Skype is getting a major, much-needed upgrade: Skype 4.0. President Josh Silverman calls it the “biggest new release in Skype’s history.” The new software client, which which will be released here in beta tomorrow (for Windows only), takes up the whole screen. Video is front and center.
“Our old UI was purpose-built for voice ,” Silverman tells me. (I put an excerpt from my interview with him up on TalkCrunch, or you can listen to the audio file directly). Now by going full-screen, the functionality can be spread out and made much simpler. It also makes it a better video-chat client. There is a big green “video call” button now. There is picture-in-picture functionality, and you can move the thumbnail around that shows your video.
The peer-to-peer technology ensures good quality video, and there is more space available for text chatting or sending files while the conversation is going. When you do a video chat, it really has the feeling of being in a video chat room. You can also pull in videos from Metacafe and DailyMotion (but not from YouTube). While Skype can handle up to 25 participants on the same call with voice, it is limited to one-to-one video chats at this point. Although, those can be combined with multi-party voice and text chats where everyone else just hears the audio. In comparison, Paltalk can do thousands of simultaneous video chats in a similar room-like environment.
The other major change in Skype 4.0 is that the entire experience is now centered around conversations and managing those conversations, whether those are with groups or individuals. Skype 4.0 lets you import contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. (No Gmail, another snub to Google).
There are also other improvements, such as automatic detection when you plug in a new headset or if your laptop lacks a built-in microphone. It also has software tools for testing your audio and video quality. All in all, Skype 4.0 is a step forward.
Skype, which is owned by eBay, boasts 309 million registered users and had $126 million in revenues in the first quarter.
Skype has partnered with Jaman, an internet movie service, to provide users with thousands of embeddable film scenes that can be added to their chats, profiles, and “mood messages”. The service is still in development, and Skype plans to have it available within the next couple of months.
Jaman’s licensed collection consists almost entirely of independent and foreign films, which will appeal to Skype’s international audience but may put off its American users. Skype has yet to finalize the available clip catalog, but at launch it expects most of the videos offered will be movie trailers as opposed to actual scenes. This limited library doesn’t sound particularly enticing - Skype will need to include more engaging content if they want this to catch on.
It seems that everyone just realized that people like to chat while they’re watching videos. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen new products from Lycos, Videophlow, and Userplane that plan to offer similar features. The trick will be to offer content that people actually want to talk about, which some of these companies don’t seem to have covered yet.
When early adopters sit at their computers, what applications and websites do they use the most? The answer: Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, and MSN Messenger—just like most everyone else. At least according to data from RescueTime, the productivity app that monitors the amount of time a user spends on every application on his desktop. The Y Combinator-funded startup has given us an exclusive look at the usage data they’ve compiled from over 30,000 users (most of whom are early adopters). This data represents real-life usage on a huge scale, totaling 475,190 man-hours.
Gmail, Facebook, and Skype make strong showings, but still lag behind Microsoft’s desktop apps. Microsoft Websites, however, are nowhere to be seen. All of this suggests that among early adopters, desktop apps still rule, but Webtop apps are gaining ground in terms of what they use every day. After Outlook and Word, Gmail is the third most-used application, Facebook is No. 6, Google search is No. 10, iTunes is No. 11, and Skype is No. 16.
If you add up all of Google’s apps and sites, they take up 17 percent of the time this group spends on their computers. But Microsoft’s apps collectively take up 41 percent of their time, so Google still has some catching up to do.
Here’s the disclaimer: This data is by no means scientific. It represents mostly early adopters, but these are the people who are supposed to figure out what’s useful before the rest of us do. They are the canary in the coal mine. The data also has an international slant, with only 40% of users in the US (a total of 60% are English-speaking). About 35% of the users are on Macs, a rate over three times higher than the international estimate of 10% Mac market-share.
Here’s a breakdown of the top 20 applications and Websites, ranked by the overall time spent in each.
The Top 3
The top of the list is dull. Outlook stands tall with 12.4% of all the time spent on a computer, with MS Word(9.4%) and Gmail(6.6%) rounding out the top three. No surprises here.
