Go mobile with multiple SIPs: Gtalk2VoIP launches Talkonaut 4.0

Recently I had the opportunity to go through Tom Keating’s blog on tmcnet.com. It was a very good read and I was exposed to a lot of info after reading it…

OK, let’s cut out on all the obvious praises. I read the blog because Tom Keating is supposed to be a very learned man (which he is, without any doubt) and because the news he was talking about was really something interesting.

Talkonaut, a mobile application by Gtalk2VoIP, had recently been upgraded to serve the functions of providing VoIP telephony on the Symbian 60 OS mobile phones, which would necessarily imply Nokia handsets. While most of the smartphones by Nokia did have a separate SIP stack for VoIP telephony, this feature works only on Wifi. However, Talkonaut has its own VoIP SIP stack via which mobile users could make calls over most of the general data connections present in a mobile phone such as GPRS, EDGE, 3G and Wifi. Further, as is the main purpose of Gtalk2VoIP, the user can also make calls to Google Talk users, SIP phones, MSN, Yahoo, AIM and ICQ voice capable IM clients. This fourth edition of the same can also allow users to receive free calls from SIP phones (or for that matter, any other VoIP network).

However, a striking feature that is not provided by any other mobile telephony service provider is the provision to have multiple SIP accounts onto the same mobile handset. This might prove to be a smart strategy to attract frequent users of Talkonaut’s competitors. While Talkonaut might not offer the lowest rates everywhere, they may be providing cheaper calling rates in a few regions. The users could hence, use one of the other mobile VoIP providers, like Vonage, for making calls to one particular region, and use Talkonaut to make calls to another. This would give users ample options to communicate and allow Gtalk2VoIP to have a hold on the customer base of its competitors. Pretty smart thinking, if you ask me. This could also lead to a comparison in the minds of users where they might compare the voice quality and connectivity features of various VoIP providers and quite a few might even switch over to Talkonaut.

Regardless of how hyped is this latest version of Talkonaut is, what would really set the wheels in motion is the voice quality and call connectivity, two basic features for the success of any VoIP application. Overall, it would all boil down to how well the interface of this latest offering from Gtalk2VoIP is built. And if the previous version of Talkonaut is anything to go by, things are certainly looking good.

VoIP enabled on the Sony PS3

The saga of one-upmanship between two titans of gaming consoles continues. But this time, it’s with a twist. It’s not better graphics or improved game play that is the matter of concern.

Sony has recently introduced inter-user VoIP communication in its games with the result of firmware update 2.4. While this feature had already been available on the Xbox and the Xbox 360 since its launch, via the Xbox live feature, the question at stake is not that why didn’t Sony retaliate it at that point of time? If one remembers correctly, in May 2007, Jajah, an Austria based VoIP provider, had announced that it has developed a web interface which would support the PS3 in making and receiving calls. After that announcement, that news was lost in anonymity, probably because the PS3’s interface might have suffered or the game performance would have been lackluster. There is no mention of the same anywhere on Wikipedia also, which is very strange, considering almost ‘tying’ up with a brand like Sony could have done wonders to the market value of Jajah, If it would have worked. Apparently, it didn’t.

As far as the recent upgrade is concerned, it is still for the users to see whether it is effective or not. But if it is, it would definitely be a huge hit among PS3 fans. There would also be an improved in-game chat feature, which could be integrated in the Xross Media Bar. And for your information, the Xross bar has been awarded an Emmy award for its interface. So, things seem to be finally falling into place for Sony. However, this could be a little too late as the Xbox 360 has already taken a huge lead over the PS3 due to its early launch. While Sony did claim that the delay in its release was due to problems in the digital rights management (DRM) of its revolutionary Blu-ray interface, the fact still remains that the Xbox took the early initiative and has benefited immensely.

Earlier in March also, the PS3 had sort of followed the Xbox to create a community of its own. What amazes me is the constant news that Sony is repeatedly doing what the Xbox has done. While learning from your competitors is a good thing, you must also use your own brains for once. The PS3 has had a rather disappointing 2007, with Playstation boss Jack Tretton admitting that there were “missteps” (according to an article on pcworld.com). While this latest ‘innovation’, if it can be called that, is the latest in the list of the Sony PS3, the future for this console looks very uncertain, due to two factors; for one, the Xbox and Wii are going as strong as ever, and the rising expectations are continuing to lead to the downfall of this gaming console, which is the successor of the original and the PS2, both of which were huge hits even ten ears after their launch.

Internet penetration: A milestone achieved or a drop in the ocean?

They say that the world is god’s playground. If that is so, then the internet can definitely be referred to as the playground of the human mind. Conceptualized in 1989, this stupendous achievement of English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, was promoted publicly by 1991. Gradually, it began to expand in its usage and accessibility, and reached the Indian population in the late 1990’s.

