GigaOM » voice

What K-O’ed Skype Last Week

Om Malik — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:14:49 +0000

Skype, the Internet telephony service went on the blink last week, stranding millions who use it for their communication needs. It took more than a day for the service to be restored. In conversation, CEO Tony Bates told me that the problem might lie with some errant Windows Clients. Well, make that many errant Windows clients! Today Skype’s Chief Information Officer, Lars Rabbe offers more details in a blog post.

In a nutshell, Skype says it was bug in a Windows Client software which lead to overloading of certain super nodes, which crashed and thus caused a chain reaction of problems.

On Wednesday, December 22, a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overloaded. As a result of this overload, some Skype clients received delayed responses from the overloaded servers. Because of a bug identified in a version of the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152), the delayed responses from the overloaded servers were not properly processed, causing Windows clients running the affected version to crash.

Around 50 percent of all Skype users globally were running the 5.0.0.152 version of Skype for Windows, and the crashes caused approximately 40 percent of those clients to fail. These clients included 25–30 percent of the publicly available supernodes, also failed as a result of this problem.

I wonder if some of these problems were brought on by recently introduced aggressive “forced updates” which have not gone down well with some users. Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor offered up the theory that buggy software that was pushed on to Windows users was to blame.

If you had the latest Skype for Windows (version 5.0.0.156), older versions of Skype Windows (4.0 versions), Skype for Mac, Skype for iPhone, Skype on your TV, and Skype Connect or Skype Manager for enterprises, you were not initially affected by this problem. However, with nearly a quarter of Skype’s super nodes going down, it quickly became a network-wide problem.

A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients and establishing connections between them by creating local clusters of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode.

Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the P2P network again. As a result, the P2P network was left with 25–30 percent fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes. A significant proportion of users were also restarting crashed Windows clients at this time. This massively increased the load as they reconnected to the peer-to-peer cloud.

In order to deal with the problem, Skype essentially introduced “thousands of instances” of the Skype software into its P2P network and created temporary supernodes. The biggest lessons learned from this, Rabbe writes:

More investments in their infrastructure so that the system becomes and stays reliable.
More rigorous testing procedures that don’t let buggy software out into the market.This is not the first time Skype systems came under pressure because of faulty bugs. In August 2007, Skype had software problems as well, which in turn caused a flood of log-in requests and crashed the network.

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Skype CEO Tony Bates: Here Is an Update

Om Malik — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:41:30 +0000

Tony Bates, the former Cisco Systems executive, has had better days. For the past 24 hours, he has been coordinating the efforts to bring one of the world’s largest communication networks back up: Skype. Bates, who recently took over as Skype’s CEO, spoke to me about the service’s downtime and gave me a status report.

16.5 million of 25 million concurrent users are back online, even though you might be seeing a lower number in your desktop client.
Users in Europe and on the U.S. East Coast are fully restored.
The IM, video and audio services are back up.
The Group Video services and offline IM capabilities are not going to be working for some time, mostly because Skype is using those servers as supernodes.
The company will issue an update later today.

“We are bringing up the service in a controlled manner and things are moving in the right direction,” said Bates. “This outage, if anything, has made it even more clear how reliant people are on the service. It is amazing to see how many people are using it.”

Bates, who said he is going to take many lessons from this outage, added: “I am sorry it happened, and we are going to be issuing formal compensation to people.” (Details to follow.)

Bates said the implementation of the new supernodes isn’t going to have a material cost for the company. “We have a fair idea as to what happened, but we are going to do a full postmortem,” said Bates. A handful of Windows clients failed and set off a chain reaction that brought down Skype. ”One of the biggest lessons from this is how we do communications in the future,” he said.

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State of Skype: 23 Hours Later

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:47:32 +0000

Skype failed yesterday, and this morning, almost 24 hours after people first started complaining about not being able to log on, the VoIP provider disclosed that more than 10 million people were back online. Though Skype has over half-a-billion members, it recently said that at any given time, about 25 million people are concurrently connected to the network.

