We recently got a chance to briefly sit down with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who definitely ranks among the geekier and more sincere CEOs we’ve had the privilege to meet. We discussed the long-missing JavaFX Mobile platform Sun promised a while back, as well as Java on the iPhone, and doing battle with Microsoft as an open source software vendor. Check it out over on Engadget Mobile!
We got a few minutes to chat (once again) with Real’s Rob Glaser today, who was kind enough to answer a few lingering questions about Real’s freshly announced music alliance with MTV and Verizon called Rhapsody America.
Today’s interview is a first for Engadget in a couple ways: we’ve never talked with an executive whose company doesn’t actually make or sell something, nor have we talked with anyone whose technology is theoretically infeasible. Still, we’ve all had our chance to criticize Steorn for its scientifically heretical claim to the invention of a perpetual motion machine, its failed live demonstration of that machine, and so on. So now it’s time to turn the mic over to Steorn’s CEO Sean McCarthy, where he discusses his belief in the potential of Steorn’s Orbo technology, his feelings about the scientific community and skeptics at large, and what happens next for the supposed free energy company.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. I’m sure that you’re very busy, especially after the last couple of weeks–
I’ve had better weeks. (Read the rest of this entry…)
For this week’s Engadget Inteview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Bluetooth SIG executive director Mike Foley from his headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., about wireless headphones, hands-free phone gabbing, and what kinds of Bluetooth-enabled gadgets we’ll be seeing in the years ahead. 
For those who aren’t familiar with Bluetooth, what is it and why should we care?
From the big-picture perspective, Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology with its mission in life to replace cables and to allow devices to communicate with each other without having to plug them together.
Work on this began in the mid- to late ’90s. Since then, work has been done on enhancing the specification, creating a good test program that devices go through before they enter the market to ensure interoperability between devices, and getting Bluetooth into many devices so that it really becomes valuable to the consumer.
We got a rare chance to sit down and talk shop with recently-named Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. President Kaz Hirai, and his US successor, Jack Tretton. These two had a lot to say, and we were more than happy to let them talk about where the PS3’s going in terms of hardware, software, and services, why Sony’s E3 presence this year is so radically different than last year, even a little bit about how things have been at PlayStation HQ post-Kutaragi — check it out!
So out of all the three press conferences we’ve been writing up, we’re giving each one a grade based on a new highly scientific Mega Man ranking system. Sony is our last one, but chronologically so we haven’t gotten there yet. But this press conference had a much different tone then let’s say last year’s E3 press conference. How much did you guys look at last year’s, how should we say, performance, and decide that you needed to do something different? What kind of decision making process was that?
Jack: Well obviously I was not as intimately involved in planning last year’s press conference as I was in this one, but it’s funny now that you look at that perspective and you see some of the other press conferences and how people are conducting themselves. I think companies are very proud of their success and they want to tell everybody how successful you are. But what you realize is that everybody already knows that and no one really cares. They want to know how you are going to be successful going forward. And so we’ve certainly taken our fair share of heat about, you know, the performance of PlayStation 3 in the first six to eight months, and I guess we wanted to focus our message on really telling you why PlayStation 3 is going to be successful going forward.
And its all about content, its about games, and I think going through that experience, you know, the light bulb goes off, and you go oh, wait a minute, its really all about the content and what we’re going to do going forward to keep our platforms relevant. Its not about what we did 10 years ago, its not about how many units we’ve sold here or there. So clearly I think for points of reference and perspective we wanted to point some things out that we really wanted that press conference geared towards why people are going to want to buy games and buy our platforms and that was kind of the theme and the central message. I give Dave [Karraker, Senior Director, Corporate Communications, SCEA] a lot of credit for building off of that theme and coordinating tremendous amounts of presentations and content through the whole thing. But hopefully we’ve stayed on message and we’ve gotten the point across.
So why no word about rumble?
Jack: Well, I guess at this point the SIXAXIS controller is something that we’re comfortable with and we’ve certainly settled our differences with Immersion. Is it something that can happen down the road? Absolutely. But the bottom line is we haven’t made that decision and we didn’t have anything to announce or introduce. Will we down the road? Possibly, but it’s unbeknownst to me if we have a rumble controller coming out.
Oh I think you’d know before anyone!
[laughter] Well, you’d be surprised! It’s a big company…
There is some discussion, I think by [redacted], about something to the effect that the timed exclusive for Unreal Tournament wasn’t an arranged thing, but just a matter of fact that they hadn’t got the chance to get the 360 version done in time. You know, your exclusive strategy seems to be one almost similar to Nintendo’s, where you are focusing on first party exclusives…
[Kaz Hirai, President, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., enters the room.]
Jack: Yeah, you guys know Kaz I hope.
Kaz: I heard you guys were here and Jack was sending me an SOS email… [laughter]. Sorry to interrupt.
Jack: If I heard your question correctly, I think and would tend to agree with you that we felt and that you can never control or anticipate what another company is going to do. That’s their business and they run it as they see fit. So the best way to ensure that you have content that differentiates your platform from the next and showcases the technology is to create it yourself. That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in our internal development over the years. I think we kinda look at exclusive opportunities a little more organically. Most of the time the publishers approached us and said, this is what we have to offer and this is what we’re looking for — whether its some development help or some co-marketing — but you know we would look at that the same way we would look at our strategy behind developing a first party game.
Is this something that is going to showcase the technology and is this something that is gonna differentiate our platform from the next? Because an exclusive, just because it’s not on any other platforms does nothing for you. If its exclusive and its actually a game people want to buy and want to play you know that helps you. So, you know we get a lot more exclusive offers and / or games that have come out on our platform than I think we would — you know, I don’t think you can assume that every time there is an exclusive, “Oh, they must have paid for that or they must have co-marketed.” Its the ones that we say yeah, we’re going to help drive the message on that game because that’s going to help us drive the message on our hardware.
So I hope that answered your question and wasn’t too windy, but yes I think first party development is what we saw as the key. I didn’t hear Mark’s comment to that effect, but you know whether that’s true or not I’d be disappointed to hear that. But again I guess this is a perfect example of you can’t control what other people say and they run their business as they see fit. I guess that the net-net of the whole thing is that it will only be available on our platform this year and hopefully that is a good thing for PlayStation 3 consumers.
So to what would you attribute the sales figure that we’re hearing now that the Wii is outselling the PS3 6 to 1 — at least in some markets. But all markets that the Wii is out, the Wii is vastly outselling the PS3.
David Karraker: I think that at least you are referring to Japan, the 6 to 1 margin so that I might actually be a better question for Kaz.
Well, in the US the Wii is still outselling the PS3 as well.