According to a report by IAMAI- the Internet And Mobile Association of India, there are approximately 46 million claimed users and 32 million active users of the internet (those who access the internet at least once a month) as of September 2007 in India. This shows an exponential growth of claimed internet users since 2000 when the number was 4.9 million, showing an average annual growth rate of almost 50%. On the other hand, active internet users have also had an annual growth rate of approximately 70% since 2000. This goes very much against popular belief regarding India’s population which is not considered to be tech-savvy by any means. Today, even the remotest of corners in the country have access to the internet. Initiatives like ITC’s e-chaupal have allowed the rural section of the society to come of age and be acquainted with the latest technologies.

Figure 1: Internet Users in India (2000- 2007)
Source: IAMAI Data

Be it education, entertainment, finance, shopping, or anything under the sun, the internet has become the ultimate resource of knowing whatever is to be known and doing whatever could possibly be done. With the advent of technology and awareness, internet accessibility is prevalent even in the second and third tier cities of the country. According to one of the IAMAI surveys conducted in September 2007, out of the 46 million claimed internet users, 17.48 million are from the top 8 metros, 9.66 million are from other metros, 5.52 million are from cities having a population between 5 to 10 lakh, and 13.34 million are from cities having a population between 2 to 5 lakh. This clearly shows the extent of penetration of the internet industry into the Indian market. No longer is internet usage restricted to the elite few who used to be the privileged ones to use it. The estimated user-base which accesses the internet was expected to be 100 million by 2007-08, as per IAMAI, which results in an astounding growth of 163% and the Indian internet users now account for 4.9% of internet users worldwide. While this might not be close enough to the USA, with 19.7% (according to internetworldstats.com), it is definitely a good start over a span of just seven years.

With broadband connectivity having such a huge impact on the industry since its inception, the provision of faster internet speed acted as a magnet to attract more and more users who were skeptical about the dial-up internet regarding its comparatively slower speed. Broadband provider guarantee high-speed connection. The current broadband to dial-up user ratio stands at 23:77 (as of Sep, 2006, according to IMRB) which clearly indicates that broadband could be the chief reason for this unprecedented growth.

Figure 2: Mode of Internet Connectivity in India (2006)
Source: IMRB Data

All these numbers are a clear indication of how much penetration has been achieved in the internet industry. This is truly an achievement and something to be proud of for each and every Indian. However, this is not the end. While we can choose to bask in the glory of our past and feel elated by such high percentages of growth rates, quite a long road lies ahead of us when we think of the entire population as a whole. We are quite a few steps ahead from the start line, but still far from the end. The great Indian dream, if you will, would be accomplished when each and every citizen of India would be empowered with the internet to lead his life in a better way.

Google Acquisition: Concrete news, or just plain ‘Skype’

Writing something on the current on-going rounds of transaction between eBay and Google regarding the acquisition of Skype is not any easy task by any means. Particularly as we bear witness to the amazing pace at which the online market is changing. But anyways, since it is the ‘in’ thing today, let me start off by saying something that Billy Crudup said to Tom cruise in Mission Impossible III after he discovered that Crudup was an ally of his enemy. “It’s complicated.”

Calling Skype as the undisputed king of the VoIP industry might not be an overstatement. Especially if you consider the fact that it has close to 280 million users and will continue to add-on to that huge list, thanks to its ever-popular brand-name. Google Talk, on the other hand, which is Google’s take on the VoIP platform, has just under one million users (according to comScore). While Skype posing a serious threat to Google could both be the biggest joke of the new world and also be a very valid point, the focus now shifts to eBay.

eBay had acquired Skype for $3.1 billion in September 2005. Almost two years after the deal was through, and shortly after signing off as Skype’s CEO to concentrate more on Joost.com along with Janus Friis, his co-founder for Skype, Niklas Zennstrom had made a statement at a tech conference held in Budapest that eBay had overpaid for Skype when it was acquired. While Joost can be described as an excellent software to watch video streaming with exceptional clarity, and starting off on a new venture is something that entrepreneurs usually have a habit of, the fact of the matter is that Skype, despite its rather healthy run-rate revenue of $400 million, is being sold, and that too at a written down price of approximately $2.28 billion.

It is without a doubt a well known fact that Google has all the monetary resources and commercial network while Skype has an extensive user-base that could be utilized by Google in a variety of ways. Say, for example, Google could send invites to Orkut, its immensely successful social networking website, to its newly acquired database, courtesy Skype. While this is all good going for Google, eBay is clearly in a soup after acquiring Skype. A project that can not be called as a failure by any means, but was not managed properly after its acquisition, sums up the story for Skype. Industry critics had raised doubts over eBay’s strategy while talks were going on by the leading retail chain to acquire a product that was clearly not its forte. While the deal is still being negotiated, only time will tell whether Google is able to bring Skype back to the position it had gained when it was first launched in August 2003.

