Disruptive Telephony

Does today's announcement of a beta version of "Skype for Asterisk" signal a way to tear down some of Skype's walls? And does this move Skype along toward better SIP interoperability?

The announcement happened out at Astricon today and TMC's Tom Keating had one of the first posts about it - updated with info from TMC reporters who are at Astricon. Both the Digium news release and the Skype blog post highlight these four points that Asterisk users will be able to do:

• Make, receive and transfer Skype calls with multiple Skype names from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware.
• Complement existing Asterisk services with low Skype global rates (as low as 1.7€¢ / 2.1US¢ per minute to more than 35 countries worldwide).
• Save money on inbound calling solutions such as free click-to-call from a website, as well as receive inbound calling from the PSTN throughcreate virtual offices all over world using Skype’s online numbers.
• Manage Skype calls using Asterisk applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voicemail.

I want to focus on one part of the first bullet. Recall that in my last post about Skype and SIP interoperability I talked about how Skype currently has one-way connectivity via SIP to external SIP clouds. A SIP system can receive calls from a Skype user, but cannot make calls into Skype's cloud. (My employer Voxeo's application platform is one example.) Yet here's the first bullet of the announcement:

• Make, receive and transfer Skype calls with multiple Skype names from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware.

Ta da... two-way connectivity in and out of the Skype cloud.

What's more, because Asterisk is really a telephony platform that speaks multiple protocols, you could easily see the ability to interconnect into other systems... including SIP clouds. Here's a quick graphic showing how it could work:

I changed the color of the arrows to and from the PSTN to reflect the fact that PSTN connectivity could really occur from either the Skype cloud or directly from the Asterisk system. Conceivably you might have an Asterisk system with existing PSTN connectivity (through either hardware cards or SIP or IAX trunks) that only wants to use the Skype For Asterisk channel driver to communication to/from Skype users. On the other end, Asterisk can connect to systems running the protocols of SIP, H.323 or SCCP (Cisco Skinny), as well as whatever other protocols Asterisk sysadmins might add to their Asterisk box. They could be on-premise systems such as IP-PBXs or they could be hosted systems or "clouds" of network connectivity.

Now what is really being announced today is that you can register to join the beta program for Skype For Asterisk. You cannot download the code yet. You can't inspect it to see how it works. All we can do is speculate and sign up to join the beta program (which, it indicates, may involve an NDA).

Still, it's an interesting move and it will be intriguing to see how this actually works.

I'd like to understand, though, how this is or is not similar to what has been offered by Chanskype for a few years now. Is this the same code? i.e. did Skype buy or obtain the Chanskype code or team? Given the lack of any info in that regard in these announcements, I'm inclined to think it is separate code.... but how does it compare?

We'll have to see as the code becomes available. Tom Keating did say in his post that it will not be available as open source code but rather under a commercial license.

In the meantime, congrats to both the folks at Digium and Skype for making this happen - and I look forward to seeing it in action.

Technorati Tags: voip, skype, asterisk, sip, telecom

In just a few minutes, at 10:30am US Eastern time, Google and T-Mobile will be in New York City to announce the launch of the first Android handset.

Predictably, the blogosphere is buzzing with posts and articles.

I expect, quite honestly, to be a bit underwhelmed by the initial launch... after all, Android is still evolving. We'll see - the fact that stories are out that Amazon is launching a DRM-free music service along with the Android phone is certainly an interesting dynamic.

Today's launch aside, the launch of Android is really the next step in the ongoing discussion about what the future of the mobile Internet looks like. Will it be controlled by only the carriers? Or will we as consumers have the freedom and choice to use the apps we want? Android holds out that potential - if the carriers let it be used that way. This morning I recorded a short video on the subject:

If you would like, please do join us on today's Squawk Box at 11am US Eastern time to discuss what all this means. Undoubtedly I'll be writing more on this here as will others across the VoIP blogosphere in the weeks and months ahead. We are definitely living in VERY interesting times!

Technorati Tags: google, android, mobile, wireless, voip, internet, future

Should Skype open up it's network to other users? to other networks? Should Skype stop preaching about "openness" when it's network remains closed?