Jack: You know, all credit to the Wii for the success they’ve had. I think we’re talking about 8 months into a product life-cycle and we don’t want to be outsold for a day, but if we’re outsold in the first 8 months, its much less of a concern than to be outsold for the first 8 years. The other thing that we have going for us is the perspective that we’re looking at a 10 year product life-cycle. I’m not saying that our competitors aren’t, but the thing our competitors don’t have is two viable product platforms in the market. So we get to add up the revenue and the sales that we’ve sold on the PlayStation 2 with the revenue and the sales that we’ve sold on the PlayStation 3, and while I’d like think that [users] buy a PlayStation 2 today and they buy a PlayStation 3 tomorrow — we know that people we’re selling PlayStation 2s to are probably not going to buy a PlayStation 3 this year — they are probably going to migrate somewhere down the road.
But we really believe in bringing interest in the category is good for everybody and while I’d like them to buy a PS3 today, if they buy a Wii and they buy a PS2 and they buy an Xbox 360, I think in time we’ll be able to convert everybody and anybody who hasn’t bought a PS3 to the PS3 if we deliver on the promise of the technology and the gaming content. I don’t think its a matter of when you get them, but its a question of if you get them. If we’re sitting in this competitive position 10 years from now I’ll be very disappointed, but quite frankly as far as the company is concerned, if we are well accepted by consumers and we deliver profit contributions, how you sold relative to the competition is somewhat irrelevant. Because what they sell and don’t sell doesn’t pay any bills for Sony.
Its about how your platform is doing in terms of consumer acceptance. And I think if you look at the PS3 right now is is a little bit softer than we would have ideally liked? Yes. Is that a tremendous surprise? Not really, we knew that it was a tall order to get millions consumers to pony up $599 in the first 6 to 8 months. That’s a lot of money and its a lot more money then they’ve been used to paying for hardware. And I think in time they’ll understand the technology, and if we deliver the promise on the software that we’ll get where we want to be.
Do you think any of that has to do with the phenomenal success of the PS2 as a platform? Because you guys didn’t go scorched-earth with Microsoft and with the Xbox, so there is less incentive for people to upgrade in some respects. And you also have the massive price difference between the two systems.
Jack: I don’t think there is any question about that. We had the same question on the PlayStation 1 and the PlayStation 2. I mean, again, we’re dealing from a position of strength, we’re not talking about the first 6 months. I mean, if you’re starting from a zero base and, you know, you said it yourself, scorched-earth, those platforms are abandoned. So now you’re trying to decide your first unit with your new platform and you’re in a position where the last generation you didn’t fare too well competitively, so its all about year one. Maybe, we’re a bit overconfident, but the PlayStation 2 remains incredibly viable — great contributions to the bottom line and great software for the consumer — so I think we felt like we could have a little more patience in terms of getting to where we needed to get to.
I guess that the question that I’ve said a bunch of times — maybe it’s a good question for Kaz — is the decision that Sony could have made a couple of years ago is to say, you know, we’ve really got this PlayStation 2 thing nailed, and we’ve sold 118 million units. What do you think about doing a PlayStation 2.5? We’ll add some bells and whistles to it, we can put it out at $199 or $249. I bet we could sell a bunch of them in the next couple of years — and I think we clearly could. Could we sell a bunch for the next 10 years? No. So I think we’d have been looking at introducing a newer platform that didn’t have the staying power that the PlayStation 3 does. We elected to do the quantum leap. The 10 year life-cycle because that’s what did so well for us in PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2, and if you have a strategy that’s worked, you tend to stick with it. I don’t know how you feel about…
Kaz: Just to add to what Jack said, or to add some more color. We’re obviously a part of Sony and we do take a very long-term perspective on the business as a whole, and I’d always say, well instead of focusing on the first 6 months, I think the better perspective and great example to really see where things stand is really with the PS2. Where you look back, you know 7 or 8 years into the life-cycle and to say, ok, how much have we accomplished in terms of business volume for Sony for publishers and for the retailers on this platform that is 7 or 8 years old (depending on which territory you’re talking about), and after 118 million units worldwide, then you look back and say how does that compare with the business volume of, say, Sega, which was able to generate the Dreamcast (because were talking about the same generation), and how much business and volume Microsoft was able to deliver with the Xbox, and how much business volume were we able to deliver on the PS2.
I don’t think the same kind of comparison is really viable had we had this same conversation back in the Spring of 2000 or even in 2001, because again we were only a year in a half or two years into the life-cycle of that product. The hand really hasn’t really played itself out to the extent that we have the perspective now of looking back where we are with the PlayStation 2. So I know we all get focused on the here and now, and I have a tendency of doing that as does everybody else, but I think we need to make sure that we look at here and now, but also understand that there is a wider business implication that we need to look at from the Sony perspective over the 10 year life-cycle that Jack was talking about as well.
So Kaz, specifically for you, how do you feel that the business has changed within Sony within the games division with the departure of Kurtagi-san?
Kaz: I think that you know, many subtle changes have already come about, in that I kind of bring a different perspective in that I was in Jack’s position for 11 to 12 years on the regional headquarters side, where you know, we got a lot of different strategic input from Japan on a lot of issues that would pertain to the North American market. So I was on the receiving end and Japan was on the transmission end. There were times where I said, you know what, perhaps that’s a great idea for the Japanese market or the European market, doesn’t know if that really works here in the US. Snd other times I think the Europeans felt great about strategies for North America, but it doesn’t really work in Europe, et cetera.
So one of the things that I’ve tried to start changing is giving more autonomy, more decision-making power and therefore more responsibility, if you will — as well as more credit, if everything works out — to the RHQs (regional headquarters). We’re starting out with small things, like, for example, this time around Jack was talking about the PSP. We’ve got the black obviously, we’ve got the silver and the white, and as opposed to Tokyo saying you do this color or that color, or here are the five colors we can choose from — none of them really work for the US but which one would you like? The process was more like, Jack, tell me which colors you need and I’ll make it happen. Small things like that I’m really starting to implement, but bigger issues down the road as well. Again more autonomy for regional headquarters.
When it comes to basic fundamental strategies where the hardware needs to go or worldwide implications such as where a phone needs to go, those kinds of things — that’s obviously something that needs to be decided at the Tokyo level, but in conjunction or in concert with a lot of discussions we would have with the RHQ heads to make sure their issues and their points of view are taken into consideration when we come to decisions at the Tokyo level (that have these global implications). Having said all that, its not like it was a one-way street before, but perhaps it was 6 lanes coming this way [from Japan to US] and 2 lanes [from US] going to Tokyo, we’re making sure that the freeway now has 3 ways either side in terms of information flow and exchange of opinion, and also making sure that those kinds of opinions actually get reflected in decisions that I need to make in Tokyo.