We’re checking with Skype for more details, but for those wondering what went wrong here, Dan York, the director of conversations at Voxeo, has some coherent analysis here. Essentially, he explains Skype’s supernode architecture, whereby Skype user’s computers connect to these supernodes running Skype’s software, and said that a problem could have knocked a lot of them offline, which shrinks the pool of resources on which Skype can run. He explains further:

My guess would be that there might also have been “cascading failures” in this scenario. If there was, say, a software update affecting some supernodes, as those supernodes dropped offline, the increased load of Skype clients trying to connect to online supernodes might have caused some of them to then drop offline. Or when a supernode came back online, it may have been overwhelmed by the quantity of connection requests and soon failed again. As I said, that’s purely a guess… but you could see those kind of failures happening in a situation like this.

The only thing most of us care about is: When will we be back online? Skype doesn’t know, but many of the GigaOM staff are back up, and reports of more Skype connections coming online are popping up on Twitter. We’ve reached out to Skype and will update the story when we hear back. The company says it will be releasing status updates shortly.

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Skype Goes Down. Millions Impacted. Skype responds

Om Malik — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:37:15 +0000

Updated with response from Skype: If you are one of Skype’s many users who use the service to make a living or to talk to your remote users, then you may be straight out of luck. The service this morning is down and the outage is affecting millions of users. So far there is no word from Skype or no comment on their blog as such. On Twitter, Skype posted: “Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations.”

Sorry, not good enough! Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web. According to a recent study, Skype accounts for about 0.57 percent of all Internet traffic. It has become a major telephony provider. For the first six months of 2010, Skype had 6.4 mbillion billing minutes versus 10.7 billion minutes during entire 2009. Skype logged 88.4 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes during first six months of 2010, versus 113 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes in 2009. Clearly, it is already a hit with consumers, and over past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world. I am not sure we can comprehend the productivity cost of this outage.

Here is a visual interpretation of the Skype outage and its impact, via Phil Wolff at Skype Journal. He points out that in terms of impact this is a much bigger outage than Skype outage in 2007.

In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology shouldn’t see an outage. But that is not really the case – the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. It is not clear why the current outage happened, but it is something that makes me pause. (Updated: Skype responded. See their response at the bottom of this post.)

The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business. If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage. I think Skype is at a critical point in its life – its investors are trying to shepherd the company towards the big corporate customers. The hiring of new CEO Tony Bates from Cisco Systems is only firms my belief that Skype is slowly starting to ignore its core and passionate user base who are happy to spend money on its products – consumers and small businesses.

More importantly, Skype is facing increasing competition from new services, many of them having shown that they can keep pace with the Internet telephony behemoth. It is not six years ago when Skype had an advantage of riding on the back of the file-sharing service Kazaa to attract new users. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, word of mouth has taken on a whole new meaning. The recent launch and fast growth of Viber, a no name free VoIP company, shows that Skype can’t rest on its laurels.

More importantly – it needs to ensure that it is doesn’t go down. Even for a few minutes.

Skype just responded

Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.

Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.

What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.

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Hello fring, This Is Android & Money Calling

Om Malik — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 20:15:59 +0000

First, Skype and Nimbuzz reported how well they are doing. Then there was the spectacular launch of Viber. And now fring is telling us that they are seeing their quarterly revenues grow at a rapid clip, thanks to the growing popularity of its Android app which is boosting demand for its fringOut service. It seems mobile VoIP is finally seeing its day under the sun.

“We have been bringing in $10,000 in daily revenues from Android phones,” says Jake Levant, vice president of marketing at London/Tel-Aviv-based fring, which makes a multi-platform app for video and voice calling over Wi-Fi and 3G networks. The company has seen a big burst in growth thanks to the expanding Android ecosystem. “We are on track to doubling our revenues in the first quarter of 2011,” Levant added. The company makes money by offering cheap calling plans, called fringOut, for folks who want to reach contacts outside of the fring network.

What’s helped: more incorporation of front facing cameras in new smartphones, which makes fring’s cross-platform video calling service possible. In addition to the iPhone, the HTC EVO and Samsung’s popular Galaxy phones and tablets have front facing cameras, for example. The availability of video calling makes folks install fring and later use it for outbound phone calls.