In the middle of last week, there was quite a little storm raised in the VoIP corner of the blogosphere after Andy Abramson published a letter from Gizmo Project founder Michael Robertson critical of Skype's openness after Skype continued to call upon the FCC to open the wireless network to applications. (See also here and this Skype blog post (and this one) for background.) Being at ITEXPO last week, I didn't have the chance to blog about this at the length I felt it deserved until today.

First, for some context, here are some of the blog posts last week:

• Andy in VoIPWatch: Gizmo Project's Michael Robertson Sounds Off
• Phil Wolff asks some pointed questions (of Michael) at Skype Journal: Michael Robertson says Skype should open to Gizmo Project
• Phil posts: Michael Robertson Responds where Michael responds to Phil's questions
• Andy responds: For the Record, Gizmo vs. Skype
• Alec Saunders had a whole cast of characters on Friday's SquawkBox, including Andy, Michael Robertson, Jim Courtney (Skype Journal) and a good number of others.
• Phil posts: A few thoughts on Skype interop tradeoffs

All of it makes for good reading. It's an important issue.

So I guess I'm somewhat of two minds on this issue.... while I agree with some of Michael Robertson's points, I guess I see the whole issue of "Skype openness" as quite orthogonal to the larger issue of open wireless spectrum. I'll write about both issues at some length below.

This is long. Don't plan on reading it on a crackberry or iPhone. Best get a cup of coffee and read it on a laptop or something like that.

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WIRELESS OPENNESS

To put it another way, I completely applaud Skype's letter to the FCC and think that the battle for opening up the wireless networks is probably the preeminent "battle" we who are advocates for an open Internet have before us. The wired carriers are well on their way to being commoditized big, fat, dumb pipes. The telcos started selling "data lines" and then soon the world of IP wound up increasingly removing them from the picture as anything other than a big pipe... and that's not the world they want. They are fighting (and will continue to fight) to retain relevance (and ARPU - Average Revenue Per User) but the IP train left the station a long time ago and the telcos are scrambling to catch up and stay on board rather than just being (some of) the providers of the track.

On the wireless side, not only do the carriers own the track, but they still own the train and they are still driving that train. They control who gets on and off... how fast or slow it goes... what color the train is, etc.

I, for one, don't want that. I want them to give us a solid set of tracks to use... but I want the train to be open to all. I want the wireless carriers to be big, fat, dumb pipes. I want choice. *I* want to be in control.

The carriers naturally don't want to relinquish this control. They see how they missed it on the wired side. They want to keep the wireless walled gardens for as long as they can.

The cracks are appearing... Apple's control over the iPhone and AppStore is a phenomenal crack in the telco walls...... although it ultimately really means exchanging the walled gardens of the telcos for the bright shiny walled garden based in Cupertino, CA. I'm not sure that ultimately is the best for all of us... but it does crack the telco walls. I think Google's Android has more potential... but we'll have to see later this month when those phones first come out.

So with that view, you can expect I applaud Skype's efforts to open up the wireless networks and allow consumers to have a choice of what apps they want to run. I want the *wireless* carriers to be big, fat, dump pipes... give me an IP address on the *mobile* Internet and let me do what I want with it. Sure, the carriers can offer their own services, and maybe if I like them I'll pay for them.... but I want the option to use other products and services - without degradation or prioritization...

To put it another way, I pay the wireless telcos for *dialtone* now. Once connected, I can call anyone and use any *voice service* over the PSTN. I could use someone else's voicemail if I want (like GrandCentral), although the carrier's offering may be more convenient (and is usually free). But I can call anyone on the PSTN and use any voice service I want. The carriers just provide me dialtone.

I want "IP dialtone". I want a Big, Fat, Dumb Pipe.

So... go, Skype, go!

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SKYPE OPENNESS

Yet having said all this, I agree with Michael Robertson that Skype's got its own issues with openness.

I don't like walled gardens. Period. End-of-story.

