VOIP, Skype, Wireless, and Internet Security en-us hhbv@glimfeather.com (Editor) hhbv@glimfeather.com (Webmaster) 60 Skype set new records for concurrent and "real" users today (September 2nd, 2008). Concurrent online at 15:15 GMT was 12,744,917. Following the usual summer slowdown, it looks like things may pick up faster this year than even in 2007 which was very vigorous throughout the fall season. I did not expect to see new highs for several weeks, so I'll probably upwardly adjust my year-end projections if the trend continues much longer. The current projection for year-end is 36 million "real users". http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/25321657.html A few days ago, Skype decided that it would discontinue its free Skypecasting service. There were actually two versions of Skypecasting; public and hidden. The public version was a spammy service where any idiot could create a voice chatline and invite other idiots to join. The "hidden" version was entirely different; more like a regular conferencing system where you set up a time, topic and joining link which you then could offer to individuals directly. I disliked the public version intensely, mainly because the content was uninteresting and of low quality, but the "hidden" version was a very acceptable way to handle large scale conferencing. A few months ago, we did some head-to-head comparisons of various conferencing tools that one can use with Skype (Calliflower, Skypecast, HiDef, and regular Skype multiparty calling). In terms of voice quality, our conclusion was that Skypecast ranked highly in that list). In terms of features and ease of setup (hidden Skypecast), it ranked poorly but that was highly subjective, platform dependent, and certainly correctable with software upgrades. In other words, Skypecast was competitive in the emerging VOIP conferencing market. Skype says that the decision to terminate was based on the fact that they didn't know how to make Skypecasting viable economically. I hope that this is not the case, for it would suggest that they did not appreciate the existing quaities of their own product, or the many ways that it could have been improved, or the many ways they might have monetized it. I rather hoped the reason for canning Skypecast was that Skype judged its relationships with HiDef, Calliflower and other 3rd parties to be more important than its own prospects of economic success with large scale voice conferencing. Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case; it remains an open question whether Skype has decided to not compete with its 3rd party developers. Skype had an opportunity here to refresh its relationship with 3rd party developers, to prove that it has turned against its reputation for eating its young. Having celebrated Skype's 5th birthday, we're still waiting for some organizational maturity. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/17128166.html Here we go again, another rumor that Skype's encryption isn't working, or worse that it is intentionally compromised. People who claim there's a "back door" in Skype are like those who believe they have seen visitors from outer space. But just try convincing them that they don't exist. The unprovability of it all is evidence to them that Skype and the evil governments they collude with are even more sneaky than we ever imagined. Oh wait, I've got it, eBay paid what they did for Skype because there are secret and lucrative contracts with certain goverments to lure criminals into using Skype where they will surely be caught ... unaware of the fact that all their conversations are being taped. Sounds like a 007 plot. Come on folks! It wasn't more than a couple months ago that the German police were complaining that Skype was preventing their ability to catch crooks, and now the Austrians are suggesting just the opposite. Somebody should get these countries talking to each other. The press is making fools of all of us as we run around in circles following the latest rumors. I beg you to look at the structure of Skype and tell me how you think a "back door" would work in this environment. Nobody, absolutely nobody has such a theory and they most certainly don't have any actual evidence. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/81083234.html Skype is still unique. No competitor has yet put together a plausible challenger, but the uniqueness won't last forever. One might reasonably ask whether the isolated group of developers in Estonia, as talented as they are, can keep up with the pace of change that is necessary. Also, Skype leaders have never reached out to their community of independent developers or to their core community of users, so how do they actually come to decisions on corporate strategy? Has Skype to some degree isolated itself from its market and from the reservoir of ideas that might reverse the trends? Does the core group of Skype users that is producing all its growth have incentives to evangelize the platform and to bring in new markets? These are rhetorical questions. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/30023870.html Like everybody else on the planet, I listened intently to Apple's Steve Jobs on Monday as he laid out the course for iPhone's second year. In bullet fashion, this is what I heard: http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/66072730.html Will this become a new marketing theme for Skype, or for Apple? Young child points to the computer monitor and says "Grandpa"... associating the computer's monitor with seeing grandpa in a video call, and making the machine come alive. Rumor has it that iPhone, which is due for upgrade release today, will be accompanied by an upgrade release of "iChat", including a version for Windows. If true, then let's not be surprised to see a marketing campaign along the lines of the above from Apple. Such an ad campaign could have been launched by Skype a year ago, because the software certainly has the capability, but iChat which now will have comparable cross-platform features may well reap the greater reward. Look for iChat to challenge Skype in the days ahead. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/46449702.html The lack of callerID when calling a landline or a mobile phone has always been one of the two or three drawbacks to using Skype as a standard "telephone" in the North America. As of yesterday, that problem has gone away. A Skype user can now choose whether to display a mobile phonenumber or an "online number" (a.k.a. SkypeIN number). If past experience is any guide, the advent of a feature as important as the ability to display a callerID should result in a spurt of growth as people reassess their telephony options. Things have been pretty quiet for Skype since February, so the improvement is coming at an opportune moment. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/67732903.html As we move into an era of broadband wireless for IP communication, let's compare the past, present and future generations of cellular... Hopefully everyone will find this simple chart helpful when one of the broadband wireless competitors makes an outrageous claim. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/60686334.html Communication has just become too easy and too cheap. The marginal cost of text communication is essentially zero. We therefore are swamped with redundant, boring, sensationalist, silly, inaccurate and worthless blogs, micro-blogs, feeds, notifications, tweets, and other types of "messages" endlessly popping up on our devices (fixed and mobile)... other communication media are showing the same spam-like tendencies for essentially the same reason. The challenge of communication in the next generation is to find ways to be more selective... http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/34314596.html It will be called "iChat", and it will be accompanied by new Mac and Windows iChat clients. I predicted this a year ago when iPhone was first released, and it didn't happen. So here I go again under an assumption that sooner or later I have to be right. While Apple may soon clear the pathway in the iPhone API to allow Skype onto the iPhone platform, I suspect the damage will have already been done.... Apple will give its own iChat VOIP client a headstart. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/44004752.html So what's the answer? http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/92783104.html Ike Elliott's blog is always a fascinating read, and I am grateful for his regular usage of my "real user" Skype statistics. He has recently been trying to figure out the "line losses" experienced by telephony incumbents (about 9 million in 2007), and he correctly surmises that only a few of the losses are coming from the likes of Skype and Vonage. The following comments will tend to confirm his findings: http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/62075007.html Chat Publisher™ is a free and frictionless mashup between the Web and Skype® public chats, enabling chat conversation and related communication to be instantly shared on the Web. The purposes of such a tool are many. Since its original deployment a month ago, Chat Publisher service has expanded and improved in many ways. The most recent changes include the following: http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/40312923.html ...based on an accumulation of measurements, the Internet has grown at a rate of about 50% to 60% per year for the last few years. In that light, Skype's growth rate does not seem too spectacular. It is keeping up, but not exceeding it by much. To put Internet growth in some perspective, Google whose reputation as a powerhouse remains unchallenged is growing at a rate of only 50%... in line with the averages. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/23281918.html Yesterday was April fool's day, but that didn't stop the blogosphere from getting excited about the rumor that eBay was going to sell Skype to Google, then hoping that it might be true and finally convincing each other that it actually is true. Without exception, these bloggers all think such a divestiture would be a good thing. I take a contrarian view... http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/57323934.html According to the FCC's Chairman Kevin Martin, the recent auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 Mhz band, which was won by Verizon (and to a lesser extent by AT&T) has opened the wireless spectrum to such an extent that Skype's petition should be dismissed. Will Skype (owned by eBay) now participate in the wireless IP revolution, or allow wireless communication to be dominated by the cable companies and major Telecoms? http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/15754334.html Skype ended today what will eventually be recorded as its fastest growth on record. At the quarter's beginning, the IP service provider had 27,206,646 "real users" and by the end there were 31,741,318... a 16.9% bump in just three months... I'll go out on a limb and predict $140 million in revenue for the quarter just ended. That is $4.41 per real user, an increase from $4.23 last quarter. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/56887522.html Jean Mercier just posted an interesting comment in which he predicts that Skype will soon provide a new system for virtual PSTN numbers that goes well beyond SkypeIN. The new system relates to the 883 prefix which is a virtual "country"... or you might think of it as an international toll-free number... http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/29103376.html In the last few weeks I have discovered that the chat interface in Skype is very accommodating to spammers, and I've been a victim twice, in two separate but related ways... http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/59997203.html Cyber Kinetic IP is therefore an IP service with multi-media communication features, usually with integration of voice (voice over IP or "VOIP"), video, text, and data sharing. These communication forms are combined in varying ways to achieve a result in communication that is more effective and seamless than its component parts. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/36646212.html Sparked by "Skype Public Chats" and the enormously clever innovation of "persistent" messaging... "Chat Publisher" can help transform working and social communities with more effective, efficient, and interesting conversation. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/77972333.html Well, the battle to get 3rd party applications onto the iPhone is not over yet, especially for VOIP applications. In one specific way, the SDK actually closes the iPhone platform rather than opening it up to 3rd party innovation. An explanation is in order. http://www.glimfeather.com/borderless/ http://www.glimfeather.com/Borderless/Blogs/43864735.html