Will the Skype founders buy back their brainchild with their own and other investors’ money?

Skype is probably the most visible high-tech success story in Europe and one that pops up regularly even in the US news. That alone is quite a success, as most other European companies don’t get much buzz going for themselves. But, for whatever reason, the two founders always manage to be in the headlines. Now again the New York Times reports on rumors that they are planning to buy back Skype from eBay. eBay has mentioned several times in public that they want to get rid of Skype, as it does not fit as a core element into their strategy and, as the newspaper also writes, they need some cash, too, to keep the U.S. operation running. I personally think it would be a great move, as the potential of Skype seems to be unlimited, but to fully develop it needs the right people and focus. eBay certainly does not provide that.

Another interesting detail was the fact that for some reason the Skype founders managed to retain the core intellectual property of Skype, which is its peer-to-peer networking. If this is indeed the case, then this shows two things: one that eBay not only overpaid them at the time, but also that they seem to not even have bought the core technology rights, which seems quite amateurish, to say the least, and from the viewpoint of the Skype founders shows how incredibly smart and forward-looking they were. Would be nice to have them back in a real promising venture, also because their last startup, Joost, does not seem to be moving anywhere really.

Latest: eBay is now looking to bring Skype to the stock market as the CEO said. I think this makes little sense and probably serves to have a better negotiation position with buyout firms.

About a week ago the Australian Government announced its intention to establish a ubiquitous Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to start “very soon”.  The price tag is anybody’s guess but a guideline of USD$35 Billion (yes Billion) is a rough guide!  The objective is for 51% Government (taxpayer) funding but may get to 100% depending on the enthusiasm of private industry.

As a telecommunications professional from Australia I keep being asked what it’s all about.  My problem is that frankly, I don’t know.  The announcement itself is more political than technical.  Their business case is easy to summarise: “If we build it, they will come”.  Not an encouraging start.

As it stands the telecom industry in Australia consists of “Telstra” (the privatised ex-government “PTT”) with about 80% of the market, Optus (a full-service carrier with between 10% and 15% of the market) and 250 or so niche players.  Telstra owns and controls almost 100% of the “access network” - telephone copper wires connecting most homes. Both Telstra and Optus have suburban fibre trunk networks, suburban TV Cable (HFC) networks and large interstate trunk networks.

The government has been trying for some time to get “equality of access” to the “access network” for all
telco players but it feels that Telstra is reluctant to give up its monopoly position. Within this context there have been a number of attempts to get a ubiquitous “broadband access scheme” going - the most recent being a VDSL access proposal; but they have all foundered on the question of who should own and control it.

The current announcement is for a totally new “network”, which will be sold “wholesale” to carriers who will then provide the customer services.  The big questions are about the scope of the network and how it will be shared by multiple carriers.  If one of the current “PON” (Passive Optical Network) architectures is adopted, then how is the network to be shared so that any user can choose whichever telco they want to do business with?  The obvious way would be for the new network provider to own a very large number of large IP routers - in which case what real value would another telco have to add?  Billing perhaps?

The proposed change could be radical and deep.  It could mean the end of “vertical integration” in the telecoms industry.  But we haven’t been told anything about the technology or functional extent of the network.  Of course, it is entirely possible that the announcement is only a “big stick” intended to “encourage” Telstra to come to the barganing table - if it is, then that will be a pity.

FTTH is a great idea and we will probably need the capacity sometime in the future - but it is not needed yet!  So why spend the money?  On the other hand the majority of the network cost is the highly labour-intensive activity of “digging up the roads” to reticulate fibre to every home.  At a time of mass unemployment this seems a sensible way for government to provide economic stimulus and invest for the future.

Personally, I hope the network goes ahead.  I would hope that it will be the owner and operator of fibres and little else.  I would hope that it will “rent” or “lease” fibre strands (and space in equipment housings) to anyone on the same terms and at the same price as to anyone else. I suppose however, it is a faint hope.

