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Simplicity Sells

I am at the VoIP Developer Conference in Santa Clara today and tomorrow. Paul Amery, the man behind Skype’s developer outreach program gave a relaxed and engaging talk on Wednesday morning. He gave some numbers and some advice to developers.

First, the numbers: there are now almost 200 million registered users of Skype. 30% of Skype users use it for business calls. In December 2006 Skype 3.0 started putting add-in programs right in the menu of the on-screen phone rather than leaving them in a “back end gallery” on the website. Downloads of “Skype Extras” went from 25 thousand a month to 3 million a month as a result of this change. The most popular download is Crazy Talk, a lip syncing avatar that you can use in video calls even if you don’t have a camera. It has been downloaded 4.5 million times since December. Gizmos Talking Heads is another top ten avatar. 30% of the downloads are games. When Skype sells one of your Extras you get 60% of the revenue.

Another number from Paul was that there are tens of thousands of third party developers building Extras. Clearly to succeed you have to stand out from the pack. Paul had a simple recipe for this: keep your software simple. What sells is what users can figure out in less than 10 seconds. This is so true; look at the revenues being made from ringtones.

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Dual mode phone trends

Here is a chart of the number of dual mode phones certified for Wi-Fi each month starting in 2004, compiled from data found on the Wi-Fi Alliance website. There is a suggestion of a trend over the first few months of 2007, but of course it’s too early to call the entry of FMC into the trough of disillusionment. In the first three months of 2007 there were 14 certifications, versus 8 in the first three months of 2006. That’s a healthy 75% year on year increase. When you look at it on a quarterly scale, the first calendar quarter of 2007 is the second best ever, beaten only by the twenty certifications in the fourth quarter of 2006. But broken down by month it looks like certifications are sliding. There has only been one so far in May.
Wi-Fi certifcations of dual mode phones

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WSJ on FMC

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good article about T-Mobile’s UMA trial in Seattle. It says that T-Mobile may be rolling it out nationally as early as next month, despite some trial particpants’ complaints about handoff and battery life issues. T-Mobile will be offering a home router to help with QoS and battery life. I presume that for the battery life this is just WMM Power Save (802.11e APSD) since that is what the phones in the trial (Samsung T709 and Nokia 6136) support. For QoS side I expect these APs will support WMM (802.11e EDCF), but they could also support some proprietary QoS on the WAN access link, the way that the AT&T CallVantage routers do, which would be interesting.

There is some background on the trial here.

The article goes on to put the trial into the context of other FMC deployments, from BT Fusion, Telecom Italia and Orange. The article quotes a Verizon Wireless spokesman saying that they aren’t convinced that Wi-Fi can deliver high enough voice quality to carry Verizon branded calls. This is amusing bearing in mind the usual quality of a cellular call in a residence.

The article also quotes Frank Hanzlik, the head of the Wi-Fi Alliance as saying that business FMC may have more potential than consumer. I agree.

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Nokia’s WiMAX “Phone”

Reuters picked up on one little sentence buried in a Nokia press release entitled “Nokia Demonstrates Leadership in Technologies for Internet on Mobile Devices at Web 2.0 Expo.” The relevant paragraph, in its entirety, reads:

“Nokia Shows Commitment to WiMAX as Web 2.0 Enabler

“Nokia is dedicating significant research, development and intellectual property to WiMAX and supports efforts in making it a global broadband standard. The combination of WiMAX broadband technology and Web 2.0 services offers people an enriched high-speed Internet experience free from the desktop PC. Nokia plans to bring its first WiMAX enabled mobile device to market in early 2008.”

With no apparent evidence, the headline of the Reuter’s story mentioned the word “phone,” and the Internet echo chamber commenced to spawn dozens of stories saying that Nokia is going to release a WiMAX phone in 2008. Actually it looks more as though they are talking about an Internet Tablet like their N800, which is much less exciting.

A Nokia phone based on WiMAX would either have to have a regular cellular radio for the voice channel, or it would use WiMAX for voice. A phone that uses WiMAX for voice would most likely be aimed at a wireless Internet provider that doesn’t have a cellular network, for example ClearWire in the USA. This would put a date on their anticipated entry into mobile voice over WiMAX to compete with the incumbent cellular operators.

But that’s not what the press release says.

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Dual-mode phones are the key to better-sounding calls

Potentially VoIP calls can sound radically better than what we are used to even on landline phones. So why don’t they? It may be lack of will. Some say the success of the mobile phone industry proves that people don’t care about sound quality on their calls. I don’t think this is a valid inference. All it proves is that people value mobility higher than sound quality.

