I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the EBay announcements of the last couple of days. A teaser peek at the EBay / Paypal integration, and click to call in PayPal advertising. As Luca Fillighedu pointed out, if all they wanted was click to call, then $4 billion was a little bit excessive.
Both Luca, and Jim Courtney at SkypeJournal made an iotum / Skype connection. Luca points out that an iotum / Skype integration would allow sellers to be always available. Phil Wolff speculated that Skype might cause a flood of EBay calls and Jim messaged me that iotum could be the key to managing those calls on the basis of value to the seller. These are all great thoughts.
Naturally, at this point it’s difficult for us to do anything with Skype until the much promised call transfer API is available. According to the presentations, that won’t be until late this year and initially it will be only Skype to Skype. Until then, we’ll be focusing our efforts elsewhere. It’s unfortunate, because we’d like to be Skype developers.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker 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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If the PayPal transaction cost wasn't so high, then this would be big. I take a lot of my payments via PayPal, mostly with people I'm dealing with over messenger. Hmmm! This works for me. Now, if this worked for the guy giving $20 to his buddy for a bet, then this would be big.