• Skype(VOIP) over 3g : As we all know, this service means free calling for sure. All you need is a skype account and the person you are calling needs to have one too. Skype over 3g was banned through service contracts in the US as well as UK till a few days back. Many of us have already tried Skype over wifi and we know how wonderfully it works. But, now with the iPhone as well as Android based phones allowing the same at the couple of places through different service providers, free calling is sure of becoming a reality,if you phone has 3g enabled or you are in a free Wifi area.
• Advertisements seconds  during free calling: I am sure, Google and some other people have this idea in mind. Would you mind hearing an advertisement of  10 seconds every 2 minutes of calling, if the call becomes free. I see something like this coming very soon. I am not sure who is going to bring this one out, but I won’t mind this idea if I have an option of switching between advertisement supported calls and paid calls. I would like uninterrupted calls at times, but to have an option of free ad-supported calling is wonderful.

Google Wave was supposed to be the one stop collaboration tool, but now that we know, it is still in its pre..pre..pre..(repeat 100 times) alpha phase, I am going to put up some tools which people might find useful, and yes the concentration will be on free products. (Remember, we donot have a million dollars to spend, we have to spend out of our pockets to build this).

• Skype (Communication): A fairly obvious choice, the international audience might think but believe me not every Indian startup is using it. Skype is just not to be used by the internet savvy companies, it is to be every damn startup  in India. You are a mechanical designing company, a web development firm, a media agency or whatever, i suppose it is fine to presume that that you will have your computers and a decent Internet Connection with you. Skype is not only to be used when you have finally got your first American client and you donot have the money to make ISD calls every other day. Use it for your team meetings, when you are working out of different locations, use it out of your Smartphonesin your Wifi area in your office. Use it also for the pep talk which you need to keep yourselves motivated when you are working out of your wifi garage. Believe me, Skype conference meetings are better for pep talks than realtime meetings; you donot have to look into the eyes of your best friend when your a trying to point a finger at his work.
• Team Viewer (Desktop Sharing): You may think, I am just talking about the Internet firms. But is it not true when you and your friend were working together on you design for a flowchart, or the next kickass car design or the next marketing presentation and were talking to each other on your 1 paisa per second STD call (which kept getting disconnected, i.e if you were not smart enough to use skype), you wished how good would it be if we could work together, talking for free and not need to email your work every now and then. Team viewer is exceptional, less than 2 M.B in size, free for personal usage, work on connection speeds of 256 kbps (I would however suggest you to go for a better Internet speed as you will have a simultaneous Skype call going on ), and works from Windows, OS X and Linux(Through Wine) and the desktop sharing happens just so seamlessly.
   
• Google Apps(Standard edition)(Enterprise Applications) : You are basically starting a company, some of you have not yet left their day jobs, and the one guy who went for an MBA amongst you has registered the company on his name.(Donot forget to register your company, it helps!!). The scene is all set, ain’t it , for the next Google to just come up. But, how can you mail people with email ID’s stating XXXXX@gmail.com. It doesn’t look professional enough. Just set up Google Apps, the standard edition gives out  10 email ID’s free (you email ID will now look like XXXXXX@yourstartuprocks.com), all you need is a registered domain hosted on the internet.(Hardly a 1000 INR = 20 USD).
• DeskAway or Unfuddle(Project Managment) : Lots of project planning happened when you had your all important discussion for the next 3 months (You did realize that you need to have these all important meetings at least once a week so that the team knows every member is contributing his bit). If you need to do time and project management for yourself,and you need proper milestones to be set up for your team, just go for Deskaway. It just does the job for you. The $10/month edition will work for a startup. However, if you donot want daily monitoring and you would rather love a code repository(and a bug tracking system) and weekly milestones, the $9/month version of Unfuddle rocks. These two tools just work for you.
• Dropbox(Folder sharing): Dropbox is a beauty. You just want something like this for free. You get the dropbox folder on your desktop once that you have installed it and all the problems you faced while uploading something to Yousendit are gone. Use dropbox as your folder sharing system on the Internet.(Mind you big companies who are trying to compete with you, and they can’t  because their recently awarded intranet fails much more than Dropbox.
• Social Media : You work 20 hours a day to make the next big thing, sometimes 24 hours because your dreams just don’t let you sleep. However, amidst all this you don’t forget to say hi (on facebook and twitter) to the chick who was your childhood crush who is dating this loser M.B.A who never had the guts to do anything kickass after his engineering or Bachelor’s. She also likes to talk about an old friend of hers (word of mouth publicity) who is making the  most brilliant 1000 Rs (20 USD) solar energy device(which is more useful than an iPad any day), which will help the poor children to study at night and their Mom’s to cook food using the same energy. Use this new age media power and donot hire anyone to do this for you(comes so naturally to you) because you deserve good word of mouth and you can get it from your friends.  Also keeping in touch with this chick may help you win her back someday.

This list cannot be complete for sure because there will many more such tools which can be extremely helpful for you to grow up as a startup. If you consider your team to be distributed in three different cities, then the total cost of having this mini intranet will be (Rs 1400*3(Good Internet)+(Free Skype) + Free (Team Viewer) + Rs 500 (for the Unfuddle or Deskaway account )= 4700 per month ~ 100 USD).  Please help me complete this list by telling me what other tools can be used by small sized distributed startup’s.

Update1: Some More tools suggested by my friends Amit and Rakesh after the post were GitHub, Google Wave in the right way , Basecamphq and Yammer.

