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eBay Wants Voice Phone Free In Five Years
kmk writes "In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay's chief executive said on Wednesday."
I would much rather pay for phone service than to put up with ads on the telephone, of all places.
And now with advertising in it, yay...
From the company that perfected "nickle and diming."
I pay a nickle a minute for a Wal-Mart-branded major-carrier long distance card.
It still gives me an ad I can't bypass after I enter the number.
At 5 cents a minute it should be ad-free.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
of the ad-based PCS that they gave away, what was the name ?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
So do I, so do I.
.... As in beer?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Sorry, I'm cranky today.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
This is just the continued rumblings of the Internet bubble dunderheads. "We're going to transform the world! You'll have e-phones and e-ads and e-commerce and e-billing and e-rections."
Phoey. Ma Bell ain't going away anytime soon.
Our telephone company does this already! Even if you are on the DNCL, you will get telemarketing calls from their "partners."
We had our number ported to Vonage and solicitations stopped immediately.
Looks like eBay is hurting... and it's not just because of the Skype purchase.
From the article:
"EBay said it had 168.1 registered users for its online auctions as of the end of September."
Giving Ebay customers the ability to bid with their cell phones, after all how many people can sit by the computer and hit refresh every time an auction ends?
Say that you want to make a call to eastern europe..your looking at paying 20c/min. a 20 min call will cost you 4$. I think that i would rather save my $4, and listen to a 30 second spot for pepsi. We do it on TV AND we pay for cable service. Why not get free voip, and listen to 30 second add for any long distance call.
The more the call would cost...the longer or more ads they can run. So when u wana call africa, u might listen to 2 min ad, but better then paying 30$ for a call.
-EL
With keyword spam, rampant brand name misuse and other listing policy violations and abuses spiraling ever more out of control, is providing telecom services really what ebay needs to focus on right now? How will they provide me with a dial tone if they can't even provide me with a safe auction?
1. I call someone... while it's connecting me I have to wait 60 seconds to listen to an ad...
2. Other person picks up the phone... they have to listen to a 60 second ad just to talk to me.
3. Oops, it's a wrong number. So I have to go back to step one and waste another 60 seconds.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Office Space trivia game - play it now douche hole.
or maybe it'lll work like AdSense, and whatever your talking about on the telephone will be interrupted with "directed advertising" delivering only advertisments relating to your conversation!
What I don't see, however, is the "supported by advertising". Not if, by that, he means that you'll have to listen to advertising before/after/during the call. Maybe if he means in a round about way, like Google's jabber service is run by google, who runs on advertising.
Generally, though, paying for high-bandwidth service should be enough. If we have to, we can make direct connections for voice transmissions. No one needs to be charging me for that beyond my normal ISP price.
I wonder if the the DND rules in the US would apply to ads on the phone? Perhaps not if you had a choice in selecting your Telco.
Isn't that much the same logic that lead to the .com bust? Lots of companies eating lots of money and not actually making any? Nice and idealistic concepts my friend... but still awful naive.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
its good to hear that broadband is eliminating other bills and actually saving us money. my site so im not so anonymous...
me: So greg, my friends and i were going over to the bar ...
....FUCKING THING!
*BEEEP* you said bar, you may want to check out Punters pub, tonight we have free chicken wings! *BEEEP*
me: urrg. Sorry about that, so we were going to that....place and were drinking some beer...
*BEEEEP* You said beer. Have you tasted the cool, clean refreshing taste of budweister today? *BEEEEP*
me:
*BEEP* YOu said fuck, have you called 1-900-hot-chix today, for the best in....
Really just plain ads?
Or will they take advantage of the new mandatory wiretapping laws, and have automated systems that scan your conversation for keywords and give you related ads?
Sort of like Google adsense, but with voice content...
I for one do not welcome our new phone tapping overlords...
/* TAANSTAFL */
rather than talk about how eBay itself should provide ad-supported auction service, why is it suggesting other telecomm companies to provide ad-supported services?
and as a company whose customer service over the phone is practically non-existent, phone charge should be least of their concerns.
I once had a signature.
Is it just me or is this like Microsoft going into the car business?
I for one welcome our new
Buy your Red Hat, get your hot fresh Red Hat
advertiser-supported telephone overlords.
