Disruptive Telephony

Today I called Alec Saunders via Skype.  Not terribly unusual, really... except that I initiated the Skype call from my Blackberry!  Back on Monday, Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal had posted a teaser about an application for the Blackberry that allowed you to use Skype IM.  Today my curiosity got the better of me and I had to IM Jim to get the info. I downloaded the app and promptly had to try it out... I guess by virtue of Alec being at the top of my contact list, he was my victim (I also know from past experience that he's open to this kind of thing).

Tonight Jim has spilled the goods for all of us in the post rather dramatically titled "Skype on the Blackberry - A New Era in the AlwaysOn World". It turns out to be an application called "IM+ for Skype" from a company called ShapeServices, which makes a variety of software products for PDAs (and specifically Blackberries).  It turns out there was a news release about this back on May 7th, but I didn't see any coverage of this at all.  The app itself costs $25, but you can also download it and use it for a free 7-day trial.

Blackberry users can even download it directly for Over-The-Air installation from wap.shapeservices.com.

The app itself seemed like other IM programs I've tried for the Blackberry.  Very easy to create chats.  See the chats in progress.  Get a notification vibration/beep when new chats arrive.  You first naturally give it your Skype username and password and it (slowly) loads in your contact list and shows the presence of all of your contacts.  After that, it's rather like a Skype client.  You can scroll through your contact list, open up chats, initiate calls, etc.

The calls are interesting.  I was initially expecting it to be a true VoIP client and initiate the call via Skype over the data connection from the Blackberry.  I wondered how well this would work given the generally limited quality/speed of the data connection.  It turns out that it doesn't work that way.  The data connection is used by the IM+ app to initiate the call, but the actual voice connection occurs over your phone's regular mobile connection. 

So when I called Alec, my phone actually rang and I answered it.  From Alec's perspective using Skype on his PC, he was placed into a conference call with "Dan York" and then a SkypeOut call to my cell phone.  What's curious to me is that I don't quite understand where the other party was that was making the conf call happen.  It wasn't on Skype on my PC.  I can't imagine the Blackberry could actually be doing the conf call... so where was it?  A PC (virtual or otherwise) back at Shape Services?  I don't know... but I will say that it worked.

From a cost perspective, I have the Skype Unlimited calling plan, so the call to my cell phone was free from a Skype point-of-view.  I have an unlimited data plan for my BB so there was no cost there.  Obviously there was an airtime cost for the connection to my BB... but that was it.   Now obviously I could also use it to make SkypeOut calls to other numbers, at which point it is becoming much like one of the call-back services like Jajah.

Interesting app... we'll see if I actually use it much.  My past experience with IM clients on the Blackberry is that if they are left running in the background they tend to eat the battery up very quickly.  Still, I could see me using it when traveling and wanting to IM someone or find out their Skype presence.  Will I make actual Skype calls with it?  I'm not sure.

What do you think?  Would you use it?  For Skype IM?  Calls?  Or both?  Is it a "New Era in the AlwaysOn World"?  (Would you pay the $25?)

Fun stuff...

I have not really written about Jaiku here at all... I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven't had the time.  What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.

But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: "Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 1"  Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones.  But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:

First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.

Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.

I agree with Ken that this type of "lifestream aggregation" represents a direction in which social networking is evolving.  The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation.  Jaiku would like to be your aggregator.  So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com).  And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.

So which do you choose?

All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort.  Ken can't follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter.  Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook.   We do need to have some kind of common aggregator.   We need to tear down the walls so that we don't wind up in isolated islands of communication.

But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken's post to read more.  This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.

Today Skype released their initial version of Skype 3.5 Beta for Windows.  You can download it here if you are the adventuresome type. In addition to fixing a bug (that caused Skype to crash) with public chats that has been plaguing those of us who use them, the major feature rolled out in this release is the long-awaited "Call Transfer".  Don Kennedy goes into this at far greater length in "Skype Pro Does Call Transfer" where he provides some examples and also provides a sample application.   

One of his examples is the interesting one of having all calls be transferred to a "group" which could include Skype names as well as SkypeOut numbers.  In Don's example, you could have someone call you on a SkypeIn number which would then be transferred to the "group" which could include your own Skype ID and also a SkypeOut connection to your cell phone.  Now all of this capability isn't yet in the Skype GUI.  Today you need Don's Call Transfer Example application, also available through the Skype Extras manager, but it is a glimpse of what is coming.

