Skype understands the Long Tail … and information intermediation.

September 9, 2005  |  Mobile, Weblogs, Webtech  |  , ,

Skype announced a new voice con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion model in a Press Release yes­ter­day. They get the Long Tail and they under­stand the rev­enue power from infor­ma­tion inter­me­di­a­tion, as Google and Ebay do.
 “Inter­net stan­dards are open­ing the tra­di­tion­ally closed phone net­work. With the adop­tion of VoIP for trans­port and VoiceXML as the appli­ca­tion lan­guage, now any­one, any­where can build cre­ative new ser­vices for the phone,” said Mike McCue, Tellme CEO and Co-founder. “By part­ner­ing with Skype, we believe this com­mu­nity will begin to set the stan­dard for the way peo­ple build, buy and deliver phone ser­vices globally.”
Skype’s got the dis­tri­b­u­tion and they have a nice rev­enue model through Skype Cred­its, mean­ing they 1) take a cut on the paid VoiceXML con­tent and 2) make money on the float as well, since you buy cred­its upfront and there’s a lag before you con­sume them (via Murli Ravi).
Skype callers will pay for charge­able voice ser­vices from their Skype Credit account with a per­cent­age of the fee going to the con­tent provider who cre­ated the ser­vice. Con­tent providers’ voice ser­vices will be reviewed and the most pop­u­lar will be deployed and listed on the Skype web­site. Details about how to sub­mit appli­ca­tions and the fee struc­ture will be announced later this month.
The W3C is work­ing on stan­dards for text to speech, (includ­ing say-as attri­bu­tion tags for dates, phone num­bers and maybe emo­tions), mean­ing that text con­tent can be ren­dered into voice, con­verted to RSS, which is just another XML lan­guage, like VoiceXML, and then bought and dis­trib­uted through Skype.
The con­ver­gence of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and the Web is now bring­ing the ben­e­fits of Web tech­nol­ogy to the tele­phone, enabling Web devel­op­ers to cre­ate appli­ca­tions that can be accessed via any tele­phone, and allow­ing peo­ple to inter­act with these appli­ca­tions via speech and tele­phone keypads.
So, no need to “browse” the inter­net on a small screen, for those who still believe that the mobile inter­net is about surf­ing the web on your mobile phone.
 
But the mobile is more than just brows­ing … it’s about back­ground and fore­ground func­tions. Pod­cast­ing is a back­ground func­tion, since you down­load your pod­casts at night, and then lis­ten to them when you’ve got the time.
 
In fact, the notion of back­ground should be extended to include the auto­mated func­tions, ie. the work, that you del­e­gate to your lap­top or mobile phone while you’re off doing some­thing else. For instance, down­load­ing pod­casts, down­load­ing tor­rents, dis­trib­uted com­put­ing, track­ing RSS feeds, pres­ence on IM, log­ging IRC chan­nels, and arguably your blog (vir­tual self) are some of the “work” that can occur in the back­ground. But this is get­ting a bit off the track and deserves its own post ;)
 
 
Pow­ered By Qumana

 
Tags: , ,

Related Posts

Recent Posts

  • ah, thought of this yesterday and wrote it without knowing the news.

    it could be that not only is skype rehashing an old model, but finding new cusotmers.

    now, which way will it go?
  • let's see. things like voip, voip service providers, and vxml have been around for a very long time. there are many reasons they haven't gone anywhere.

    one benefit for skype is that, while it's repeating what has gone before, it seems to be succeeding on a much beigger scale than the poor suckers who tried all this in the late 90's.
  • I love the idea of your blog being an "automated function" that's working for you in the background while you're busy doing something else. That's spot on!
blog comments powered by Disqus