Now I know. The cheap bastards are waiting for free phone service.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
FTA: "What I mean by that is: the largest number of registered users, the largest number of voice minutes, the largest number of developers who develop the platform, the best product ... that users are willing and want to pay for." (emphasis mine)
Yes, the 'winner' will be the company with the best product and the highest market share. Nothing about how this justifies purchasing Skype (other than the number of active customers they have now)... which was the point of the release, since eBay has taken so much heat for the purchase.
Notice also that TFA states that per-minute costs will approach zero... says nothing about subscription fees. We're already seeing per-minute costs approach zero -- unlimited plans are available for traditional telephone as well as VOIP and cell phones.
Besides, isn't GooglePhone better poised to take over the zero-cost telephony market? Oh wait, that's next month's press release...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What will happen to all those poor retired NFL quarterbacks? They'll have no more commercials to do.
7. post it on /. (new advertising medium)
8. Profit!!!!
Ebay wants free phone calls? Well I want a solid gold toilet, but we're both going to be disapointed, eh?
You can get this functionality in the latest version of YIM, and I suspect several other instant messengers as well. All this really is, is vonage adware.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"So I was at work, right? And in comes this customer and.... **We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from S. C. Johnson Wax! For a 5-minute instructional tutorial on how to use your new ShitWipers...press...one! To speak to a representative about new ShitWipers...press...two. To learn about our exciting Web site at ShitWipers dot com...press...three. To hear why ShitWipers are superior to competing toilet wipe products...press...four. To resume your phone call, dial...pound...three...five...seven...one. This message will repeat in 5 seconds. **
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, but you didn't respond quickly enough. This message will now repeat.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational bulletin! Is your toilet getting messy? Try new ShitWipers, new from...
>FIVE<
I'm sorry, you cannot press buttons until this announcement has completed.
We interrupt this call to bring you this exciting informational..."
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Things will be free when people stop paying for useless shit. And I guess it is too obvious to say, but Ebay is lying. They do not want phone service to be free. They want to be collecting revenue from you indirectly through lucrative advertising deals. What they should say is, "We want things to look free as soon as possible so that cost is not an obstacle to you entering our consumer market and buying non-free shit as soon as possible."
in 5 years, every little computer app will allow you to make free calls via the net. its really not that hard to stream sound/audio once bandwidth limitations are overcome. Meg Whitman overpaid for Skype.
..if people like you would stop going along with it.
The thing is, someone high up in the gov't will eventually have to approve running ads on all telephone calls. And if it was some senators choice, do you think he'd put up with having to listen to ads when at work or whatever? noo....
It's really hard to argue that when Cingular goes out of business because the Government offers free wireless service, that's the result of a "capitalist economy." Now, if they go out of business because another company offers free wireless access, that's capitalist. You weren't specific.
--
RumorsDaily
I'd rather pay for a service that is free from advertisements than get a free service that I can't use when I want to. Most of those "free services" require you to sit through ads before you can use them, such as many website video streams. My time is not free.
Ha! I can't wait for this! I'll be talking to my mom on the phone, only to have another incoming call, indicated by the usual beep. However, this time, it isn't a person; it's an ad for penis enlargement.
Hmmn, advertising is being touted as some kind of miracle cure-all for IT industry troubles these days, much as medieval peasants waved religious relics around and bought and sold saint's bones (or what they claimed were saint's bones) to ward off plagues and famines. It didn't work then and in any case there weren't enough credible relics to go round, so you had, say, 14 different churches all claiming to contain Christ's right arm or whatever.
It won't work now, either. There isn't enough advertising money in the world to underwrite the number of allegedly clever ideas all based entirely on advertising revenue. Advertising coarsens and corrupts everything it touches. Perhaps we all need a human rights and privacy law which is the freedom to be let alone from advertising. By law, a telephone carrier for example would be obliged to offer an advert-free service to those who willing to pay for it.
Besides, this might help some companies to formulate credible business plans that are based on charging for your products instead of giving them away and then wondering why you go bankrupt shortly afterwards.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Until it's made illegal, like Kazaa, which Skype is nominally based on, it's free, peer to peer. You pay the Internet connectivity usage costs, and whatever dirtbag computer you're got connected to it.
I won't listen to advertising, or watch it either on a VoIP call. I'll just find another source. Anyone with a PC making 20c/min calls to anywhere needs to dig just a little bit and find a wealth of absolutely free (as in beer) VoIP techniques. If you want to join an Enum/SIP-based network, free ones are forming. No one is going to COPYRIGHT MY DAMN VOICE.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The Baltimore city paper has a very nice article about this on its front page. Actually, they wouldn't need to pay up that much ads to make the service free!