A step by step guide on how to oversell your product: the Skype way

I believe that the title was catchy enough to make you finally land up here. So without further ado, let’s start off on the best guide on how to oversell your product, the Skype way. Marketing and sales people, pay heed. Such kind of advice is hardly floated free of cost.

Methodology
First, you develop an excellent, one of its kind product. One that has all the juice to attract the masses as well as the crème-de-la-crème. Then, gradually, you market it in a very effective manner, so that it has tens of millions of users hooked on to it. This might be the hard part, but the results that you can get out of it are worth the trouble. After your product is sufficiently popular, you begin talks with big organisations to catch their attention. Once this is done, you choose one of them and offer your product to them at such a high price that it would take years for them to recover the costs, and wait, here is the interesting part. You know your product is not worth that much. But with the help of an effective marketing team, you pull off the deal. And then, as an icing on the cake, you go out in public and blab out as to how you fooled one of the biggest players in the industry and lured them into overpaying you.

Live example
Those who are in touch with the IT industry might have guessed as to what I’m talking about. For those who still did not, thank you for taking the trouble to read till here. Here is the story; I am talking about eBay’s acquisition of Skype. When founder Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis launched Skype in August 2003, VoIP was a very small industry. The only other major player was net4phone, which eventually ended up suing Skype in 2006 for something that made no sense. If you read out the bottom line, Skype was sued for doing what net4phone could not. Getting people on to using the VoIP service, that is.

Anyway, Skype expanded in a very grand manner. Slow to start with, it eventually added on 60 million users within a span of two years. This caught the attention of eBay, and while Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was also in the look-out for acquiring Skype, eBay finally took the booty at a heavy price of $3.1 billion. Days after signing off as the CEO of Skype after the deal was through, Niklas Zennstrom, who alongwith Janus Friis went on to develop Joost.com, told a tech conference in Budapest that Ebay had overpaid for his company. While the words were slightly jumbled up, even an amateur could have understood what he meant. This whole episode eventually took a dramatic turn when Google started bidding for Skype quite recently, but at a price that has been written down by $900 million. While this might seem to be an extremely derogatory evaluation of a very popular brand, shockingly, eBay is still interested. Probably because of the fact that Skype did not turn out the way eBay had expected, or probably the way it was projected by the former company owners.

Epilogue
While one might appreciate the marketing skills of the Skype people, it was not a good deal at all for eBay. And to add insult to injury, we have Skype’s ex-CEO talking about how he is the only smart one and sold a lemon to eBay in front of the entire world. Considering all these aspects, Google might be biting off more than it can chew. While that is all for time to tell, Mr. Zennstrom has definitely raised a few doubts over the popular belief that one should not bite the hand that feeds it.

VoIP loses another Ad-VON-t-AGE

With a rising number of VoIP providers in the industry, using the law to cut your competitors down to size seems to be the order of the day. The latest in the list of major VoIP companies that were sued are Skype and Vonage.

While Skype’s litigation is still being resolved, Vonage is one brand that has received a severe beat-down on its reputation as a service provider. More recently, it settled a lawsuit against Nortel, allowing for cross licensing of their technology. While this did not call for payment by any organization, 2007 was a relatively bad year for Vonage. AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, three major competitors in the VoIP arena, filed lawsuits regarding patent-infringement against them, which resulted in an astounding figure of $239 million to be paid by the company. Adding to the damage is the recent news that Vonage had tried to lobby the federal government, also in 2007, and spent nearly $1.4 million in the process, according to a disclosure form by the Senate’s public record office which was posted online on Feb. 13th 2008 (as per Associated Press).

Vonage was one of the first providers of VoIP back in 2001 when it was started. Its user base grew to about 1 million till 2005, but constant customer complaints and four lawsuits brought the company down in 2007. According to Patrick Monaghan, a Yankee Group analyst, Vonage’s biggest challenge is going to be countering the rising debts, which would amount to $253 million in obligations that come due in December, 2008. While this is a very big loan to pay off, the bad news apparently is far from over for Vonage. Customer volumes are also rapidly declining. While about 300,000 subscribers were added on in the third quarter of 2007, 222,215 users were lost in the same time-span, resulting in an effective addition of only 77,785, according to Monaghan. Further, trying to cancel Vonage’s services is a tedious process and can cost as much as $40. Also, transferring a Vonage phone number to a normal land-line takes 10 days, and often doesn’t work for many users. Telephone companies have also brought sufficient competition to Vonage with their own offerings having unlimited long-distance plans. As they can add satellite TV, phone and DVR services to make their product seem the better one, Vonage is clearly walking on thin ice. Quality issues also persist with voice quality dipping when users play games online. Though Vonage has assured its customers that such problems would be resolved very soon, it is not going down well with the masses.

