Five Fingers of Death

December 30 was proclaimed “Day of the Download” in Belgium. In fact, this was a protest action against the two main monopolistic Internet providers Telenet (TV-cable) and Belgacom (phone-cable). Unlike neighbouring countries, they both limit the download quantity to about 12 GByte per month.

My way of participating was to run internet TV Joost on two computers at the same time. And at night i looked at an old Kung-Fu movie (see the title of this post). After 20 minutes i realised that this was the same "first" Kung Fu movie i saw in my life more than 30 years ago. Great!

Result of my download contribution: 4 Gigabyte in 24 hours!

My evaluation of this daylong Joost experience, beginning with 5 good “fingers”:

1. It is free!
2. Diversity of channels (news, movies, documentaries, …)
3. Acceptable quality
4. Advertisements are short and not too frequent
5. Easy to pause – easy to start again

The 5 bad “fingers” … :

1. On one of my computers, frequent program crashes, on the other sometimes (but not too often) temporary frozen images and sounds.
2. The visual interface is a mess, difficult to make a fast choice
3. The sounds of the adds were often quite much louder than the sound of the movie or channel watched
4. High downloaded volume (a real obstacle if you have a limit!)
5. No remote control function!

Compared to Skype, Joost will IMHO not be a success story. It is nice, it is free, but it isn’t disruptive. The quality is acceptable, will probably improve, but it will probably always stay behind the quality of DVDs or paid television. If you can afford high resolution flat panel screens, you can afford to pay a subscription to high quality cable television!

Anyway, a happy New Year to all of you, Skype believers and unbelievers, Joost believers and unbelievers, and anybody else!

Skype back to Europe?

In April 2007 i noticed that the RSS feed of Skype for data on number of downloads and users online, changed somewhat: the hour was the “New York” time instead of the GMT+0 time, and i blogged on this: Headquarters in New York?

From November 12 on, the RSS feeds were down for almost one month, and came back some weeks ago. Better late then never, but this weekend i noticed that something else happened:
the time was set again to GMT+0: 9969495 Users Online Now Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:40:01 +0000.

Good! But it could be that something else is happening anyway! Is Skype moving back to Europe, and loosening the chains with eBay?

Latest hidden emoticon

Not really a funny one, but through a chat with another crazy fanatical Skype user i found the latest hidden emoticon: type “(myspace)” in your chat window, send it, and you get it!
Read here why they added the MySpace emoticon: MySpace, Skype to offer calls on social network.

The Skype calls through MySpace will be web based! Perhaps the beginning of a new surge in Skype users?

All the emoticons, including the hidden ones (but still not the MySpace emoticon) and all the flags can be found here: Skype Emoticons Cheatsheet.
Enjoy!

Again Skype RSS feeds!

The RSS feeds of users online and Skype client downloads are working again, after one “frozen” month. This will make my number analysis easier again! It got stuck since November 12!

And on the graph below (from nyanyan.to), we can see that Skype reached an “all times” record number of concurrent users online: i saw 10.649.190 on my Skype client!

Skype for businesses

Through the Skype Forum, i discovered that full time USA graduate student Charmaine Walker, who will soon become a school librarian, just completed a paper on Emerging Technologies and chose Skype as her topic. She says on the forum: “I have been a user since its inception in 2003 and think it is truly marvellous”.

I picked some interesting phrases out of her 9 pages work, which could convince businesses to use Skype (some minor editing by myself):

• install the program where and when needed on as many computers at no cost;
• as the equipment is owned, it eliminates the need for another company to maintain and upgrade an existing VoIP tool;
• as Skype is simply a software program, it does not have any operational, maintenance, or management expenses;
• there are no early termination fees associated with a VoIP provider contract if it no longer meets the business’s needs;
• businesses can simply uninstall the Skype program without incurring a penalty and/or returning another company’s equipment;
• aside from the expense of a microphone and speakers or handset to make and receive calls, Skype’s optional extras are extremely low in comparison to other VoIP providers.

Valid arguments for small businesses (my opinion!).

Encryption = no wiretapping?

Quite a lot of Police corpses, CIA, FBI, KGB and others are worried about the encrypted calls that Skype users can place: no possibility to wiretap Osama Bin Laden or Georges Bush when they call to each other through Skype!

There were even voices (official and non-official) asking for a "back door" in Skype!