I've heard that the owner of the Skype system is turning to pananism, and in turn has decided to make the calling services assosiated with Skype free, in order to combat what he claims is, "eBays continued plans to take over the global internet buisness". He later added that, "The internet is serious buisness". Anyway, I dont know. I guess we'll see what happens.
Free calls for watching ads?????
I seem to remember doing this 5 years ago.
True, VOIP is better now than it was then, but still.
My, how technology advances
How much of modern telecommunication is based on outdated, outmoded pricing models?
Is it just the UK? Are we getting royally screwed by the communications industry? Is VoIP going to be another royal shafting? Answers on a postcard...
Awesome for geeks anyway... we'll all just use adblockers or alternative, open-source brows... er phones.
From the article: "Our belief is that the winner in this space will be those that have the largest ecosystem," Whitman said. "What I mean by that is: the largest number of registered users, the largest number of voice minutes, the largest number of developers who develop the platform, the best product ... that users are willing and want to pay for."
Aside from the marketing fru-fru use of of the word "ecosystem," she makes perfect sense. Except that she can't assume that just because someone sells something on eBay, they will use Skype. As for the largest number of developers, it's not like these other guys are small potatoes.
As for advertising... maybe it's just something in the background of your free phone calls, like a softly playing radio station. Maybe it just has onscreen ads every time you use the software (e.g. the Eudora model). Maybe they mean they'll sell your Skype number to telemarketers!
The real question is, how can eBay blend its online auctions and PayPal with VoIP features? Voice chat with a seller? Real live auctioneers during the final mad minutes of an auction? Auctioning off vanity Skype numbers, or access to Skype-based porn?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I haven't had a landline service for 3 years but I recall my bill:
$122: total
-7: Caller ID
-4: Touch tone
-9: Voice Mail
-4: 3 Way Calling
-8: Unlimited *69
-11: Help The Needy Tax
-9: City Tax
-8: State Tax
-3: Telegraph Tax
-4: Freedom Tax
-3: Voluntary Anti-terrorism Tax
-2: White Pages Listing
-50: DSL
====
$0 - Free phone service (unlimited calls)!
You mean like how I do it now with a land line.
My phone calls don't involve transactions and I sure as hell don't want ads. Other than that, it sounds like a great plan.
What are they thinking? Not everything can, or should, be free. And if they're trying to say that phone calls will be free as part of a non-free package, then they aren't exactly free, are they? By that logic, I can make unlimited local calls free already--as part of a package that includes call waiting, caller ID, etc.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In the year 2020, the only way to block 24/7 ads is to gougue out your eyes and pop your eardrums.
However, by 2021 nanobots will constantly press on the skin of the deaf and blind with brail ads.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why EBay would buy an Internet phone which cannot be embedded in a webpage, when they are a completely web-based company is hard to understand. Of course if they can get Skype preinstalled maybe Joe Blow will use it, but I'd say Microsoft has a better chance of getting their Messenger/Teleo service preinstalled :).
So, EBay has payed billions of dollars for a system which they will procede to destroy with ads and Microsoft will preinstall the app that everyone will use. Perhaps phone calls will be free, but it won't be EBay that provides the service.
--
The Switchboard - get a private browser based VoIP system for your web-site for $40
Perhaps the poster spends all day reading /. and hardly ever talks on the phone and only makes short calls?
Show him a cell phone or land line plan for under $0.05x200=$10/month for 100 2-minute calls.
Why on earth do you think Google wants to start picking dark fiber and implementing free wifi throughout major cities. It's not because they're not evil, it's because the internet providers of today are going to be the phone providers of tomorrow. I wrote a couple of posts about it on my site back when Google introduced Gtalk: http://www.yesterdaywasdramatic.com/articles/2005/ 08/29/more-crazy-thoughts-on-google
Basically, I think google is going to offer some form of advertising(location based?) in order to offer free phone service. I think pay phone carriers will still exist for those who don't want adverts tied to their phone calls.
I've never used ebay, but I think unless they utilize Skype with a heavily user centered design focus, Google stands a good chance to step into this arena and win it over. I'm pretty sure the reason Gtalk is so basic is that Google didn't want to confuse end users with it's primary focus(simple voice and text chat).
My money's on Google to win this one.
They use the word "free" extremely loosely. You either pay in currency or you pay in tolerance. Make no mistakes about it ladies and gents. Nothing in life is "free".
