For Skype, 2011 is undoubtedly going to be a pivotal year. The VoIP giant is preparing to go public, and armed with a new CEO, Skype is looking to add new products for both its consumer and enterprise businesses and boost revenue. Already, Skype launched video chat capability to its iPhone app, acquired mobile streaming startup Qik, and launched paid group video functionality to its enterprise offerings. While we’ve heard about the company’s enterprise strategy, we have not yet uncovered the details of Skype’s long-term consumer strategy. Skype VP of Consumer Neil Stevens spoke to TechCrunch about the VoIP company’s goals when it comes to expanding its consumer user base, product roadmap and revenue plans.

When asked what the most important product strategy is for Skype in 2011, Stevens was quick to reply that video, especially on mobile devices, is going to be a significant area of development for the company. At any given time Skype now has 28 million simultaneous users (which is up from 27 million reported in early January), with 42 percent of these users engaging in video calls. While Skype has video functionality on its Windows, Mac and now iPhone clients, there is still much more to come in 2011 says Stevens.

Mobile Video

“We want to put Skype video everywhere, whether it be on a TV, tablet, or smartphone, Stevens tells TechCrunch. Mobile video has huge potential, he says, especially considering the traction Skype’s recently launched iPhone app has seen with the new functionality. In its first week in the App Store, the new version of Skype’s iPhone app saw ten million new downloads, and a million video calls were made on the app’s first day in the store.

Of course, Skype plans to expand its mobile video presence to other mobile operating systems. Stevens believes that tablets could be an ideal platform for Skype, especially if video is added to the next-generation iPad. And he says that an Android app with video integration will be launched in the next few months.

The Cloud

Another product area where Skype is readying a major strategic push is the cloud. We heard that Skype was sniffing around a few web chat startups and spotted these job postings on the company’s website last Fall. We confirmed that Skype was building a team to work on cloud products and plans to launch a number of web-based applications this year including a plug-in and integrations with well-known partners.

Stevens reiterates that Skype will be making a big move to the cloud; saying the time is right for realtime communications via Skype to hit the web. Skype’s cloud products will vary, from a plug-in to the ability for developers and advertisers to embed click-to call ads using Skype’s technology.

Specifically, click-to-call advertising on the web is a way for Skype to bring in revenue. Another potential revenue model, says Steven, is to work with carriers to include Skype’s mobile services as part of a consumer’s phone bill. So the data used via Skype’s services could be charged to the consumers directly through the carriers.

One of the benefits of Skype, says Stevens, is that its a scalable model that can be extended to the cloud. But the challenge is making the “right bets on the right opportunities.” He declined to name Skype’s partners in the cloud-based initiatives but did say that the company has a “vast number of potential partners,” with the challenge being how to prioritize partners. Partners could range from shopping sites to online dating sites.

Talent

For all of its engineering ambitions in terms of the web and mobile, you may be surprised to know that Skype only has 350 engineers. Stevens says that hiring talent is definitely a challenge in Silicon Valley but that acquisitions like Qik help the company boost the number developers and engineers. And the company is looking for more acquisitions in the future; which will be focused on talent and technology vs. marketshare, he adds.

In terms of hiring, the company said this past week it will be adding 350 jobs mainly in its newly opened Palo Alto office in the realm of engineering.

For Skype, product development may not be the company’s biggest challenge. Before taking the company public, Skype needs to convince investors that it can create meaningful revenue channels. While enterprise efforts are easier to monetize, Skype will have find a way to make its consumer users to pay for additional features for a service that has been free for sometime. As of August 2010, only 6 percent of Skype’s customers pay for the service. Stevens maintains that Skype will need to increase awareness of its paid services, but new and old, in the coming year. But, he adds, Skype has a basic services will always include a free model for video and calling.

One thing in Skype’s favor is that it is a brand that people love and use on a daily basis, Stevens explains. The company has a massive userbase, with nearly 600 million total registered users (for a basis of comparison, Facebook reportedly just passed that number as well), so attracting members is clearly not an issue for Skype.

But in the process of trying to monetize these users, Skype will have to strike a fine balance. The company certainly doesn’t want to start alienating users by charging for services that were once free. At the same time, the company has to deliver innovative products that consumers are actually willing to shell out cash for on a routine basis. It’s a problem that many prolific technology companies have had to face; and the company is tackling the issue while under the scrutiny of potential investors during the IPO process.

“This is going to be a defining year for Skype,” says Stevens. I think we can all agree with that statement.

I was aware that Facebook is close to trademarking the term ‘face’, at least in relation to online social networking and related activities, in the United States. But as far as I know, nobody has yet pointed out that Facebook has already pulled that stunt in the EU, i.e. the union of 27 European member states (which include the UK, Germany, France and Spain).

