Rectel - a chance for you to make your own recording of telephone calls Monday, March 10, 2008

Rectel is a non-subscription outgoing call recording service that can be used by anyone at any time. Just pick up the phone and dial 0871 900 9000 and you will be given a PIN and asked to enter the phone number you want to call. Rectel then records your conversation ready for you to download on your PC. Calls to their number are charged at 10ppm inc VAT and this is how the service is funded.

Whilst their website suggests it is not illegal in the UK to record a phone conversation for your own use and you don't have to tell the other party that you are recording the call, I'm not sure what restrictions apply and to me it obviously makes sense to tell the other person so that you are recording the call so that you are not restricted in how you can use it.

This service has widespread application and whilst skype users etc could record calls easily enough for free, for the mass market dealing with large corporate call centres, this could prove immensely useful assuming the cost is not too prohibitive in the call centre queuing system hell.

I am indebted to Hawkeye for pointing this service out to me.

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Skype - a massive write-off Monday, October 01, 2007

The success story of Skype - it's free, it has over 200m registered users and in 2005 the owners walked away with a cool $2.6bn for their trouble and have been feted as heroes ever since.

But the question that has been doing the rounds in the markets for a while is "was it fools gold"?

“It has seemed relatively clear that Skype has underperformed even modest expectations for the last two years,” said Derek Brown, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald.

And based on today's write down of $1.48bn and the "elevation" of Niklas Zennstrom, a co-founder of Skype, and chief executive of the division to non-exec Chairman, ebay seems to have formed its' own view on the question.

Adotas has the story here

Still, the former investors will care even less thanks to eBay paying a onetime $530 million fee to to settle the revenue incentives, which increases Skype’s total acquisition price to $3.1 billion.

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Heck, skype's broken Thursday, August 16, 2007

You never realise how much you depend on something till it's gone.

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.


Hmmmm. And someone even asked me if I had dropped them from my skype contacts because I wasn't online.

As for "it's a software issue" - duh, you think so guys.

Oddly I have read a few articles noting there has been a windows update in the last 36hrs that may have been the culprit - I confess that my PC has certainly been updated. Given ebay stock price has been hit, albeit that may be market issues generally, it would be interesting if Microsoft were held culpable. However, I doubt they would be found liable as they have no duty of care to skype.

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Video conferencing for free is here - I think Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Many entrepreneurs I meet increasingly work as remote teams i.e. each person works from a different location, but is able to easily interact via devices like IM, skype, whiteboards, collaborations tools etc. Facetime together is limited to maybe a few half days or days per week.

Whilst I too use such tools, there is much to be said for "looking the other person in the eye" when chatting a concept over. So I will opt for video chat whenever I can (assuming meeting in person isn't an option).

For person-to-person video chat, skype is fine or MSN. But neither of these support multi-person. Hence, I usually opt to use userplane in these situations, which can be fiddly.

However, there has been a rush of new players recently, focussed on live broadcast from webcams, that I suspect could also be used for meetings and video conferencing.

Operator11 is one such free service, providing a fairly simple method to hook up a Webcam and get going. It also lets you upload video clips but it's the capability to have multiple people drop in and out of a live broadcast, controlled from the browser, that most interested me.

You can also record, embed, and share their shows with others with 40 minutes recording time per "show"/meeting available for free.

Two other services I'm also trying are Mogulus and BlogTV. These have both been reviewed by Techcrunch recently.

The main problem I've encountered is that only the controller appears to have the option to see everything that's going on in one screen, and swap back and forth between Webcams on the fly ala TV show producer. I've yet to determine how to have all participants visible to everyone, rather than flipping the camera shot between people.

If this works, it would also make an excellent solution for most corporates too - most big companies rarely have enough meeting rooms for all the meetings people want to hold. If they gave everyone a webcam (leaving bandwidth issues aside), people needn't leave their desks to participate in meetings and voila, space problem over. It would also make impromptu meetings far easier to hold, not to mention the recording feature would ensure there was a record of decision reached (or is that an unlikely outcome at a meeting in a big company?)

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Skype take down a blogger Sunday, April 29, 2007

Phil Wolff reports that Skype lawyer Seema Sharma emailed blogger Jan Geirnaert Friday afternoon. She told him his popular skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com blogs put him in legal jeopardy, because they use "skype" in the domain name. As consequence, these popular sites have been taken down.

What a great PR move for skype - not! Of course they have to protect their brand name, but it doesn't feel like this was a competitor trying to pass itself off as skype. Nor was the site portraying itself as an officially endorsed site.

It'll be interesting to see how the skype "big company" machine plays this one out.

Update: Robert Scoble thinks Skype did the right thing but suggests Skype could have easily licensed Jan if they felt he was a positive force.

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Zoho Notebook launches in alpha Tuesday, January 30, 2007


Zoli Erdos has posted about Zoho's new offering that they previewed at Demo 2007, Notebook.

Still in alpha, Notebook is an online application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily - all in one place, without having to switch applications.

Zoho are proving an amazing powerhouse in the SAAS space for SME and enterprise workers. Their product innovation cycle is blistering and I'm looking forward to trying this one out. I particularly like the idea of the skype integration given how much time I spend communicating with others via skype.

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Skype disappoints eBay Thursday, January 25, 2007

Despite rapidly growing user numbers (171m users, up 129% in 12months), eBay acknowledged "revenue has not developed as quickly as they'd hoped" in its earnings statement ($66m in Q406, up 31% on Q306).

Is this news surprising? I spend lots of time using skype for calls, video calls and IM. Yet I've never paid a cent in 3+ yrs of use.

Whilst skype anticipates only a small proportion of its users will generate revenues, it faces an unusual scenario with its current pricing structure; the more people that join skype, the less I and other skype users need to consider skype in/out paid for services. And when I do need to connect with none-skype users, I can usually find a number of online voip operators that have a promotion with free calls to my destination e.g. voipcheap.com

Would I pay a subscription for skype? Given the network benefits of lots of people being on it, I would - say £10 per quarter. But if subs came in, would there be a mass exodus, thereby destroying the hoped for revenues and creating a viscious circle in which other left because their contacts were no longer using it? I believe so.

Other brands are piling into this space, so I can't see life getting any better for skype. That said, with such a large customer base and recent prices paid for "customers" of nearly $10, it still implies a current value of over $1.5bn. Note, the 171m number reported relates to accounts in existence and not active accounts - in my experience skype never reports over 9m online at any one time.

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