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eBay has been kind to Skype and to itself, to a certain extent, by putting it up for sale. Although this wouldn’t solve the software issue, it does give Skype a lot more freedom to feed on its current popularity, which would have become difficult under eBay considering that they were losing money quickly and were in the middle of a legal mess with Joltid.

There have been reports that the founders of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are planning to buy Skype back. That would indeed solve the technology issue that Skype is in, but that would depend on how much of truth is present in these reports. Although the user base of Skype has been increasing steadily over the years, they do face competition from Gtalk (Google’s  p2p voice service) and Vonage (VOIP Service Company).

Skype with its broader user base has the upper hand when compared to GOOG, which targets the U.S. audience mainly and has no video-call facility, and Vonage whose services do not include a free calling service. Interestingly Vonage intends to tap the landline market as well, by replacing all landline phones with Vonage VOIP software’s. Although that sounds quite impressive, it lags behind on two fronts, firstly they do not have a free service, and secondly it needs an external Vonage specific router to make use of their services for a ‘small’ fee.

All this makes Skype the obvious market leader. The group of investors who acquired Skype, Silver Lake Partners, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz Ventures, are no strangers to the startup. They understand the business better than anyone else, and hence it can be said that Skype is in safe hands. It has also been reportedly said that the new bosses of Skype are looking to make Skype public through an IPO. That was what eBay was planning to do before they decided to do away with Skype entirely.

I personally hope, being a regular user of Skype myself, that it realizes its true potential under its new owners who truly understand its value. This should be one rise that all of us should watch out for, just so that we don’t miss the flying colours that you’ll get to see at the end of it all.

THE  STORY THAT WAS:

• eBay struggles to convince shareholders on Skype acquisiton
• Equates the deal to the PayPal acquisiton in 2002
  
• Skype is projected to bring in $60 mn by 2006

Before we start dissecting the reason behind the potential sale of Skype, lets understand the rationale behind eBay’s acquisition of Skype. eBay has been among the top three players in the web space competing with the likes of Yahoo and Google. What were they competing for? Eye balls, Obviously! eBay sensed the heat building up when Yahoo and Google entered the online phone market with a bang.

There was a furore over why eBay chose to move out of their traditional e-commerce domain and enter the communication market, where they had very little expertise. This move even angered a few sellers on their site, who complained that providing a ’personal’ touch through voice service, would be an additional cost to them in terms of a resource who handles these calls.

The cost, $2.6 bn, was another deterrent in their attempt to downplay the controversy the acquisition was making. The reason given by EBAY was quite simple, to tap the growing markets in Eastern Europe and Asia. They believed that people in these countries preferred a more ‘hands-on’ approach to buying off the net than their western counterparts. Using Skype’s brilliance in web-based voice tools, they wanted to leverage this opportunity.

In addition to all of this, Meg Whitman constantly compared the Skype deal to the PayPal deal that they had made earlier. This obviously meant that eBay infact believed that Skype was as much a part of eBay as PayPal was. It is quite hard to understand how the two expansions can be equated considering how far off Skype, as a product, is from the e-commerce business.

To cut the long story short, despite all these difficulties eBay managed to add Skype to its kitty. Typical end to a heroic story. Now, after all the energy spent in fighting to keep Skype, what has suddenly changed in the eBay camp prompting them to give away their prized possession?

Lets look at some facts before we head to the ‘Why offload Skype?’  question

FACTS AND FIGURES :

Revenue Generated by Skype : 170 m $ *(25% increase from last quarter)

eBay’s total revenue -- 2.1 bn $ * (5% decline from last quarter)

THE STORY AS IT STANDS TODAY:

• eBay sells 65% of its stake in Skype for $2.75 bn
  
• Blames lack of ‘Synergy’ for change-of-heart
• eBay’s revenue is on the way down

The figures are quite self-explanatory about how Skype did when eBay as a whole was on the decline. This for sure removes the foremost doubt in everyone’s mind about Skype’s profitability being the reason. That leaves us with one question hanging in the air, why would eBay want to get rid of a profitable portion of its business when its revenues are actually on the decline?  We can only speculate, unfortunately . Firstly, the reason being given by John Donahoe, that Skype doesnt ‘fit’ into the scheme of things at eBay is all farce. That is ,at the most, just a weak attempt to cover up for their misfortunes.

Secondly, a lot of buzz is around eBay being caught in a legal wrangle with the founders of Skype over the ownership of the technology behind it. eBay allegedly tampered with the underlying code and thus breached the agreement that had been reached upon by the two companies. Joltid, the company behind the backbone of Skype, waged a legal battle threatening to cancel the license for using Skype. Without this, Skype would be virtually useless to eBay. The only way out for eBay would be to build its own software to run Skype, which I believe is not something any e-commerce company, in its right mind, would be willing to do at the cost of an already flagging revenue.

Logically this seems to be one among the myriad of possible reasons behind a complete turn-over in eBay’s attitude towards Skype. As I write this, eBay has officially confirmed that they are selling Skype to an investment consortium.The terms of the deal haven’t been made public yet.

What does the future hold for eBay and Skype? Will eBay manage to turn its fortune around? What will this deal translate into for Skype? These are some of the questions bothering me as well, and as you go ahead and chew, swallow and digest my opinion, I do some crystal ball gazing to get you more grub on this.

Do watch this space for more!

* All figures mentioned are for the quarter ending June 30th 2009