Mark Brooks, an authority in the online dating industry, was kind enough to point me to the filing (screenshot below), which – surprisingly – dates back to May 2004, when Facebook was still in its very early days. As you can tell from the screenshot, the EU-wide trademark (in relation to usage of the word in the operation of online chat rooms, we should point out) was granted in October 2006, with the expiration date set to May 24, 2014.

Again, I’m not entirely sure this hasn’t yet been reported, but I couldn’t find any coverage of it after some sleuthing, so figured I should report it here if only for posterity’s sake.

It gets more interesting, though.

Like in the United States, Facebook is also pursuing a trademark for the term ‘book’ in the European Union, notably in relation to online communities, social networking and Internet dating services. This filing was made more recently, in early November 2010.

The application is still under examination by the OHIM, the trademark and designs registry for the internal market of the European Union. Evidently, we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Obviously, this move is likely to raise further questions over the company's motives.

TechCrunch readers will be aware that the social networking giant has already waged wars against sites using the word ‘book’ in their names (see the Lamebook and Teachbook cases). Facebook has also pushed travel site PlaceBook to alter its name to TripTrace.

I’ve asked Facebook for comment and will update when I hear back.

As you may have seen, last weekend, Robert Scoble worked himself into a tizzy because an answer of his was moderated into a collapsed state on Quora. The whole bitchmeme surrounding the incident was rather humorous. But there was at least somewhat of a point behind all of it: people began asking more questions about the methods behind Quora’s ranking system. Today, we have some of those answers.

Truth be told, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever previously stated that Quora was working on an algorithm to determine user quality well before Scoblegate happened. As he noted on January 21:

(2) We’re developing an algorithm to determine user quality.  The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it’s not exactly the same problem.  We’ll use this to help decide what to show in feeds, when to send notifications, and how to rank answers.

Today, fellow co-founder Adam D’Angelo posted some of the details about the new Quora “Answer Ranking Scheme“. As he notes, the exact details are a bit complicated, and are going to change, but the main principles for this Quora “PageRank” are as follows:

• Answers with more upvotes are ranked higher.
• Answers with more downvotes are ranked lower.
• A vote from a user who has written good answers in the past carries more weight (both upvotes and downvotes).
• Answers written by users who have written good answers in the past will be ranked higher.
• Votes from people detected to be gaming the system (vote collusion, spam, bullying, etc.) will be ignored or minimized.
• Whether a user is an admin or reviewer does not affect the scores in this system.

So, essentially, the methods are pretty obviously. Answers with the most votes will be ranked higher (though gaming will not count). Votes from people with a history of good answers will be ranked higher. And answers from people with a history of good answers will be ranked higher. Makes sense.

And yes, anonymous answers are included in the above system because Quora will know who you are (they just won’t surface that information).

[image: Walt Disney Pictures]

Personally, I think the concept behind Readability is pretty awesome. It gives you a way to read all your favorite articles on the web without all of the clutter of the web — meaning, mainly, ads. And the recently-launched payment component is even more interesting because it gives you a way to pay back (in a very small way) your favorite writers/publications that you often read on the web. But as one such writer who works for one such publication, clearly I’m biased. I realize that this idea isn’t for everyone. And it’s going to be a fairly hard sell for some people. But that sell may have just gotten a little easier.

When Readability re-launched last week, they noted a partnership with popular bookmarking service Instapaper. The main component of this integration was set to be a Readability mobile application that Instapaper’s Marco Arment made (and will release soon) in Instapaper’s image. This is great for Readability since Instapaper is already a hugely popular app on the iOS platform. But a small bit of news today is even better. As Arment announced today on the Instapaper blog, you can now send you Instapaper logs to Readability.

What this means is that you can use the payment element of Readability without having to really use Readability at all (beyond the initial payment set up). So if you like the idea of Readability but still prefer to use Instapaper, that’s fine — this gives you the best of both worlds.

And there’s an option when you link your accounts to send everything you save on Instapaper to Readability or to only send items you archive to Readability. That’s also interesting. It gives you a way to selectively pay certain publishers/authors.

Writes Arment:

Now, you can support publishers automatically from Instapaper: simply link your Readability account in Instapaper's Account screen. Instapaper will notify Readability whenever you save articles, and they'll be included in the publisher calculations for your Readability account.

You'll be directly supporting the sites that you save to Instapaper, automatically.

Again, this won’t be for everyone. And some people will wonder why you would do this when you can just use Instapaper for free? Well, you certainly don’t have to. But if you’ve ever felt the desire to give a little something back, this is an easy way using a service that’s already pretty popular.

Readability allows you to contribute as little as $5 a month, of which, 70 percent goes directly to writers/publishers (split up over all the various ones you’ve read that month, obviously). It’s certainly a model that could fall flat — but if it hits, it could be a nice little bonus for writers on the web outside of the traditional ad-based model.

Instapaper has also been testing a micro-payment subscription model as well.