I thought that one of the most interesting parts of the keynote was when Phil pulled out a Sony Ericsson phone that had some integration with PlayStation Home. Historically Sony has had a lot of trouble integrating, they’ve been a very vertically integrated company and I know that one of the things that Howard was brought in to do was to try and make the company more horizontal. I’m just wondering going forward what things are we going to see in terms of the company being more horizontally integrated and being more cross platform in respects to things like mobile devices. We’ve been hearing hints of a Sony Ericsson mobile phone with PSP capabilities and things like that…
Kaz: Sure, you know this is one of these things where there’s always room for improvement and quite honestly it’s something Sony can do a lot better job at doing just as a group, but having said that I’ll try to respond to your specific point before I do that I do want to point out to basically the PS3 where if we were completely siloed and only vertically integrated we probably wouldn’t have a PS3 because we wouldn’t be able to design it we wouldn’t be able to source key parts for it like the CELL chip, because that’s coming from Sony; we wouldn’t be able to manufacture it because it’s being manufactured, portions anyway at Sony EMS, and so, Howard talks about Sony, and I was actually at a management conference where I did a presentation on business at Sony united, and I said if you want Sony united look at the PS3. where necessary and especially at the real operation level of the organization, there’s a lot of back and forth that happens, with or without Howard saying Sony united or not.
Now, as I said before there’s always room for improvement and I think the smaller territories where there are smaller numbers of people within SCE and within Sony there’s a lot more integration that happens, and a prime example of that is the relationship that Sony Computer Entertainment Canada has with Sony Electronics Canada because they’re actually very close and they work together on a variety of different promotional activities and what have you. When it comes to Japan it’s the hardest because there are so many people and so many different businesses involved. But I think just overall, with Howard making a call for Sony united just at every level of the organization, you know for example I engage with Howard literally on a weekly basis, you know he’ll call me, I’ll call him… I spend some time with Dr. Chubachi who is the President and Electronics CEO over at Sony. I also speak to Mr. Nakagawa and Ihara, who are right below Dr. Chubachi, and we just talk about technology trends, we talk about marketing issues, we talk about the possibility of what can we do … for example, what can Sony Ericsson and Sony Computer Entertainment do, what can we do in conjunction with Sony Pictures in Japan or in the US, so there’s a lot more, again, talking about the two lane versus six lane highway, there’s a lot more information flow that happens at the management level as well, and I think that going forward, whether it’s in products or in marketing activities, or in sales activities in certain instances, you’re going to see a lot more collaboration between the Sony organizations.
But I think the most important thing though is - we’ll do that, if it makes sense, not for the sake of doing it, and that’s a trap that we don’t want to fall into, we meaning not just us, but everybody in the Sony group. I think some of the things that made sense, that manifested itself would be, for example the Talladega Nights pack-in, and you know, people look at it and say, well that’s just a pack-in of product. Yes, but you also need to realize we got it, what was it, a week or ten days before the launch. And you know, Sony Pictures pulled some strings, and they made it happen for us. You know, that kind of stuff you can only do when you have a video game company as well as a motion picture company within the same group, and that’s a prime example of the kind of things that you can expect to see going forward and even more, given the kind of dialogue, improved dialogue that we are having with the Sony companies at the senior management level.
Can you talk just a bit about the integration with Sony Ericsson going forward, and the stuff on the…
Kaz: I can definitely tell you we are having some conversations.
Are you thinking more on the device level or just on the software integration level?
Kaz: I can tell you that we’re having some conversations. [laughter]
Let me ask this then, why was the Home integration announced on the Sony Ericsson mobile devices, and not within the PSP? The Home demo was on a Sony Ericsson phone, but not on a PSP.
Kaz: I think you know was just a, I don’t want to belittle the Sony Ericsson guys, because it’s not meant to be that way, but you know, basically Phil wanted to demonstrate a technology where you could take a picture on your cellphone and then, you know, have it come back on Home, and it just happened to be that, obviously if we’re going to demonstrate something on a cell phone, that we would much rather use a Sony Ericsson phone, than a Motorola phone, so it was a technology demonstration, and you know I don’t think that we want to read too much into that at this point in time.
David: Yeah and that was actually, he sent it via a phone network.
Via MMS?
David: Yeah.
Okay, I was just surprised that it was on a Sony Ericsson phone and it wasn’t also shown on a PSP in addition to the phone. So speaking about working horizontally and the Talladega Nights example, I think a lot of people were disappointed that we didn’t find out more about any kind of video on demand service, or an IPTV service, for the PlayStation 3. That seems to be one of the areas where there was a lot of opportunity for corporate synergy, to use a corporate term, and we still haven’t seen it. There had been promises of things like that on PlayStation 2, and here we have the PlayStation 3 — which seems kind of ideally suited to provide that service — and we still haven’t heard much about it.
Kaz: A couple perspectives. One, is, and we’ve said this before and it still holds true, is that we are looking at a variety of ways of bringing a video download service and a music download service to the PlayStation 3, as well as the PSP (obviously), and it’s something that we’re actively looking at doing and actively working on as well. Having said that, whether we like it or not there are some other companies that have that as their core competency in that music download space. One of the things that we have to look at this point in time is, okay, if for example, I think had we done something like a straightforward music download service for the PlayStation Network Store, your quesion would have been, “What differentiates your store from downloading music from the iTunes store?” And I want to make sure that we are able to put a unique, PlayStation-esque way of presenting the music content, for example, to the PlayStation 3 users .Otherwise, we’re just one of them.
We have the assets obviously, but it’s not like Sony Pictures or Sony BMG for music download doesn’t license the music to anybody else — obviously they license to everybody, which is the way they should be doing their business, so they have access to the content as well as we would so what differentiates their service? So one of the things as an example of what im trying to get at is Phil demoed Singstar and obviously there’s a music download component there’s also a video download component there primarily for promotional videos, obviously because its a music application, but you can see that the music download is an integral part of and is in addition to just downloading music listening to it — and okay you’re happy.
But its a part of the overall Singstar experience that you’re downloading the music that so that is a kind of different experience than you would have for downloading music that’s specific to the PS3 experience that you can’t get anywhere else. That’s the kind of thing i’m talking about, and therefore, in conjunction with Singstar, there is going to be music download obviously because we find something that’s very PlayStation-esque. So I want to try to come up with something that has the same kind of different PlayStation experience for music downloads, if we’re going to expand it to the PlayStation Network Store≤ and also for video downloads as well — so that you won’t be asking me, “What separates your service from everybody else’s?”
Well I think there’s still a general demand for digitally distributed things like TV shows or movies regardless of how unique the experience is. I think people like the experience of being able to rent a movie at home directly. Right now you have the Xbox 360 maybe at some point in the future Apple will enable it in the Apple TV, but Sony seems peculiarly able to do this, not only because you guys own movies, but also in terms of the hardware you have available…
Kaz: Not only that, we also have the infrastructure in place as well. So the technology [road]blocks if you will, and the client side — its all there, but you know again, we may ultimately decide a straight solo store is the best way to go, because, you know, we may have a lot of internal discussions on this between your recording — maybe there is still a lot of demand for just a straightforward download service and we may end up doing that ultimately. So again, it’s not something that we decide we’re just not gonna do, it’s something we want to do, but we want to do it right, and if the right answer means we just do a straightforward download [service] that may be the solution, so that’s kind of where we’re at. Are we planning something? Absolutely. When I say, “I’m planning something” and you say, “When’s that gonna launch?”, well it’s up for discussion.