There is one gotcha... to do the transfer from a SkypeIn number or to a SkypeOut number, you need to have the "SkypePro" monthly subscription plan.  However, the USA is not one of the "available countries"... but apparently you can, in fact, purchase Skype Pro.  But, of course, if you are in the USA or Canada and have already purchased "Skype Unlimited" for $30 for the year for unlimited calling in NA, you have to wonder why people would pay $3/month more for Skype Pro... unless perhaps to get Call Transfer?   Certainly a bit confusing.

Call Transfer isn't the only thing in the 3.5 beta - per the Windows Release Notes, the release also contains:

• feature: Auto redial
• feature: Call Transfer
• feature: Device Indicators
• feature: Edit chat messages
• feature: Message history loading granulated
• feature: Private Telephone Numbers
• feature: Send contacts inside chat
• feature: Visual indicators for Audio In / Audio Out in options
• feature: Show examples of notifications / alerts in options
• feature: Added Latvian localization - Intars Students
• feature: In-Client Hardware store button
• change: Extras Manager updated to version 1.2.0.261
• change: Options categories smoothly slide open and close when changed
• Updated language files for a variety of languages

Some of those are more obvious that others.  What are "Private Telephone Numbers"?  or "Device Indicators"?  We shall see.  In any event, Skype has now made this release available for those who want to play with it...

UPDATE #1: Raul Liive at Skype indicated that "Private Telephone Numbers" means that your phone numbers in your profile are only shown to those people in your contact list.   

 UPDATE #2: Phil Wolff demonstrated the "Send contacts inside chat" feature that you can see on the right.  You can send a contact to all members of a chat by using the Send button on the top of the screen (or apparently by dragging/dropping into the chat).

UPDATE #3: Raul and others explained that "Device Indicators" will clue you (a Skype 3.5 user) into the fact that the person you are communicating with may be using an embedded version of Skype with less capabilities (for instance, some of the new WiFi phones that have Skype and don't require a PC).

Yesterday, Bandwidth.com announced that their SIP trunking service would be powering Mitel solution centers across the US.  From the news release:

Bandwidth.com, a leading nationwide provider of complete business communications solutions, today announced that it will be powering all Mitel(R) Solution Centers across the country enabling customers and VARS to preview innovative solutions, including SIP Trunking technology in a live environment. Mitel operates solution centers in five locations; Chicago, Costa Mesa, Atlanta, New York and Herndon (Virginia), all of which will be equipped with Bandwidth.com's SIP Trunking VoIP solution by the end of June.

There's been a relationship between Bandwidth.com and Mitel since last September. This announcement yesterday is a logical evolution of that relationship.

There's a lot to write about the incredibly disruptive power of SIP trunking... I don't think we yet fully understand how the power to obtain SIP trunks from anywhere in the world is going to so severely disrupt the global telecommunications infrastructure.  With IP, geography no longer matters... and there are all sorts of local carriers - and tax authorities! - who I don't think fully understand how much this messes up their business models.  I really need to write that up........

Two notes for Bandwidth.com:

1. On the positive side, they have to get credit for one of the coolest graphics I've yet seen for SIP trunking!  I'm talking about the image above that is also on their bandwidth.com/mitel page.  I'm going to have to see about getting permission to use that graphic in some presentations... I just really like it from the design side!

2. On the less positive side, it continues to astound me the number of companies that do not immediately post their news releases on their web site "news" area!  This news release went out yesterday (June 11) but yet it's still not on Bandwidth.com's news page!  It's too bad, because they are missing out on a good potential for inbound links to their site.  Instead, we're left to link to either TMCNet or PR Newswire, both of whom I'm sure don't mind the traffic.  Our (Mitel) PR team have moved to getting the news releases posted on the site right away... I don't know the stats on what kind of traffic we get, but I do know that it lets bloggers like me link directly to the site if we want to.

(See also Ken Camp's commentary about the rising importance of SIP trunking in SMB.)

Per Russell Shaw, ShoreTel has filed it's paperwork for an IPO.  Reuters also has the story.[1] Ken Camp also provides his opinion.  I'm sure that more will be written in the time ahead.  ShoreTel is one of the many newer entrants into the enterprise VoIP market and have been doing some interesting things (and yes, in the spirit of full disclosure, they do potentially compete in some areas with my employer, Mitel).  Kudos to them for getting things together to go for the IPO.  It will be interesting to see how that moves forward - best wishes to them all. 