Recently the German Police made some comments on Skype, but didn’t say they would ask for a back door: We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance - that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted.

Indeed, Skype and other new communication techniques are challenging the creativity of those who want to monitor conversations.

But "creative wiretapping" already happened, and German Police was indirectly involved:
Fourth suspect Rudy Hermann Guede allegedly spoke (through Skype) to a friend who, unknown to him, was inside a Perugia police station.The suspect appeared to be hiding in Germany! In fact, Police asked a friend of the suspect to try to reach him by Skype, and wiretapped him … indeed “after decryption”!

Clever!

51 million Skypers in China

I read the following: China becomes Skype's biggest market with 51 mln users, yet to make profit.

As usual, let me correct this statement: they mean “registered user names”, not "registered users", and this isn't equal to "active users".

Like i do usually, let us assume the numbers are however correct, this would mean that:

• 20 % of the active Worldwide Skypers are from China
• 3.9 % of the population of China are Skypers
• 5.4 % of the “active” population of China are Skypers (discounting people older than 65 years, and younger than 14 years) [EDITED ON 25/11: The number in red was edited, as i made an error in my calculation]
• 34 % of Chinese internet users are Skypers

Bear in mind that the second, third and fourth numbers above are very exaggerated. Reasons are:

• lost password, and therefore inaccessible user name, therefore the need to create a new user name
• testing Skype, and abandoned use of the user name
• spare user names, registered for alternative or future use (i have several!)
• the owner of the user name died (yes, this also happens!)
• the person switched to another VoIP tool
• the person registered a temporary name for a temporary past situation
• spammers also register multiple usernames to "attack" their victims

So, like always, this 51 million users statement is marketing exaggeration!

avoid Skype Pro

I have complained several times about the fraudulent SkypePro advertising in the past.

Tony Austin, has posted a long but interesting explanation with the following title in ITWire: “1300 reasons to avoid Skype Pro in Australia”.

He begins his explanation with the phrase:
“There are examples all around us of misleading and deceptive advertising, inflicted upon us either deliberately or due to the lack of attention to detail or even the incompetence of the advertisers. Where does Skype Pro stand in this regard?”

And ends with:
“Skype needs to change its Skype Pro documentation to read something like: "Pay nothing per minute for calls to landlines within the same country -- except for certain classes of landlines for which we'll charge the SkypeOut rate and not the Skype Pro rate and this will cost you much much more than nothing per minute!"”

I have to agree 100% with Tony!
And Skype can't say they are not aware: the regular questions concerning the SkypePro costs on the Skype Forum don't go unnoticed by Skype Staff.

How much money is Skype taking from customers in Australia, Brazil and a lot of other countries with this misleading SkypePro advertising?

Skype contribution

I got a very interesting comment of Sascha Vitzthum on a previous post, and i distilled the following graph out of it:
According to eBay …
"Direct contribution consists of net revenues from external customers less direct costs. Direct costs include specific costs of net revenues, sales and marketing expenses, and general and administrative expenses over which segment managers have direct discretionary control, such as advertising and marketing programs, customer support expenses, bank charges, site operations expenses, product development expenses, billing operations, certain technology and facilities expenses, transaction expenses, provisions for doubtful accounts, authorized credits and transaction losses. Segment managers do not have discretionary control over expenses such as our corporate center costs …"

This means Skype had a 15% contribution compared to revenue in the last quarter. This is quite OK. From the graph we also see that 2007 will be probably the first year that Skype contributes really to eBay’s profitability.

Skypers on Map

Through the blog of Jan, i found the following two graphs on the Japanese “Skypers on Map” website.

Skype Online Users

This one displays the same information as the other Japanese website Nyanyan but instead of one week, a whole month! (Click on the image to have the full view).

SKMap Status summary

And this one displays the status of the Skype users who registered on SKMap!

Both graphs are very interesting, although the scale of the first one is not optimized.

The second one is generated by using the data of Skype Users who accepted to show their Skype status on a Google Earth map (almost 1000 right now!).

Quite interesting. Add your Skype status here on http://skmap.gatagata.jp and click on the "how to" link in the upper left corner for instructions! Fun!