I don't like telco walled gardens. I don't like Apple's walled garden. I don't like Facebook's walled garden. I didn't like the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Genie, etc. and I rejoiced over time when the open standards of IP tore down those walls and brought about the Internet (with all of its warts) that we have today. [Tangent: I do worry, actually, that we are retreating a bit back into the walled garden world with things like Facebook and Myspace... but that's another topic I've blogged about.] I can somewhat see some value in walled gardens during the early stages of a product or technology as it reduces the set of parameters/variables and allows the service to be stablized/fixed/improved. But at some point the walls need to be reduced/eliminated. As a security guy, I don't like monocultures... I don't like homogenous systems (where one virus or issue could wipe out the whole system)... I like diversity... heterogenous systems. I don't like single-points-of-failure. I don't like single companies (or small sets) in control. I don't like walled gardens.

I don't like Skype's walled garden.

The PSTN run by the telcos of today does not provide the rich communication experience we want. We need to bypass it and leave it behind and build the massive interconnect of IP communications systems. Players like Skype have a key role in my opinion in building that new infrastructure.

But if we exchange the current PSTN walled garden controlled by the telcos for a new walled garden controlled by eBay/Skype, have we really gained anything?

Sure, it gives us a rich, multi-modal user experience. Sure, it's nice and pretty. Sure, it gives us a central user directory. Sure, it gives us wideband and encrypted audio. Sure, it's cool and all... but it's still a walled garden controlled by a single company.

Ultimately, I would like to see a new voice infrastructure that consists of many different "clouds" all interconnected and able to communicate between the clouds. Skype is one cloud. So are the SIP clouds being run now by various carriers. So are the Voice-over-IM clouds like MSN, AIM, etc. (that try vainly to compete with Skype). So are the various systems being built by vendors all over the place (including all the Microsoft OCS clouds starting to appear within enterprises).

We need to build the interconnect.

Yeah, there are a TON of issues out there that we still need to address to build that interconnect. There's a whole host of security issues... there are billing issues... there are trust issues... there are network plumbing issues. Yes, there are all those issues. But if we are to succeed in ultimately bringing about the rich communication experience we want, we need to make this happen.

And for that, Skype's walls need to come down.... at least a bit.

What we need is that Interconnect from Skype's cloud out to the emerging IP infrastructure. Think about it... Skype right now has a two-way interconnect between Skype's cloud and the cloud we know as the PSTN. It's called "SkypeOut" and "SkypeIn" (or whatever marketing names they are being called now). If you dial my SkypeIn number, you can reach me on Skype wherever I am. From my Skype client, I can call anyone on the PSTN. The two-way interconnect is already there.

So why not offer the same on the IP side?

Because I work at Voxeo and we were one of Skype's original Voice Services partners, I already know that Skype has a massive SIP infrastructure on the backend to do the the PSTN interconnect. Skype users can even dial a specific +99 number and the call goes from Skype's SIP cloud over to Voxeo's SIP cloud... and it works beautifully.

So one half of the interconnect is already there - although only for limited numbers of partners.

But where Skype already has the infrastructure, why not look at making that capability more accessible? What if someone in Skype could just type "sip:[email protected]" and the call would go out from Skype's cloud to the service providers? This could be a new feature as part of the unlimited calling plans, etc.

How many people would use it right now? Probably only a tiny few... today. But suddenly Skype becomes an enabler of the broader post-PSTN infrastructure. New companies can get their services up and running knowing that they can promote them to Skype users and have Skype users get to those services.

Plus, Skype can now connect to all those enterprise VoIP systems being deployed everywhere... so for all those IT managers blocking Skype now but allowing SIP gateways for remote teleworkers using IP phones... Skype can suddenly be that remote softphone being used in the sense that it could connect in to other people on the corporate enterprise system - they just become "sip:" entries in my Skype directory. Skype still is my overall directory and user agent.

And what about the other way? Wouldn't it be great if someone out there on a SIP system could just call something like "sip:[email protected]"? The call goes from their SIP cloud across the Internet to Skype's SIP gateways and into the Skype cloud.