The telephonic journey from mouth to ear, often thousands of miles in tens of milliseconds, traverses a chain of many weak links, each compounding the impairment of the sound. First, the phone. Whether it’s a headset, a desk phone or a PC, the microphone and speakers have to be capable of transmitting the full frequency spectrum of the human voice without loss, distortion or echo. Second the digital encoding of the call; it has to be done with a wideband codec. Third, the codec has to be end-to-end, so no hops through the circuit switched phone network. Finally the network must convey the media packets swiftly and reliably, since delayed packets are effectively lost, and lost packets reduce sound quality.

Discussions of VoIP QoS normally dwell mainly on the last of these factors, but the others are at least as important. The exciting thing about dual-mode cell phones is that they provide a means to cut through them. Because they must handle polyphonic ring tones and iPod-type capabilities, the speakers on most cell phones can easily carry the full frequency range of the human voice. Cell phone microphones can also pick up the required range, and DSP techniques can mitigate the physical acoustic design challenges of the cell phone form factor. Smart phone processors have the oomph to run modern wideband codecs. This leaves the issue of staying on the IP network from end-to-end. The great thing about dual-mode phones is that they can connect directly to the Internet in the two places where most people spend most of their time: at work and at home.

So if you and the person you are talking to are both in a Wi-Fi enabled location, and you both have a dual mode cell phone, your calls should not only be free, but the sound should be way better than toll quality.

Check out the V2oIP website for an industry initiative on this topic.

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Cisco buys WebEx, loses faith

Cisco has two main customer constituencies: network service providers and business IT departments. One of WebEx’s crown jewels is its MediaTone network. This is a global private network, with dedicated fiberoptic links and multiple peering points to the Internet. If Cisco doesn’t sell this off, they will be competing with their customers in one of their primary markets. Unlikely to fly, though Cisco sometimes doesn’t seem to mind treading on toes.

This leaves the remainder of WebEx, the application (SaaS) side. It’s a natural complement to two of Cisco’s current business lines, filling a gap between their Unified Communications Manager (VoIP PBX) products and their high-end telepresence offerings.

As Cisco gets into more and more of the software services that run over IP networks, they end up competing more and more with Microsoft among others, and in an odd way for an Internet company.

Cisco rode the Internet Protocol to the stars. An article of faith amongst the IP cognoscenti is that the network must be stupid. This means that we conceive of the Internet as an amorphous connectivity cloud with computers on its periphery. Some of them are clients and some of them are servers. The Internet doesn’t care which is which. This is very powerful, because anybody with an IP address can set up a web site (a.k.a network service). This is anathema to the traditional network service providers who want to provide value (get revenue) in the network beyond mere connectivity. The Internet world (like Google) and the PC world (like Microsoft and Intel) love the stupid network model because it lets them innovate. The owners of the wires hate it because it forces them into the role of mere connectivity providers, since they are incapable of innovation at the service level.

But Cisco’s bread and butter is network equipment. Cisco doesn’t sell servers. So every service that migrates from the stupid network model to the intelligent network model increases Cisco’s potential market. Cisco hasn’t yet apostatized, but these actions are building gravitation in that direction. They have already ported their IP PBX to IOS, and they are allegedly even warming up to IMS!

Background
Forbes article on the acquisition.
CNET interview with WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar.

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Mossberg pans FlipStart UMPC

Mossberg pans the FlipStart UMPC in today’s Wall Street Journal. Comes to the usual conclusion that the in-between form factor falls between two stools rather than finding a vacant sweet spot. The keyboard is too big for thumbing and too small for touch typing. The screen is too small for regular Windows work. It doesn’t fit in your pocket. He goes further than these generic objections to UMPC in his critique of the FlipStart, saying it’s riddled with bugs, too expensive, too thick and too heavy, though he likes the screen size and the battery life.

Citing the iPhone, he concludes that the mobile PC of the future will evolve from the smartphone, rather than the laptop. I agree.

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LG Shine

On the phone front, a review in today’s Journal is the LG “Shine,” This looks like a Razr that slides instead of flips, and with a much bigger screen. The large LCD is a mirror when the phone is idle. This LCD/mirror technology is reminiscent of the Philips Miravision TV, a product that would be a runaway success if they priced it competitively. The Shine is the next step in LG’s project to bring fashion design to cell phones, preceded by the Chocolate and the Prada phones. Judging by the photo in the paper, the Shine is just a regular simple phone – which is exactly what a huge segment of cellphone users want. If it performs this basic function superbly – making clear calls with good reception – it will be a hit. Unfortunately the Journal hints that the fashion trade-off may have gone too far; the trendy metal casing may impair reception of the wireless signal.