A few weeks ago, Skydeck went to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. MWC is the largest trade show devoted to our industry and we were there to meet with several companies interested in working with us to launch Skydeck outside the US.
I wish we could say that we saw lots of cool new phones and applications at MWC, but they were few and far between. As many people have pointed out, some of the most interesting companies in the industry were not exhibiting in Barcelona at all (Apple), or doing invitation-only demos (Palm), or making cameo appearances in the booths of other companies (Google).
Most conspicuously absent? You, the consumer – someone who might actually want to buy a cool new phone or application. (more…)
We’ve had lots of great responses to Skydeck’s new features (check out the reviews) and lots of feature suggestions! Please keep them coming.
We’ve also been testing multiple price plans and combinations, including free trials, free and premium versions of the service, and gated access. For now we’ve settled on a 30-day free trial with unlimited access – that’s unlimited domestic calling in the US and unlimited voicemail transcription – so tell all your friends. (If you were not offered a free trial during the last two weeks of testing, we’ll be sending you an email to offer you one month free.)
If there’s one thing we hate more than dialing voicemail, it’s figuring out voicemail menus. We’ve just added a section to the ‘My Account’ page to let you manage your voicemail preferences from the web. You can choose text message alerts, email, or both, and you can even turn off transcription if you wish.
When we launched the beta version of Skydeck last June, we said that our goal was to help people manage their cell phones online. We said that you ought to be able to manage your cell phone conversations the same way that you manage your email. We said that this is your data, and that you ought to have more control over it.
This morning we released a new version of our service that delivers against all these ideas and more. We’re calling the new Skydeck “your cell phone, online.”
Now all of your calls, all of your text messages, all of your voicemails, and all of your contacts appear on Skydeck.com in real time, and you can search, read, and reply to your messages from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.
For those of you who were already using Skydeck, let me just point out the new features:
All of your calls – including missed calls and voicemails, which never showed up in the original version of Skydeck.
All of your text messages – including the content of your text messages.
All of your voicemails – including the audio of your voicemails, plus a transcribed version that gets sent to you by text and by email, all stored on Skydeck.com.
All of your contacts – sync your cell phone directly to Skydeck.
In real time – not one day late.
Search – including the content of your texts and the content of your voicemails.
Reply – take advantage of your broadband connection, your headset, and your keyboard to place calls and send texts from Skydeck that appear to be coming from your cell phone.
We’ve completely redesigned the interface to incorporate all these new features (and almost accidentally I think we’ve built the best address book application on the web).
Technically, Skydeck combines an (optional) application on the handset, a Flash softphone, a voicemail system, and voicemail transcription with a completely redesigned version of our rich Internet application, our original software for collecting data from carrier web sites, and an expanded set of APIs that give you programmatic access to your data in real time. But that’s like saying a cell phone is a combination of a radio, a microphone, a speaker, a display, and a keypad. It’s really very simple: Skydeck is your cell phone, online.
For the best possible experience, you need a Blackberry or Android phone, with full support for Windows Mobile coming soon. But many of the new features of Skydeck are compatible with almost every cell phone in America, so please sign up to find out.
We’ve also kept our promise that the original features of Skydeck would remain free. Some of the new features are not, but plans start at just $9.95 per month – the same price as adding a line to your family plan.
Thank you for all your enthusiasm and suggestions over the past 6 months. We hope you enjoy Skydeck.
Skydeck will be unavailable from Sunday the 18th of January at noon PST until Monday the 19th at 8 am PST. This is our first planned outage. We promise that it will be worth it.
At Skydeck we believe that your phone records are your data, and that you should be able to take your data anywhere. That’s why we announced a set of APIs for accessing your data before we’d finished building our own service. Today we’re happy to announce the first three applications built using Skydeck’s APIs.