[1] Side note: It's interesting to me to see that the Reuters story about ShoreTel IPO filing in the US was actually filed by a reporter in Bangalore, India at 6:54am.  At that time most North American reporters were probably only getting going. 

For those of us who pay attention to things related to Skype, one of the people we became most familiar with has moved on to different pastures.  Back in May 2005 when Skype started up their first blogs, Jaanus Kase was the public "face" who helped those of us outside the company understand a bit more about this thing called "Skype" and all that was happening with it.  A prolific writer/blogger, Jaanus told us about new features, industry trends, promotions and also told us about many things happening inside of Skype as the company itself evolved and changed.  He interviewed people, he talked about how Skype was enabling people to communicate, he responded to criticism and generally helped "humanize" the entity that is Skype through his many, many postings.  He did so with a conversational style that was sometimes serious, sometimes humerous... but generally always enjoyable to read.  He also launched a "Skype Blog Public Chat" back in November 2006 that many of us early adopters joined and it provided a great forum for exchange of information about what was going on with Skype.  That public chat still exists, although it doesn't quite have the same volume and interesting topics that it did in the early days... there are now several other public chats where more energy seems to be. Jaanus was also a techie underneath, and let us watch as he played with things like scripts that could get chat stats or do mass-ejection of idle chatroom members.

Jaanus was, of course, a member of Skype's Marketing group, so you understood he came at things with that bias - and he was certainly not Skype's only blogger... they have a whole crew of folks blogging for them.  But over time Jaanus became the voice we listened to in order to understand (or try to) what Skype was doing.  He encouraged a community of people interested in Skype and certainly did, I think, do a great amount in his own way to help Skype spread and grow.

All thing come to an end, though, and Jaanus let us know back in late May that he would be leaving Skype and returning to school.  More precisely, he's heading to Carnegie Mellon University to pursue their Masters of Human Computer Interaction program.  I wish him all the best... any of us can certainly attest to the fact that "human computer interaction" is certainly a key field and will only become more so as we continue to computerize everything we can.

Thank you, Jaanus, for all you did in your time at Skype.  You'll be missed.  Enjoy your summer off.. and best wishes with your new journey... we look forward to hearing about some new wacky UI some time in the future... :-)

As to Skype's blogs, a new face, "Villu", entered the picture.  A self-professed "PR-flack", we'll see how he does!  He's got some big shoes to fill...

As readers and listeners know, I've been very much looking forward to heading over to Stockhom, Sweden, for VON Europe 2007 and the co-located Podcamp Europe. Unfortunately, when my flight leaves this afternoon, I will not be on it.  I'm now not going.

Since about the middle of this past week, I've been experiencing some pains that made it extremely uncomfortable to sit or stand for long periods of time.  Oddly, walking is fine, but sitting or standing still starts to really hurt.  After spending literally the entire day Saturday in a medical center and then hospital, they think it might just come down to something like a severely pulled muscle... but they don't know and suggest watching it for the next couple of days.  It's strange because I can't recall doing anything that would cause a muscle tear.

The net of it, though, is that: a) spending 10-ish hours in airplanes getting over there is going to be very painful; and b) if anything gets worse, I don't really want to be going into a hospital in Sweden... (and then fighting with US health insurance about coverage!)

So very unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to miss out on this one... which is a severe disappointment!  I know that folks there will have fun... and I'm looking forward to hearing/reading about all the went on (including the Blue Box dinner tomorrow night).

In my queue of things to write about, I'd be meaning to comment on the fact that this year's Fall VON on October 29 - November 1 in Boston will also be the site of Digium / Asterisk World.   Jeff Pulver's team announced this back in March and it will have Mark Spencer and others from Digium involved.  I wasn't particularly surprised to hear this, given that Jeff Pulver has always had an interest in open source and that Digium has always had a large presence at VON exhibit halls.  (You would have to be blind to miss the giant orange booth with its many pods!)  Kudos to Digium and Pulvermedia for organizing a way to spotlight all the great stuff happening in open source telephony.  I'll look forward to seeing what goes on there.

