Alec Saunders SquawkBox

New VoIP Weblog: http://www.eyeonvoip.com/voip.  Great URL!

Just caught this on News.com: Microsoft Web Platform Under Construction.  Also Microsoft Web Plan Takes Aim at Google.

At the PDC, Microsoft will unveil MSN APIs for MSN Search, portions of MSN Messenger, and Microsoft Virtual Earth.  Seems they are taking notice of Google and Yahoo’s Web 2.0 efforts to turn the Internet into a platform after all.

Rich Tehrani muses that Skype Voice Services might be ideal for the adult entertainment industry.  Adult phone services apparently have a notoriously difficult time keeping a merchant credit card account.  Skype as a micro-payment vehicle might solve that problem. 

Aswath also points out that the feature set Skype is implementing looks suspiciously like Pulver’s FWD features from a few years ago.  Two points:

1. Skype has already implemented a micropayment system. When you buy Skype credit, and you can spend it on minutes, DIDs, voicemail, or downloadable goodies to go with your Skype client. With this announcement, they are just extending that system to include third parties.    I don’t necessarily think this is artificial, since they are the gatekeeper to their customers.  It’s simply an old fashioned channel distribution model.
2. Skype is already more than a softclient.  They’ve become a VNO as they’ve implement Skype-In/Skype-Out and voicemail.  The burning question is how open they will become.  Will they be like AOL?  Who can play in their walled garden?  What will be the cost?

For the time being, the Skype Voice Services model is very expensive.  Hopefully we will see this come down dramatically.  If not, then they are creating the circumstances under which a more open, more cost effective competitor can arise. 

So says this article in Red Herring.

Unnecessary interruptions from sources such as instant messaging, spam email, personal phone calls, and idle web surfing cost businesses in the United States up to $588 billion per year, or 28 percent of a knowledge worker’s day, according to a study released Thursday.

Jonathan Spira, the analyst quoted in the article, says, vis a vis communications tools like IM, and cell phones:

“The answer is not to shut them off,” he added. “It’s training people in how to use them, and making knowledge workers and managers aware of the cost. It’s as incumbent on the individual knowledge worker as it is on a manager to manage attention to do the work.”

Awareness by itself is not the answer.  What’s needed is a method to rank, filter, and prioritize those interruptions — a me-centric communications model that puts control of communications back in the users hands.