What the VoIP providers are missing…

As reported by Tom Keating in his blog, click-to-call provider eStara put their PR team to work yesterday in trying to spin the eBay/Skype announcement. Their spin, naturally, was VoIP-centric. In their press release, Joe Siegrist, Senior Vice President of Technology, is quoted as saying "Companies are beginning to realize the commercial uses of VoIP are huge”, and elsewhere in the release, “eBay has correctly seen the potential of the pay per call market.”

Of course VoIP is an important part of the story, and pay-per-call is an interesting topic (though it was not mentioned at all by eBay), but what’s missing entirely from eStara’s assessment is “presence”. Skype brings presence to eBay listings, and that’s powerful. VoIP is just a commodity, but being able to project visual cues that accurately reflect the availability of sellers to answeri potential buyers’ questions is not. Presence is, in my view, the real news.

There are many, many other posts on this blog espousing the value of presence in the context of online ads, listings, and landing pages so there’s no need to go back over them. Make no mistake, eBay’s integration of Skype is about a lot more than VoIP, it’s about the combination of presence and instant communications. eBay has placed a very large bet that the combination will accelerate their revenues and improve both the buying and selling experience for their users.

ContactAtOnce! delivers the same combination for publishers and individual advertisers, and our customers have already proven that eBay is right about the benefits. Soon, every online publisher will offer their advertisers/sellers the option of enabling presence and instant communications from within an ad or listing, and we plan to be the service provider for the most successful of those publishers!

eBay & SkypeMe .... Deploying in the US

After many slideware references, mocked-up screen shots, and a trial in China, eBay today announced the long-awaited launch of "SkypeMe" functionality in the US in 14 seller categories starting June 19. It is still billed as a "pilot program," but this announcement represents the next major step in the march towards widespread adoption of “presence-awareness and instant communications” by publishers of online auction and classified sites.

ContactAtOnce! is the only solution purpose-built to help eBay’s competitors enable the same functionality on their sites, so this announcement should be good news for us!
The 14 eBay seller categories that will be enabled are:

• Automotive
• GPS devices
• Camera and photo lenses and filters
• Wired networking routers
• Skype devices
• VOIP / Internet telephony
• Diamond solitaire rings
• Real estate (residential, commercial)
• Manufacturing and metalworking
• Beds
• NBA basketball cards
• Silver coins
• Lost in Space collectibles [!How aboout that for a category!]
• Radio control toys
• Cars and trucks

Not surprisingly, “Cars and Trucks” and “Real Estate” are on the list. These are the two categories where ContactAtOnce! has seen great interest so far. But it makes sense that any category with high consideration products or services, where consumers might have the all-important one-or-two key questions to ask, would make the list.

Here's a little bit more from the release:
Beginning June 19, sellers will have the option to add a “Skype Me” button to their item listings when completing the “Sell your Item” form. If the Skype option is selected by the seller, a “Skype Me” button will appear in a new “Ask a seller a question” section. By clicking on the button, buyers will be able to communicate with sellers using voice, text chat or both. Buyers can use Skype to instantly request more information about a specific item and interact with the seller in real-time. This functionality will be available at no cost to users.

For those that missed it, I previously posted about how ContactAtOnce! and Skype compare, and about how ContactAtOnce! complements the public IM/VoIP solutions (including Skype).

How ContactAtOnce! Complements Public IM/VoIP Clients

If you’ve used the consumer-facing ContactAtOnce! IM window you’ve seen the familiar icons of the 5 most popular IM/VoIP providers (Skype, Yahoo IM, AOL AIM, MSN Messenger, Google Talk)… you may have wondered what they do and why they’re there. And you’re not the only one because my colleagues and I get that question quite a bit. So…here’s an explanation…

First, to be clear, ContactAtOnce! does NOT compete with any of the public IM/VoIP providers. Collectively they have hundreds of millions of happy Web-savvy users (I happen to be a registered user of all 5!) and each is backed by an industry giant. Why are the users happy? Because they’ve experienced the benefits of “presence”, “instant communications”, and “free calls” - all of which serve to simplify their life.

From our POV, the last thing the world needs is another public IM/VoIP provider. Our vision is to help the millions of happy IM/VoIP users get even more value from their favorite IM/VoIP service. We accomplish that by blending together a number of underlying commodity technologies – IM, VoIP, live Video, Click-to-call, email, and call tracking – and wrapping them with a proprietary application built to meet the requirements of not only the consumer but also advertisers and the publishers of the websites on which consumers find said advertisers (e.g. directories, search engines, classifieds, etc.).

You can read more about the proprietary application and the requirements of advertisers and publishers in the solution and product sections of our website. But back to the consumer side of things…

The first experience a consumer will have with ContactAtOnce! will be via our consumer-facing, browswer-based, AJAX-powered IM client. Why, you ask, create a browser-based IM client instead of just picking one of the many available clients? In a word, REACH. Advertisers value reach. They don’t want to limit their audience. Had we picked an existing IM client – be it Skype, Yahoo, AOL, or any other – we would have limited the advertisers’ reach because not even the most popular IM/VoIP client has a fraction of the install base that browsers do. So…we built the browser-based client to maximize the audience reach.

As mentioned earlier, our vision is to help the millions of happy IM/VoIP users get even more value from their favorite IM/VoIP service. When those users first encounter our browser-based client while contacting a specific advertiser/merchant (e.g. Acme Corporation) from an ad or listing on a publisher’s site, they will be presented with buttons which enable them to add ‘Acme Corporation’ to the buddy list of their favorite IM/VoIP client. And, in so doing, they can then use their favorite IM/VoIP client to contact ‘Acme Corporation’ in the future.

So there you have it…that’s our vision.

If you try this feature out today you’ll notice that it is only partially implemented – we still have work to do. But now you at least know where we’re headed. Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!