It seems pretty obvious that this should have happened a very long time ago. Now thinking a few steps ahead it just seems like there’s just too much of a reliance on physical media — what’s the point of having downloadable 1080p movies for PS3 if you have Blu-ray discs, what’s the point of having downloadable movies for PSP if there’s UMD? So it seems like you keep on saying, “It’s happening, it’s happening,” but to me it just seems like, “No, get it on one of our physical medias.”
Kaz: As I said before, exactly your point, that’s exactly the kind of discussions we’re having internally, we may ultimately decide that that’s the right answer and in which case the ingredients are in place, but you need to come to the determination that we’re embarking on the right strategy, so that as I said before jokingly, that Jack is not asked next year, “What is so unique [about your service]? Everybody can download to 1080p.”
Thanks for your time!
We got a precious few minutes to sit down and talk to the man himself. That’s right, we landed a real interview with Fake Steve Jobs. In it, “El Jobso” reminisces about his drug-addled youth, what he does to the traitorous wretches that leak Apple products before they’re launched, the questions they ask you when you apply for a job at Apple, and even how he really feels about my girlfriend. Not to be missed!
So, thanks for the interview, Steve.
You’re most welcome. Namaste.
So, what’s the hardest thing about being Steve Jobs?
The constant pressure and sh*tstorm of a million distractions. Eurotards, Microtards, longhairs. Not to mention the SEC and US Attorney’s office. Oh and Greenpeace. I hate Greenpeace. Really — a lot.
What about people that ask you for tech support? Do you get that very often? Because my shuffle has been acting up…Yes all the time. Luckily, however, I actually know almost nothing about computers. And people who know me know that. So they don’t ask. But yes, strangers come up to me all the time.
Do they ever confuse you for the character actors that portray you on SNL and now Mad TV?
Yes and it drives me nuts. Or people will go, You know, you look a lot like Steve Jobs. But honestly, usually people do know who I am, and they get all weird and nervous around me, which i have to admit, never gets old. I love it.
I was really into NeXT, whatever happened with that?
Well, we had some issues around pricing. Like, we figured out what the product should cost, and then we multiplied that by four and set our prices that way. Turns out we were over-overpricing. When I returned to Apple we figured out how to overprice correctly. About 50% more than the reasonable price is about what people are wiling to pay to get a product that makes them cooler than everyone else. So now instedad of over-overpricing, we’re just overpricing. And as our results indicate, it’s working.
Speaking of overpriced, so were you really carrying the iPhone at the soccer game, or what?
Sure. Why? I’ve been using one since last summer.
Well, um, can I have a look at it?Sure. Do you know where my office is?
I’ve been to the Apple campus, sure.
Great. Well just come on over, go to the front desk and tell them I’m expecting you.
I hear they’re all locked in a vault. So will HyperCard work on this thing, or what?
I have no idea what HyperCard is. But, um, yes. it will.
Seriously?
Absolutely. What is HyperCard?
I guess that was after you left, it was in the 80s — lived up through OS 9. They taught it in school.
Yeah, well, see, I am a dropout. And I have very strong feelings about that. And about education in general.
On the topic of strong feelings, what do you have to say to all the European countries criticizing Apple right now?
You know, I tend to get kind of hostile and upset about this topic… but lately I’ve been trying to just calm down and approach it rationally. Really what I’d say is, look, nobody is forcing you to use iTunes and iPods. You don’t have to buy them. So vote with your dollars. It’s as simple as that. We put a product out into the market that we think is insanely great. But if you don’t like it, don’t use it. Go buy a Zune, you’ll love it. Or better yet, make your own music player… friggin Norwegians.
So if you had it to do all over again, would you still invent the friggin iPod?
Absolutely. But this time around I would make sure I got all the credit for it. I’m kind of bummed at the way all these other people have rushed forward trying to claim it was partly their idea too. Did you see that Wired story last fall? Made me sick.
Yeah. But, well, PortalPlayer did the software right? And it was a very engineer-driven effort…
No, I wrote all the software.
Really! I did not know that.
Of course you didn’t. Because the anti-Steve propaganda machine has been kicking in in full force. I wrote OS X, too, but you never heard that either did you?
You know, I didn’t!
Because Apple PR invents these frigged up stories.
So I actually wanted to know — on the topic of journalism and outreach. Obviously you are pretty tight lipped about forthcoming products. What do you do when learning of a leak in the good ship Apple?
Basically, our ex-Mossad security team swings into action. I ran a photo recently of a leaker, and what we did to him. [Pulls out photo]
Ah. Ouch. And what about Scully? Did you ever pull a knife on that guy?
Wanted to. But so far just prank phone calls. Which, by the way, he always falls for, the dope. He so wanted to be like me it was just sad. He used to even talk like me, try to imitate me. I pitied him. Then he got me tossed, bastard.
Speaking of which, I know you and Gates are pals, we’ve all seen the pictures of you at D, and you’re appearing together this year. Why do you have to go making fun of him on TV?
Look, Gates has spent the past thirty years stealing every one of my ideas and then making Special Olympics versions of what I make. It’s insulting. If he’s going to copy me, he could at least do a good job of it. Have you seen Vista? It’s embarrassing. And even then they couldn’t get it out on time. All they had to do was copy us and they still couldn’t do it.
I dunno, it’s got its pros and cons.
Really? What are the pros?
Well, it certainly handles business networking environments pretty well. And Media Center is pretty good — and it predates Front Row…
Ouch. Okay, I’m outta here. Bye. [Stands up]
Ok, hang on, we can talk about something else…
Nope! This interview is OVER!
But –
But what? You apologize?! For your lies?
…
Well?!
Well, why don’t you tell me who would win in a fight? Do you think Gates would have some secret implants or something you just didn’t know about?
I would totally win in a fight with Gates. He does have implants but I don’t think he’s gonna hit me with his [redacted], honestly. And I’m a 10th degree Tai Chi master. I could tear out his heart and eat it in front of him. I know what you’re going to say: Tai Chi is not a violent martial art right? Well, I do the violent form of it.
I think I’ll pass on my question about how many of your fingers you think I’ll break if you keep blogging about my girlfriend…
I only blogged about her once or twice didn’t I?
Well, that’s once or twice more than most tech execs. [Links here and here]
Yeah well she deserves more. Let me say this, all kidding aside. Veronica is a rock star. Seriously. Go look at all the other internet TV talking heads. They’re awful. She’s like an order of magnitude better than the others. And on top of that she’s extremely beautiful. Let me ask you something. Is she as gorgeous in person as she is on TV?
Absolutely.
I wish she didn’t rate the Gigabeat above the iPod, but what the hay, she’s entitled to her opinions. I really do think she’s going to end up on network TV, or cable. Has she ever talked to anyone at Fox?
I hope not, TV is so old-media. Speaking of which, what’s with the love affair with Time, WSJ, Newsweek, and those stodgy publications?
