Alex de Carvalho

Skype understands the Long Tail … and information intermediation.

by Alex de Carvalho. Average Reading Time: about 2 minutes.

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 ;)
 
 
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  • http://www.blethers.com Stu­art Mudie

    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!

  • http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog char­lie

    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.

  • http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog char­lie

    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?

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