The SIP system user can do this right now... via my SkypeIn number... but they have to use the crappy PSTN. Why not ditch the PSTN and go directly across the IP infrastructure? Hey, maybe some user of a "HD Voice" Polycom phone could call Skype's gateways via SIP and actually wind up talking via wideband audio? (Yeah, okay, I'm probably dreaming on that since Polycom supports G.722 for wideband and Skype uses its SVOPC codec.)

I personally would probably wind up using my Skype client more for a simple reason that I have a SIP IP phone on my desk... but I'm not at my desk all that much. Wouldn't it be great if I could forward that to the SIP URI of my Skype client? (Which I can do now by forwarding to my SkypeIn # but again I'm going across the crappy PSTN.) Or better yet because I have a SIP URI for Skype it becomes one of the various phones I ring when someone calls that number (it's not, now). The number on my business card would then wind up actually going to my Skype client.

Suddenly Skype can be a player in the enterprise "unified communications" market. People don't need Skype-to-PBX gateways or sacrifice chickens and utter weird incantations to get Skype connections working with open source VoIP systems. Skype users can talk to Microsoft OCS systems... or Cisco IP PBXs... or Avaya's or Nortel's or Mitel's or ShoreTel's or... or... or...

What if... even... I could do a SIP invite to make a video call to another system? (Okay, so now maybe I'm really dreaming...)

Suddenly people (like Michael Robertson) have fewer reasons to complain. Sure, the Skype client still uses it's own proprietary protocols and codecs for communication within the Skype cloud... but you can interconnect.

Suddenly Skype is a leader in building the broader overall next-generation IP communications system. Skype's not a walled garden but rather a player in the larger picture.

Sure, there's a whack of issues involved with doing this. On the technical side, Skype has got to build SIP gateways that could deal with the abuse they would undoubtedly suffer by being exposed on the public internet (like any or all of the VoIP security tools out there). They have got to make sure such gateways don't become a way to inject spam/SPIT into the Skype network. Skype has got to figure out how to package it... potentially charge for it, etc. And they have to deal with all the glorious interoperability issues that come with SIP... as the protocol increasingly becomes an unmanageable accretion of all sorts of crap. (And I say that as an advocate for the SIP protocol.)

Ultimately, I think that's the kind of openness Skype needs.

Skype needs to provide the same two-way interconnect to the evolving IP communications infrastructure (that is almost all becoming SIP-based, for better or worse) just as Skype provides the two-way interconnect to the PSTN.

Build it and Skype would silence many of the critics of Skype's lack of openness[1] and give Skype a (much-needed, IMHO) hype-boost among the early adopter crowd who also plays with all the other emerging tools. It would be a bold move that would also help Skype gain some credibility and recognition within the larger industry. In my opinion, outside of the technical issues it would go far in so many ways in helping Skype grow - and helping the industry grow.

Will Skype get there? Good question...

[1] Not all critics would be silenced naturally because someone would still complain that they can't connect their particular client to the Skype P2P overlay network. Or that they can't connect XYZ hard phone to the Skype cloud, etc., etc. But it would silence many of the critics of Skype as a "walled garden".

Technorati Tags: skype, sip, net neutrality, open, openness, voip, voice, telecom, telecommunications, gizmo, interop, interconnect

As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I'll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I'll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I'll be speaking about "Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud", a favorite topic of mine these days.

Voxeo will also have a booth and I expect to be there. I'm also doing some video interviews and other media work (actually on both sides of the camera). I'm looking forward to catching up with a good number of folks out at the show.

If you read this blog and are out there at either the Communications Developer Conference or ITEXPO, please do come by and say hello. I posted the schedule of talks over on Voxeo's blog site. You should be able to find out more about where precisely I am through either twitter.com/danyork or twitter.com/voxeo.

Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, los angeles, dan york, voxeo, danyork, cloudcomputing, sip, sip security, voip security

Given that I've written here a good bit about Voxeo since joining the company 11 months ago, I thought I'd point to an excellent interview that Voxeo's CEO, Jonathan Taylor, did with host Alec Saunders on Alec's Squawk Box podcast. You can listen to it by either using the audio player on the show web page or alternatively you can download the MP3 file directly and listen to it in iTunes, Windows Media Player or whatever MP3 player you wish.

