Intuitive Desktop Sharing Application Bringing in Over 5,000 Installs Daily
WebDialogs has been offering beta versions of its Unyte desktop sharing application for Skype for over six months. However, with the release of Skype 3.0, Unyte has become one of the top downloads from the Extras Gallery resulting in over 5,000 installations daily. Simply doing a download is not sufficient for Unyte to count as an installation; Unyte requires that a user not only download and install the program but also initiate at least one session with a remote participant. Key to Unyte's success:
Increased visibility and awareness through the Extras Gallery
A positive initial user experience in not only downloading and installing but also in using the product.
An intuitive user interface
While a session host needs to download and install the 1MB client, participants in a desktop sharing session simply need any web browser (IE 6 or 7, Firefox, Opera) in any OS (Windows Mac, Linux) to view the shared desktop.
The screen above shows Unyte coming from Phil's desktop to my Firefox 2 browser. Note that there is one level of magnification to all viewing at the native resolution of the shared desktop (with panning).
The free version of Unyte provides basic desktop sharing for one-to-one sessions; it allows the user to get experience with its ease-of-installation and -operation. However, a paid subscription brings many additional features including:
Joe Klein does voice overs for vlogs and podcasts. He sounds like God, if your God has a sense of humor. Business problem: he'd get a script, record it in his home studio in Laughlin, Nevada, ship off the mp3 and the invoice. Then clients would ask for a second take, for free, something Joe usually charges for. Joe, already into his next gig, would face irritated clients.
Skype was his solution. He'd bring the client right into his recording studio, piping his high end recording into Skype. The client would hear Joe's takes and, when they were satisfied, approve the reading on the spot. The sessions run a little longer but the clients are getting exactly what they expect, Joe doesn't spread one small fee over two or three studio sessions, and the clients are bringing repeat business. The clients get to be the session director, the person in the glass booth guiding Joe's inflection and interpretation. That sense of control, and the high fidelity, leave them very happy. And builds Joe's bottom line.
Skype released this video to the U.S. and Canadian press for editing into nightly news reports. It has (a) sound bites by a Skype executive (the new payment plan), (b) a finance counselor (saving money is a good thing), and (c) a user (staying in touch with family is good. especially when it doesn't cost you as much.)
I'm posting this less because it is newsworthy than the contrast in brand notes. On the one hand you have Don Albert emphasizing Skype's value added features, how it improves communication and is qualitatively different from phone calls. On the other hand, you have Skype's Unlimited Calling plan coming in at a disruptive 10% of comparable plans from AT&T, Verizon, Vonage et al. Which message comes through stronger? Savings.
Skype's biggest challenge? Getting people to understand this is $X per year, not per month. When you hear $40, you say "I'm paying about that now, what's new about that?" But I pay $40 monthly to AT&T long distance for flat rate service throughout the US (not sure about Canada). I may just pocket that.
Does adoption rise when people pay? The big win here is framing Skype as comparable to existing services, and a very low cost alternative. People are angry, scared, frustrated, and desperate over their communication bills. I don't have any teenagers at home and I spend about $60 on mobile, $80 for local and dsl; about $2200/year with long distance thrown in.
I'm sure the money will look very good come April's investor conference call, and will set a pattern for other regions.
I'd love to see Skype carve out discount programs for K-12 schools and teachers.
I interviewed Don Albert on Tuesday, 28 November 2006, over lunch at eBay’s cafeteria. Albert is Skype’s general manager for the United States and Canada, what Skype calls North America. This transcript is roughly edited. Jennifer Caukin, Skype’s North America public relations director sat in. – Phil Wolff
Skype Journal: With marketing more centralized in London and engineering in Tallinn, what’s here?
Don Albert: So Henry and the rest of the executive team thought it was really important to have a team on the ground. Because this market requires some special attention. Skype is not as well known or as well penetrated here as it is in Europe or Asia. We have a few marketing folks and a few business development folks here. I think our total team is probably ten or eleven people now. We have a couple of PR folks that you’ll be getting to know, and someone that does promotions within North America.
We’re also looking not so much at unique product for North America but at packaging, pricing, things like that, that might make sense for this market. I report to Henry and we have been working closely with the marketing functions over there and will continue to do so. We’re not totally self sufficient here; there aren’t enough of us to do everything.