By the way, what was the question about breaking fingers? You want to break my fingers? Or you’re going to break your own? You wouldn’t pick on an old guy would you? –So you think I’m obsessed with Time, Newsweek, and the like?
Well, you do seem to give them the exclusives. You’ve been on the front page of Time more than a few times. Our pal Mossberg gets a lot attention from you.
I think maybe it’s a generational thing. How old are you, may I ask?
I’m still in my 20s.
Yeah. See, when I was your age, Time and Newsweek and the Journal all really mattered. So I guess it’s hard to undo that kind of thinking and try to imagine that, um, like Om Malik is really important or something.
Om is a pal of mine, I think he’s doing some really important stuff…
No disrespect to Om, he’s a pal of mine too…
So any chance of you debuting the next iPod on Engadget then?
I am pretty sure we’re already making those arrangements. Can I turn the table and ask you a couple of questions?
We don’t normally do that, but ok. Who am I to refuse Steve Jobs?
Hey this is new media, citizen journalist. Why should you stick to the old way of doing things? So, how many times have you taken LSD?
Hm, to date? None.
None. Okay, question 2. At what age did you lose your virginity?
Er…
See, these are two very important questions that I always ask everyone before I hire them. Did you know that?
What are the correct answers?
Zero acid trips means you don’t get to work at Apple. Have you done mushrooms at least? Peyote? Mescaline? PCP? Anything?
Sorry, I don’t do drugs! (Stay in school, kids.)
Damn. What is wrong with your generation, Ryan? It makes me sick. You all fell for that Reagan “Just Say No” stuff. Drugs are amazing and very important and will totally unlock your creativity. You should try acid. Forget ecstasy, it’s for girls.
Well, we do our best to be sober when interviewing people.
You know this one time when I was at Reed and really experimenting with acid, we did some 4-way acid but we didn’t realize it was 4-way so we each took a whole hit — which turned out to be a quadruple dose. And I swear during that trip I imagined the iPod for the first time. This was the early 70s. Actually I imagined a little teeny tiny record player that you could carry with you. But that’s basically what a hard disk is. I think.
How close did you come to realizing that vision?
Oh, the iPod turns out to be almost exactly what I saw back in the 70s. Acid is amazing stuff. Really.
Well, your wrangler is motioning that you’ve got to go — anything you’d like to leave us with? Parting words for Engadget’s readers?
We’ve got some amazing products coming very soon that are going to restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives. I hope you enjoy using them as much as we enjoyed making them for you. And I’m not just talking about the iPhone. Also, go buy the Apple TV. It’s insanely great. Peace out. Namaste. I honor the place where you and I are one.
Thanks, Steve.
You’re welcome.
We interviewed David E. Weekly, founder of Coceve and creator of the super-handy IMSmarter.com. What is IMSmarter? David describes it as a “secretary that helps you out by sitting between you and the rest of the world, letting you know about things that are interesting and taking notes of your meetings so you can recall what was said later.” Works on all computers, no software to install, very neat idea. We predict this will be a standard part of IM soon.
Name, rank, a little about yourself.
Private David E. Weekly, Serial #55429…hey wait! I’m not in the military. 
I’ve been a computer geek since I started programming at five - less impressive than it sounds when you realize I was just copying in BASIC programs from a kids’ magazine into an Apple II/c to see what happened. I’ve been tooling around with computers since then - I actually got pretty involved in the whole MP3 movement while I was getting my CS degree at Stanford. I believe I was the first person to have a web page that actually explained what MP3 was in layman’s terms.
I signed up with ICQ fairly early on (way pre-AOL) and have been following the IM space with great interest since
then. I worked for a year and a half at the virtual world startup There.com, which was a neat experience and definitely
got me thinking about ways to enhance communication between people. If you ever do sign onto There.com and see (and
hear) jukeboxes in the world, that’s my code - I’m pretty sure that was the first 3D implementation of a Shoutcast MP3
player. 
My personal website is at http://david.weekly.org/.
What is IMsmarter?
It’s a new kind of IM enhancement. Go to www.IMSmarter.com to check it out. Geeky people would call it a “proxy”, but
the easiest way to think about it is as a secretary that helps you out by sitting between you and the rest of the
world, letting you know about things that are interesting and taking notes of your meetings so you can recall what was
said later. In the same way that you don’t need to change your phone or mail systems when you get a secretary, IM
Smarter doesn’t require you to change anything about your current IM habits - after a thirty-second configuration (not
requiring you to install any software), you’re good to go. You just keep on using your favorite client on your favorite
OS: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, iChat, Trillian, whatever! It works on Windows, OS/X, and Linux!
Give us some example of IM Smarter in action.
It’s 4pm; you’re at work and you remember you were going to meet your buddy for dinner tonight, but you’ve forgotten
where. He’s not online, but you had IMmed with him last night from home to discuss where you’d meet up. Without IM
Smarter, you’d be screwed - with IM Smarter you just log in to the web site, click on your buddy’s name, and see the
chat you had last night.
or…
You’ve got a lot going on and are feeling a bit scatterbrained; you’ve just put the clothes in the wash and need to
remember to move them over to the dryer in 40 minutes, plus the casserole needs to come out of the oven in 30 minutes.
You’re doing a million other things and you know you’ll forget when you need to do what. A “calendar” is the wrong tool
here. With IM Smarter, you just send two IMs:
bug me in 40 minutes about the clothes in the wash
bug me in 30 minutes about the casserole
And presto! Even if you log off and log back in, you’ll get an IMmed reminder - even if you log on from a different
location and with a different screen handle! And even if you sign on with a different protocol!
Isn’t this just like (Google Desktop / DeadAIM / Trillian)?
Google Desktop can be pretty handy, but can only search chats on the same computer from which you IMmed, can only
search them provided you IM using the official AIM client on Windows, and can only search them if you’re running Google
Desktop application…and want to give everyone else who might ever sit down at your computer access to your full chat
logs without a password. It can’t do any kind of IM notifications, and even search-wise it can’t let you search “all
chats last week about sailing” or just search chats with a particular user. Google Desktop even makes it awkward to
simply say “I just want to search my instant messages!” IM Smarter lets you securely search instant messages and
richer-yet search functionality is planned for the near future. And you don’t even have to install any software.
DeadAIM requires you to download software that modifies AIM. And it obviously only works with AIM. While you can log,
you can only search logs of chats you had on that computer, and even then only chats on AIM.
Trillian is pretty sweet; it’s one of only a select few pieces of shareware that I’ve found valuable enough to pay
for. But it does require you to download a piece of software and change your IM habits. This hasn’t proved popular with
most IM users. A number of the features that work smoothly in the official clients don’t work very well in Trillian
(voice and video in particular). Trillian 0.74 and Trillian Pro 2 can both log chats but provide no real search
capability. Trillan 3.0, currently in beta, can only search chats that you had while chatting on that computer using
Trillian. All this said, you can use IM Smarter with Trillian; many of our users do!
