THE "XOIP" CHRONICLES

Last week, Starbucks announced that its profit margin would be 97% lower than last year’s, at 1 penny a share, compared to 21 cents a share in 2007….
This points out to a wider trend: the Golden Years are over. The years of spending $5 on a coffee daily are now looking to us as days where we foolishly thought spending $200 a month of coffee wasn’t impacting our savings, or our quality of life. In this economy however, we invite you to take a look at 3 small points that could help rebalance your bottom line:

• Check your phone bill. If possible, go to a lower rate plan - but only if the lower plan would cover the average amounts of minutes spent in the last 6 months. So if you’ve been using 650 minutes in a 900 minute plan, and the next one under is 450 minutes, do NOT change plans. If you can, at home, use Skype, that’s free software that allows you to make cheap ($0.02/mn for the US) calls to landlines and cells from your computer, and free calls to other Skype users .
• Repair any leaks. If you pay your water bills, now’s definitely a time to watch out for leaks. Leaks can add up to hundreds of dollars a year in water… where fixing the leaking faucet can cost as little as $2 for the old joint in the Hot handle. If you need help understanding how your faucet works, try Home Depot, they have very helpful do-it-yourselfers there!
• Eat home-made food. These days, you can make lasagna for $25, which can be reheated for lunch and serves 2 people 4 meals. That’s about $3 a meal per person. It’s home made, so it’s much healthier than any other $3 alternative at a fast food or other. Even simple pasta dishes can be made for $2-$3 per meal, and are easily re-heatable at your office’s microwave. If you can save $5 per meal per day, that’s $200 per month (20 working days per month), or $2400 a year. That week in Hawaii won’t look so expensive at the end of the year, and you waistline will thank you…

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Ok, so we’re not the Gates family, but sometimes, we have some give aways. They’re modest, they’re intriguing, we try to make them fun. For example, in June, we had a Free Skype Voucher give away. And it’s this time of year again, so we’re looking for ideas!

We’re very tempted to be generous again, but the last campaign proved to be extremely tiring. The responses to the survey we put up (”What kind of webcam would you like to have?”) were great… but 36% of respondents cheated. That’s right. So that we could give a maximum amount of Skype vouchers to the largest possible amount of new customers/visitors, we had set a limit of one per household, one per email address, one per IP address policy. Without that, we thought, some clever person would just fill out the survey 200 different ways (so the information wouldn’t be statistically relevant), and take all the vouchers, leaving our other visitors with nothing. Well, 36% of respondents still managed to submit several responses, sometimes trying with different IPs, sometimes, with different emails…

This was a little frustrating for us. We love to use Skype, and we know our www.ipevo.com visitors and our Ipevo phone users do too. So it’s just really irritating when we have to go through thousands and thousands of entries and spend (literally) days looking at excel sheets only to find that some 17-year-old wanted 30 vouchers for themselves. It may not look like it, but giving away free vouchers is a very time-intensive experience. Meaning, I have to sit in front of my computer for hours. I write you guys a simple letter to say thank you for participating, and whooof, 30mn are gone. I attach the voucher and send notes, and pooof, 6 hours are gone. I have to sift through thousands of cheaters’ email, and whoof, 5 days are gone.

So it’s this time of year again, the Holidays are approaching, and despite past tiring experiences, we’d like to give away some Skype vouchers. But this time, I’d like NOT to spend my evenings figuring out who tried to cheat the system. (Oh and for those of you who participated… you KNOW I’ve never used that email to spam you EVER. So help me out too!)

We’re open to ideas… what do you think would be the best way to get people who use Skype every week or so to get free vouchers from Ipevo? For starters, the best idea gets 4 x 30mn vouchers!

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Recently, we wrote about Google’s new found videochatting capabilities… and it got us to thinking of 3 new and innovative ways videochatting may be put to use in the future…

• Intriguing: Politics 4.0. This year, we have seen the Obama campaign use Skype in its grassroots campaign to reach out to a new electorate. So we’re thinking, could Joe the Plumber be giving you a call in 3.5 years? Could you maybe meet Joe and his family and have a conference call with others in your neighborhood?
• Annoying: Telemarketing. Of course, there’s the good’ole video telemarketing… who knows, maybe the Home Shopping Network could become the Anywhere Shopping Service. Imagine being interrupted mid-email for “an exciting, unique, only-for-this-minute, extraordinary opportunity to buy a one-of-a-kind 12 carat earring for your mom or friend by simply clicking on the link that was just spammed to you!”.
• Useful yet off the wall: egrocery shopping. So you’re looking for that tropical honey Stroopwafel your friend brought back to your from the Netherlands. Some grocery stores seem to have it, but you have no idea whether or not your local store would carry such an exotic product? Maybe you’ll be able to build a grocery list, and ask a local merchant to go check it out for you? A quick videochat would confirm/ And while we’re dreaming, it’d be waiting for your right at the cash register, so that your down time is exactly 0 minutes…

What are your thoughts? How are some of the new ways you think you’ll be using videochat in say, 5 years?