You know your line is being tapped when you hear ads targeted at law enforcement officers.
I'm not paying for "telephone" minutes per se, haven't done so for quite a while. My $53/month naked DSL bill pays for my SIP calls, thankyoumerymuch.
I also pay for (relatively) scarce radio spectrum through my mobile phone bill, and *that* is metered. It doesn't have to be:
My mobile provider offers "free" in-network calls, so if I was so inclined, with a second mobile permanently tethered to my home setup I could have a $0.00/minute gateway from my (other) mobile, wherever I am as long as I'm not roaming. Modulo what happens to DTMF on the mobile-to-mobile voice call, which I haven't investagated.
In a few short years, users can expect to offer items at auction for free, with no fractional charges, as part of a package of services through which auction site operators make money on advertising, Verizon's chief executive said on Wednesday. The same chief executive was later seen singing "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haaa" by Napoleon XIV.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Based on the conversation you are having .. you will hear ads. Don't worry I am sure the interruptions will be polite...
..if you buy in bulk .. I can even dial the number for you now to reserve your case.. note your current call will be interrupted.
*ring*
GF: Hello
You: Hey baby
Voice: Sorry to interrupt, did you know that you can buy Hay at a really low price from Bob's farm on route 64?
You: o..
Voice: And for your baby, there is a special on Baby food going on right at Joe's Groceryu store
You: I'm not interested
Voice: No problem. I see that you called a different lady prior to this call, so you may be interested in our new "more friends" plan?
electric- charge for delivery service (the connection)
electric- charge for electricity consumed
Telephone- charge for basic service
telephone- charge for making calls
Water- charge for service
water- charge for useage
water-charge for sewer service
water-charge for sewer volume
cable tv- charge for service
cable tv- useage subsidised by commercials or premium payments for some channels.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Many internet providers already offer unlimited free national phone calls... in France
You just need a DSL modem in which the phone plugs into.
You can do it with AOL: it's the AOLBox
You can do it with Neuf: it's the NeufBox
You can do it with Free: it's the FreeBox
OK, I think you get the picture.
It's not in 5 years, it's now. And there are no ads, of course. It's free for land lines. For cell phones, add a small charge.
and pay a little money thanks.
got a good plan and a number that follows me everywhere.
who needs voip.
I'm not sure what they are smoking in the executive boardroom either.
What expertise do they have?
HOW does this fit into what they are doing now?
This HAS TO BE and unqualified disaster in the making. No wonder their stock price is falling.
This statement is absolutely true. It also invalidates everything else he says. If money is always changing hands for any given product or service, then nothing is free.
I wish more people would dig up such valuable links!
I'll trust eBay with my phone...when pigs fly! They can't program an HTML editor, much less something like Skype.
"Thank you for reaching 911, please hold while you listen to an ad for one of our sponsors."
"You cannot make this call because either your feedback has dropped to -1, or your PayPal balance has been frozen. Please try again later after you've built up more positive feedback, or fax us your drivers license."
"How would you rate your conversation?
Positive, Negative, or Neutral?"
eBay, and PayPal running the phone company? The irony is, it's about the only multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporation I know of that doesn't have a published toll free contact number for customer service. If you try to post the number to their help forums, they remove the post.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
What expertise do they have?
HOW does this fit into what they are doing now?
How about you read the fucking article and find out.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
At that point, the only way to avoid avertising would be to remove your brain. Of course so many people seem to function without brains now that they could just operate your body instead.
it's QoS. There are simply no guarantees for delay and latency on the Internet. Given the lack of financial incentives for one ISP to honor QoS markings coming in from another ISP, it's very unlikely that end-to-end QoS will ever happen in the existing Internet model.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You make a very good point. All these "apparently free" services supported by ads assume on some level that you don't value your time, at least not as much as you value your money. That's twisted though; because you can always make more money; but as far as I can tell, any amount of time you have wasted is lost forever...
phones weren't hardwired into our ears.
unless you guys are on a different page than i am.
"In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the 'Net will trend toward zero,"
Lets analyse this:
-Broadband will be free? Highly doubt that.
-As in the service your gateway provider delivers to get calls outside the network, with people actually being able to understand what the other party is saying? Doubt that will be free either.
In the end, when everything is free or approaching 0, who will Joey Average call when things do not work as advertized. There will be no support staff, since they are alledgedly enjoying a 'free' trip to planet Utopia.