Everblue Training (Everblue.edu) — an environmental education startup with offices in Berkeley, Calif. and Charlotte, N.C. — this week attained accreditation from the group that verifies the quality of non-collegiate, continuing education and professional training programs throughout the United States for the U.S. Department of Education, the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education.

Principal and co-founder of Everblue, Jon Boggiano, says the endorsement allows his business to sell its services to: government veterans’ education programs helping them adjust back to civilian life; large companies that seek to train and certify their employees in a variety of environmental topics; and professionals or students who use government grants and loans to afford their continuing education. All of the company’s customers prior to its accreditation paid out-of-pocket.

Boggiano explained that he and his brother, Chris, a co-founder (along with Grant McGregor) are both veterans hoping to make the U.S. more energy independent, and to prepare the domestic workforce to remain technologically competitive. The duo also worked in the field of test-prep, helping business school hopefuls get ready for the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) prior to founding Everblue.

With about twenty full-time employees, and fifty contract instructors, Everblue now teaches about 25,000 students per year, combining both classroom-and-online, and all-online courses.”Generally, people come for short-term boot camp type training. Most of the students in the classroom are architects, municipal officials, or anyone who has a hand in designing for communities. They’re collegiate up to retirees,” Jon Boggiano explained.

Everblue courses cover the following topics and certifications: Building Performance Institute (BPI) Certifications, Weatherization Training; the Residential Energy Services Network’s Home Energy Ratings System (RESNET HERS); the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification of LEED certifications; the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners’ Solar Certification, Corporate Sustainability, and Carbon Accounting.

To build its content, Everblue used the open source course management system Moodle, Drupal and Articulate software, among other technologies. In 2010, the 5 percent of students who completed Everblue courses used the purely online services. Boggiano says he expects that number to grow to represent 20 percent by the end of 2011.

The company currently partners with 60 schools and trade associations to deliver its coursework broadly. It plans to soon deliver multiple language editions of its online coursework to students in China, the Middle East and Europe, and to add more game-like and immersive features to its digital courses, Boggiano said.

Image: Chris (left) and Jon Boggiano (right) in Iraq in 2004, via Jon Boggiano

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Hunter Walk who spends way too much time researching 1980s hair metal bands on Wikipedia. His obsession with Wikipedia is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube.

Wikipedia is the world’s 5th largest website, runs no ads and, depressingly, seems to be perpetually on the fringe of solvency. Google for “Jimmy Wales personal appeal” (Wales is Wikipedia's founder) and you’ll see that there are 32,000+ results, which gives you a sense of the fundraising requirements for this user-generated encyclopedia. The question of whether they’ll ever run ads in order to break this cycle is an ongoing debate. In fact there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to this topic with discussion about ads, opt-in ads, search ads, etc.

At 400+ million users worldwide, any of these options could certainly raise considerable funds used to support the technical and philosophical mission of this non-profit. But to date, Wales has been reluctant to introduce any advertising. So where do we end up? After hitting its 10 year anniversary this January, the question is: can Wikipedia sustain itself for another 10 years without a significant change to its business model?

In my mind there’s a simple solution previously unexplored which would cover their fundraising goals of $16 million annually without any visible change to the site or behavior of its authors and users: simply insert affiliate codes into relevant links on Wikipedia. When I’m reading about the film Twilight, give me a link to buy the video at Amazon and Wikipedia will collect up to 8.5% of any transactions as an Amazon Associate. Or from the Hawaii page, a simple Orbitz affiliate link will produce $3 for each plane ticket sold, 3-5% for a hotel reservation, and so on.

How much money could Wikipedia make from this small change? How about $16,422,000 annually from just their US traffic, roughly 2.7 billion monthly pageviews (25 percent of Wikipedia's total pageviews). Multiplying those pageviews by a .50 revenue per 1,000 page views yields a total which amazingly just exceeds the $16 million target. [note: the .50 eCPM is an estimate gathered from web experts in affiliate monetization. Oliver Roup, CEO of Viglink, a technology which helps web publishers monetize their site in the manner I suggest for Wikipedia, told me they see some eCPMs up to $5 within their network but suggests a more conservative estimate like mine  for Wikipedia.]

Three simple steps can make this happen and preserve Wikipedia as a vibrant, free service:

1) Jimmy Wales needs to say "yes!"

Although I've heard Jimmy talk about his views on advertising, I haven't located any comments regarding affiliate programs. Unlike ads, affiliate links require no change to the site or conflict of interest. However today Wikipedia maintains strict policies on outbound links which forbid affiliate programs. Accordingly, Wikipedia would need to relax their policies on outside linking.

