Skype News. To Jajah or not to Jajah.

When this type of stuff ends up in the Skype Journal, you know the gloves are off on what Ebay should do with Skype. There are even articles circulating these days on who Ebay should sell Skype to! Funny enough, as a full time user of Skype services - well at least for peer-peer voice calls - it never even crosses my mind that Ebay owns it. So much for the planned synergies.

I have been fortunate enough to be involved at the client level with click-to-call for over a year now. I say fortunate because while it is rather simple technology it is significantly changing the Internet landscape. The phone is back. This posting at the Skype Journal on the click-to-call battle reminds me of what a client of mine said a year ago when estimating Skype's ultimate role in the click-to-call market. People still want to use a phone over a computer and more importantly, the phone will always be the universal interface. Meaning, everyone knows how to use it. And websites want to appeal to everyone.

I join everyone else is my curiosity of what Skype will be when it grows up. For the moment though, I continue to use it for what it's best at and nothing else. After all, with Jajah, Lypp, ifbyphone and a slew of others, I have no lack of options.

Canadian Conferencing.

Canada continues to show its strong telecom roots - this time leading the way in the next wave of voice conferencing. Yes, voice conferencing. What's old seem to be new again. Dare I say, Conferencing 2.0? No.

Two start-ups, located on opposite sides of that vast country, made news this week. Iotum - led by a group of overly passionate VoIP preachers - made a splash on Facebook this week by holding the first ever conference call launched out of Facebook itself. Now that I have officially lost 20 years and joined Facebook myself, I can see that this is a killer app among many we will see from inside the pages of Facebook this year and next.

Focused similarly on the industry-old problem that making a conference call is too difficult, the founders of Gaboogie are launching Lypp (into Beta) this month, a voice conferencing service that will leverage simple interfaces like IM (including mobile) to make collaborating from anywhere - with anyone - simpler. And Lypp will call you. No dial-in numbers, no PIN's. Brilliant. Read more about it here.

I seem to writing a lot about Canada these days. Could it be time to go home? No, again.