Skype 2.6 for Mac Now Available

Skype has released Skype for Mac 2.6, the latest version of its communication software for Mac users. For the first time, Mac users will be able to enjoy a new Skype feature before it's available to Windows users.

Specifically, Mac 2.6 offers a new call-transfer feature that is exclusive to the Mac platform. Users can now select More > Call Transfer to transfer an ongoing call to another Skype user on their contact list. It is obvious how this will appeal to small business users, especially lone eagles and remote personnel.

Beyond the exclusive call-transfer feature, Skype for Mac 2.6 incorporates a number of nice Skype features that were previously only available on other platforms.

Mac users now can join public chats. There is a chat typing indicator. Skype Prime offers the ability to call a premium-service provider and pay for their advice and knowledge with Skype credit.

Automatic updates are automatically pushed to end users and DTMF tones for automatic answering services are available during Skype-to-Skype calls.

Past Early Adopters?

Wal-Mart is offering Skype certified hardware in 1,800 of its stores throughout the United States, including headsets, webcams and handsets, as well as the first prepaid cards for Skype available in the U.S. Either Skype and Wal-Mart think Skype is way past the early adopter phase, or else both believe early adopters shop at Wal-Mart. We think the latter might be closer to the truth.

"Free is Going to Win..."

The paid video download market is ultimately a dead end, argues Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. "Free is going to win."

Online video sites that sell shows and movies such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes will likely peak this year as more programming is made available on free outlets supported by advertising. Sales of movies and television shows are expected to almost triple to $279 million in 2007 from an estimated $98 million last year.

"In the video space, iTunes is just a temporary flash while consumers wait for better ways to get video. They're already coming," says McQuivey, who says the paid download video market a "dead end."

That's certainly the developing conventional wisdom, but might not be entirely accurate. Most video watched today is partly ad supported, and partly subscription based. U.S. Cable TV revenues of $74.7 billion include $33.6 billion of basic cable (ad-supported channels) and $6.5 billion in commercial-free premium channels. Cable advertising is about $5 billion annually. So for linear video, ad support is crucial for most channels.

But "pay to own" or "pay to watch" models also are well established. The "pay to own" market includes $16 billion of annual movie and DVD sales. The "pay to watch" segment includes $8 billion in rental revenue. None of that is likely to change simply because a new distribution method is added to the legacy mix. In other words, "pay per view" or "on demand" always has been a smaller portion of overall video consumption.

So the conventional wisdom probably is right: ad support will drive most online video viewing. But not all. There still will be some appetite for downloading to own, just as people now watch ad-supported video and buy DVDs.

Need Engineers? Buy a Company

Google buys a start-up once every few days, or around one a week, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "In the past, we would buy businesses in lieu of (hiring) engineers." That's why they call it "Google speed."

Bye Bye Walled Garden

Whatever else it may do, the iPhone probably has killed any hopes mobile carriers might have harbored that they could create and control musice downloading walled gardens. Alltel, for example, is launching Jump Music , free of digital rights management and supporting side loading, so users can upload music they already own into their handsets.

Jump Music allows transfer of existing owned music to phones including the LG AX8600, MOTOKRZR K1m, MOTORAZR V3m, The Wafer by Samsung and the aforementioned u520. We also note that Sprint Nextel has realized the market price for a song is 99 cents, not $2.99.

Wholesale Poised for More Growth?

Business end users have, for as long as I can remember, had the ability to create their own voice services as an application. We call that a phone system. What's new these days is that there are more ways enterprises of all sorts can create their own voice services. And some of those same mechanisms can be used by consumers as well. Click to talk from a web site is one example. Instant messaging integrated with Session Initiation Protocol is another example. Voice-enabled gaming is another good example.

My assumption is that calling remains most useful when any telephone number can be called, without the constraints of who is in one's community or directory, uses a compatible client or device. And that means there is a growing business for wholesale providers of voice capabilities including, but not limited to, termination services. Which leads one to wonder whether the wholesale portion of industry revenues might be poised for even more growth. How could it be otherwise?

And might that be the case even though sales of traditional products appear to be falling? At least that's what The Yankee Group suggests is happening. The problem with tracking wholesale revenues is that the category tends to include all sorts of things. Access fees paid for termination provide a good example. What is difficult to capture are wholesale sales of services to retail providers of wireless, wireline termination and orgination, whether those entities are service or application providers or large enterprises that repackage voice termination as a feature.

That especially is true when an application provider basically needs to buy only dedicated Internet access or other bandwidth in order to make the voice application available to a wholesale customer. One wonders whether falling prices are not more than balanced by increased usage, even for legacy services, to say nothing of harder to measure IP-based wholesale.

Vonage Preps Workaround

Vonage thinks it has found a workaround that avoids any of the claimed Verizon patent infringements and plans to begin implementing them shortly, says Jeffrey Citron, Vonage interim CEO says. Vonage's new technology can be installed through software downloads and shouldn't be costly to deploy, Citron says.