Borderless Communication

My Skype friend Hudson Barton blogs again! Hurrah! See his interesting graph on Skype concurrent users online by continent! Based on his personal calculation.
His blog is called Borderless Communication.
In fact a very appropriate title for a Skype blog:

• Skype originated in Europe but …
• My first contact was my Brazilian brother in law Cassio;
• From the beginning on Skype was multilingual, there are 29 different languages for the Skype client and you can even edit your language file to your local slang, or create a new one!
• Skype users are everywhere, just look at the different nationalities that visit my blog;
• There is SkypeIn in 19 different countries on 4 different continents;
• Skype belongs now to eBay (USA), has it official registered office in Luxemburg (for tax reasons), its marketing and commercial people mainly in the UK, but also elsewhere, and – last but not least – the technical staff mainly in Estonia;
• Even on the Skype Forums there are now subforums in 5 different languages;
• I keep in contact through Skype with people i know (people i met personally at least once!) living in Belgium (of course), and 20 other countries on all continents (i was myself surprised by this number)!
• I keep in contact with friends and colleagues travelling abroad for business or holidays;
• I used myself Skype when travelling abroad in at least 6 countries to communicate with family or professional contacts;
  
• And, last but not least, i keep in contact with a lot of Skype Crazy Fanaticals (Bloggers, Forum (Super) Users, Beta Testers, and Staff) like Hudson Barton!

Borderless!

a real useful obsession ;-)

Quite some bloggers copied and made comments on my post “+2.5 % this week” of October 27, and …
I got a very nice compliment from Russell Shaw at ZDNet: “Jean has this real serious but frankly, real useful obsession. He runs the Skype Numerology blog, a resource dedicated to the evolving and statistically quantifiable aspects of Skype’s download, usage, and related metrics over time.”

Now, Russell thinks that the 2.5% in one week is “natural growth of the Skype user base”, and therefore not linked to the MySpace deal. Let me try to explain why i really think “something” is happening.

When you look at the inserted table, you will notice that it is the first time in 4 years that the growth of concurrent users online has been higher in October than in September! But there is more …
The download speed in October had a mean value of 890 downloads per minute, double as high as September (425 downloads/min.).

As my Blogger-friend onlyebay remarked, “It could be all the free publicity that Skype is getting”. Here the HUGE list of October events:

• Skype buttons on eBay
• Facebook games
• The 3-SkypePhone
• A deal with MySpace
• 10 million users online
• High quality video calls
• And last in the list but the first event of the month: Skype CEO steps down!

Did i forget something? Anyway, enough events to wake up sleeping potential customers!

1/8 video callers

Hmmm … i don’t know what to think about it but i read this in the Associated Press (again some numbers):
Jonathan Christensen, Skype's general manager for audio and video, said a quarter of all Skype calls have at least one talker on video. The service claims 246 million users

Let me correct this somewhat:

• If it is true, at least one out of 8 callers uses video!
• 246 million “registered user accounts” … NOT users, probably only 50 million users!

I repeat why it is “USER ACCOUNTS” therefore why there are less active users than registered user names:

• lost password, and therefore inaccessible user name, therefore the need to create a new user name
• testing Skype, and abandoned use of the user name
• spare user names, registered for alternative or future use (i have several!)
• the owner of the user name died (yes, this also happens!)
• the person switched to another VoIP tool
• the person registered a temporary name for a temporary past situation
• spammers also register multiple usernames to "attack" their victims

Hidden curiosities

Skype has its collection of hidden emoticons. There are fourteen of them, not including the 238 country flags. You find all the codes for them here.

Today, thanks to a question from RAKISHI on the Skype forum and the answer of the “proud Bulgarian Калин” i can unveil two other hidden curiosities.

When you open a chat window, and begin to chat, normally your contact person will see a typing indicator: a pencil writing!

However, when you press 3 alphabetical keyboard keys at the same time, the typing indicator is changed by something else. Try c+a+t for instance (and keep the keys down), you get an animated cat. Or try q+s+d and you get two fists grabbing a pencil. Funny.

[EDITED]: this works only with the new 3.6 beta Skype client version!

+2.5 % this week!

Last week we reached for the first time 10 million concurrent Skype users online. Completely to my surprise, this week we went over 10.270.000 users online. This is an increase of 2.5% in one week!

Is the deal with MySpace already harvesting new Skype Users? Perhaps, because i noticed also an increase in the number of downloads of the Skype client! The download speed is twice as high as some weeks ago.