What IM Smarter is doing - providing a zero-download consumer IM logging and notification service - is really a
completely new kind of thing.
What are the future features planned for IMsmarter?
Providing logging is interesting - and hopefully useful - to a lot of people, but it’s really only the tip of the
iceberg. The really exciting and hugely novel stuff concerns notifications - the next major release (internally:
Release Seven) we’ll be deploying a rich notification architecture to let you know not only when your buddies update
their websites, but when news likely to be of interest to you is happening; or when your package status changes with
UPS or FedEx. Really, any time when you get a short email or are obsessively rechecking a web page is an opportunity
for IM to make someone’s lives easier.
One of the venues we’d like to explore is how we can help make IM more interesting and more secure; not just in terms
of the logging, but also in terms of connectivity. For instance, we’d like to help filter out IM virii for people and
let folks easily and safely share file attachments with whole sets of buddies. We take our users’ privacy *extremely*
seriously; we have a very strict privacy policy and even a rather unique Privacy Pledge that I and my co-operator David
Ulevitch have signed. We’re going to be continuing to look for ways to guarantee the sacred right of privacy for our
users with Hushmail-like mechanisms. If folks don’t want to bother with the legalese of the privacy policy, we’re
making a new “welcome” walkthrough that will hopefully make it clear that we’re here as defenders of their privacy, not
intruders.
A lot of very neat feature ideas come from our users, who email us with their ideas and post them on our forums at
http://forums.imsmarter.com/. We had one fantastically neat suggestion to let people upload exported calendars and
automatically get reminders; we’ve got that on our TODO list now. Many of the other suggestions range from layout
comments to radical new ways of using IM. We look forward to hearing about, implementing, and deploying lots of other
neat features suggested by our users - they really enjoy being able to talk directly with the developer of a service
they care about and influence its direction.
Can anyone with a device that runs an im client can use IMsmarter?
While most IM clients can use IM Smarter, there are unfortunately a few clients/devices that are not supported at this
time. Some devices that support instant messaging, like the Sidekick, do not have any way to configure the client to
use our service. We do hope to partner with organizations like T-Mobile at some point to be able to provide IM Smarter
functionality to these devices, but that’s probably more than a month away.
What’s the future of IM? is email on its way out?
Email isn’t on the way out; IM is simply a different medium! IM may end up overtaking a number of the things for which
we currently use email, simply because IM is better at them. Email is good at some things that IM is not, like
composing a long, thoughtful reply, writing poetry or essays, or really anything where you need more than the
granularity of a single line of text in which to compose your thoughts. You can write out an email, think about it,
save it for later, then decide not to send it. You don’t have that kind of flexibility with IM, nor do I think should
you - it’s just the wrong medium for that kind of interaction. So I don’t think email will go the way of the dodo. But
I do think that places where email can be annoying - like lots of tiny little notification emails and so forth - may
well end up migrating to IM, where they belong.
IM has many advantages to email in terms of timeliness, but the part I think a lot of people miss when reporting about
things like “SPIM” (IM SPAM) is that IM is fundamentally a centrally-authenticated protocol. The whole message delivery
process is through a single agent! Fundmentally, this makes spam on IM a much more tractably-solveable problem than
spam on email. And spoofing is incredibly harder on a mature IM system than on a mature email system. Generally, if you
get an IM from someone with whom you’ve chatted before, you can be fairly sure it’s them[*]. At least much more so than
could be said for an email.
I think that in many ways IM has been kind of a second-class citizen, a bastard child of cyberspace. Business has
understood and embraced email, but IM is viewed as a kind of renegade thing; something that needs to be monitored,
controlled, and suppressed. When I first started getting into the IM enhancement market I was amazed to find a plethora
of services offering centralized logging, none of which actually provided any value to the people whose messages were
being logged! The “features” could *only* be used against you and couldn’t help you do anything. They were only for
corporate compliance. While there’s good money in that market, I’d rather write non-evil software. I wanted to make
something that could enhance people’s IM experience and make IM a mature first-class Internet citizen with a service
that really changes the way that people look at IM. Obviously, IM Smarter has a long way to go, but I think that with
the help of our users, we’ll quickly continue along that path.
Thanks so much for this interview!
Visit and try out IMSmarter for free.
[*] Cypherpunks reading this may point out that not only is IM not anywhere near end-to-end secure but that my entire
service is based upon this flaw. They’d be right. They might point out that email-compatible systems like PGP provide a
much better proof of identity than an IM handle. They’d also right about that. But for the average user, IM is a much
more secure and trustworthy communications environment than email.
Flickr is quickly becoming one of the most popular
“moblog” and photo sharing site, is it the interface? The APIs? Caterina talks about this and more!
Name, rank, serial number…(who you are).
Caterina Fake, co-founder and jill of all trades. As you know, this being a small startup I do a lot of everything:
marketing, pixel pushing, strategy, product development, janitorial duties, money raising—you name it.
In a nutshell, what’s Flickr (including cost for user, etc..).
Flickr’s originality as an online photo sharing site comes from the marriage of content that users create the online
community that they share their photos with…
The network creates a kind of self-organization that makes all kinds of things possible: collaborative curation,
group scrapbooking, easy search, dynamically assembled galleries and has resulted in the best organized collection of
photos in the world. Over 80% of the photos in
Flickr are public you can make it so only your friends or family sees your photos which makes all kinds of
creative collaboration possible.
We also make it really easy to get your photos into Flickr, and really easy to get them out again in whatever way you
like, whether that be by RSS feed, posting them to blogs, or, as some of our users have done, making dynamic
screensavers built on the Flickr API.
There is a free version of Flickr, limited to 10 MB uploads a month and 100 photos displayed on Flickr; the paid
version permits 1GB uploads a month, and unlimited storage (as well as unlimited photosets, no ads and other
things).
Do you plan to support video in the future?
We would like to support short-form video like the kind of video you can take with your digital camera.
What are your favorite Flickr sites?
My personal favorite is the Squared Circle group.
It was started by a user named Striatic, and all submissions are of
something circular set in a square frame. The amazing thing is to watch
the slidehow:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/circle/pool/show
It is fascinating! You see plates of food, clocks, water towers,
airplanes that have been cut in half and when you watch the slide
show they fade into one another. Its amazing. One of the things thats
great about Flickr is you can remix your own photos with other peoples,
by forming groups or using tags.
Some other great groups are Obscure Obverse, which shows the
back sides of picture frames, mirrors and other cool things;
Molskinerie, which shows cool things people have done with
their Moleskine notebooks; The Secret Life of Toys which has
great pictures of
toys acting like people its really endless. I can, and do, spend
hours just surfing around looking at this stuff. People are so
inventive.
Tag surfing is another thing that I do. Some great tags include:
Space Invaders.
Sleeping.
Creepy.
Decay.
What digital camera do you use (its interesting that you can see the EXIF data, is there a most popular
camera on Flickr?
