Now Niklas Zennstrom has the floor. Last year at VON Canada he announced Skype-In and Skype-Out. What’s in store for this year?
He has a great chart of how fast his company is growing. 1.2M Skype-Out accounts. 1.5B minutes per month of traffic and growing 22% per month! It can scale at this rate because it’s all peer to peer. He has no switches.
The big theme of his talk is that you can’t charge for voice. No argument. He asserts that VoIP is now driving broadband. While I agree that it will drive broadband, I am not sure it is yet.
Another of his assertions is that the IM generation wants to talk on the PC. Kids today use PCs for everything.
One thing which they’ve been trying to build is an ecosystem. They have an API that allows accessories to be created which are Skype enabled.
He sees growth opportunities in new mobile platforms – embedded Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile. They are also building Skype for Embedded Linux, so that hardware companies can build Skype enabled devices easily.
New APIs are coming, with better links in from web pages. However, Niklas made no mention of APIs which could be used to create new services.
He’s a good speaker, and comes across as a true visionary. It’s been an interesting transition. One year ago he was the bad-boy of the industry. Today he’s visionary embodying the true values of the IP revolution.
Press conference this afternoon, which is presumably where any product announcements will occur.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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the embedded implementation for VoIP (extend to Video and Voice) or SIP is my focus nowadays. There is broadly applications not only for mobiles, but also for enterprise and factory. Let's image it that all sensors and devices report their status themselves, this is a big user group, the member is machines and devices.
If skype can afford the QoS in such conditions, this will be a better direction I think.
The thing about Skype and QOS is that it really is dependant on best efforts on the network. Niklas was quite clear — he believes that the solution to resource constrained networks is simply more resources, rather than prioritizing packets.
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