Yahoo Buys Zimbra - will they kill the Skype integration piece?

Om Malik, is reporting that Yahoo has just purchased Zimbra for 350M$ (which I think is a steal). For those that don't know Zimbra is an opensource Ajax based webmail solution that competes with the likes of Microsoft Exchange. It has robust mobile capabilities and the UI is just spectacular; it also offers great Skype integration (will be interesting to see if Yahoo kills that little piece in favour of YIM).

This is a brilliant acquisition for Yahoo. Oddly they just completely revamped their web based UI with a new Ajaxy UI (which sucks, sorry guys but it does) - and hopefully will do it again and add full Zimbra functionality.

I will say it publicly right here. If Yahoo gives me Zimbra for free, I will switch to Yahoo mail and kiss Gmail goodbye instantly, Zimbra is that good, I would gladly pay for extra storage and a personal domain as well.

Visual Voicemail won't work on an Unlocked iPhone

I just caught a note on Techmeme (which should probably be called Applememe from here on, as 5 of the stories today are Apple related) that Apple has shipped 1 Million iPhones, 1 month ahead of schedule. Aside from the truly remarkable growth, the cottage industry that is springing up around unlocking the iPhone is quite astounding - but I have been asking myself if it actually makes any sense.

One of the iPhone's more compelling features is the Visual Voicemail application (I am sure more will follow). How exactly Apple does this is a bit of a mystery. I am not referring to the technology itself, that is old hat - rather the integration between the iPhone and AT&T's Voicemail infrastructure. The backend proxy that AT&T would have had to create to deliver VM to the iPhone would be quite complicated and as proprietary as the systems it was integrating with. Does Apple run this middleware/server farm? I highly doubt it, but if they had the foresight to actually keep this under their control it will make integrating to other carrier networks a hell of a lot easier ie. just publish and API and let carriers do there own integration/development. Most likely AT&T owns this piece as they probably recognized this was an ace up its sleeve - tying Apple unwittingly to it for the long long haul. (possibly explaining the meme the Jobs is sick of the Telco's already)

So herein lies the problem with buying an unlocked iPhone. Why bother if the features aren't going to work? Apple has a unique relationship to its hardware/telco's in this case, in order to provide the user experience they were after, they had to build a lot of non-standard infrastructure; and this means the iPhone's cooler features just won't work unless you are on a pre-approved Apple carrier.

Shipping an iPhone to a new country is more than just sending Fedex with a parcel.. It requires a carrier willing to integrate to iPhone's unique feature set, and if Apple made a mistake by allowing AT&T to run the middleware portion of the iPhone's UI they are probably not going to make the same mistake twice.

Unlocking an iPhone probably doesn't make a lot of sense in the long run, as you will unlikely have more than 1 carrier per country to use it on anyway.

Apple releases iPod Touch w. Wifi

From the Gizmodo Live Blog - Apple has followed up its design work with the iPhone and brought it to a standalone multimedia player form factor in the iPod touch. The Touch is also wifi enabled, taking a page from the Zune - watch for social features on the Touch soon. Full Safari support, Google and Yahoo search, Contacts, Calculator, YouTube etc.

Also updated is the iPod nano - "with a little video for everyone' It looks very slick and will sell out this Xmas for sure.

PC World Live Chat - Apple Press Event

PC World, has a live chat powered by Meebo - directly from the Apple media event this afternoon. This is a first - and quite cool.

Samsung releases an Embedded Skype enabled Monitor

via Engadget - Samsung has released the 220TN LCD monitor with Skype capability. The monitor comes network enabled and has a 500MHz Geode LX800 processor running WinXP embedded inside the LCD housing.

Using interactive buttons on the LCD you can literally hang this monitor (comes equipped with a webcam, speakers and microphone) on the wall anywhere you have a spare Ethernet port and make Skype calls in full video.

Is the era of the video phone finally here? This is so Logan's Run'ish I am tingling.

The Coming Leopard Letdown? Hardly.

Hadley Stern over at Apple Matters (good blog, but come on guys full feed please) has an interesting post today entitled "The Coming Leopard Letdown" which boiled down is a bitter Apple Fanboy's diatribe on how he would fix the upcoming Leopard OS by focusing more on innovations rather than refinements. He goes on to critique John Gruber's post that the iPhone is the next generation for Apple, and OSX is so good it simply doesn't need any wondrous UI re-invent. Naturally Apple Matters (whom recently lost media invite status with Apple, gee I wonder why?) says this just ain't so - and Apple needs to champion new innovations daily or; and I quote

All I know is that if all we can expect from Apple right now is John’s visions of refinements for OS X the company, in the long-term, will be in trouble.