Have you worked with Henry before?
A little bit.
Will the free SkypeOut continue in North America? Do you know yet?
We’re getting pretty close to finalizing that and we’ll probably be coming back to you in about two weeks.
How are you thinking about that decision?
The first thing is the program did everything that we wanted it to do. We saw a nice ramp up in new user acquisition in the U.S. and it stuck at the higher level, which was great. And we’ve seen a big surge in SkypeOut calling, so more people are trying SkypeOut, which is a good thing.
Jennifer Caukin: The calls on SkypeOut are beyond just North America; a lot them internationally too. Because people kind of adopt using it for their local and domestic calls going beyond as well.
Don Albert: Our revenue is back up above where it was pre-promotion, even though we’re giving away all the U.S. and Canada calls. So we have got so many more users now that our international revenue has more than made up for what we gave upon the U.S. and Canada revenue. We viewed the promotion as a marketing expense; obviously it required investment on our part, paying all the termination fees. And the amount of calling in the U.S. and Canada went up 10X so those fees, especially as we get bigger, can get fairly significant.
Our Canadians all want to know about SkypeIn. What is Skype doing to get SkypeIn in Canada?
The issues really are regulatory in nature. Chris Libertelli, working out of our Washington office, is the right guy to talk to about that.
Got a note from Stephan Beckert about TeleGeography Research Group’s TeleGeography 2007 : Global Telecommunications Traffic Statistics and Commentary report. The whole market for international traffic’s been growing…
We spent some time going through Skype’s subscribers and traffic flows, and compared them with “traditional” international traffic (that is, phone to phone traffic, whether it’s carried by switched carriers, or IP based carriers, like iBasis).
Skype’s numbers are huge–particularly for a company that was only founded in 2004. Interestingly, though, Skype’s growth has not yet had a quantifiable impact on switched volumes. Aggregate traffic from the many many carriers we surveyed has continued to grow, pretty well in line with historical trends.
Skypelights:
Skype traffic grew by 6.2 billion minutes in the last year. From 7.6 billion minutes in 2005 to 13.8 billion projected in 2006. 80% year over year.
Just in case that’s sounds like a lot…
Other VoIP traffic grew by 16.8 billion minutes to 42 billion minutes. These are the Vonages, cable and telco voip offerings.
Their growth was bigger than Skype’s total traffic. But wait, there’s more.
Swtiched telephony, grew 8% to 237 billion minutes. Switched growth was 18 billion minutes.
So even if Skype traffic is growing 10 times faster than switched service, picking up a few points of share, the Skype threat falls into telecom’s background noise. Skype’s revenue doesn’t even fall in telecom’s rounding errors.
What did growth cost? What did it take to sell 41 billion more minutes this year than last? Skype still has its dramatic advantage in marketing cost per minute served.
Where is Niklas’ vision of free Skype calls forcing telcos to slash prices? The market hasn’t reached a tipping point where customers fly to Skype. Yet.
Still, it’s amazing that one company, let alone a three year old company with 500 employees, is even showing up on the charts.
Back when I was working on a Master’s degree, one class I was in was
part of a trial with another nearby university. The course was being
jointly taught by two professors, one in each town. The room my class
was in was a small amphitheatre with a large screen usually obscured by
the overhead projector’s screen. The other university had a similar
setup. Occasionally, our lecturer would turn on the transmission and
we’d see the other professor, who would conduct the rest of the lecture
- or vice versa with our professor. This only happened a few times
during the semester, and the transmission was over a satellite link. It
was video-conferencing of a sort, but very expensive, if I recall.
This
was back around 1993-4. I know the room is still there, although I
don’t know if they still use the satellite link. The campus had access
to the "web" back then, which consisted only of email, ftp, gopher,
archie, newsgroups, etc., access. The full Internet was only a few months
away. Today, there is Wi-Fi across parts of the campus, accessible if
you have a student or alumni account. But video-conferencing is not
only a lot more accessible these days but far less expensive. Anyone
with an internet connection and a video-calling soft phone like Sightspeed can have a video conference.
In fact, several SMBs
(small and medium businesses) in the United States are using
video-calling functionality. A small teacher certification business in
Texas uses Sightspeed’s video-conferencing feature to communicate with
their students. The founder of a consulting firm also uses Sightspeed
to communicate with both clients and colleagues (in another office).
