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.

New VoIP Quality Monitoring Diagnostic Platform Cuts ISP Call Center Queues

For the first time in the advanced telecommunication industry, Internet service providers or ISPs are offering their Voice over internet protocol or VOIP users to diagnose faults in the VOIP process. To check problem in the IP process, ISPs offer Vocalite, a new diagnostic platform to monitor internet telephony problem regarding the VoIP quality. Vocalite offers Epitiro, the internet performance expert, to control throughput, jitter and latency within the network core. In addition, Epitiro is designed to ensure the reliability and quality of VoIP delivery, speed troubleshooting and help the ISP to monitor and ensure VOIP quality of experience. Epitiro is flexible in nature and allows user to automate the schedule call anytime i.e. 24*7*365. For monitoring and testing, automated test schedules are considered as an important component to enable benchmarking of voice service quality before the customer do.

Vocalite is the next generation customer support solution based on a concept of empowering the subscriber's VoIP faults. Vocalite offers the diagnostic information to subscriber via web-browser on either the instructions of service provider's contact center or end-users. After completing a thorough two-way analysis of connection, Vocalite provides subscriber with a basic summary of the test and results will be automatically sent to the service provider. In the meantime Customer Service Representatives (CSR) can have an access to an extensive list of test results including Call Setup time, Dial Tone Delay and more importantly, voice quality. Moreover, CSR allows visual pass and fail indicators to assure adequate service quality and acknowledges the presence of a fault. This reduces the need of second line support staff.

From an end-user's perspective, Vocalite measures the call quality across the virtually existing provider's network. This enables network providers to keep an eye on both physical network, key applications and switches to fix any problem before they reach the end-users.

Hosted VOIP Services - The growth continues.....

The way we communicate is changing by the day. And the implementation of new and innovative techniques is playing a significant role in this context. One could take the example of hosted VOIP services, for instance.

In hosted VoIP services, the physical telecom equipment is located off the premises of the client companies, this means that maintenance of equipment is not the client's liability. This inherent flexibility of hosted services makes them very much popular among corporate houses - more specifically, the small and medium businesses.

Hosted VOIP services have special significance for small businesses. And the reasons are quite evident. Small businesses often lack the capital or the infrastructure to deploy and manage full-fledged enterprise-wise VOIP solutions. For this category of business users, subscribing to hosted VoIP services is the next logical alternative. In this discussion, we are assuming that the business groups are thinking rationally. They want to employ the best that technology has to offer to enhance their profit margins.

Recent figures substantiate the claim mentioned above. According to the result of recent research, the use of hosted VoIP services has increased significantly, more so among small businesses. The future global trend is that the growth in hosted VoIP services would continue.

These results should not cause any raised eye-brows. In addition to flexibility, hosted VOIP services have several other factors going for it as well. Significant cost savings and feature functionality are two of the more important factors that need to be mentioned in this context. Easy integration with other data networks also go in favour of hosted VoIP.

The popularity of hosted VOIP solutions is expected to increase further with the convergence of voice, data, video and mobility.

Business VOIP - Innovative solutions. Industry leading costs

Approximately three years ago, a new business VoIP service was launched by iCallGlobe, a communications company having business interests in several areas of the globe. The successful implementation of the "corporate business solution" has been behind the growth and diversification of many businesses across different geographical domains.

This and other similar launches have clouded the telecommunications landscape and have enhanced the recall value of the term - “business VOIP.” Corporate and business users are increasingly managing and routing their calls through high speed Internet connections and PBX systems are almost done away with.

VoIP call termination services, designed for business users, are now available at industry leading prices. As a matter of fact, the cost of making calls using business VoIP solutions is significantly less as compared to traditional phone systems. Some specific business VoIP solutions come with additional features such as voicemail, caller ID display, call waiting, call transfer, address books and number blocking. All these features make the business VoIP solutions more capable of taking on the challenges of the volatile business world.

Business users could make international calls and connect with branch offices located in different parts of the globe at nominal costs. One could even go to the extent of running virtual offices - thanks to some of the more innovative business VoIP solutions.

It can be said that with the current genre of business VOIP solutions, the geographical barriers and boundaries loose their meaning, making the world an even smaller place.

On A Marathon With VoIP- Continued

Continuing with one of my previous blogs titled “On a marathon with VoIP” I will try to list another business opportunity that one can take advantage of for increasing their revenue generation( read- $$$$'s !)

Elaborating on the above mentioned blog, ideally an internet service provider, system integrators, hardware & software product manufacturers, call shop owners, calling card companies among a host of others can provide VoIP service in a creative way to earn big moolah.

For instance, if you are dealing with calling cards or if you are an internet telephony service provider then the best option would be to provide bundle up services with voice over IP i.e. by unifying your existing service with VoIP call termination facility.

This will give you two fold advantage. By providing a bundle up service you will be able to attract customers since you will be offering them the convenience to take care of just a single bill at the end of the month( who prefers to maintain a track record of numberless bills..i don't!). Additionally your product line and profit margin will increase without making any substantial investment( as mentioned previously, the service provider owns and maintains the entire infrastructure and the technical equipments needed to transmit the call).

Let your creative spirit drive while you sit in the super fast VoIP jalopy and see yourself win the race!

A Shot In The Arm Leaves SunRocket Without Business

Earlier this week SunRocket, 2nd largest VoIP provider, send packing about 40 of its employees. Ever since then people have been talking in hushed tones about the financial problems that might have led to this sudden move.

In less than a week another development has confirmed the rumor which has been ringing everywhere. It seems like the company has closed down without even informing its clients. Perhaps they want to doge the questions that could be raised for this sudden closure. Personally i feel this is a case of shirking the responsibility and projects their complete lack of accountability towards their customers. All sympathies with their 200,000 subscribers who are now suddenly left without a telephone service.

Their customers became aware of the companies close-down when they heard a voice message on calling the providers 800 number. On the other hand, there is no mention of this shut down on their website which is still operational allowing customers to purchase their services. Caught in a dilemma the customers have really nothing to fall back on.

What amazes me is the irresponsible and completely unprofessional way this Vienna, VA based company is handling this unfortunate shut-down. Are the companies overlooking business ethics? With this case in point I think they are.