It was an enjoyable call (I was listening) that went for about 45 minutes. Jonathan spoke about how and why he started the company, about the new release of Prophecy 9, the acquisition of Micromethod, our recent financial results and much more. I think you all will find it a great introduction to what Voxeo is all about.

11 months later, I'm still extremely glad I made the choice to join the company...

Technorati Tags: squawkbox, voxeo, voice, voice applications, voip

Five years ago today, the first public beta of Skype launched, and in a blog post today new Skype CEO Josh Silverman celebrates with "Five Years of Wow". It's a bit of the "Ra-Ra" celebratory kind of post I would expect from a CEO but ends nicely with this:

So, as we celebrate the first five years of Skype, let's raise a toast to the human desire to connect.

Indeed!

Skype has done a great amount to help people easily connect to each other. It's also caused a heck of a lot of disruption within the telecommunications industry. I use Skype daily (Skype ID: danyork) and it has indeed become a significant part of both my business workflow and personal life.

A PERSONAL REMINDER

I had a personal reminder of that the other day when I wound up in a video chat with one of my closest friends who was my best man at my wedding 12 years ago. Although we have spoken in the intervening years, we had not actually seen each other in probably most of 10 years due to living far apart. He and his wife emailed a group of folks that they now had a Skype ID. I added them as a contact, opened an IM chat and wound up calling them... and then moving into video and seeing them both. It was a powerful moment - and a great reminder of the power of Skype to easily connect people.

Like many longtime fans of Skype, I do have concerns about Skype's future direction. It doesn't seem to quite have the "buzz" it once did and I'm still not really sure what the long-term vision is... what does Skype want to be when it grows up?

HOW SKYPE DISRUPTED TELEPHONY

But future concerns aside, I think we should take a moment to celebrate Skype's five year birthday and I want to reflect a bit on some of the ways in which I think Skype has changed telecommunications (some of which we discussed a bit on yesterday's Squawk Box podcast).

Skype arrived in 2003 at a fascinating intersection of multiple trends. First, we as a society were at the stage where we started to get massive ubiquitous 'always-on' broadband connectivity into people's homes (at least in many parts of the world). Dial-up was fading away... cable Internet and DSL were becoming "normal". Second, home computers were becoming more powerful and more multimedia. Third, peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing networks had grown to a massive scale and validated that such a networking approach could be used for serious applications. The timing was perfect for something like Skype to come along and ride the waves.

So what did Skype bring that was different?

• SKYPE "JUST WORKED" - If you look at comments that people make about their experience using Skype, over and over again you see comments along the line of "it just works." More than anything else, I think Skype's simplification of the end-user experience made it the runaway hit that it was. I would suggest that this simple experience is really two parts:

  • SIMPLE USER INTERFACE AND INSTALLATION - Skype provided a drop-dead-simple installation and a user interface (UI) that was incredibly easy to use.

  • FIREWALL TRAVERSAL - Connect your laptop to a network and... ta da... probably 9 times out of 10 (or 10 out of 10) your Skype icon is ready to go. I've often even personally used it as a connectivity check - if the Skype icons show as "online", I knew I had good connectivity. Skype does an amazing job adapting to firewall restrictions and figuring out how to punch holes through whatever firewall it is behind and enabling communication to occur. Yes, it can be blocked, but the simplicity by which it got through made it so incredibly easy to use.

  It should be noted, too, that this occurred cross-platform with versions out for Windows, Mac and Linux (although with not all platforms sharing all features).

• WIDEBAND AUDIO - Skype was the first VoIP application deployed on a large-scaled that used a "wideband" codec (originally iSAC from GIPS, now their own SVOPC) to give a much richer voice experience than traditional telephony. For the first time, many people realized that VoIP could provide better audio quality than the PSTN. After you have used Skype for a while, you rapidly changed your perspective to where PSTN "toll quality", previously the high bar for voice telecommunications, would be viewed as low quality audio. To me this represented one of the most profound yet less visible shifts brought about by Skype.