I found this rather ironic, as today two of the top stories on Techmeme are about Apple. The first is how 1 in 6 computers shipping in North America are Apple, and the other on how the stock gained about 4.00$ on above average growth. Another post that really grabbed my attention was from Microsoft uber Fanboy Alec Saunders, whom is so frustrated with his Vista experience (I share your pain Alec) - actually wrote to Microsoft senior management expressing basically a WTF guys? letter. To which they promptly responded - 'yeah we know, sorry - we are working on it'.

So to the good folk at Apple Matters, whom think a dark cloud is descending over Cupertino - I offer the following reality. Apple has an OS in Tiger that is already light years ahead of its closest competition in Vista. They are shipping 1 in 6 computers in North America, and M$'s biggest proponents are jumping ship, cause' they are sick of the hellish experience they are having with Vista. Apple has NO where to go but up, as they are not going to lose a single user to Vista - so if I were them I would leave well enough alone and concentrate on getting to 2 in 6 computers sold. Their continued growth is in converting PC users, not keeping their existing customers and they know this too well.

The experience you get when you first use a Mac is much like the feeling you get the first time you make an overseas calls on Skype. You are just blown away - it is so good. Leopard won't be a letdown in any way shape or form, the purists will love it, the newbies will drool - one thing is for certain however; it will get guys like me and Alec to make the jump. Oh yeah, btw - I don't even own a Mac yet.

How do you like d'em Apples.

Julian Cain's explanation on the Skype Outage (from GigaOm)

This is a great explanation of the Skype Out(age) by someone named Julian Cain (no idea who he is, but obviously has experience with Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and p2p programming) - he posted this explanation in the comments in this thread @ GigaOm.

Number of Skype Authentication servers:

Count == 50; // Clustered

Number of potential Skype clients:

Count = 220,000,000 // Mostly decentralized

Number of SuperNode clients to maintain network connectivity:

Count = N / 300 at any one time.

•   If there are 3.0 million users online then the ratio is
3,000,000 / 300 = 10,000  == Supernodes available
•   Supernodes are bootstraps into the network for normal first run clients
("and handle routing of children calls").
•   Supernodes maintain the network overlay via a DHT("Distributed Has Table")
"type" method. // This is normally very slow and done over UDP
•   If a client cannot find a Supernode, regardless of authentication
via central server then is NOT allowed on the Skype network.

Lack of Supernodes mean lack of network connectivity regardless of successful login via “central server”.

You CAN be a Supernode but not have full network connectivity because you have only a portion of the “Distributed Index Data aka DHT”.

MOST people that become Supernodes will bail out if they cannot keep a clear route (”aka calls bail out, client restarts and aborts Supernode status, thus booting it’s 300 - 500 Children and putting them into a “Connecting mode”.

Children that are trying to “Connect” are unable to do anything unless they have a “Supernode” as a parent. // No calls, No IM….

The overview of this is as follows:

Skype introduced a flaw into the network that dealt with “routing” and “fucked” the “decentralized data store aka DHT” this in turn ran clients on a RANDOM search of Supernodes which at this point were well booted off of the network.

In the End:
It is a huge cycle, no matter how many bugs they “fix” in the “central servers” it will take many days for N nodes to become Supernodes so they can route X data from peer A to peer B. This is NOT minor, a fix to the centralized server code base to relay data to N Supernodes there is lack there of, resulting of a very segregate network. Right now there are approximatly 10,000 sub Skype networks instead of 1 Single “in sync” network. When this “data store(see DHT) is in sync globally then the Skype network will be again STABLE.

I know this is very broad but, unless magically all of said nodes can recreate the “single overlay (DHT)” then nothing will be in sync. You will see delayed messaged, delayed or incorrect profiles and presence.

My take, in the end is give it 48 more hours and it may be semi-stable, but hey this is what you get with using end users as your own redundancy…

Yours…

Updated** - had a quick chat with Julian Cain, he was a core programmer at Kazaa - and knows his stuff. He is working on some very interesting stuff, which I will post about at a later date.