Even though fring started life on Nokia’s Symbian platform, its recent growth has come thanks to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-based smartphones. At present, Android accounts for a third of its total installed base and is growing at a rapid clip, especially in countries like South Korea. North America accounts for 40 percent of fring’s new downloads, making it one of the fastest growing regions for the company. The company says it has more than ten million users who have activated the service and the majority of its calls are destined for Canada, India, the UK and Australia.

The company is still waiting clearance from Apple to launch its fringOut service on the iPhone, however, so the majority of the fringOut revenues coming from North America are from Android phones. But the Android ecosystem has its own headaches with wild variances in device capabilities, different versions of Android available and customized user interfaces. As a result, fring has to modify its app for different handsets and different manufacturers. Nevertheless, that’s fine with Levant because Android is what is turbo-charging its business.

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By The Numbers: How The Workforce Is Changing

Om Malik — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:00:32 +0000

In a post earlier this week, I wrote about work being the killer app of the Internet, arguing that the workplace of tomorrow is not going to be bound by space and time alone, because connected-ness brings ability to build distributed workforces. In order to better understand this, Incite conduced an online study on behalf of GigaOM Pro and Skype. One of findings of the study: nearly two-thirds (62%) of companies surveyed had remote workers and over a third (34 percent) of those remote workers worked away from office – at client, customer or partner premises; at home or in public spaces. Clearly, we are in what Citrix Online President Brett Caine calls, a workshift.

The survey reached out to 1,000 technology empowered workers – 500 end users and 500 decision makers at businesses that ranged from small businesses to large corporations. As part of our Net:Work Conference coverage, we are sharing findings from the report:

The companies are adjusting to this new work reality.

More than half, at 57 percent, of firms allow flexible working hours, that fit with employees’ lives, rather than “standard office hours.”
Most employees, at 80 percent, appreciate flexible working as a means of balancing their lives.
Of those employees 65 percent feel a flexible working policy would be important to a future
change of job.

The change in the workforce is bringing in new tools and processes to the work place, continuing the consumerisation of the enterprise IT.

In two-thirds of organizations, workers can bring their own personal technology into the workplace.
41 percent can bring and use their own tools independently (without permission from their IT departments.)

This explains why the iPad has been such a major hit in the enterprise, much like tools like Google’s Mail and Apps. The survey revels that video and VoIP are going to be big applications going forward. It makes sense – we at GigaOM are constantly using Skype Video, Google Talk Video and Apple’s Facetime. Some interesting stats about workers who use video for work:

More than two-thirds at 68 percent experience richer and more productive communication with colleagues, clients and suppliers.
Most of those at 65 percent, say they collaborate better.
The majority also say they save time at 62 percent and money, at 56 percent.
Almost seven in ten at 69 percent want video to be available on a range of devices and locations not just fixed systems.

The change in the work patterns, however, has a detrimental impact as well.

A significant number of people at 42 percent agree the workplace is suffering from information overload.
While 35 percent of people blame email for this overload.

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Why Is Skype Moving to the Web? Hiring Binge Explained

Om Malik — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:43:39 +0000

Skype is hiring a whole lot of engineers. Many of them will work on the company’s mobile applications, as we reported earlier this week, and many will work on cloud-based implementations of Skype that would include working with third parties such as LinkedIn. This hiring binge is part of Skype’s big expansion in Silicon Valley, something I wrote about in July 2010.

The company has leased 90,000 square feet of office space in the Stanford Research Park at 3210 Porter Drive in Palo Alto, with Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s media platform chief, heading company’s operations in Silicon Valley. A Skype spokeswoman recently told me:

We’ve gone from just a few engineers here this time last year to nearly 80 engineers, and they are coming from all over, including from the big name Valley companies too. Times are tough with the talent wars, but we’re determined, and we’re only just at the beginning with plans to significantly scale up our engineer workforce in Silicon Valley. And, while the perk of a 10 percent raise or spot bonus sounds good, it’s also about getting a great opportunity on the ground floor, working on really cool stuff that can make a huge impact.

