The Jeff Pulver Blog: Skype co-founder Shared Product Roadmap @ VON Canada 2004

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May 22, 2004

Skype co-founder Shared Product Roadmap @ VON Canada 2004

It was great having Nikolas Zennström with us at VON Canada 2004.

I enjoyed the time spent with Nikolas and the vision he shared. In some ways I looked at Nikolas as the Roman Polansky of my generation since he preferred to stay out of the USA due to his KaZaA legacy. While one day I hope he will join us in the USA at a future VON event, I understand the issues at hand and why he choose Canada as the place in North America to share the Skype roadmap.

When Nikolas took center stage at VON Canada 2004, he spent most of his keynote talking about the history of disruptive technologies and disruptive communications. One of his slides showed his customer acquisition costs vs. Vonage where their costs were .001 cents and Vonage was marked at $400. I think he may have underestimated the Vonage number a bit. ;-) It wasn't until Nikolas got to toward the end of his talk when he had everyone in the audience going on every word as he shared the product roadmap for Skype which included: SkypePlus and SkypeOut.

As previously hinted, SkypeOut will provide Skype users on a prepaid basis the ability to place calls to the public switched telephone network. During the talk, I found out that G.729a will be used as the codec to perform the PSTN interconnect, so at least for the moment, when SkypeOut launches, customers placing calls to the PSTN may not always be able to experience the higher quality sound that Skype normally uses for it's own Peer-to-Peer communication.

SkypePlus will offer Skype customers value-added services including: Voicemail and the mapping of DID (Direct-Inbound-Dialing) numbers.

While no formal launch date was provided for these new Skype services, during the Q&A session, it was mentioned that revenues are expected to start during the third quarter of 2004, which translates to me as "sometime really soon."

For me, the most exciting sleeper news that came out was the announcement of a Skype API that will allow third-party developers to leverage Skype engine and in effect build new applications. The availability of a Skype API may have a profound effect on the future of PC based peer-to-peer communications, as more and more developers learn about this and start to extend the communications power of Skype.

I looking forward to seeing Nikolas again in a couple of weeks when he will be giving one the of most anticipated keynotes at VON Europe 2004 on June 8th.

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Posted by jeff on May 22, 2004 07:22 AM | Permalink

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Comments

I don't really trust skype. It's made by the same people who did KazAa and that's just a shitload of spyware. :/

Posted by: Pi at May 28, 2004 03:31 PM

Interesting to see the slide shot..
I think theres a difference between customer acquisition cost and the marginal cost of serving an additional customer. And there's difference between vonages' customers who pays $$$ and skype's customers, most of whom are NOT going with the paid versions..

For skype To acquire a paid customers, their cost can't be $0.001. When we talk about customer acquisition, we are talking about how much ads, marketing promotions etc I have to pay to get a customers to sign up for my Paid service.. Well, their cost maybe appraoch to 0 if skype never never spend a dime in marketing, which is unlikey of course..
So $0.001 has to refer to their marginal cost of serving an additional customer. This sounds reasonable as their p2p claims to be scalable infinitely..yes, in theory, of course...But in practice we all know as well as skype know it's not the case.. Besides, fewer than 1 out of 100 skypers going to pay for their service maybe..So their claimed marginal cost has to be multiplied by that 100 or maybe who knows 1000..

Their claimed of marginal cost per call to be zero is even funnier..It's true for a in-network call, as is with any voip providers. The cost of in network call is APPROACHING to 0, but never 0.

Once you touch PSTN, you always have at least termination cost, hell, how can that be FREE? It wont be free for any pureplay voip providers that dont own any public switches... It maybe free 10 years down the road when most calls are terminated off PSTN. but until then it's just another skype HYPE..

Yes, many success stories for disruptive technology. Digicam for one, just off top of my head.. Voip is disruptive, that I understand.. But how disruptive skype is, that I still dont see..
They use the same codecs ILBC that I have on my x-pro except that skype uses alot more resource than x-pro..
The only maybe disruptive thing about it is its ease of use and NAT transveral..which SIP seems to have a difficult time to catch up with sometimes...

Im not here to bash skype, but if people really think skype is so much different from other voips or even from yahoo messenger, I have to say skype has done an amazing marketing job convincing ppl to believe this...

Posted by: imnoob at May 22, 2004 01:17 PM