With the US market reaching a saturation point in terms of connectivity, the future for Vonage clearly lies in the international market. However, considering the present circumstances of the industry as a whole, clearly there is a need of either a serious facelift in the interfaces of the current VoIP providers, or maybe the time has come for new players to enter into the market and provide consumers with a better voice quality and connectivity features. Measures like these are very essential, if VoIP is to expand its avenues and further grow as the new means to communicate.

VoIP: The new way to talk, or just another tech-triviality

The world is shrinking! While scientists might continue to debate on the aforementioned statement, there is another world that is constantly expanding, a world that knows no boundaries and no limitations. That world is the World Wide Web.

Touted as the best accomplishment of the human mind since the era of Edison and Graham Bell, the internet has almost 20% of the entire world’s population connected to each other via a common source. Initially started in the USA as part of technological advancement procedures, the internet was accessible to the public in the early 1990’s. While networking sites and blogging seems to be the order of the day, it’s VoIP that is coming of age as a utility that is growing in popularity and usage. The biggest example of this is Skype, which has an estimated user base of 280 million, and was acquired by eBay in September 2005. While eBay itself is in talks over selling Skype to Google, the point is that eBay, despite being from a completely different industry, i.e., online retails and auctions, chose to invest a heavy amount to acquire Skype. Clearly, they had foreseen the rise of the VoIP industry, something we bear witness to now.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. This is a technology that converts one’s voice into digital packets and sends it across to the receiver, where it is converted from the digital form to the analog form. This process can be customized according to specific users’ requirements, as per their needs. The process sparked off at the beginning of the 21st century and presently, there are over 50 VoIP providers in the market. These include big names like Vonage, AT&T and Nortel, to say nothing of Skype, which still is the biggest shareholder in terms of user base.

This technology allows people to communicate in a more cost-efficient manner with PC-to-PC calling being free and PC-to-Phone calling being chargeable at lower rates than a landline or a mobile connection. While this concept was received with apprehension during the early stages of its innovation, more so regarding concerns over voice quality and stable connections, VoIP has now entrusted enough faith in its efficiency to be termed as the next step in telecommunications.

This technology is clearly all set to replace the existing telephony solutions and establish itself as the voice of the new world, and quite literally at that. What remains to be seen is if the future would bring in more and more users who would like to choose VoIP over their traditional mobile phones and landline, or will this newly-found innovation get lost in oblivion, much like many others that were promising enough to start with, but could not sustain their position.

Google : All Skype-d up?

The market is abuzz with the news regarding Google’s supposed buy-out of Skype. Considering the fact that Skype in itself is the Google of PC-to-PC calling, it comes as little surprise that Google decided to buy it from eBay, which had earlier overestimated its market value and gone ahead to pay $2.6 billion (plus an additional $530 million for performance levels, which was negotiated and reduced from the initial figure of $1.7 billion) and acquired Skype in September, 2005. It had then gone on to add approximately 220 million users to Skype’s then existing customer-base of 60 million within two and a half years. Skype has till date provided its users with over 1 billion minutes of talktime inclusive of PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone calling. The revenues earned by Skype for eBay are approximately $79 million in the first quarter and $90 million in the second quarter of 2007, fairly good going as far as cost recovery is concerned.

While this might seem all hunky-dory till now, here comes the crunch. It defies all logic to see why eBay is selling out one of its most potential-bearing products (apart from up4sale and CARad) to Google. While transacting with one of the major players in the market might seem as a healthy proposition, it’s the selling-out part that appears slightly out-of-the-way. There is also another area of concern regarding the fact that the value of Skype has been written down by $900 million, which is a big reduction considering what eBay had paid for it, to say nothing of inflation and cost-effectiveness since Skype was acquired.

The question now arises, why is eBay negotiating with Google to sell-out Skype? One of the main reasons that seems to be the prevalent one, is the fact that Skype has approximately 280 million users according to the latest statistics and Google talk has approximately 976,000 users and could seriously benefit from Skype’s database. The second reason could be a potential fusion of Google talk and the Skype software, which would do a lot of value-addition to both the brands.

The fact still remains that eBay’s sell-out of Skype might, and will raise, some serious questions. While Skype has not proven to be inefficient in any manner, it could be a matter of concern for all Skype users as to whether there is something seriously wrong in the hugely popular application regarding which it is being sold.