The hiring binge is mostly because of two distinct reasons:

Skype for Business. Skype is trying to compete with Microsoft’s Lync: a set of technologies that allow you to communicate, collaborate and socialize with others, especially in business environments.

Skype hasn’t been shy about its own business ambitions, and in previous interviews, had indicated it’s going down this line, where it would become the hub for such collaboration.

Skype understands today’s work goes beyond just desktops, which is why it needs to support browsers along with mobile platforms. Andy Abramson, a well-known VoIP blogger, points out he has gotten similar indications from Dr. Jonathan Rosenberg (Father of SIP) and Skype’s GM for Skype for Business David Gurle (ex-Microsoft), two respected names in the voice-over-Internet community.

Skype for Business has the potential to transform the enterprise telephony landscape, especially if Skype doesn’t fall prey to old thinking. It would need to think beyond PBX to have a lasting impact. Sure, some of the traditional companies are going to ignore Skype – they will any way – but it would be a good way for Skype to grow-up with the customer base which has made them so successful: little businesses of today.

Thousands of startups that use them for communication will be more open to Skype’s presence and IM services, video services, its collaboration platform and possible scheduling features. Folks at Facebook recently showed us how to re-invent the email inbox by transforming the tool (the email inbox) to fit the user behavior. I hope Skype does precisely that.

Skype as a Platform for growth. Taking a page from Netflix platform strategy, Skype is looking to transform itself into a platform. In a conversation before he left the company, former CEO Josh Silverman told me the main reason why Skype was expanding in Silicon Valley: It saw an opportunity to expand its footprint, in other devices and consumer electronics, for example. “There is a huge demand for us to build Skype into other people’s experiences,” Silverman said.

Just like Netflix, Skype needs to embed itself in many places for people to start using its dialtone to make calls to non-Skype numbers and thus bring in the dollars. This is an area where the company is looking at an uphill climb.

Graphic by Phil Wolff via Flickr.

Phil Wolff, in a recent blog post over on Skype Journal raised some potential questions about Skype’s growth when Skype announced that 25 million users connected to the Skype network on a recent Monday. Wolff pointed out it took seven months for the service to show 9.1 percent gain in daily online users.

In other words, it’s likely Skype is hitting a ceiling of usage of sorts, mostly because it’s now competing with many different communication-centric Internet services like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps in order to overcome these issues, Skype needs to go partner up with different web players – like LinkedIn and Facebook (already in place) — to find new growth opportunities.

So perhaps now you know why Skype is on a hiring binge.

Virtual Office Pro: Complete Cloud Communications

Charles Hamilton — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:00:35 +0000

Virtual Office Pro 2.0, from the telecommunications company 8×8, is a web-based suite of communications and collaboration services. The suite, known as VO Pro, includes phone, fax, web conferencing, call recording and chat.

VO Pro’s Flash-based web interface allows direct sending and receiving of calls through a softphone, as well as access to functions that are standard with many VoIP systems, such as call forwarding and three-way calling. Users can also record and archive calls, and can see live video of callers and co-workers. 8×8 has jumped on the social media bandwagon, too: and users can post status messages to Twitter and Facebook directly from the VO Pro dashboard. In addition, the service includes unlimited sending and receiving of faxes.

The core functions of the suite are available on the road through VO Pro’s mobile application for iOS.

VO Pro’s interface and feature set is similar to Ribbit Mobile‘s, although VO Pro feels more like a finished product than Ribbit’s did when I tried it a few months back.

8×8 Virtual Office Pro 2.0 is available as part of several plans, including an “unlimited” plan for a price of $49.99 per extension per month, plus a $40 setup fee. It is possible to port existing telephone numbers to the service.

If you’ve tried Virtual Office Pro, share your comments below.

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On Broadband, VoIP Finds Its Voice

Om Malik — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:30:18 +0000

I distinctly remember the days when VoIP was nothing but a curiosity — a choppy and quixotic experience at best, when our fastest consumer Internet was a 128 kbps ISDN connection. It was back when Verizon ( s VZ) was called Bell Atlantic.