2) An Affiliate Marketing Partner needs to be selected

Viglink and Skimlinks are two of the leaders in the affiliate monetization space. Although specifics would need to be worked out, Roup offered Viglink's support: "We've helped thousands of publishers monetize their content, including a few of comparable scale and we're proud of the meaningful role VigLink revenue now plays for them. We'd be honored to similarly assist Wikipedia in continued pursuit of their mission." That sounds like a deal waiting to happen!

3) Participating Merchants need to honor Wikipedia affiliate clicks

Affiliate programs exist to generate incremental sales and merchants reserve the right to limit payment to partners based on a variety of conditions. This is why you don't see Twitter just append their own affiliate code to all Amazon links shared via their site — Amazon would likely say "bug off." However, in this case, given Wikipedia's non-profit status and the massive amount of traffic this would help unlock for participating merchants, merchants would likely welcome the affiliation. And those who don't? Well, there's always another merchant who will or how about a people-powered boycott by the Wikipedia community? :)

By embracing a smart affiliate program technology, Wikipedia could readily remove the questions around their solvency and redirect all that fundraising energy to activities more directly productive to the wikipedia corpus. So c'mon Jimmy, what do you think?

Disclaimer: I work for YouTube, which is owned by Google, which has a group called Google Ventures which made an investment in Viglink, however I've got no agenda here other than Wikipedia's future.

Egypt meets Google v. Bing on the Gillmor Gang, with Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, and Danny Sullivan. Sullivan broke the story of Google’s sting operation on Bing scraping of search results, which struck some of us as saying more about Google being scared Schmidtless by Facebook.

Egypt’s second week without Twitter did nothing to slow down the realtime wave of governments resigning, news anchors hightailing it back to the ironic safety of New York, and iPadders trying to find something interesting in The Daily. Life in the Fast Lane. @scobleizer @dbfarber @dannysullivan @jtaschek @stevegillmor

Jackthreads, a Thrillist company, is offering a sweet $200 so you can maybe get a nice pair of pants or a shirt to wear on Valentine’s Day so you (and I mean this in the nicest way) won’t look like huge slob.

I mean really, whens the last time you bought a nice pair of pants? Maybe a shirt? Shorts and sandals might be fine for your Magic: The Gathering parties but not for going on.

Ok. Ok. Don’t get testy. Click through to see how to win.

Read more…

I’ve had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and extremely DRM-friendly copyright law, and links to Don’t Make Me Steal started popping up all over the Internet.

You probably don’t realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on CD rootkits and impressively inept PS3 encryption did not go into building better products. All this effort lavished on restriction rather than creation reminds me of the great Ryszard Kapuściński‘s depiction of the Soviet economy:

One can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire … For the matter does not end with the wiring of borders! How many thousands of kilometres of wire were used to fence in the gulag archipelago? … If one were to multiply all this by the number of years the Soviet government has been in existence, it would be easy to see why, in the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a hammer, never mind a knife or spoon: such things could simply not be produced, since the necessary raw materials were used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.

DRM is the barbed wire of the media world. Nobody likes it except manufacturers, publishers, producers, and copyright holders … a group which includes, er, me. I’ve been stubborn and lucky enough to have had a clutch of novels published around the world—and, inevitably, pirated. As a “content producer,” I’m generally expected (especially by my publishers) to be a staunch supporter of DRM, and piracy’s sworn enemy.

It’s easy to see why. Most of the arguments that echo around the Net in favor of unlimited copying range from “intellectually lazy” to “wilfully deluded.” Yes, musicians make up for much of their piracy losses with performance income, but no, the same is not possible for all other pursuits. Yes, Cory Doctorow does very well, but he’s an extreme outlier who markets himself on one of the world’s most popular blogs and has $10,000 lunches with Mark Shuttleworth. No, “real artists” will not keep at it regardless of whether they’re paid; passion is only loosely correlated with talent, and those who make a full-time living from their work do more and better than they would as hobbyists. Yes, obscurity is any creator’s primary enemy, but that doesn’t make piracy a friend. No, The Pirate Bay is not just like a library or secondhand shop. Yes, all of these arguments sound like “I want the fruits of your years of hard work, but I don’t want to reward you in any meaningful way!” wrapped in an extremely thin rationalization.

Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don’t make me say it again.

Ironically, it’s Apple who gives me hope. Yes, Apple, who—unlike Amazon—refuse to sell DRM-free ebooks. But I take heart in knowing that people have bought billions of songs from iTunes (a clumsy, irritating tool which offers by far the worst user experience of Apple’s entire product suite) even though they could easily have downloaded them for free. Most people don’t want to steal. If we content producers make our goods cheap enough, and the process easy enough, they’ll be willing to buy them. I hope. So I’ve released two of my books under Creative Commons licenses, and I’m trying to talk the major publisher who’s agreed to re-e-publish a third to do so without any DRM. So far they’re reluctant: but it’s a leap of faith that all of today’s defenders of DRM will ultimately have to make.

Image credit: Thobias Vemmenby/Flickr