Sunday, February 18, 2007

Skype.com Traffic Ranking by Country (US = 13%)


Alexa's new features (announced last week) sort traffic on a website by country now. It is a very handy feature and a welcome improvement.

Here are the traffic rankings for Skype.com per country.

I have been searching for an updated list of 'Skype users by country' and 'revenue by country' but haven't been able to find anything recent. It would be interesting to see how the two statistics correlate with 'traffic by country'.

Usually in business 20% of your customers represent 80% of your revenue (if not higher) but in Skype's case - no one country (I am guessing) overwhelms the rest, the top 25 are listed which make up 70% of Skype.com traffic, and the rest of the world = 30%. It poses an very interesting and challenging task for Skype Marketing. How do you market to the entire world if you don't have the budget like Coca Cola, and do you concentrate on the 25 countries that make up 70% of your traffic and forget about the rest of the world? Neither of which is an easy task.

The solution it seems would be to co-brand your client and work with as many #1 and #2 portals worldwide to get it out there. Something that Skype has done in the past (China, Japan Poland that I know of), but you don't hear much about anymore. The revenue numbers from co-branding partners would also be very interesting to see - maybe it isn't worth the work.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Skype and Spinvox... I guess it's sort of cool

via Andrew Watson @ The Independent

According to a news story from The Independent, Skype has announced a deal with Spinvox which is a UK based company with a reported 130K users. Spinvox converts voicemail (VM)messages to text messages that are then delivered to the users mobile phone. This will be handy for avid Skype users who (at this point) don't have a method of retrieving voicemail from any source other than the Skype client.

I am lukewarm to this service, mostly as Skype seems to have jumped a big step in the evolution of VM. Simply having the VM messages delivered as mp3/wav attachments via email would be a welcome addition for Skype VM. Currently messages are proprietary in nature and only available through the Skype p2p network, which to be blunt - sucks - and is a huge limiting factor to Skype VM adoption and usage. A web interface and portal of my messages would really tie me to Skype as a communication tool, even when I am not logged onto the p2p. Every other VoIP solution currently offered in NA provides this basic form of Unified Messaging.

Personally I wouldn't pay for the SpinVox solution, if it was free I would probably use it - I imagine more text/SMS centric people will think differently. But as a member of the Blackberry faithful I would rather just get an attachment sent to my mobile/email, that I can then store and forward a la' Apple's new Visual VM for the iPhone.

There is no mention of the deal on Skype's website as of this writing, but I will update if they release a press statement regarding SpinVox.

Friday, February 09, 2007

DOING OUR BUSINESS is what computers are for.


Whatever you do or whatever you learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That will be all.

Courtesy Tech Digest

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Skype Luke Johnson - He is waiting for your call

Luke is running a social experiment by posting his mobile number on the internet for everyone to see. His goal is to receive as many calls as possible from total strangers all over the world. A side goal will be to drive his wife insane.

The media is no longer the message; the message is we are becoming the media.




Hat tip - Alec.

Tagline - Binkle