While it was possible to use Skype already for quite sometime through other service aggregators such as Fring starting from March 31 on you can directly install a Skype app on your iPhone or IPod Touch.

I have tried the chatting function and it works very well, better in fact than the Fring version so that there is no need for me anymore to use Fring.

The Skype iPhone app has been downloaded 2 million times the first week which is an unbelievable number. The potential are more than 400 million Skype users of course and with that creates some real threat for the mobile operators it seems. Interestingly, these iPhone Skype users seem new users who have not been using it on their PC before so the Skype community keeps growing with this too. Last but not least they are coming out with with Skype for other mobile platforms so soon it will be around on all smartphones it seems.

I still have to use the voice function but will certainly do so on my next business trip. The cost savings are tempting no doubt even if you have to first find a Wifi connectivity. The mobile operators have to react now with some very attractive service bundles I think. To try to block them from their network is of course another protective measure but hardly a long lasting strategy. Providing attractive international voice, data roaming packages is the way to go I strongly believe.

The German consumer test magazine Stiftung Warentest looked at 16 anti virus software packages and compared PC load, help functions, features and price with each other. The top three were from GData, BitDefender and F-Secure. Looked at the list from the bottom the worst are from CA, Panda and Agnitum. That CA is the last of all the tested programs is due to its high toll on PC performance, lack of help functions and this for the highest price of all tested programs. Three free programs were tested as well and landed in the middle and these were from AVG, Avira and Alvil. I personally would have done this test differently though. Strong protection is key, but then I also find it very important to not put too high load on the CPU. I had installed programs in the past that when they updated the virus library or when they checked on e-mails or starting up programs took the full CPU power and I could not work for a while anymore. I find this entirely unacceptable. Looks like the winner GData falls into that category although I have not personally used it so don’t know it first hand. What the test also looked at were help features. This seems not that important to me though either. What should be much higher on the list is a fully automated while safe operation. You don’t really work with a virus scanner but expect it to do its job well and does this in the background and maybe only informs you of certain actions it does. Not sure how the results of this test would have looked like then, but I guess GData would not have been on top then anymore. I am currently using Kaspersky and it does fulfill all of my criteria extremely well (no CPU stress, super safe, reports occasionally on actions it does so you can or also cannot change it) but landed only on place 4 of this test. So I recommend to not take this test too serious but decide for yourself what is important for you.

Yesterday comScore published that from Jan. 2008 to Jan. 2009 the number of people accessing the web using mobiles doubled to 63 million per day in the U.S.

If you think that this was mainly done using smart phones then you are wrong: 70% are still using “ordinary” mobiles.

The most popular applications you can see below with news and information access the number one and with social networking or blog sites having the highest growth rate and landing on second place already overall.

I think this is very exciting news for everyone involved in the mobile data business.

This week Google announced Google Voice or at least prepared the public that it is coming soon as the service right now is only available for existing Grand Central users. Grand Central was acquired by Google in 2007.

Most comments in blogs and news portals missed to report about the potential that lies in Google Voice though.  So far practically all of Google’s apps lacked the potential to create any - sizable - income stream next to their search ad business but I think Google Voice could actually be the base for lots of additional business - if they want to use it that way. We are talking here about unifying voice and data and controlling both for the masses. The idea is not new and there are many business solutions available already that offer this but no mass market one that I would know of. If I would be a company in one of the following areas I would be nervous right now: SMS web clients, voice mail, VoIP (ala Skype), IP video conferencing. These are the obvious ones. But what about these here: ringtone downloads, mobile app downloads or e.g. any voice recognition enabled applications? And of course the Google mobile phone platform Android will profit from it too it can be assumed.

Google Voice could become the platform for all that, I don’t see why not. If there is anything that Google knows best then it is scalability so that won’t be an issue. Of course operators - mostly - don’t like Google and here is the challenge for them. Maybe at the end it will be the same as with all their other new things though. They become irrelevant by themself and serve only one purpose: to help bind more folks to Google search. In that case noone has to become nervous but simply better and maybe cheaper too. And if not? Well then it is up to everyone to think how much do we want Google to know about what we do on the web and with our phones.