The first is from FreshBooks, the number one online invoicing service. Many of FreshBooks’ customers are consultants, designers, lawyers or other professionals who bill by the hour, and FreshBooks provides them with lots of tools for tracking their time. But it’s very hard to keep track of your cell phone calls, especially when you are away from your desk. When the team at FreshBooks read about Skydeck’s APIs, they realized that they could help their customers track and recapture all that time automatically. You can find the FreshBooks/Skydeck mashup here. (more…)
I’ve been invited to moderate a panel at Mobile 2.0, a one-day event in San Francisco the week after next. While there are many brand new mobile-themed conferences in the Bay Area this year, Mobile 2.0 is now in its third year and is organized by people who are immersed in the industry, like Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone, Mike Rowehl from Skyfire, and Gregory Gorman from Tertius Advisory Services.
My panel is entitled “Platforms, Monetization & Third Party Applications”, and includes speakers from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and the mobile application store GetJar. The full schedule is here, and you can register for the conference here.
Today we announced that Skydeck has raised $3 million in its first round of venture capital. If you’re one of our users it means that you’ve got lots of powerful new features to look forward to, sooner than we expected. If you’re an engineer looking for challenging work at a well-financed startup, it means that you should send us your resume.
When Mike Wells and I founded Skydeck, we were determined to work with investors who knew and understood the mobile market. Earlier this year we made a short list of VCs that we admired, and one of the names on that list was Craig Cooper at Saban Ventures.
Craig is one of those rare people who has been successful both as an entrepreneur and a VC. He co-founded Boost Mobile, one of the first MVNOs, and sold it to Nextel in 2003. He co-founded EBT Mobile Plc, the largest independent authorized retailer of mobile phones in China. As a venture partner at SoftBank and VantagePoint, he led series A rounds in mobile startups that we respect, including Thumbplay, YouMail, Nellymoser, and V-Enable. He recently formed Saban Ventures, the new venture capital arm of a well-known private investment fund called Saban Capital Group, and Skydeck is his first investment there.
Also joining our board following this round is Chip Austin. Chip is one of our angel investors and a co-founder and General Partner of i-Hatch Ventures, where he backed Thumbplay, m:metrics, WiderThan, and our first company, Vindigo.
Mike and I are delighted to welcome Craig and Chip to our board.
Last week I was invited to speak on a panel at Om Malik’s Mobilize conference. The topic was “What creates good mobile user experience?” and other speakers included Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku (now at Google), Jeff Taylor from the carrier “3″, and UX expert Rachel Hinman from AdaptivePath. Moderator Dylan Tweney from Wired wrote a great summary of the panel and you can watch the whole discussion at the Mobilize site. (That link doesn’t take you directly there; click “Thinking Experientially” in the column on the right of that page.)
My advice to the audience? Remember that in mobile there are lots of factors that are both outside your control and unreliable: the connection, the device, how your service is delivered and provisioned. If you want to create a superb user experience, you need to control every part of the process as Apple and RIM try to do, or you need to have complete confidence that the parts that you do not control work very well – which is why so many application developers are concentrating on the iPhone.
Can a startup emulate Apple or RIM? Yes, especially if it focuses on simple, single-purpose devices. Think of the Flip camcorder – not wireless, but mobile – or the new Peek email device, or even the original Blackberry.
Another approach is to build software and services for carriers and handset manufacturers to help them improve the user experience on their devices. Aricent is a very successful Valley startup that built the Celltop interface for Alltel, and Ontela makes cameraphones much easier to use.
Skydeck has so far dodged the problem of how to build great applications for your phone by building applications for the web that complement your phone. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the phone.)
What won’t work is building an application that has a gorgeous user interface, but that takes half an hour of work by a skilled technician to install on your user’s phone. Unfortunately, most mobile startups keep trying this approach.
At Skydeck we use ONC RPC to communicate between parts of our server infrastructure. ONC RPC is an old, simple, reliable remote procedure call protocol. It fits well with OCaml since it deals in values and functions, rather than objects and methods, and it has a good implementation in Ocamlnet. However, since all of our ONC RPC clients and servers are written in OCaml, it is a little annoying to have to write interfaces using the somewhat clumsy ONC RPC specification language. It’s nice to be able to stay in the OCaml type system from end to end. (more…)
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I’ve been invited to moderate a panel at Mobile 2.0, a one-day event in San Francisco the week after next. While there are many brand new mobile-themed conferences in the Bay Area this year, Mobile 2.0 is now in its third year and is organized by people who are immersed in the industry, like 