Yet another company uses Skype and the Festoon add-on, which bridges both video and voice calls between Skype and Google Talk.
VoIP itself can save a small business.
Video conferencing can save a business even more, coupled with the
ability to share clickable URLs, documents and desktop applications,
the need to travel even locally between offices can be reduced
significantly. This not only saves money but valuable time.
A quick clip just passed by on CNBC TV saying that Jim Balsillie, Chair
of RIM, makers of the addictive BlackBerry mobile communication devices
and cell phones (e.g., BlackBerry Pearl), has signed something or other about their intent to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Now, I'm not knocking the team, but WTF? RIM is head-quartered in
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, about 1.5 hours SouthWest of Toronto,
surrounded by Mennonite country (similar to the Amish culture).
Balsillie denied a few weeks ago that he was the frontrunner to buy the team.
Why
on earth would Balsillie buy a team in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Amish
country, right? Is there some connection here? (And why a hockey team?)
Well, according to
the Penguins website, he's an amateur hockey player. Maybe there's also
the fact that Sidney Crosby, a young Canadian player, recently joined
the team.
One assumes that since the Toronto Maple Leafs were
not for sale, Balsillie might have tried to create a team in Hamilton,
Ontario, a city of several hundred thousand that my hockey-loving
Canadian friends tell me having been dying to have a team. I mean,
Balsillie supposedly spent about Cdn$100M of his own money to build a
quantum physics research center (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) in Waterloo a few years ago. Surely Hamilton would have welcomed his money.
When I said yesterday that Microsoft and Nokia's coming "email push" communication devices were no threat, and that RIM will survive
and innovate again, this wasn't what I was thinking about. But good
luck anyway. If the NHL board of governors approves, Balsillie takes
over ownership from Mario Lemieux's Lemieux Group LP. On the other
hand, RIM might find new clients this way.
In spillover activity spurred on by the recent Hewlett-Packard "phonegate" scandal, Verizon is suing 20 data brokers
for fraudulent activity re pretexting. Pretexting is where someone
pretends to be someone else so that they can access their phone
records. Interestingly, the president and vice chair of Verizon is on
the HP board of directors. Verizon says it has spent $100,000
investigate the pretexting fraud.
In related news, Democrats in the US House of Representatives, controlled by the Republicans, stalled a bill
to make pretexting illegal. The activity is illegal in some states,
including California, where the alleged activities took place. As part
of an US House of Representatives probe into the pretexting scandal, five private investigators and at least two HP executives have been subpoenaed. HP is also under investigation in California.
Well, I didn't find it, exactly. After I posted my Single geek male seeks single toll-free number
article, Michael Steverson from SkyNET-tel.com posted a comment saying
that they can do what I was asking for right now: a single 800 VoIP
number. Do my eyes deceive me? Really?
The deal is US$9.99/month
for a Personal 800 Number. That has to be teamed with the One Cent
Plan, which is $4.99/mth. Calls are then $0.01/minute. While I haven't
been as much of chatty kathy lately, if I were to resume my old talk
habits of 800+ minutes per month, well that'd still only be 14.98 +
8.00 per month. My old toll-free number cost me about $35/mth, if I
remember correctly. So even if I used 1000 minutes per month, that'd
still be just under $25/month. There's also the unlimited plan of
$23.99/mth (first month free) or the unlimited business plan of
$39.99/m.
Coupled with a personal 800 number, that's not a bad
deal at all, if I can find a reasonable VoIP call-in number plan and
suitable area code, then I'm set. The 800 number requires a local
number, but if I can get a local area code with VoIP when I move to the
big city, then I'm good. (That might be a problem, as most popular VoIP
services do not cover the city I'm moving to, including SkyNET, from
what I can tell.) But the 800 toll-free number is apparently good for
36 international locations. People from all of these locations can call
the number as if it were local. Man, am I excited. I can finally enjoy vishing and annoying telemarketing calls from all over the world.
