According to reports coming from Asia, the Skype protocol has been reverse engineered. The work was done in China, which, notorious for its lack of intellectual property protection, probably guarantees that it can’t be thwarted by legal means. The crackers are promising it will be available commercially by end of the month.
Interestingly enough, the hacked clients cannot act as supernodes. Effectively, they are freeloading on the PC super nodes out there. Impact? Still unknown, but the speculation is that this could slow down the Skype network.
One wonders how Ebay will respond. My opinion? The smartest thing now would be to publish the specs for the protocol, and attempt to retain control through attractively priced marketing campaigns.
Without diminishing the importance of yesterday’s announcement by Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) that their IM clouds now interoperate, none of us should be hailing this as anything more than it actually is — two underdogs teaming up to try to beat the incumbent (in this case, AOL). Neither Yahoo, nor Microsoft, despite the positioning, have done anything more than open a gate between their walled gardens. There is an undeniable benefit to consumers, but the benefit that has been offered is to remove just one of the many IM clients you currently have on your desktop.
What is needed is true interoperability. The players in the industry need to move to a common standard, be that XMPP, or SIP/SIMPLE, and provide mechanisms for individual users to present credentials and authorize on any network. What is the equivalent of cell phone roaming in the IM world?Â
We should take heart in Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse statement that they welcome other players to the table.
“We certainly welcome seeing other industry players come to the table,” Yahoo’s Garlinghouse said. “We’re blazing a trail for how interoperability is done.”
Great move Microsoft and Yahoo.  We’re eagerly awaiting your next step. What would really give us all hope is to see an open interoperability specification published.
A couple of notable events for the Ottawa tech crowd:
At the Bytown Tavern on Friday night (I guess that’s tomorrow!), Shopify will be having their launch party.  For those who don’t know Shopify, they’re getting recognition for their commerce platform all over the web. Promises to be a good event, and you can even hobnob with city councillor Alex Munter.Â
Albert Lai just recently posted about Frank Demmler’s Techyvent articles on Venture Capital the other day. These are a must read resource for any startup entrepreneur, which I’d forgotten about. I made extensive use of this material developing our cap table models a little over a year ago.