It wouldn't make any sense to force people to listen to ads before or during every phone call. The advertising is probably done in other ways.
Do they mean free international phone calls ?
I already can call by phone for free in my country.
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
"Our belief is that the winner in this space will be those that have the largest ecosystem.
We lose money on every sale, and make it up in volume!
This article is so brief that we don't the specific details. Nothing in life is black or white; if the ads are short than it's worth the trade off. If they are long and repeating then it's not worth it. Either way, if you don't like ads then there will be an option to still pay for phone service, if you don't care about ads then take the free service.
Ad driven model is sure to make the costs free.
Which is why ebay and paypal are using the free advertiser driven model now.
More than likely explosive growth will lead to explosive charges.
We pay for telephone service without commercials. Why can't we pay for TV service without commercials too?
Presuming eBay plans to be as free with information about my telephone habits as they are with information from my auction account, I think I'll stick with my phone bill, thanks.
On a more general note, though I'm sure this is subject to change, right now my phone bill is the least of my worries, frankly. The land line is a bargain considering what it does for me every day, and it just plain works... I've lost my power, my internet, my cable for periods of time, but I've been living in my town for over a decade and not once has my phone gone out for even a minute in all that time. Figure out a way to deliver heat through the internet - that's the bill I'm worried about this winter.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Does having more advertising shoved into our skulls really have a positive net effect on income ? Some commercials are actually entertaining (mostly funny ones), but for the most part it's more of the same poop. Some dumb ho walking around in new overpriced jeans (and little else), or some white-trash male model promoting chewing gum. It's goddamned chewing gum, if I feel like gum I'll look at the display rack at the convenience store. :P
I like advertising that teaches me new stuff.. informs me of products I was not aware of, and hopefully that I'm interested in. I don't need to see some dyke faking a (bad) orgasm in her shower thanks to X-garbage-shampoo. I don't need McDonalds to remind me they still sell BigMacs. I might actually like to hear about a new soft drink, and they could shut the hell up once half the world knows about Diet Ultra Coke Purple. Once I've tried it, I don't need more advertising, I'll just buy some at the store if I want it.
The day marketing stops treating humankind as puppets, is the day they will earn my respect.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
when @Home spent some $900 million on Blue Mountain Greeting Cards. @Home went belly-up for that plus a number of other reasons ... but blowing almost a billion on an electronic greeting card company wasn't too smart. They could have used that money to stay in business, rather than making me give up my 4 mbit/sec symmetric @Home connection for AT&T Broadband's wimpy-assed 1.5/256, followed by Comcast's 3.0/384. So now here's E-Bay betting a truckload of green that they can make money from "free" phone calls. Unless they can get some kind of law passed that says that transmitting voice over IP via anything that other than an "official" provider is illegal, I can't see how they're going to get much of an R on that I. I understand the concept of diversification but, well ... I guess don't have the big picture.
No doubt it's on a greeting card somewhere.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Off topic I know...
I wonder how this business, and the rest of the VoIP business, will manage if/when the ISPs start filtering out and stopping or delaying the VoIP packets?
There was an article in the latest IEEE Spectrum about it:
The VoIP Backlash
Doesn't look good, IMO.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
A bunch of trolls when it comes to eBay. Giz on the Google logo, shit on eBay. Skype was great before eBay bought it. Even though eBay is going to do nothing to Skype, Skype becomes a POS. Sure.
Yes, I am green...
I'm not sure what they are smoking in the executive boardroom either.
What expertise do they have?
HOW does this fit into what they are doing now?
You know... that's what a lot of people once said about a guy that owned a chain of record stores and a record label when he tried to get into the airline business. At the end of the day, Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic hasn't done too bad over the years. Of course, I haven't tracked it since I worked for Virgin (record stores), but I believe the airline is still around today.
"carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees"
This is kind of vague, and the article goes into zero detail.
So per-minute charges will disappear, but I'll have to pay everytime I connect to someone else's phone? That's what that says to me.
As for advertising, I'd rather just keep taking it in the ass each month from Qworst than listen to one second of some asshole telling me how his company makes the world better by selling me shit I don't want.
Some years ago when politicians discovered that Internet users where swapping emails without paying postage, some people discussed the idea that in the future email senders should have to pay something. But information wants to be free, and the Internet Protocol now allows users to make inexpensive phone calls across the planet. Not only politicians failed to tax email, but the power of the Internet bitten back and made phone free too. Information is by its very nature unstoppable, so politicians and business managers should better find other ways to get money and let us enjoy as much information as we want.