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Dear reader,

Ipevo is seeking enthusiastic interns to join our great San Jose team! Our intern positions are posted on intershipin.com.
Come work for a fun, hard-working, multi-cultural office and learn the basics of buzz/viral marketing, event marketing, and promotions with our seasoned in-house specialists! You too could be posting on this blog, be part of our TweetForce, or part of our crazy-yet-efficient tradeshow team! We have the experience and means of a multinational in a start-up setting, so if you want to learn, and learn fast, check our posting!

We look forward to meeting you,

The Ipevo Team.

Filed under: Mashup Community, The Office, Web3.0 | No Comments »

• We have beer Fridays (well, most of the time). Want to get our bunch to clean up on Friday? We found a way! Get everyone a beer, and you’ll be set to go! Friday at 6:00pm is the magic, happy, clean-your-desk-if-you-want-one hour. And until a few weeks ago, we use a prettyhurt.com crutch as a bottle opener (we gave it out for a contest and we all miss it very much).
• When we go out to lunch together, we either go for Pho or Dim Sum. That’s either soup with noodles (with soy beans and basil on the side that you can add to your leisure), or a family-style, every shares the food type of restaurant with crazy plates such as chicken feet (this is for real), pork buns, Chinese broccoli and stinky tofy (again, real name).
• We want a Wii in the office. That’s right, we’re all big game nerds. We all already have an XBox 360 and/or a PS3. Some of us also have the Wii, but it’d still be awesome to argue over projects and resolve them with the highest score at Yoga.
• We can’t decide 2008. We’ve been talking about a company outting for a good year now, and still in contention are skydiving, rafting in Russian River, and the Grand Canyon. We just can’t decide!
• We play poker. So when we met Phil Hellmuth at Von earlier this year, we made sure to get our picture taken with the Poker Giant (literally… the guy is very, very tall).

Want to know more? Comment or email at cs@ipevo.com!

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We love to hear about how Skype helps connect people. One of the stories that was relayed us and that we would like to share is one of Skype in the classroom.
This great teacher posted a completely hands-on, practical how-to use Skype in the classroom

Our take on it: this is an awesome idea. Languages and geography are both pretty hard to teach to younger kids. Even if the vocabulary is tangible, there is no perceived necessity until you are trying to express your own thoughts to someone else. In this economy however, not every kid has the means, or the opportunity, to go travel abroad. The seeds of curiosity are planted young, and we think it’s inspiring to find free ways to give the future of our nation a yearning for learning! So we pull our hats down to the Cool Cat Teacher, and hope to see these initiatives and hope that others around the world will reproduce these heroic efforts!

Did you post a cool, new way of using Skype? We’d like to know! Email us at cs@ipevo.com

Filed under: Electronics, Outside the Office, PRODUCTS, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, Voip, Web3.0 | No Comments »

As many of you have noticed, last Wednesday, our cherished www.ipevo.com was down for a make-over.
This week, we’re very happy to say that we’re back up with a face lift AND some new content!
Welcome to the back stage of an epic change…

www.ipevo.com has been up for a rejuvenil-lift for a few months. In fact, content has been created between Taiwan and the US for the last month, giving away hours of our lives over Skype, and talking about the fresh look and feel of our e-home! Of course, changing the website itself proved to be pretty challenging, and untold battles had to fought, such as the move-your-battle, and battle-of-the-Fire: as the servers had to be manually moved, some cables got inadvertently mixed up, leaving our poor e-home without an address, and Monday night, a fire in the building across the street led to another black-out of www.ipevo.com…

But not to worry, we shall persevere! Check back in the next few weeks to see even more content, even more interaction, and of course, better information on the our latest offering! We love to hear your comments/suggestions, so don’t hesitate to email us at cs@ipevo.com

Thank you for visiting!