NetworkWorld is running an article today that talks about the announcement from ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers) of the ARIN Board resolution calling upon ARIN to no longer be "neutral" in the IPv4 vs IPv6 space and instead work to actively encourage migration to IPv6.

For those not aware, ARIN is a non-profit organization that allocates IP addresses within North America and is one of the five Regional Internet Registries that allocate IP addresses on behalf of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). 

Think of it this way... let's say you start a business and want to get an Internet connection where you can run your own web server.  You need a public IP address, so you are going to contact an Internet Service Provider (ISP), set up service, get an address, etc., etc.  If you are in North America, the public IP address you are going to get will have been allocated to your ISP by ARIN.  ARIN, in turn, was given blocks of IP addresses to give out by IANA, who is ultimately responsible for all IP addresses.  So it looks something like this:

IANA -> ARIN (and the other RIRs) -> ISPs -> You

(and yes, where I said "ISPs", there may in fact be multiple levels of ISPs and other intermediary registries giving out addresses - I'm trying to make this simple, okay?)

Until now, ARIN and the other RIRs have generally been fairly neutral in the IPv4 versus IPv6 debate and have not shown a preference in allocation, but this announcement from ARIN shows the first signs of change.  It starts with this warning:

The available IPv4 resource pool has now been reduced to the point that ARIN is compelled to advise the Internet community that migration to IPv6 is necessary for any applications that require ongoing availability from ARIN of contiguous IP number resources.

And here is the key part of the Board resolution:

BE IT RESOLVED, that this Board of Trustees hereby advises the Internet community that migration to IPv6 numbering resources is necessary for any applications which require ongoing availability from ARIN of contiguous IP numbering resources; and,

BE IT ORDERED, that this Board of Trustees hereby directs ARIN staff to take any and all measures necessary to assure veracity of applications to ARIN for IPv4 numbering resources; and,

BE IT RESOLVED, that this Board of Trustees hereby requests the ARIN Advisory Council to consider Internet Numbering Resource Policy changes advisable to encourage migration to IPv6 numbering resources where possible.

The net of it is that we can expect that ARIN (and undoubtedly the other RIRs) will make it increasingly harder for ISPs to obtain IPv4 address blocks and will be scrutinizing requests... while it will be basically wide open for IPv6 allocation.

So how long do we have?

If you read Jeff Doyle's blog (an excellent one on IPv6 issues),  he believes that IANA will stop IPv4 allocations in late 2008 or early 2009.  Given that RIRs have existing pools of IPv4 addresses to allocate, IPv4 addresses may continue to be available through 2009 or 2010.

2009?  2010?

That's not that far out, when you think about it.  Given that we've been talking about IPv6 for now most of 20 years, the date does indeed seem to be looming.

The real question to me, though, is simply this - will anyone care?

Will anyone heed these and the other warnings and start the migration to IPv6?  Or will we just keep going along as we are until we hit the real bump in the road and it becomes a crisis?

Were I a betting man, my money would be on the "crisis" scenario.

Resources:

• My previous posts on IPv6
• Ars Technica: "Everything you need to know about IPv6"
• Jeff Doyle:
• "No Way to Slow Down"
• "The IPv6 Business Case"
• "Getting to the Next Generation"
• ARIN IPv6 Information Forum
• IPv6 Forum

Today Skype announced that you could now have up to 150 people in a public chat session. They had quietly rolled this out a bit ago, but I only noticed then because I monitor and participate in a couple of Skype public chats that focus on new releases/features of Skype and development issues.

There does, though, seem to be a continuing puzzle around discrepancies regarding the actual limits.  Ask any 4 people in a Skype public chat to type "/info" on the command line and relay the result... and you'll probably get four very different answers.  I just did that in one public chat (Update: it was the "Skype Developer community public chat") and, as shown in the graphic, showed a total of 201 people in a chat session... with the limit theoretically being 150!  Someone else in the chat did the same command and showed 122 people.  At various times in the past, we've done similar tests and found that there's a very wide range of numbers.

One has to wonder... is this something about the peer-to-peer "cloud" that makes up the Skype infrastructure?  Is this a convergence issue?  i.e. over time the numbers will converge to a common number as the p2p cloud updates?

Very strange.

Update: A contact at Skype indicates that this is a known bug where the count may not reflect people who have left the chat.