I see what you did there.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
VoIP has a place withing network domains under a single administrative control - i.e. If Skype were to also offer ISP service using their own network, they could then offer workable QoS, and reasonable SLAs.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
eBay is the last company I expect to provide phone service. The market is already "over-extended" with phone service. Paid service, free service, and now another free service? To my recollection, once eBay pisses off a person, they never never come back. Once you have an issue with Paypal or eBay which eventually everyone will have - eBay will go down. Why do you think their numbers are slipping? 1. They charge too much. 2. They don't care - just as long as they have your money.
..... but Skype isn't.
..... with my boss's blessing}. Now that's compatible with every "proper" SIP phone and, thanks to the gateway, with every ordinary telephone whether mobile or tethered. I can even introduce encryption at the IAX layer {present assumption: any machine on my LAN is trustworthy; if/when Wireless is introduced, it will be encrypted and tightly firewalled}.
The whole point of telephony is interconnectivity, which Skype is going dead against with its closed protocol. {I'm using a hardware SIP phone [the only way to do it IMHO] and my own copy of Asterisk to connect through an ISDN line at work
Unless Skype is opened -- willingly or by force {are you out there, DVD Jon?} -- it will not succeed in the long term. Its short-term success is due to early adopters; not all of whom will stay loyal, particularly once the insurmountable-by-design disadvantages begin to become apparent. How many electric companies do you know that sell 72V, 20Hz out of weird sockets with two half-moon and one flat pin and are still in business?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
and now flying world wide thanks to its pacific counterpart Virgin Blue
XML - A clever joke would be here if
911 what is ur emergency HELP MY LEG IS BLEEDING.BEEP(advert=are u bleeding? try our new band-aids, for all ur cuts*bleep* help my leg is Beeep(advert=leg of ham, on sale now for 99cents) *dead*
do they think the skype based pron would be less stealable than the audio story porn thats on the net... or are they going to develop skype based 1900 numbers for skype phone"sex"
XML - A clever joke would be here if
It's like free hosting. There is a cost associated with every assigned telephone number, there is a cost associated with every outbound call even to a local number, and the cost for long distance is even greater. Free hosts have to cheat, use cheap bandwidth and dump high use accounts to remain even marginally profitable. Thus far in internet history, users have proven that they will do whatever is possible to block advertisements and that as they become desensitized to ad formats the CTRs plumet. Short term perhaps ebay can create enough spin that they will be able to convince their stockholders that their 4 billion dollar blunder has an upside, but my bet is still that in 2010 we'll all look back and laugh.
I'll stick with companies like Vonage who provide VOIP services for a fairly low amount of money each month without needing to pay per minute. It may not be "free", but companies that charge anywhere from $15-$40 per month and provide voice services without subjecting their customers to advertisements is the way things are going.
There may be advertising based voice services out there for those wanting to pay nothing for their service, or for those who can't afford $25/month in addition to their internet connection payment, but those will be a small fraction of the number of people using voice services.
Hmmmm, a game costs $60 for the new games that are comming out, $12-$15/month for a MMORPG payment, and people don't want to pay $25/month for their voice phone service?
If eBay bought Skype, why can't they do this now? Just make it free now.
I don't get it.
This man is very dangerous.
All you need is lurv.
In 2020 everything will be owned and produced by ChinaCo(tm) and therefore no advertising needed!
YOU WILL BUY A NEW CHINACO(tm) PRODUCT
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
VoIP Buster. Works like a charm. Now. No ads. And I'm not planting one now. :)
no idea.
Is advertising as revenue earning really going to continue to be such a viable model. Even one that seems to be increasing?
Surely they don't seriously think anybody is going to sign up for something that interrupts calls or insists on you listening to an ad before placing a call. That's just the obvious hyperbole line to take.
So, how does advertising and phone calls work? You can put banners and popups on the software tools, but people will manage to block them. Besides, they like to sell Skype phones, so that doesn't help. Ads on the Skype phone? Only way I can see that working is if you replace the buttons with a touchscreen that shows ads when you're not actually dialing. Though that again still fails when you consider the trend towards cradle free wireless phones.
Anyone care to conjecture, seriously, just how advertising can fund phone calls?
What's worse, ignorance or apathy? Who knows, and who cares.