Chat
In the battle for chat-client supremacy, MSN Messenger comes away with a whopping 4.14%, more than twice as much as the next leading client. Adium’s high performance is indicative of the high proportion of Mac users (it is easily the best client on the Mac).
Websites
Facebook holds a surprisingly strong lead over other websites, with nearly three times as much usage as Wikipedia’s English site. Also notable is Twitter.com’s usage (this is the site itself, not the API, which reportedly sees ten times more action). Digg is more popular among this group than the NYTimes.com, and gaming site Kongregate makes a strong showing as well. TechCrunch comes up right behind YouPorn (NSFW), which isn’t such a bad place to be in.
In all, RescueTime users spent 44.6% of their time using communication services, beating out work-related apps by a large margin. The trend is probably much worse for the typical user, as RescueTime users are more likely to try to stay on task (in theory, at least).
We’ve included the full spreadsheet below, and would love to see further analysis in the comments.
Skype is now available on many leading mobile phones, although depending on where you live you can’t use it to call people.
The java based mobile thin Skype client works on around 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The standard feature set includes chat, group chat, presence, receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn. The half pregnant part: Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls are initially only supported in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
It’s a big step forward for Skype; the company has a partnership with the 3 network and offers Skype enabled phones (and even a Skype phone) in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau, Sweden and the United Kingdom, but Skype on handsets outside of these markets has been the domain of third party go-between services until now. For eBay, getting Skype on more phones means increased use of the service, and hopefully enough profit to keep it from selling Skype at the end of the year.
Skype notes that this release is “expected to last several months, after which a public version of the application will be made available to millions of mobile phone owners around the world,” by which we’d hope is a fully fledged Skype client for everyone.
eBay has gone on the record saying that they will sell Skype if they fail to find ways of using Skype to support its core ecommerce business.
Richard Waters at the Financial Times got the scoop directly from eBay’s CEO John Donahoe:
“What we’re testing this year are the synergies,” Mr Donahoe told the Financial Times this week after Ebay reported its latest earnings. “If the synergies are strong, we’ll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it.” That could lead to the disposal of the business, he indicated.
eBay purchased Skype 3 years ago and has failed to find ways of using Skype across its other products in this time, so it is unlikely that miracles will start happening for Skype in the next 8 months. A sale is likely late this year or in the first half of next year.
eBay reported its first quarter results today with revenues of $2.19B, up $424M from the same quarter last year. Its GAAP net income was $460M, or $0.34 per diluted share.
Skype revenues were $126M with 61% year-over-year growth (although revenue is decelerating rapidly). During the first part of this year, Skype added 33M registered users, bringing its total to 309M users. This makes the Skype user base the largest within eBay’s collection of services.
The report signifies that Skype is hanging in there despite the setbacks of last fall that involved CEO Niklas Zennstrom stepping down and earning only 1/3 earnout.
We’ve heard nothing new regarding the possible Google partnership or acquisition with/of Skype, although a partnership looks more likely.
Something big is brewing between Google and Ebay’s Skype, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Actually, for weeks now there have been low level rumors of the two companies talking, but nailing down any details was difficult. New information, however, suggests that they are in current talks and that a partnership or outright acquisition may be announced in the near future.
Skype, acquired in late 2005 for $3.1 billion, has been a financial albatross around Ebay’s neck. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.
It’s clear that eBay wants to either unload Skype, or significantly drive performance.
Google, by contrast, is just beginning to think about how to dominate the voice space. They have a VOIP service through GTalk, a free 411 service and GrandCentral, a telephone management service they acquired last year for $50 million.
All of these products reside under VP Product Management Salar Kamangar and his new right hand guy, Bradley Horowitz. Other key players in the group are Wesley Chen, the product manager who championed the GrandCentral acquisition, and GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet.
That core team should be at the CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas, but we’ve heard that they either aren’t there or at the very least aren’t showing up for scheduled meetings (if anyone at the event sees them, let me know). That doesn’t mean the team is busy working on a partnership or acquisition of Skype instead of attending the conference. But given that we’ve heard from sources close to the deal that something is happening between the companies, it’s not a stretch, either.
