Too Much Skype, Not Enough Product Planning

Too Much Skype, Not Enough Product Planning

Skype has launched a series of services that all seem to confuse, confound and basically befuddle.

First was Skype Unlimited--This means make all the Skype Out and Skype Forward calls you want from the USA to USA and Canada. Okay. This makes sense. One price flat rate calling. This makes your phone budget very predictable.

Then came Skype Pro--this adds unlimited calling and a bunch of bundled features, but it seems to be aimed at the NON-USA market first. It also seems to intrude on Skype Unlimited in some ways, but add some neat features at no cost. Bottom line is if have Pro you don't need Unlimited but if you have Unlimited you may still want Pro for some features.

Now there is Skype ToGo which requires Skype Pro. It looks like a clone of Mint Telecom except that it uses your Skype minutes. This is useful as a "minute stealing" defensive play. My guess is that Skype looked at Jajah and said, our customers are using that, so lets make up something simple that keeps things Skype. They also likely looked at MobiVox and saw some minutes being driven over that access gateway and said, we need to do more here.

What would have made sense would have been to just include Skype ToGO in Skype Pro and call it a day. For those who signed up for Skype Unlimited they should have been given Skype Pro for the balance of 2007. In 2008 they should be offered Skype Unlimited or Skype Unlimited Pro and that way they can decide which way ToGo.

End of the day, Skype keeps looking more and more like a phone company, albeit a 2.0 version. So where is the E911?

Trends the social use of handsets in India and China…

Emerging (Markets) Telephony

• listen

Tuesday June 5, 2007 8:57AM
by Imran Ali in News

Looks like Nokia’s heeding the research of staffer Jan Chipchase in their design of handsets for emerging markets.

Matt Web noted in his recent keynote at Reboot, that a new range of Nokia phones addresses the social use of handsets in India and China…

They’re for the emerging markets of India and China. There, the context of use of the mobile is the whole village.

• The phone tends to be shared by a family, so each one stores 5 distinct addressbooks
• There’s often one mobile per village, which is rented out. These home can have pre-set call time/cost limits, so make renting out easier. They come with a built in business model
• It turns out that after voice calls and texting, two major uses of a phone are as a clock, and as a torch. So there’s an external screen showing the time, and a torch built-in
• There’s a teaching mode
• And these phones are cheap. Like, 40 euros cheap

I’m impressed to see such a huge corporation building products in such a progressive way.

Well done Nokia :)

And finally eBay opens up, offers new APIs

Written by Om Malik
Monday, June 11, 2007 at 6:30 AM PT | No comments

You know Open Web (the trend formerly known as Web 2.0) has reached a point of maturity, when eBay, the auction giant decides to embrace it ethos. The company at the eBay Developer Conference in Boston announcedthat it has opened up its three core business units – eBay, PayPal and Skype to third party developers, hoping to catch some of the ‘open web’ magic. (This is something we had talked about earlier.)

EBay’s API offerings will give third party developers abilities to conduct searches, bids, alerts and a whole slew of other features from anywhere on the web. (Full list at the end of the post.)

The more interesting APIs however are coming from the PayPal group, which will enable mobile checkout. Similarly, Skype is going to be pushing something called Skype Extras, which are plug-ins written by independent third-party developers that let users expand Skype functionality and enrich their Skype conversations.

EBay’s moves, while welcome, show that the company is feeling the heat and losing ground to more “embrace-and-extend” services. As the web moves away from monolithic entities, eBay stands the risk of losing its core audience to social networks, blogs and other social media destinations.

The company’s decisions also indicate that it cannot be the solitary driver of innovation, and needs to tap into the web collective. EBay developers such as Unwired Buyer, Cooqy, and mpire are proof of what the developers can do for eBay.

eBay APIs announced today:

• eBay Shopping Web Services: a suite of faster, more responsive APIs that makes searching on eBay up to 16 times faster and allows developers to easily create buying applications
• eBay Bidding API: qualified developers can enable bidding on eBay from anywhere
• eBay Client Alerts: lightweight, near real-time alerts about platform activity
• New JavaScript and Flash Developer Centers: making it easier for JavaScript and Flash developers to access the eBay Web Services platform
• New Production Call Plan: access to API calls in the production environment raised from 10,000 per month to 150,000 per month, allowing new developers to rapidly scale up their applications.
• PayPal introduced a new suite of APIs, including Mobile Checkout, which allows developers to integrate any mobile website with the PayPal checkout process.
• PayPal introduced a new Name-Value Pair API that allows developers to integrate PayPal more easily and quickly into Web sites and applications, enhancing online commerce experiences and making PayPal more accessible to Web users everywhere.
• Skype Extras: are plug-ins written by independent third-party developers that let users expand Skype functionality and enrich their Skype conversations.
• Shopping.com announced plans for a re-architected API that will be available in Q3 2007, which will have a new easy-to-use interface, detailed documentation, and tools for faster implementations.