At Mobile Wireless World it seemed like the mobile TV technology vendors who require a relatively large upfront infrastructure investment, such as DVB-H or DVB-SH, were facing the economic downturn in a bad way. On the other hand, mobile streaming video system vendors got lots of attention, being an immediate and relatively low-cost alternative.  When I saw live mobile streaming TV for the first time on my iPhone just a few weeks ago, watching the US presidential inauguration, I was quite disappointed with the quality of Ustream, the first iPhone live mobile TV app. The program crashed every few minutes and also the video quality was partly bad, so that the whole experience made me believe that this is not yet working. At MWC in Barcelona, though, I saw quite a few demos that did an impressive job in delivering high quality live mobile video streaming over Wifi, 3G and even 2G network connections. Will that mean that 2009 is the year where mobile video streaming makes it big? We will see. Some people clearly think so. See e.g. here, here and also here.

Today I replaced my iPhone with an iPod Touch. I realized that I only really use my iPhone with Wifi Internet access, and otherwise only use the applications offline. I also have a Samsung phone that lasts a few days without having to recharge it and it is so slim that I can slide it into my shirt or pant pockets and hardly feel it any more.

When travelling and using my iPhone I used to accumulate lots of roaming charges as I was tempted to use my iPhone more often. Even a cheaper international plan did not cut it for me. Also, the iPod Touch is lighter and slimmer than the iPhone and I expect the battery to last longer too.

Now I just saw this statistic from admob, who serve ads to more than 6,000 mobile websites, and their mobile data usage statistics are interesting, showing that the iPod Touch is indeed becoming the number one choice for using the Internet on the road. What that of course also means is that right now the incumbent mobile operators are losing out on this trend big time. 3G networks simply cannot offer the speed needed, and 4G is still far off, it seems. To make things clear: I have now the iPod Touch which has only a Wifi chip built in. And my other phone I just use for calls, so don’t really care if it is 2G or 3G or whatever. More and more people are getting used to this right now. All of us could have become loyal wireless data customers using 3G or 4G networks if they delivered what was promised: fast wireless internet access. Now we’re spending our money elsewhere and getting used to it.

Two days ago mobile book reading made another major step forward on its quest to become mainstream when Google announced that 2 million books (US and international) can now be read on your mobile phones as well.

The continued adoption of e-book readers should get another boost by this and also Amazon seems to have plans to open their books for many mobile devices while their new Kindle e-reader is due on Monday.

Meanwhile, if mobile e-books are your thing, a few other nifty apps are available for the iPhone that do a good job: Stanza, eReader or BookShelfLT are all free.

Looks like ever since Nokia closed down its mobile phone manufacturing plant in Bochum, Germany, whatever the Finnish company does that looks only slightly controversial, the German public jumps at it vigorously.

This just happened once again in German’s IT portal Heise Online (where comments on news articles are well known for being quite direct and often aggressive, using vulgar language as well). A news article saying that Nokia was pushing the Finnish government to pass a law that would allow it to screen e-mails of its employees generated 400 — mostly hate — comments on Heise Online.

While Nokia won’t make the masses in Germany their friends anymore, also due to the way they handled the closure of the mobile phone plant, I think they should have the right to screen e-mails for suspicious recipients such as competitors’. Espionage by Chinese companies is big. Huawei in particular is known to have copied Cisco routers one-to-one, incl. all its manuals and of course bugs as well. They also copied Ericsson’s GSM network elements and are now only replacing SW parts with their own developments as I heard from some insider sources.

That Nokia seems to have similar issues with Huawei is not surprising. To think though that they could protect themself by screening e-mails I think is a bit naive. Someone stealing design insights would hardly use company e-mails to do so.