Below i published the updated graph of the evolution of users online since the beginning of Skype in August 2003 (my data samples).
Users online fluctuate during the day, week and months, but reach now sometimes 10 million users online, and never go below 4 million users online (see the two blue curves, representing “upper” and “lower” limits of users online over the last 4 years). Some reasons for the fluctuations are:

• At night some people log off;
• During the weekend, less people are online;
• Holiday periods (summer, New Year, other public holidays) are also “bad” for the online number.

Although the growth of users online has been strong the last two weeks, i still don’t believe we will reach the 11 million mark this year!

Skype minutes

On the “downloadable presentation” of the eBay quarterly results i found these facts:

• Skype to Skype (S2S) minutes: 6.1 billions
• SkypeOut minutes: 1.4 billion
• Or, dividing revenue by SkypeOut minutes: 0.07 US$/SkypeOut minute

My interpretations or guesses concerning these numbers:

• S2S minutes are diminishing, although the number of users is raising! One factor that has probably influenced this quarter is that it includes the Holiday/Summer period, traditionally a period with lower Skype usage. But this quarter is quite lower than the corresponding quarter of 2006. Are people using Skype to chat instead of talk?
• SkypeOut minutes are not raising anymore, although income is still raising (see my previous post). Is the increase in revenue therefore only due the weak dollar? Indeed, the weakening of the dollar compared to the euro is about 8.8% since the beginning of the year. According to Skype, 83% of their income is generated outside the USA. Therefore we could extrapolate and say that 7% of the US$ income is due to currency fluctuations, and therefore not to "real SkypeOut minutes"!
• The higher income compared to 2006 is also due to the “hidden” price increases of SkypeOut calls since the beginning of the year (connection fee, SkypePro, etc.).

Skype Revenue

eBay published its quarterly results. Quite good growth for Skype, not what eBay expected when purchasing it, but still … not too bad!

And some good news, like "MySpace to offer free Skype calls" and "Skype goes mobile".

These are the results for quarter 3, 2007 (rounded numbers):

• 100 million US$ revenue
• 250 million registered user accounts (total all quarters)
  
• 700 million downloads of the Skype client (total all quarters)
  
• 10 million concurrent users online at peak time
• 4 million concurrent users online at “low tide”
• 0.4 US$ revenue per registered user account

These were facts! Now my guesses or speculations, or whatever you want to call it:

• 50 million regular or active users
• or 2 US$ revenue per active user
  
• 6 million paying customers
• therefore 17 US$ revenue per quarter per paying customer
• or 67 US$ per paying customer per year

I would like to have some more reliable numbers from Skype!

10 million, hurrah!

Hurrah, 10 million concurrent users online today! Nice! Fantastic number! See also the announcement on the official Skype Blog.

But, it is anyway a big disappointment for Skype believers. It took “us” 261 days to go from 9 to 10 million. The longest period ever, if we exclude the first million users!

The growth of Skype is clearly slowing down! I am curious about the report of Ebay concerning the last quarter of Skype ??? Will it improve without Niklas Zennström?
Read also this: "Five Reasons Nokia Should Buy Skype From eBay". Interesting point of view of Stephen Wellman! And Nokia is Finnish, Skype is Estonian (at least where the technical staff is located): geographically and culturally very close!

Monetizing Skype

I found this post by Larry Barrett : Skype Co-Founder Admits Expectations Were Too High.

Some interesting phrases caught my attention:

• Skype now generates only $1.60 (revenue) per subscriber per year
• the barriers to competition are low and alternative offerings from the likes of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AOL have emerged
• Skype outlined part of its plan (in September) to monetize its communications platform by launching its first Web service for developers looking to build mashup applications in the Skype environment
• Skype plans to incorporate more payment options for users who want to play games or buy widgets and applications developed on the Skype platform.

And also in The Times:

• Skype in deal with 3 to offer free mobile telephone calls in the UK

Looks promising! Skype is still alive. The only items i don’t feel good about are the games and widgets!

Where is the Skype soul?

There are official Skype blogs in 11 different languages. As i speak 5 languages, and also can understand somewhat Italian and German, i checked all these official blogs! For some i even didn't need any understanding: i checked the last post date (the Japanese blog for instance)!

Not one "official Skype blogger" made a comment on the change of their CEO!

I also checked the blogs of some of the “known” Skype beta testers, and the private blogs of some Skype Staff, or at least those i know. Nothing either.

Old CEO gone, new one … No emotions? Not important? No consequences? No soul anymore?

But, the website was adapted!