What does Skype bring to the table? Scalable technology and a proven platform in the VOIP, VOIP2POTS and P2P Video, to start - 100 billion VOIP minutes have been logged on Skype to date. At any given time there are 10 million simultaneous users on Skype. Skype is the glue that can pull all the nascent Google products together.
While Eliot Spitzer’s predilection for hookers (sorry, high priced call-girls) has made headlines worldwide, video over Skype may end up as a beneficiary.
Marked as a first for national TV, CNN used Skype Video to conduct a live interview Monday. According to Reuters, CNN interviewed Jeffrey Toobin, who went to Harvard Law School with Spitzer, via Skype from Maui.
The report says that Toobin used a laptop computer and webcam borrowed from the business centre of the hotel where he and his family were staying. The interview was featured in CNN’s prime-time political programming, and Toobin took part in a discussion on Anderson Cooper 360, all via Skype Video.
Skype has long been used for IM and voice calls, but its still relatively new video feature hasn’t taken off in a similar way. With CNN being able to use Skype Video to conduct interviews and live appearances, Skype may now get a boost as a strong video alternative to existing video conferencing tools and companies.
On a related note, the hooker behind the Spitzer scandal sells music on Amie Street. 89c buys the rather ironically named Unspoken Words album with the feature single What We Want.
Update: Amie Street has added a new song “Move ya body” to the playlist. If you want to hear a famous hooker sing get in quick, the album was 29c 12 hours ago, it’s now up to $1.16. Your slice of New York history
Since launching four and half years ago, Skype users have talked to each other for 100 billion minutes, and that is just counting free Skype-to-Skype phone calls. Of course, many of those calls would never have been made if Skype didn’t exists, so you cannot count the entire 100 billion minutes as a loss for the phone companies. But a significant chunk of that has got to be eating away at phone company profits.
Skype’s owner, eBay, is not necessarily the winner here either. While Skype has been a boon for consumers, it’s eBay that is footing the bill. Even at the reduced $3.1 billion acquisition price after the write-down, eBay still ended up paying roughly 3 cents a minute for all of those calls. I think I pay less with Verizon.
When Michael profiled the Gizmo Projectin July 2005, he noted that it had more features than Skype, but lacked instant messaging. The one time Skype competitor has become the Jaiku to Twitter, having pretty much dropped off the radar as Skype was acquired by eBay and went on to become the leading desktop VOIP/ IM solution.
The open source SIPphone owned Gizmo has continued to be developed, and this week added MySpace IM support on top of support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Jabber (including Google Talk). Today’s Gizmo is more IM platform than predominantly VOIP platform, and it makes for a fairly decent product.
Gizmo offers an attractive feature set. On top of the wide IM support that makes it a competitor to Adium and Trillian, the VOIP side offers competitively priced calls to external numbers, as well as free calls to those using the SIPphone platform. Services such as file transfer are supported, although video calling is only supported between Gizmo users, and not with users on other services. Cross platform voice chat is supported however.
Notably Gizmo 5 can be installed on a range of mobile phones and run locally, complete with VOIP calling, a decent value add if you’re on an unlimited data plan with your mobile phone. Unfortunately there isn’t a version (site or download) for the iPhone yet so I was unable to test it.
Gizmo has long since lost the battle against Skype to become the dominant VOIP service, however if you’re looking for a fully featured mobile IM client that also offers cheap calls it might be worth a look again.
“Our old UI was purpose-built for voice ,” Silverman tells me. (I put an excerpt from my interview with him up on TalkCrunch, or you can listen to the audio file directly). Now by going full-screen, the functionality can be spread out and made much simpler. It also makes it a better video-chat client. There is a big green “video call” button now. There is picture-in-picture functionality, and you can move the thumbnail around that shows your video.
Skype
The open source SIPphone owned Gizmo has continued to be developed, and this week added MySpace IM support on top of support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Jabber (including Google Talk). Today’s Gizmo is more IM platform than predominantly VOIP platform, and it makes for a fairly decent product.