We’ve come along way from those early days. Today, one in five broadband lines has a VoIP service attached to it, according to industry analyst Point Topic, which estimates nearly 22 percent of consumer broadband lines have a VoIP service. That’s about 112 million lines at the half-way mark in 2010 — and no, this doesn’t include folks like Skype.

Click to enlarge the image

One of the biggest VoIP markets is France, where bitter competition between upstarts like Xavier Niel’s Free and France Telecom has made low-cost VoIP service a standard part of a broadband package. Nearly 70 percent of French households have VoIP. The U.S. is the largest market by sheer numbers, thanks to cable companies selling VoIP as part of their bundled subscriptions; while in China, only one in 20 broadband connections has VoIP.

As much as wired VoIP services have grown, however, the fact remains that VoIP’s future is on mobile. The massive growth of Skype, the explosion in the number of Nimbuzz users and the growing popularity of other services is a sign that with the rise of the smartphones, VoIP has a new growth engine. According to In-Stat research, there will be 288 million VoIP users by 2013. Mobile has to pay a role in that, especially as we enter the era of 3.5 and 4G wireless broadband. It all makes you wonder: What is the future of the traditional landline?

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Skype Boots Nimbuzz, Tightens Grip On Ecosystem

Om Malik — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:00:06 +0000

Success, they say, comes at a price. Nimbuzz, the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based mobile VoIP startup which only recently crossed 150 million downloads and 30 million registered users, is breaking up with the big daddy of Internet telephony, Skype.

Until recently, Nimbuzz made it possible for Skype subscribers to exchange instant messages and make Skye-to-Skype calls via its mobile clients. But as the size of the company has grown, it has become more of a threat to Skype by the day. The Nimbuzz client is a meta-communication that allows you to use VoIP and IM services with pretty much all major networks including Facebook, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, Twitter, Google Talk and MySpace.

The shut down of Skype services will come on October 31, 2010. “Skype’s decision is unfair to its own and our users,” Nimbuzz CEO Evert Jaap Lugt said in a written statement. Nimbuzz claims that this shutdown is part of Skype cutting off access to all third-party VoIP services ahead of its IPO, but that is not the case, a Skype spokeswoman told us:

We believed that Nimbuzz’s application was in violation of Skype’s API Terms of Use and End User License Agreement (EULA). Skype offered to meet with Nimbuzz and discuss the issue; however, we have not heard back from them since our last correspondence with them in early August. Like any company that has APIs or an SDK, Skype has certain rules that guide the development of apps using those tools. Such rules help protect the Skype brand and our end user experience.

While it is clear that Nimbuzz and Skype have their own set of issues, a statement from Skype indicates that the company is cracking down on the use of Skype API/SDK on mobile handsets. When asked if Skype was preventing access by makers of mobile apps, a Skype spokeswoman sent the following response:

Currently, our APIs and SDK are designed for third-party hardware and desktop software application development. Distribution of a third-party Skype developer application through a mobile phone network operator or mobile handset manufacturer is only permitted with the prior written consent of Skype. Because of the way our software works and the differences between the mobile and PC ecosystems, we have these rules in place to protect the Skype brand and Skype user experience. To ensure this, we only work with mobile developers, operators, and handset manufacturers committed to delivering the best Skype user experience, as we’ve shown with 3, Nokia, Verizon and most recently KDDI.

Lucrative deals with phone companies like 3, Verizon Wireless and KDDI are making it clear where Skype sees its future revenues. Similarly, Skype has found major success with its apps on the iPhone, making it a good source of revenues in the future. And the company is clearly willing to do what it takes to protect both of those markets.

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After Verizon, Skype Friends Japan’s KDDI

Om Malik — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:53:29 +0000

If its deal with Verizon Wireless was merely an indication of Luxembourg-based Skype’s true intentions to closely partner with large cellular providers and find future growth, then today that became clear-as-a-day. The company announced that it is signing up KDDI, a Japanese phone company, which will integrate Skype into some of its handsets.

