Nicholas Babaian is bullish about mobile growth for the VoIP firm.
It may have once been perceived as a threat by the mobile industry, but Skype is becoming an increasingly important partner for operators and handset makers.
ME sat down with its head of product management for mobile, Nicholas Babaian, at Mobile World Congress today. He talked about how the company's mobile activities are continuing to ramp up.
“Our iPhone app has had amazing success,” he said. “We've reached 12 million unique users, which is more than 15% of the entire base of iPhone and iPod touch users. We wanted to make the experience really easy to use, in line with what an iPhone app looks and feels like.”
However, Skype has also been beta testing the Symbian version of its app, which is now available for 15 Nokia handsets. Nokia is becoming a close partner, too. The N900 was its first handset to showcase an even tighter relationship with Skype, blending users' Skype contacts with their normal contacts.
“We find the device really exciting, with that level of integration,” says Babaian. “That's the user experience we want: calling a Skype contact is as easy as a regular call, and an instant message is as easy as sending a regular SMS. We'll have a similar experience on the N97 soon.”
And then there's the operators – the companies who were thought to have most to lose by Skype's entry into the mobile market. However, Babaian says the success of its partnership with Hutchison's 3 – which kicked off with the INQ-made Skypephone - has proved that theory wrong.
“We've already had over a billion Skype-to-Skype minutes on 3 UK, and we're now getting 100 million Skype-to-Skype minutes a month,” he says.
“A lot of people saw that deal as a real head-scratcher when it was announced, and wondered why they [3] would do it. But it was a stroke of genius on their part, to draw subscribers away from their competitors. 79% of people who bought the Skypephone were new to 3.”
Skype is holding a joint press conference with Verizon Wireless later this week – a subject Babaian couldn't talk about today, naturally, other than to confirm the event is happening. But the expected partnership between the two, which may include calls over the 3G network, shows how the industry sands are shifting when it comes to VoIP.
So what's next? Video-chat. 34% of Skype-to-Skype calls on PCs and Macs are video calls, according to Babaian. Video-calling has a lowly reputation in the mobile industry though, thanks to the relative flop of that aspect of 3G.
“That to us is part of the opportunity,” says Babaian. “Before Skype, VoIP had a pretty mixed reputation. We see the same opportunity in video-calling.”
He explains that as Skype sees it, there are three big problems with mobile video-calls to date: the costs are high and/or confusing, the user experience has been less than stellar, and there was never a guarantee that the person you wanted to video-call would be able to accept it.
“We think we have a way for all those problems to disappear,” continues Babaian. “We're going to make it completely free, easy to use, and you'll always be able to see who in your contact list can receive video. We think we can reset the bar on mobile video calling, and it's something we're going to do this year.”
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