I mostly use the cameraphone on my Nokia 6600. Because I always have it with me. Even though the picture quality,
admittedly, leaves a lot to be desired. There *is* a most popular camera on Flickr, according to the EXIF data, and
that is the Canon Powershot, though depending on how you
cluster the makes and models, the Sony Cybershot comes pretty close. Well see what happens after Christmas too!
Another thing to note is that no Nokia phones include EXIF data with their photos, so we dont know about any of
those.
What gadgets do you use? Tivos, which phone, etc..?
Im not much of a gadgeteer, but I love my cameraphone so much! All those cool-weird-interesting-beautiful things that
you see when youre out in the world: you can finally save them and share them because youre carrying the camera with
you everywhere.
For this week’s Engadget Inteview veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spent a few minutes with Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, to discuss digital media, digital music, DRM wackiness, and Mona Lisa smiles.
For readers who aren’t familiar with Roku, what are you guys about?
We’ve been around since October 2002 and we’re based in Palo Alto, Calif. Our focus is building digital media players for home. Our core expertise is to produce great-looking products and great user interfaces.
Such as?
Our product line includes the Roku SoundBridge and the HD1000. We tell people, wouldn’t you love to see a slide show of your family pictures in full-quality digital on your flat-panel TV in your living room? That resonates.
And Roku means what?
“Six” in Japanese. It’s the sixth company I’ve been involved with.
Tell us about your main product lines.
The HD1000 launched in October 2003 and now comes in two versions. The base version is $299, and the gallery version, at $499, is geared toward owners of HDTVs, flat-panel TVs and the like. A lot of folks love to display artwork on their flat-panel TVs when they’re not watching a show.
Sounds like what you might see on Bill Gates’ walls.
That’s right. The gallery collection comes with still images of classic art but also moving art of mountain streams
and other looping high-def video clips.
What’s your favorite?
I like the clocks - you can add analog clocks with pictures of your kids in the background - and the geo-clock, with a
map of the world showing where it’s day and night, and the robo clock. The most popular seller is the classic art packs
- people get it, ‘Oh, the Mona Lisa on my TV.’ Second is the aquarium, followed by nature - like fields of poppies
swaying in the breeze - and images from deep space, and clocks.
Plus, there are third-party apps you can download, like an app that retrieves weather from the Weather Channel with
the current forecast for your area, and you can press buttons on your unit to see a satellite view. And there are
third-party apps that display eight different webcams from around the world on your TV.
Just to be clear, this is not a personal video recorder.
Right. There’s no hard drive in it. Its purpose is to play media that you have on your computer or on a Memory Stick
or Compact Flash card. You can take your digital photos, plug them in, and they’ll come up in high-def on your screen.
Its primary focus is as a consumer-friendly media adapter.
When people think of high def, they think of television. But this isn’t about television.
Correct, although it will play back high-def video. If you record high-def video on your PC, you can play it back with
this. But it’s less about MPEG-2 than about the other features we talked about: displaying family photos and art packs
that look stunning on a flat-panel display.
So you can’t play Hollywood high-def TV or
movies on the HD1000.
You can get an ATFC capture card for your PC and capture TV shows over the air and play them back on your PC. A lot of
people use it to play back standard MPEG-2 DVD clips that they’ve ripped.
There are really two markets for this. There are people who want to display the art. And there are people who are
ripping DVDs who buy the $299 version.
So it won’t play DVDs, but it will play DVD files that you’ve ripped.
Yes. It plays VOD files that you’ve ripped to your hard drive, and you need to connect your computer to a home
network.
Is that legal?
I’m not a lawyer. These are DVDs that they’ve bought and are watching at home, not sharing with others.
That’s a pretty small market at this point.
This product is targeted toward the early adoption market. For the HD1000 product line, our run rate is 20,000 units a
year. We’re going after flat-panel TV owners who want to use the TV for something other than watching something
else.
What role does Roku play - software, hardware or both?
We write the software and design the hardware. We work with factories in Asia and contract out to build them. We have
sales teams that sells them to dealers.
Where can people buy them?
You can find the HD1000 at Best Buy, Magnolia, Tweeter, Good Guys. Crutchfield, Fry’s or online from us.
Let’s move to the SoundBridge.
Sure. The SoundBridge started shipping in August. There are two versions, for $250 and $500. Both products are
designed to play music you have stored on your computer in another room in the house. You can listen to your iTunes
collection in your bedroom or your kitchen. You hook them up to a pair of power speakers or your stereo.
They come in two display sizes, both of which support iTunes directly - we’re the only music player with a license
from Apple that a protocol that supports iTunes. It’s plug and play. If you have wifi, you plug it in a wall socket,
turn on iTunes and it’ll find it and play it.
The big one is 17 inches, designed to go on a rack. The small one people usually place on a table with power
[multimedia] speakers.
How does this sound through a good pair of Bose speakers? I imagine pretty shitty if you’re playing MP3 files
from Kazaa.
It depends on the bit rate. Some customers play a .wav file or uncompressed AFF file. If you’re ripping CDs, with
iTunes’ AAC format you can get a 192kps bit rate. It’s up to the user what quality level they want.
How is the SoundBridge selling?
Between now and Christmas we’ll sell 25,000 and next year 100,000 to 150,000.
How does the SoundBridge compare to the other music players on the market?
There are only a couple of others out there from the networking companies, Linksys [a division of Cisco Systems] and
Netgear. So they kind of look like routers. In terms of industrial design, our products look really nice. The other
guys don’t even play AAC files, just MP3 and WMA [Windows Media Audio].
Our other advantage is we have a big display that’s easy to read. You’ll see the name of the song, the artist, genre,
album. Another other popular feature with the SoundBridge is Internet radio, about 100 stations. And finally, the
SoundBridge has a very cool-looking vacuumed fluorescent display.
Does the SoundBridge play Windows Media files?
We’re adding it Oct. 12.
What about if you buy music from the online music stores - iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster,
MusicMatch?
Unfortunately, today the songs you purchased are protected with DRM and will only play on authorized players. There
are a lot of different DRM vendors, from Microsoft, Apple, Real and Sony.
Right now we don’t support DRM and there are no network streaming devices that support DRM, other than Rhapsody and
one or two others. We’d like to support as many of the popular DRMS as possible. That will be done through software
updates for existing products.
So you’re saying a user who buys songs legally from Napster can’t play them on the SoundBridge, but a user who
downloads songs illegally from eDonkey can?
That’s right.
That’s nuts.
Even Apple doesn’t support streaming network devices. So if you buy songs from the iTunes store, you can’t play them
on the SoundBridge, and we have an Apple license - but only for music you ripped off your CD.
Now, there are users who buy the songs and download free software off the Net that will strip off the DRM protection,
and that way you can listen to them on the SoundBridge. But we don’t encourage that. But if you buy a song download,
you can burn a CD without the DRM protection.
That’s not ideal. The DRM vendors are just starting to add support for third-party devices and we are in the process
of adding it, but we don’t have a date yet.
When people who buy songs from the iTunes store or Napster can’t play them on their SoundBridge, won’t they be
mad at you?