As part of the deal, Skype will run on KDDI’s two Android-powered smartphones –”IS03″ and “IS01″ — and will later be integrated into devices (most feature phones) running Qualcomm’s Brew OS in 2011. The first handsets will come to market in November.

Skype released a version of its client for Android recently. The Skype app (on all KDDI handsets it will support) will run in the background and make it easy to receive instant messages all the time. Skype-to-Skype calls will be free, and Skype will charge for SkypeOut calls, which are going to go over the KDDI voice network.

Skype has been working on a “Skype Everywhere” strategy. It wants to be on more devices and wants to make it easy for folks to call each other using Skype, and when they need to reach a non-Skype number, the consumers end up using its SkypeOut service. Skype depends on SkypeOut, and needs to keep growing this revenue source if it wants to have a successful initial public offering.

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New Skype Friends Facebook on Windows Machines

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:05:54 +0000

Skype today released a new version of its software for Windows operating systems. The new Version 5 of the popular communications and Internet telephony software is inherently more social, thanks to very tight integration with Facebook. There are no details as to when these features will be made available for Skype on a Mac or on its mobile client.

Rumors of a tighter integration between Skype and Facebook, two companies that share Marc Andreessen as a board member, emerged in September, prompting me to argue that perhaps it was time Facebook snapped up Skype all together.

That will, of course, have to wait for a bit. In the interim, let’s focus on the software. The new release makes a big push on group video calling features, even though those features are still in beta. Skype users typically spend 520 million minutes every day when talking to others on Skype. Of that total, according to Skype, nearly 40 percent of all Skype-to-Skype minutes were video calls.

Skype now integrates the Facebook News Feed and Facebook Phonebook. That means you can interact with Facebook from your Skype client. You can post status updates, comment from within Skype, and call your Facebook friends’ mobiles and landlines directly from the Skype Windows Client. And if your Facebook friends are on Skype, then calls are free.

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Nimbuzz Shows Mobile VoIP Is Rocking

Om Malik — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:04:39 +0000

Nimbuzz, the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based mobile VoIP start-up, says that different variants of its mobile app have crossed 150 million downloads. The service has over 30 million users.

This data from Nimbuzz, and the spectacular growth of Skype, are signposts of how mobile Internet telephony is becoming pervasive. Even relative upstarts are finding growth, mostly as folks look to find ways to talk on the cheap, or preferably for free. According to Juniper Research, there will be 100 million mobile VoIP users by 2012 and 471 billion mobile VoIP minutes by 2015.

As the number of users on the network increases, we’ll see an exponential growth in the network usage, in this case, the total amount of time spent talking. The company says the total number of minutes on its network is growing 50 percent month over month, with big growth coming from the Middle East, the U.S., India and Brazil. Nimbuzz users have talked for 3.65 billion mobile voice minutes since the app downloads began in May 2008.

While it has been a big winner on the iPhone, the Nimbuzz app has been downloaded 5 million times since it hit the Ovi store in September 2009. GetJar, a third-party app store, has provided 45 million downloads for the service.

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Ex-Skype CEO Josh Silverman Joins Greylock as EIR

Om Malik — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 22:18:02 +0000

Josh Silverman, who until recently was the CEO of Skype, is joining venture firm Greylock Partners as an executive-in-residence. At Skype, Silverman was recently replaced by Cisco executive Tony Bates, just ahead of the Internet telephony company’s initial public offering.

Silverman, who in the past was CEO and co-founder of Evite, is going to work with Greylock and look at future opportunities. Silverman ended up at Skype after spending a long stretch of time at eBay’s Shopping.com and is widely viewed as bringing in stability to Skype after a tumultuous phase that followed the exit of the two Skype co-founders.

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UMA Comes To T-Mobile Androids… Almost!

Om Malik — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:00:45 +0000

It seems T-Mobile USA isn’t backing away from Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA). I questioned company’s commitment to this technology, which gives them a unique leg-up over their rivals in terms of network coverage. In mid-September, a spokesman categorically told me that the company didn’t have any plans for UMA on Android.

