Continuing from an entry of last week…
In an article published last week in Forbes, it is reported that Skype is developing other premium services like voice mail. This is noteworthy. Since their approach is to deploy minimal infrastructure they can not be deploying voice mail server(s); and since by definition voice mail requires an always available storage device, Supernodes can not take on the role of voice mail server. So I am eager to know how they are going to do it.
Meanwhile there is a way for individual users to realize voice mail service by adding limited capability to the end-points. The idea is for the caller to record the message and send it as an email attachment to a specified email id. Since many free email providers allow big attachment and a large disk space, this arrangement is feasible and does not require any premium.
Consider the case of caller A who has sent a SIP INVITE message to caller B: The response message (from caller B, B’s proxy or redirect server) should specify the email id. With this information, Caller A can decide to leave a voice message at any time – immediately or after waiting for a (autonomously decided) period of time. SIP end-points must have the ability to locally record the speech and generate an email to the address specified in the SIP message. Thus voice mail becomes a capability of a product rather than a service (let alone a premium service).
Posted by aswath at October 13, 2004 01:45 PM
On Skype.
i see them like ebay. Part of the money they make, but the cottage industry that has sprung up around eBay, all unlicensed for the most part, is where I see Skype going, only with a licensing model. That and their arbitrage approach to minutes and currency.
Posted by: Andy Abramson at October 16, 2004 06:02 AMsimple, they OUTSOURCE Voice Mail to Level3 and charge for the ''extra''' service--------some will pay and some wont--------NEXT!
Skibare
Posted by: skibare at October 20, 2004 08:18 AM