The Ipevo Team.

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Here at Ipevo, we’re complete photo freaks. I personally take an average of 200 shots a day, between a Nikon L1, a Canon G7, and a Canon AT-1 (1970s film camera). I don’t love Canon in particular; I just happen to have some. Of course, iPhone and other miscellaneous cellphones are used for on-the-go, you-re-so-surprised shots. However, most of our photos end up in an external hard drive, or on our office server.
So what exactly would we want to represent our oh-so-fabulous shots? We tuned in to some forums to see what others wanted, and found this interesting blog from 2007!
As incredible as it may seem, most of the points raised in the blogs were still unanswered until last month.

• Still, 99% of frames do NOT offer a link to existing photo management software. Kodak and others try to get users to use *their* management system, disregarding your existing folders, or your iPhoto. Does my life need one more layer of editing, reassembling, regathering in 100 steps? (I’ll let you answer that rhetorical question)
• USB transfer is getting more common, but hasn’t been standardized yet. We’d also love to see a mini USB connection, seeing how 12-formats-to-USB are, in fact, mini-USB connections.
• Perhaps the one “new” factor of the year that has yet to be democratized: WiFi. We’ve seen it creep up in the market, but … PhotoVu thinks you’re ready to shell $600 for it, and Kodak will sell you a $200+ frame and then display ads on it. While inadvertent photos of the Ex may pair well with diaper ads, you may not want such a footnote on your artwork … so we’d like to see a balance here.
• Probably the area where I would agree the most is the author is the argument of desired simplification of features. I don’t need a cheap boom box at the back of my frame, because I don’t want elevator music to be paired with my latest self-portrait. I’d also hate my favorite Coldplay song to be playing behind my grandma’s picture… it’s called cognitive dissonance…

Of course, we’re working on these for our own benefit… and yours. So tell us, what are the other features you’d like to see the perfect photo companion?

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We’re excited to share this great post in Network World which was published yesterday . The FR-33.2 has always been the top seller in Skype hardware, but it’s always good to hear feedback from new users!

Great review also appeared yesterday for our Speakerphone for iChat, which made Keith Shaw’s “Rock and Roll Fantasy” List!

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So you want to be seen in your pyjamas, looking groggy as you’re taking your work-from-home day to relax? Well now, you’ll be able to, with Google’s new initiative to provide you video in email .

Here at Ipevo, we use Skype Video Conferencing daily to talk to our Taiwan offices. Of course, we’re committed to looking good, so we’ve decided to not use our cool isight, built in every Mac. Why? Because the angle is so awkward that you can’t ergonomically look at your Word doc AND show something else than your forehead at the same time.

So what’s our recommendation for those of you who are beginners at the whole video experience thing? Well for personal use, you’ll figure out pretty quickly that staring at someone multi-tasking is rather awkward. So we recommend our very own POV webcam to share what’s around you. For professional use, absolutely use the POV!! And check out these 3 essential tips to videochatting:

• Remember: big brother is watching you. Well, more exactly, your boss, or your coworker. And that means, you may turn that video on without even realizing at first. Or maybe you’ve just been in this video meeting for 3 hours… and you’re starting to yawn. Not exactly the best impression. With the POV webcam, you can point at a document, show the part of your home desk that’s actually organized, or point outside the window quickly while you’re sneezing. You’re so polite…
• Show yourself in your best light. Whether video interviews will become standard, or whether your company thinks it’s great for you to sync up with Barry the CFO in London for the 1st time using videochat, you want to look your best. Here’s a clue: straight on is NOT the best angle for you. Make sure you’re in a controlled light environment - either make sure you’re very close to the window, or very far, otherwise the changes between lights will make you look blue while the webcam readjusts. You also don’t want a straight-on angle, because that’ll make you either look flat, or flat out fatter. Make sure you can have your webcam looking slightly down at you, to make you look thinner.
• Set an agenda. Ok so you’re having a videochat. But tell you what, have you ever had a conversation with someone AND emailed at the same time? Kinda rude, no? You don’t want to reproduce that with a layer of technology. So when you agree to videochat, make sure you have a schedule (ie, I have 10mn for you), and an agenda, so that when the webcam *mysteriously* turns off after the predicted 10mn, everything will have been covered… and you’ll be free to return to your email-twitter-blog-johnstewartdailyshow you were into before you got interrupted….

Merry yawning!!

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