  Skype's wideband audio also let many of us use Skype as a method for creating podcasts or other recordings with remote hosts. Jonathan Zar and I have used it for Blue Box for almost 3 years. Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have used it for For Immediate Release for longer. Creating podcasts with Skype has had its own challenges... there have been connectivity challenges and "Skype moments" when audio artifacts are introduced or audio fades in and out... but those can be edited out. The fact is that when the connection is good, it sounds like you and your co-host are in the same room.

  I'll never forget a comment left by my friend Martyn Davies to another podcast that I had been part of that had used a traditional PSTN conference bridge. He said the call was good, but "he didn't know if could stand listening to such poor quality audio each week." And that was a "toll-quality" PSTN conference bridge! The bar was raised for those who became Skype users... and now we're finally seeing wideband audio come out in various IP-PBXs and in phones from vendors like Polycom and others.

• SECURE VOIP - As a security guy, you might of course expect me to praise the fact that Skype encrypted all the voice and call control from the start. But more than that, back around the time when Skype first came out, there were a lot of nay-sayers in the VoIP industry who presented the argument that you couldn't encrypt voice or call-control without having performance suffer. That was their argument for why they couldn't roll out encrypted voice. The sound quality would degrade, etc. Skype killed that argument. Skype showed that you could have high-quality voice and have it fully encrypted end-to-end. It was a wonderful way to rebut the audio quality argument (and I used it myself with some vendors).

• P2P VoIP - Until the emergence of Skype, all mainstream systems that included VoIP had been server-based. You had your VoIP client that registered with a VoIP server and communication was all handled by the servers. Skype showed that you could in fact run VoIP over a P2P network infrastructure. Now Skype is not a pure P2P network - there are "enrollment" servers that deal with usernames, passwords, etc.

• VOICE FIRST - While Skype appeared to emerge out of the "Voice-over-instant-messaging" space in that it was very similar to MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, etc., it had one fundamental difference - voice was the first mode of communication. When you double-clicked a name to initiate a connection, instead of IM, you initiated a phone call. In fact to launch an IM chat, you had to right-click or somehow get to the chat button. Voice was the first mode of communication, and so in most people's minds Skype became thought of as a "voice" communication tool versus an IM tool (even though its IM is quite powerful in and of itself).

• MULTI-MODAL COMMUNICATION - Recall that at the beginning I mentioned that I started out with an IM to my friend, which then moved into audio... and then into video. For Skype users that seems to be a fairly common path. I've had calls that have started as IM, gone to video with IM being used as a backchannel to exchange URLs, dropped back to IM only, moved into audio, back to IM... and so on. With file transfer happening in there as well. Now Skype users seldom think about that kind of movement between "modes" of communication. Certainly other clients allowed this before Skype, but Skype made it popular on a mass scale.

• PSTN INTERCONNECTION - Many of the earlier software-based VoIP clients suffered from the basic problem that you could only talk to other people with those clients. Skype rolled out SkypeOut which let you call anywhere for cheap rates. Perhaps in my mind more significantly Skype rolled out it's "SkypeIn" service where you could get a PSTN number associated with your account. In fact, you could get many PSTN numbers in different parts of the world. Suddenly Skype could be how you were contacted by regular callers.

• CHEAP CALLS - Of course Skype disrupted traditional telephony with its "unlimited" calling plans. I mean... the concept here in the US of paying $30 per year for unlimited calls within North America is a pretty dramatic change from our traditional rates. Skype certainly helped lead the further commoditization of voice minutes.

• CHALLENGING SIP AND OPEN STANDARDS - As Skype emerged in 2003, the VoIP industry was slowly coalescing around the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as "the way forward" for voice signaling. But SIP had (and still has) some fundamental problems in that it didn't work well through firewalls, wasn't terribly interoperable and was therefore complicated at times to get working. Suddenly here was this upstart Skype that... (gasp)... used proprietary signaling! Open standards advocates, myself very definitely included, were appalled and knocked Skype for not using open standards like SIP. The success of Skype, though, did give SIP advocates a good competitor... and I think to a degree that has helped. We've seen stronger firewall traversal mechanisms come out. We've seen improved interoperability. Competitors can be good and in the end help make you stronger.