Fast forward to today, and the company says it’s going to launch UMA-based Wi-Fi calling on Android smartphones. This will be made possible via an app that was released by T-Mobile’s UMA vendor, Kineto Wireless last month. I say almost, though, for two reasons: It’s not available on all Android handsets, and it doesn’t support in-call switching

It’s not very clear which Android devices will support the calling, apart from the new T-Mobile myTouch and Motorola DEFY. (I’m waiting to hear back from T-Mobile PR.) From what I understand, the Smart WiFi App from Kineto cannot be downloaded from the marketplace, mostly because it only works on specific versions of Android.

The Android app-based UMA offering is very different from the UMA offering on BlackBerry devices or the Nokia E73. The BlackBerry devices have system-level integration, where the device automatically switches to and off the Wi-Fi network in the background. That seamless switching is one of the main reasons why T-Mobile sees 40 million calls over Wi-Fi every month.

The new app-based UMA has one advantage: It will go easy on the device battery. The chip-level integration often meant that the phones would ping-pong between Wi-Fi and regular cellular networks, causing the phone battery to drain faster than normal.

This is latest from TMobile PR:

Wi-Fi Calling for Android is built upon the same technology as UMA, but is a different implementation from our past offerings. While T-Mobile’s current Wi-Fi Calling solution which operates on BlackBerry smartphones, for instance, seamlessly hands off calls from T-Mobile’s network to Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi Calling for Android does not.

A pre-installed application from T-Mobile will allow customers to make and receive voice calls and SMS over an accessible Wi-Fi connection. This provides customers with better in-door coverage and in some cases may provide the ability to make voice calls in locations where they weren’t able to do so previously.

For consumers, Wi-Fi Calling for Android increases coverage and uses voice minutes. [NOTE: calls originate on Wi-Fi, but are carried across T-Mobile’s network once beyond the initial Wi-Fi connection.] T-Mobile also has plans for business which can help defer wireless minutes and provide cost savings.

Wi-Fi Calling will be available on the new T-Mobile myTouch, Motorola DEFY and others Android phones in the coming weeks. We are planning to expand Wi-Fi Calling for Android to as broad a selection of Android devices in our line-up as possible. Éclair (2.0/2.1) and Froyo (2.2) are the Android OS versions that currently support it.

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Skype Expands to Most Android Phones, Wi-Fi Only in U.S.

Ryan Kim — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:53:14 +0000

Skype has expanded availability of its Internet calling service to most Android phones, though U.S. users will be forced to make calls over Wi-Fi. Skype said today that a new client for Android phones running 2.1 or higher is now available for download in Android Market or at skype.com.

In most countries — with China and Japan notable exceptions — Skype will enable free Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G and Wi-Fi. You can make cheap calls to non-Skype users with Skype Credits and call people through your contacts list on your phone.

Skype said the service may work on earlier versions of Android, but there are no guarantees. Skype is also working on addressing issues with Galaxy S phones. The news comes a day after Skype announced that Cisco executive Tony Bates is taking over as CEO of Skype.

The expansion of Skype on Android will be welcome news for many Android users. Skype first appeared on Android phones (and others) from Verizon phones in March, but was limited to 3G calls. It was also only on Verizon, and hasn’t been available on Android phones from other U.S. carriers. Initially, my colleague Om Malik feared the Verizon deal was engineered by the carrier to combat the iPhone and would prevent other carriers from getting Skype for a couple of years. It’s nice to see that other Android users will be able to use the app, even if it’s only via Wi-Fi here in the U.S..

The iPhone has had Skype over Wi-Fi since last year, and earlier this year, 3G calling was enabled. It’s unclear why we’re still saddled with Wi-Fi restrictions here in the U.S. with Android phones. When 3G calling functionality was enabled on the iPhone, Skype said it was a result of the operators’ move to tiered pricing. We might have to wait until all carriers move to that model in the U.S. before we get Skype calls over 3G on Android devices.

While Skype on Android is good news for sure, I’m still waiting for the day Skype adds mobile video calling. The recent success of Tango suggests that video calling from Skype would be a hugely popular feature if the company made the obvious move to enable it.

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