Disruptive Telephony

I do have to hand it to the Skype marketing folks... it's certainly a cute move on their part to offer Skype users in the US and Canada a full day of free calls to landlines and cell phones around the world.   With Mother's Day being one of the highest days of phone usage, it's a natural day to pick for a gimmick. 

There are limits, though, and the terms and conditions were interesting to read.  I'm not sure how to read #9 where users are limited to 200 minutes per call:

Skype asks that you enjoy this offer fairly and sensibly, for your personal and non-commercial purposes. Calls are limited to 200 minutes per computer during the offer period. If you make excessive, systematic or intentional misuse of the offer, Skype reserves the right to terminate your access to your account immediately.

So is that 200 minutes, total?  Or is that per call?  i.e., if you've been talking to someone for over 3 hours on the same call you have to hang up and initiate a new call?  Either way, it's a good amount of time to spend on the "phone".

I also enjoyed this part:

Skype reminds users of the nature and limitations of the Internet and is not responsible for any hardware or software problems, any technical malfunctions of any communications network, online system or computer hardware or software that may affect access to the offer. Skype is also not responsible for any fraudulent, incomplete, garbled, or delayed computer transmissions or inaccurate transcription of information, whether caused by Skype, its users or by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in this offer by any technical or human error which may occur in the processing of the offer which may damage a user's system or limit a participant's ability to participate in the offer.

So if you can't understand your mom (or whomever else you call), it's not Skype's responsibility!  :-)

Ah, well... kudos to them for coming up with a cute marketing gimmick.  If it get's some more people to try out consumer VoIP, all the better for us all.

I will call my Mom on Mother's Day, but odds are that I'll just be using the regular old landline.  We'll see.  It's tempting to call other people in other parts of the world that day, but: a) it's a Sunday and for most folks I know overseas it's a weekend and they like to spend that time with their family; and b) *I* will be spending that day with my family.

P.S. Also quite interesting to see that Intel is a co-sponsor of this marketing campaign.

Over on Skype Journal, Phil Wolff has posted his "26 Wishlist Items for Enterprise Skype", which makes for interesting reading.  Basically his list of what Skype needs to work in the enterprise.  It's a good list with many good ideas for VoIP in general, not just Skype.  The list isn't prioritized but my 2 cents would be that the #1 thing Skype needs is the network edge proxy server that Phil mentions... some kind of choke point that IT Security managers can use to monitor/block/allow/deny Skype access.  The reality is that I think most IT security folks just plain don't trust Skype. 

What do you think of the list?

P.S. Phil also has previously come up with the very cool image/logo to the right that I think all of us VoIP bloggers who write about Skype Enterprise really must use.  And if you don't understand the significance of the logo or the play on words, well, your geek credentials are seriously in doubt. (Hint)

Those of you with an interest in Skype may wish to read my post over on Disruptive Conversations about VoIP blogger Jan Geirnaert ceasing the use of his skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com domains for his blog.  I've included there links from a number of the other VoIP bloggers who have covered this issue in more detail.