The Skype Revolution Wears Thin

By | November 22, 2011
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What’s going on over at Skype? The one thing that I felt was really useful with the service, apart from all the free chats, was their Skype In service, allowing you to have one phone number wherever you were. You could set it up to forward to any phone on the planet, or your Skype account, or to your Skype voicemail, and it worked great. Now it’s gone.

Well, not gone, but they’ve had to change some of their numbers. This is the message I just received from them:

We’re very sorry to tell you that we have to change your SkypeIn number. As some of you may know, we get SkypeIn numbers from a variety of telecoms suppliers. Unfortunately, we have to return some of the 0207 SkypeIn numbers to one of our suppliers of London numbers.

This means your number will stop working from December 20th 2007. We realise the inconvenience this will cause you, and sincerely apologise.

That’s less than a month away. How on earth can you go around the world telling every Tom, Dick and Auntie Phyllis you’ve ever given your “lifetime” number to that it’s changed in that time? And just before Christmas, to boot!

To soften the blow Skype have given people affected “a new SkypeIn number and voicemail – free for 12 months on us – to thank you for your patience and to help make the changeover as painless as possible for you.” 

Nice thought, and would help, except the voucher doesn’t work. At least not for me. Just keep getting an “invalid voucher” message. So more pain and delay. 

I still talk about the Skype Revolution, where ordinary Joes can suddenly increase their tech knowledge and stay in touch with people more easily than ever before, but I’m beginning to wonder whether it isn’t time for someone smarter, quicker and better organized to take over the revolution.

Update: I’ve heard from Merje Järv- Griffiths of Skype, who offers this extra information on the dropped numbers:

As you know, Skype obtains SkypeIn numbers from a variety of telecoms suppliers.  The London-based SkypeIn numbers in question came from one of these telecoms suppliers. We spent months in discussions with a telecoms supplier to see if we could keep the SkypeIn numbers we rented from them, confident that the issue could be resolved. Hence the somewhat late notice to our users — we never thought things would get this far, given the time and effort put into resolving the situation.

Unfortunately, we have to return some of our 0207 numbers so we’re asking our SkypeIn users who are affected to change their London-based SkypeIn number.

And if any of you are having the same problems I had in redeeming the voucher, try this.

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Thanks for Cancelling!

By | November 22, 2011
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image Beware booking online: This is what confronted me when I tried to book with Skoosh, an online travel booking company. My reservation didn’t look like it had taken, so I went elsewhere, only to find I’d received a confirmation email. When I went to cancel, I found the above: the amount paid equaling the cancellation fee. Hmmm.

I’m checking with the company involved to see what’s going on. In the meantime, be careful when you book with them.

Update: I’ve just spoken to Skoosh and they say the hotel requires three days’ notice for a cancellation, hence the charge. As the room was booked (apparently: no notification page appeared) and canceled within five minutes of each other, this appears somewhat rich.

This is where these aggregation sites get a bit tricky; terms and conditions of each hotel vary wildly so there’s not an awful lot they can do. But while it seems to have been a glitch that caused my transaction to go through without my knowing it, when there’s no change of cancellation we need to be sure something like this doesn’t happen.

So, a warning to users: make sure if you are booking via an aggregator you know exactly what you’re committing yourself to, and check your email inbox to see whether a booking may have happened without it being clear from the website.

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The Innovation Gang

By | November 22, 2011
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The AIA winners, Singapore Nov 2007

The past few weeks I’ve been interviewing and writing up the finalists for the Asian Innovation Awards and the Global Entrepolis awards, which are organized in part by my employer, The Wall Street Journal. It’s the third time I’ve done it, and while it’s great to interview them over the phone this was the first time I got to see all of them in the flesh.

The drive to innovate is a weird thing; if I had to identify one thing they’ve all got in common it’s that they’re all their own people. Not a blazing insight, I grant you, but they were characters in their own way, some quiet, some not so quiet, and it was frankly a pleasure to listen to their stories and then try to write them up.

Here are the WSJ.com stories (free access!) which appeared in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Asia:

“Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water” (gold winner – Australia)

“Creating Empowerment Through Cow Dung” (silver winner – Bangladesh) 

“Rickshaws Drive Entrepreneurship” (bronze winner – India)

“GES Winner Stifles Bollywood Piracy” (GES winner – India) 

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Offended By Spit

By | November 22, 2011
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The truth about writing, especially comic writing, is that you’re always going to offend somebody. The trick is not to do it deliberately, but also, not to care when you do. Seinfeld’s The Boyfriend episode is a classic of the genre, mocking JFK assassination buffs (Stone’s JFK had just come out) with the spitting sequence. It caused such laughter in the studio audience they had to edit some of the laughter out, but still some folk were offended, and remain so. Like this commenter from a Seinfeld fan site I recently came across: 

There were lots of great elements in this show, but I found the JFK spoof material incredibly offensive. It’s one I always skip when I see it in syndication. It just seems like incredibly bad taste (way beyond Seinfeld bad taste) to be mocking the killing of an American president, especially one less than 40 years ago. I never, ever understood what was funny about those scenes.

I’m not saying such people are stupid to be offended, or too tightly coiled for Seinfeld. It’s just you always will offend people, whatever you write, but it shouldn’t stop you or alter your course. Fortunately for us, it didn’t stop Seinfeld.

Seinfeld: The Boyfriend – TV Squad

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Website Members Take Over Football Club

By | November 22, 2011
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A new model of football ownership? The BBC website reports that

Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United.

The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and they will all own an equal share in the club.

Members will have a vote on transfers as well as player selection and all major decisions.

What’s interesting is that the website has only been going since April. It has 50,000 members, 20,000 of them paying the registration fee. MyFootballClub was actually approached by nine of them clubs, none of them from the Premier League, before deciding on Ebbsfleet. The £700,000 was raised in 11 weeks.

I have no idea what the implications of this are. But given that the members/owners will now demand a say in the picking of the team, it could be more like the Israeli model I mentioned a few weeks back. Not everyone agrees it would work.

BBC SPORT | Football | My Club | Ebbsfleet United | Fans website agrees club takeover