That’s why we tell them up front - on our website and on our product packaging - that this is a limitation if that’s
what they want to do. We’re talking to Apple about opening their platform up.
What other devices are you working on?
We don’t announce upcoming products, but over time we expect to add new products to both our video and audio lines.
Different versions, features, form factors. All our products are software updatable as well. The HD1000 is up to
version 1.5, the SoundBridge is coming out with a big update this week.
J.D. Lasica is author of the upcoming book
Darknet: Remixing the Future of Entertainment.
Veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviews Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström about the future of voice communication, using Skype through wi-fi handhelds, and the coming death of the telecom dinosaurs:
Please give me a quick backgrounder on Skype.
We were founded on Aug. 29, 2003, and now have 70 employees, about half in London and half in Tallinn, Estonia, and some in Luxembourg. With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense. If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
So what is Skype all about, and what’s the difference between Skype to Skype and SkypeOut?
Skype to Skype lets you call anyone else in the world who has downloaded the Skype application on their computer or PDA [personal digital assistant], for free. You just download the free software from our site. With SkypeOut you can call anyone anywhere in the world at cheap local rates, often two or three cents a minute.
How many Skype users are there, and how fast is it growing?
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We’re getting 80,000
new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment. In fact, we just
surpassed our first 1 million simultaneous users online. The average call time is over 6 minutes - longer than
traditional phone calls.
What platforms does Skype work on?
Windows, Linux, Mac OS 10 and Pocket PC, and we’re now working on some other mobile platforms.
What is SkypeIn and what are the plans for
it?
SkypeIn will allow phone calls from the traditional phone network in to Skype. We don’t have a specific launch date
yet, but hope to offer it sometime this winter.
Who’s using Skype? Who’s your typical customer?
Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection. Our early adopters were primarily male, 18 to 38
years old, but we have users now from across every demographic, from young children using it to keep in touch with a
parent who may be traveling on business to great grandparents using it to keep in touch with family living all over the
world. Skype is easy enough to use so that people don’t need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate
with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. If you can use a Web browser, you can
use Skype.
Do you still use a land-line phone?
At home, I still have a regular phone line because I sometimes need to send faxes. At the office, we actually don’t
have a land phone line. We use Skype mostly, and mobile phones to receive calls from people not on Skype.
I hear that Skype has higher penetration in some countries than in the United States. Why is
that?
We have a much higher penetration in countries like Brazil and Poland, where phone rates are high and service is hit
or miss in some places. In Poland, for example, an awful lot of families have relatives in Chicago and other U.S.
cities, and so they place a lot of international calls. A lot of people in China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany are using
Skype, too. There are different drivers in different countries.
How does Skype differ from Vonage, 8×8, and VoIP offerings from Verizon or AT&T or the other
telecoms?
Vonage is much more similar to Verizon and AT&T than to us. With Vonage, you’re using a regular telephone, dialing
a number, and its services have rates similar to the telecoms. What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband
Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone
lines.
Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to
join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last
century.
I imagine this also appeals to multi-taskers. You can text-message someone at the same time you’re talking
with them.
Right. They also can combine voice with instant messaging and online file sharing. You can also instant message with
others whle you’re talking to someone else, which makes the whole communication experience much richer and more
efficient for businesses, too. We also have a conference call feature where up to five people can talk on one Skype
call.
How do you plan to make money?
We’re making money right now by selling value-added services like SkypeOut, which brings in revenue. We don’t need to
make as much money per user as the traditional phone companies because our marginal costs are so low. We’re also
working on new paid-for features to offer users. But let me stress that Skype to Skype calls and all the features that
you see today - except for SkypeOut - will remain free.
You recently unveiled Skype WiFi. How does that take your company in
new directions?
We decided to make Skype available on multiple platforms and independent of the PC. People need to access Skype
wirelessly, no matter where they are, and what happens is that we’ll be taking advantage of the rollout of Internet
everywhere - WiFi and WiMax in particular.
We started with Pocket PC, and now we’re looking at other mobile platforms like Windows SmartPhone, Symbian and Palm.
We don’t have any launch dates yet for any of those platforms. It’s going to be wonderful to be able to make a Skype
call from cell phones or PDAs.
So the idea is that anyone in a WiFi cloud can make a free Internet voice call to other Skype users using
their Pocket PC.
Right. At no charge, if they both have the software installed. Or by using SkypeOut if they need to call a land line
or mobile at low rates.
Several users have told me Skype to Skype typically sounds much better than SkypeOut to a land phone. Why is
that?
That’s correct. Skype to Skype uses our broadband technology and we’re not limited to the phone network. The phone
network imposes certain technological limitations on what we’re able to do with SkypeOut, unfortunately.
What equipment do you recommend to Skype users? Using a headset improves sound quality markedly, doesn’t
it?
We do recommend headsets, and Plantronics is our headset partner. It’s good for your neck and frees up your hands, and
it can improve sound better than some built-in computer microphones.
Have you considered incorporating Skype into other applications? For example, wouldn’t it be cool to integrate it with
your Outlook contacts?
Exactly. We’re talking with third-party developers to integrate their applications with Skype.
And people can use Skype for other things, like sending documents to colleagues or downloading
photos.
Yeah. What we want to do is remove the barriers in modern communications. If I have a Word document or digital
pictures, it’s easy to do and we don’t have the limitations you get with e-mail.
What other kinds of gadgets will we be seeing Skype on in the future?
There are several manufacturers that you’ll see turning out cordless phones that you can connect to the computer via a
USB dongle. We’re working with Siemens on that.
Will the wide deployment of WiMax affect the marketplace for Skype?
Sure. The more broadband wireless connections there are, the more you’ll see Skype proliferate.
Should the FCC regulate the VoIP market as it does traditional telephony?
The phone market was regulated so that customers get good service and also to enable fair competition in a
monopolistic arena. Voice over IP should not be regulated because there is no monopoly. Today, millions of people and
teenagers in particular aren’t getting land lines, they’re getting mobile phones and Internet connections. The phone
companies are clinging to old business models rather than transforming themselves into services companies and reducing
operational expenses by using the Internet. Soon, most of us will be using the Internet for voice communication, and
the idea of charging for that makes as much sense as charging for email or for using a Web browser.
A lot of people associate peer-to-peer with piracy. Will Skype change people’s attitudes toward
P2P?
Definitely. First of all, the Internet has been a P2P network from the very beginning. There are plenty of uses of
today’s P2P networks that have nothing to do with music file sharing or piracy.
Any trouble with your traveling to the States because of your role with Kazaa? We have some fairly onerous
copyright laws here.
Well, that’s not a problem. We have a number of investors from the United States. The entertainment industry is still
spending a lot of money on lawyers, even though they don’t have a case anymore. They’re still trying to drag me into
things. I’m free to travel there whenever I wish.
J.D. Lasica is the author of the upcoming book
Darknet: Remixing the Future of Entertainment.