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Trend: Skypecasting
Written By Josefine Koehn on Monday, October 2, 2006 at 1:30 AM | In Lifestyle, Marketing, Technology, USA
The new service from skype, which allows phone conversations with up to 100 people, is inspiring new file sharing and advertisement concepts.
Trend Description:
Skype’s online software enables users to make free phone calls via the Internet. With 29 million registered users, the company is one of the biggest VoIP providers (Voice over Internet Protocol). As a comparison, the commercial competitor in the US, Vonage, has 550,000 subscribers so far. A new feature, called Skypecasting allows phone conversations with up to 100 people. Skypecasting is a merger of Skype and podcasting, as the new services allows to share recorded conversations as well as live conversations via Internet telephony. In general the Skypecast live conversation is controlled by the host, who can mute or blend out disruptive participants. Up to 100 people can listen and participate. If recorded, the conversation, concert or any other audio-event can be shared afterwards via Skypecast like a podcast. But not only private consumers are using Skypecast to share their audio, corporate businesses are starting to use Skypecast for advertisement campaigns, often in collaboration with musicians and other celebrities.
Cases:
Skypecasting:
Technologically savvy users are starting to use the new Skype feature to distribute their recordings across the Internet for free. Some are even running their own mini-radio stations for Skype-users. Other examples are the best selling mystery writer Michael Connelly speaking about his newest book, the business networking call, open conversations for native English speakers, Skypecasts about gaming and traveling, and many more.Heineken Skypecast
Heineken Netherlands is using the new Skypecast feature for their current advertising campaign. In the Skypecast, the Dutch band Johan played songs of their new album and the up to 100 listeners were able to ask questions to the band members. Supposedly the Heineken campaign was the first live concert broadcasted through Skype. There is also a video online now and, of course, fans can still listen to the recorded Skypecast, win promo-CDs, and get lots of information about Johan and “Heineken Bierâ€.
Moodle Skypecast
Moodle is the biggest open source course management system in the world. The system is designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses and is used all over the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is open source and completely free to use. It now also incorporates Skypecast as a new feature, which enables the students and their teacher to communicate live. Now they’re not limited to listening to podcasts but also to live discussions and participating in Q&A-sessions.
Trend Impact:
Skypecast has opened a whole array of new possibilities for podcasters, advertisers and educators. Most ideas are even provided and developed by the users themselves. As Skypecast is free we will see it incorporated in a huge variety of open source systems. Also more and more private users, bloggers and podcasters will use Skypecast to distribute their audio content. Although Skype does not especially support uses like private radio stations, the company encourages its users to find possible applications. Another possibility might be to turn an MP3 player into a radio station for Skype users.
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