January 20th, 2007
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Business Week's Olga Kharif blogged Skype's prices are creeping up in reference to the coming Skype Pro pricing plans. What is your breakeven point on the new plans?
Skype says the plans will be around two euro a month. That puts it about $31 for 12 months, a touch more than the US+Canada Unlimited Calling Plan. At the global SkypeOut rate of 2 cents a minute (1.7 eurocents), Skype Pro pays if you're SkypingOut [SkypeOuting? or is SkypeOuting admitting to your friends and family that you use Skype and are proud of it?] for 1553 minutes per year, 129 per month (about two hours), or average 4.3 SkypeOut minutes per day.
Maybe you don't SkypeOut four minutes a day. With a free plan, would you switch from landlines or mobile to Skype for a few calls a week?
How about that long call? That two hour, long-distance but in-country call to your true love ("You hang up." "No, you hang up." "I'm still here." "Hang up, honey." "No, you hang up, dear." "I love you so much.")? To your family? Infinite call waiting with your local phone company's customer service line?
Skype in the workplace may be the big winner. Fixed per-capita rates fit nicely into annual budgets, so Skype Pro is more convenient to buy than wading through phone bills for each office each month. Customer-facing jobs (eBay sellers? Call centers?) can be on the phone for 20 to 30 hours a week, paying off 52 weeks of Skype Pro service in the first 2 weeks.
Written by Skype Journal on January 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Another Friday, another Talking Tech podcast featuring yours truly and my trusty sidekick, Kevin Restivo. In the wake of CES, it was a fairly quiet week but there was lots of buzz in the online video market with the official launch of Joost, Netflix getting into the movie and TV download business, and Brightcove raising $59.5-million. Both Kevin and I are impressed with Joost, which we think will be a success as long it can get content owners onboard. I also think Joost will be another entrepreneurial success for Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friss, who appear to have the Midas Touch in the wake of Skype’s sale to eBay.
In Canada, the big tech news of the week was Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s admission that its Talvest mutual trust subsidiary had lost a backup file that contained the personal data of 470,000 investors. Of course, this pales in comparison to TJX Inc. having its network hacked and as many as 40 million credit card numbers exposed.
We wrap up the podcast with a look at a week in the life of telecom entrepreneur Terry Matthews, who saw one of its investments, Ubiquity Software, acquired by Avaya for $144-million, while another, March Networks, had its stock drop 40% after revealing that one of its large customers (Wal-Mart) is buying less of its digital surveillance technology.
Technorati Tags: Wal-Mart, Terry Matthews, Video
Written by Mark Evans on January 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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As Ed Zander outlined his vision of a mobile world at CES recently, he of course avoided to talk about some of the harder trends the industry will face this year — the rapid decline in the average cell phone prices due to both global competition and consumers in emerging markets like India and China favoring cheap phones. Today that caught up with the company, which reported that its fourth-quarter profit fell 48 percent and the company will cut 3,500 jobs, as it looks to improve operating costs.
Motorola’s handset business’ profit margins declined to 4.4% in the fourth quarter of 2006 versus 12% in the third quarter of 2006 — “That’s well shy of Zander’s aim of 13 percent to 15 percent, a goal he has failed to meet since taking over in 2004,” reports Bloomberg. Zander clearly is willing to sacrifice margins for market share. According to their earnings release, Motorola’s share of global handset market is now at 22.2 percent, up 4.3 percentage points versus 2005.
But cheap phones are not the only reason Motorola finds itself in a tough spot. A couple of days ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was talking about how you can buy Motorola Q for $99. Ouch - wasn’t that supposed to be their big Blackberry killer and a profit machine? The company has been milking the RAZR design for a while, and hasn’t really come out with phones that can be labeled “smash hits.” Samsung, LG, Sharp and even Nokia have caught up with Motorola when it comes to “thin” phones.
Lazard Capital Markets analyst Christin Armacost, Director and Telecommunications Analyst has an equally gloomy outlook: “In our opinion, Motorola has a lot on its plate and is in one of its more challenging periods in recent memory, as we believe the competitive dynamics will weigh more on the company’s financial structure than will internal costs and processes that the company can control.”
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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While many companies deliberate about whether to blog or not to blog, 75-year-old Bill Marriott (the CEO of Marriott International) has started to write a personal blog. (Hat tip to Tony Jung, who put me on to a Washington Post story). Marriott hasn’t completed embraced blogging - he dictates his posts into a tape recorder and his first post was an unblog-like 700 words - but give him some major kudos for venturing into the blogosphere - something far too many CEOs have been reluctant, afraid or unwilling to do.
Technorati Tags: Bill Marriott, Bill Marriott, Blogs
Written by Mark Evans on January 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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