• PERSISTENT CHAT - WITH HISTORY - While I've been writing here about voice, I want to mention one other innovation on Skype's end with regard to IM. The beauty of Skype group chats is that they are persistent and have a readily accessible history. With Skype, group chats can become an always-open-and-available place for discussion. The beautiful thing is that when you shutdown or disconnect from the network and then later reconnect, you automatically rejoin all the chats you were in, but more importantly, you automagically receive the history of what happened in the chat while you were away. This latter part is huge. Persistent group chats with history means that you can be planning a project with a group of people and do it all through a group chat. Go offline to travel or at the end of your day... connect back in hours or days later and automatically receive all the messages that occurred when you were gone. What other IM system does that? None of the consumer services... and not Jabber or IRC. Certainly now we are starting to see services that offer it, especially for inside an enterprise, but it remains a strong advantage of Skype IM.

There are no doubt other reasons that people can suggest. (And feel free to leave a comment with your reasons.) Someone on yesterday's Squawk Box said a key factor for them was that Skype was the best in their opinion for cross-platform file transfer. Someone else mentioned that the vast number of users brought out all these "hard" phones and other devices that "work with Skype". And sure, it's not at all been a perfectly tranquil time for Skype. There have been outages... and audio quality problems... and changing billing plans... and... and... and... Yet in the end I think you'd be hard-pressed NOT to say Skype has had an effect in various ways on telephony and telecommunications as we know it.

WHITHER SKYPE?

What next? As I said at the beginning, many of us who have been long-time Skype users wonder where it's really going. It has seemed a bit rudderless since the eBay acquisition and has seemed to drift from vision to vision (or simply not had one). There have been opportunities that have been missed to truly turn Skype into a "platform". As Phil Wolff mentions in his great post today at Skype Journal, Skype isn't even really in the race to "talk-ify" the web. (Although I don't necessarily agree with Phil that Ribbit is the answer - I view them as just one of many players in the space (including my employer) - but I agree with his point that what they and others do is a sign of the future of voice.) There have been various features that were launched in what seemed a half-baked way. (Skype Prime, anyone?) There's been management churn and all the other fun of a company growing up.

But Skype's got a new CEO now, and he's only been there 5 months, so to a degree we have to wait and see where he points Skype. Regardless, the fact remains that Skype has changed the way we think about voice communication over the Internet.

Happy 5th Birthday, Skype! I'm looking forward to seeing where the next 5 years take you!

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, voice, telecommunications, telecom, telephony

It's good to see that James Enck is blogging again at EuroTelcoblog. For quite a few years, I enjoyed reading James' blog largely because he provided this North American writer with some perspective into telephony/telcos in Europe and also because he wrote about Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) a good bit and I learned from that.

Then in April 2007, after about 3 years of writing, James just... stopped.

But now he's back... with an interesting explanation.

Welcome back, James! I look forward to reading more of your views...

Are you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders' daily "Squawk Box" conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support
• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine

The call will take place using Alec's company Iotum's "Calliflower" conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to "join" the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:

• Calliflower Facebook application - If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:

  http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.
  
  
• Calliflower.com site - If you are not a Facebook user or just don't want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:

  http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have not already done so.

Both links are live today so you can go right now and RSVP to attend the call tomorrow. If you do so, you should also receive a reminder about 15 minutes prior to the call tomorrow morning.

When you join the call tomorrow, you can also use the Calliflower web interface through either of the links above to see who else has joined the call and also to participate in the "live chat" area during the call itself. Typically Alec will ask a series of questions of the guest and then open it to others who are participating in the call. If you'd like to learn more about what is up with Voxeo and/or ask questions of our CEO, tomorrow's a great opportunity for you to do so.

It should be a fun time and we're looking forward to the conversation. Please do feel free to join in!

NOTE: If you are not available to join the call, it is being recorded and will be made available through Alec's Saunderslog.com site sometime later tomorrow. We'll post an update here on this blog site as well.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, squawk box, jonathan taylor

Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here's a bit of what went on:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion - In these economic times, it's incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this.

• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support - To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our customers might not deploy production servers on Mac OS X, this means that their developers using Macs can now even more easily run our application server. Additionally, we've developed some new graphical management interfaces that are pretty incredible (and useful, too).

• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies - With this acquisition of a company based in Beijing and San Jose, we've added a strong SIP Servlet (JSR 116/289) platform into our portfolio and we've already started integrating that into our core platform. Developers will now have even more ways to build VoIP applications on top of our platform.

• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine - We received an award at SpeechTEK last week in New York from Speech Technology Magazine for the best "Speech Self-Service Suite", which, when you read through the text, basically means the best voice application platform. We were pleased by the recognition. My colleague Dan Burnett also received an award as a "2008 Speech Luminary" recognizing his many years of contributions to the speech industry.

Combining all of those announcements with the crazy pace of activity at the SpeechTEK show in New York definitely made for some long days and long hours. It's certainly fun, though.

I think it goes without saying that I'm rather pleased with where I wound up last fall! (We are hiring, too, although right now only in the UK.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, applications, voice, voip, speech, speechtek, prophecy, sip

If you are free tomorrow, Thursday, August 21st, at 1pm US Eastern time, I'd encourage you to listen in to a joint Mitel / Sun Microsystems webinar. Details are available on the Mitel web page.

Why am I encouraging readers to tune into this webinar? Especially when I no longer work for Mitel and have really nothing to do with them any more? Two words:

Terry Matthews.

During the time that I worked for Mitel from June 2001 up until last October (2007), the telecom industry went through some pretty bleak periods. Some very bleak periods. Mitel was not immune and there were certainly some tough times there. There were multiple times when friends seriously questioned why I continued to work there amidst some of the challenges and headaches. And while I admittedly had a few of those moments myself, I kept on working hard at Mitel because of the tremendous people I worked with there... and ultimately because of the vision and enthusiasm of Terry Matthews.

If you aren't familiar with Sir Terrence Matthews, his Wikipedia biography and Wesley Clover (his investment firm) biography give a taste of the man. Terry is at this point a billionaire serial entrepreneur who has founded something like 60 companies related to high tech and telecommunications - primarily in Canada and Wales. Not all of his investments have been successful, of course, but many have, and there are a great number of companies and products that owe their birth to Terry. He bought back Mitel in 2001, focused it on the emerging space of VoIP and continued to invest in its future. He understood back then that the revolution in ubiquitous broadband was underway and that that huge availability of network bandwidth would open many opportunities for products and services that could make use of that bandwidth.

In the last few years of my time at Mitel when I was working in the Office of CTO, I had the privilege of working more with Terry Matthews and his advisors and it was definitely an interesting and memorable time. There is a certain energy, enthusiasm and charisma that Terry exudes that just inspires you to want to do more. Sure, there were challenges, too... like all of us he's only human. But even now, almost a year after leaving Mitel, I still retain an immense amount of respect for the man and his vision.

He's also a great presenter... so if my schedule allowed I'd definitely tune in to listen tomorrow, if only to hear Terry's take on where part of the industry is going. [NOTE: Now that I'm building him up like this, I do hope he's not sick and off his mark tomorrow!]

Oh, yeah, Sun chairman Scott McNealy is speaking, too, and the product they're talking about, the Mitel Unified IP Client for Sun Ray, is pretty cool, too.

I had a chance to see earlier versions a year ago and definitely thought it was a very cool way to deal with strong authentication. Essentially you insert a secure Java card into the Mitel phone and you are logged into both your phone as well as the Sun thin client. Pop the card out... move to a different station in that office or in some other office on the network... insert the card, and now you are logged in there. All your desktop apps go with you, as does your phone extension, voicemail, message waiting indicator, etc., etc.

Very slick way to do secure "hot desking". If you go down the thin-client route, that whole solution works real well together.

Anyway, if you're around tomorrow at 1pm US Eastern, I'd encourage you to join the webinar. I'll unfortunately be on a train from New York City heading back up to Vermont/New Hampshire, so I'll have to view it later (I'm told it will be archived for later viewing). Cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: mitel, sun, voip, sunmicrosystems, terry matthews, scott mcnealy, thin client