Sounds like a deal. Currently, most of my voice chat minutes are local. I've been taking advantage of Skype's
SkypeOut free calling promo in North America, to test quality and
generally freak friends and family out with my pc-to-phone calling. On
the other hand, I did say I was moving. I would still need a soft phone
Call-In number for the new locale. If I find one, basically for not
more than what I used to spend only a regional 800 number, I can get
pretty much what I was looking for: a single toll-free 800 number, not
counting a local number. (SkyNET will have their own soft phone in the
future. Just a suggestion, but guys/ gals, base it on SIP, so that it
can communicate with users on Gizmo Project, iPhox, and others.)
Incidentals:
There's a shipping charge of $25 for the free SkyBOX, which I assume is
a VoIP adapter for the broadband connection. They're charging sales
tax, even though it's the Internet. Maybe it has to do with where I am.
And there's a $19.99 activation fee. Okay, I'll stop being a
cheapskate. This still seems like a pretty good deal
I'm listening to
Roy Orbison, the man with the soothing golden voice, right now as I
write this. So maybe I'm a bit sentimental at the moment, but this
might just be the beginning of a beautiful VoIP relationship. Thanks,
Michael. The only things that worry me are (1) the secure HTTP server
certificate on their website has expired. So I hope they'll fix this
before I decide to commit to a serious relationship. And for those of
you that don't use credit cards, like myself, they accept payment by
Paypal. I'm not moving just yet, but when I do, I'm itching to try
this. Although if Skype ever gets real mobile support going, I'll have a grand time combining Skype and SkyNET.
VoIP News has a well-thought out post about Vonage,
complete with financials, estimates, and most interestingly the odds on
several scenarios occuring. These scenarios are pretty much in line
with what I've been saying about Vonage's future paths. Vonage is one
of the first (if not the first) VoIP provider to go public, and that
automatically raises their profile.
That means they are a threat to traditional telcos
from the telcos' perspective for many reasons. And for those countries
that regularly wiretap phone calls, VoIP is also a threat to
intelligence and law enforcement agencies. CALEA in the US stipulates that regular telecommunications has to have a backdoor for recording calls, even though experts question whether CALEA can be implemented for VoIP.
So
the question is why aren't other companies going through the same sort
of thing, if VoIP is such a threat? Well, just my opinion, but besides
Vonage being one of few publicly-traded VoIP providers (not hardware
manufacturers), I think it would be kind of obvious if every VoIP
provider was having problems. If there is in fact intentional financial
and technical sabotage, it has to be subtle and not widespread..
Should Web Traffic Be Prioritized? Matt Brunk at VoIP Loop considers the types of web-based traffic and makes an argument
for why certain types of traffic might need to be prioritized,
especially since media convergence is pushing a lot of public services
into IP-based access.
Telepresence Via Video VoIP Be Here
is offering their TotalView "VoIP Collaboration Phone" which gives a
full-room view for conference participants. TotalView was announced at
DEMOfall 2006 earlier this week. [via VoIPLoop]
Vonage: Charging To Cancel Accounts
Andy Abramson says Vonage charged him to cancel his account, but explains how he was able to keep his phone number (a form of phone number portability). The VoIP Girl also cancelled her Vonage account, as did Tom Keating,
who recorded his call to customer service. What is this? VoIP
bloggers-cancel-Vonage week? Current cancellations not withstanding,
Vonage still holds the most VoIP market share.
Rebtel Picks Up $20M In VC Rebtel Networks in Stockholm just picked up US$20M in Series A funding from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. [via Light Reading]
Skype And eBay Facing Civil Suit
Why a civil suit I don't know, but Skype
and eBay are facing one from a company called Mangosoft Intellectual
Property, a division of Mangosoft, regarding a supposed patent
infringement. [via The VoIP Weblog]
Smart Telecom Lays Off 180 People
While Comcast, the US cable company leading in the cable VoIP subscriber race, is planning to hire 4000 people,
UK's Smart Telecom just laid off 180 people last week. There are
another 70 jobs threatened. The company is taking a loan from a
co-founder and major shareholder to keep going, and needs more to
upgrade its broadband infrastructure. [via The Register UK]
WebDialogs has been offering beta versions of its Unyte desktop sharing application for Skype for over six months. However, with the release of Skype 3.0, Unyte has become one of the top downloads from the Extras Gallery resulting in over 5,000 installations daily. Simply doing a download is not sufficient for Unyte to count as an installation; Unyte requires that a user not only download and install the program but also initiate at least one session with a remote participant. Key to Unyte's success:
