Liveblogging a VON session with Jeff Pulver, Vinod Khosla, and Nokolas Zennstrom of Skype (and Joost). For those interested, click on more.
I’m at VON and Vinod Khosla is speaking; always a neuron-tickling treat.
He says that transport isn’t quite dead; a trillion dollars was spent on it last year. What’s next?
New jargon I hadn’t heard yet: MoIP, mobile over IP. And SoIP, services over IP (llike ringcentral and Sotto, which combines the office and cell phone). He asks whether transport revenue will increase but be paid for by businesses instead of consumers (see 800 numbers).
What’s next in advertising? TV over IP expensive or illegal. He asks what TVoIP can learn from the web. He talks about user-generated advertising (Pulver just showed great commercials for Network2.tv the people here made to win a chunk of his $50k). He points out that SMS is a bigger business than Google “and it hasn’t been exploited…. I think this is a massive opportunity.” He also mentions 80018 that is putting a thousand channels on the mobile phone.
“Youtube was a warmup act,” he said. He wonders whether wireless USB is the answer; it enabled a very different kind of phone with 100GB on your phone or in your briefcase that the phone can use. Batteries are the biggest obstacle to these technologies. He speculates that the mobile phone becomes a projector and a real TV. He mentions Moka5 that carries your software apart from your PC; he wants to do that on his phone.
Citing the surprise of P2P taking over internet traffic, he says that we can never predict where traffic will come from but network growth will not stop.
Now Niklas Zennstrom saying that Skype is “all about enabling the world’s conversations” — one to one, many to many, when you’re not there, on all platforms, wtih data, video, im, sms, self-expression, information, feelings, location…. Skype has been downloaded a half-billion times. He says that innovation drives growth (can you hear that, media?). He says that 44 percent of the time we spend online is on communications (and I’d define that more broadly than just im, email, and voip; that makes it grow more).
Next: “SkypeFind is about enabling any Skype user to find businesses.” Gawd, I hope they can solve that. It’s a user-generated directory of any type of business. It has listings from 200 countries and then people will rate and review and edit listings (mobile-wiki data base, eh?). This will enable a business model based on advertising as well as pay-per-lead and click-per-call.
Be warned Google. Be warned newspapers. There will be a war over the small advertiser.
Next: SkypePrime enabled users to do commerce with each other. An expert can sell those services with payment via PayPal. Others — Yahoo, About — have tried this without great success. Not sure what’s going to make it work this time.
Next: Skype Extras, around since the end of last year, is an ecosystem for third-party developers.
Next: Send money enables users to send money to each other. Interesting; could cut into the calling card business for remote families.
He finally talks about Joost at the end, saying they were thinking about TV in 2000 but the timing wasn’t right. He says they will liberate viewers from a schedule (but it does that by adding a schedule back to the internet, no?) and to add interactivity (which live TV enables.
