There has been a lot of hype around Skype for iPhone. 1 million downloads - in 48 hours. This is impressive but only 0.2% of the Skype customer base, an impressive 500 million (minus 1 as I have just cancelled after they tried to auto-top my account which I have not used for over six months).
Developers always want to develop for the latest and greatest, often forgetting the total available market.
I use the Royal Ocean Racing Club in St James as my London office. Its not the usual digital media hangout, but its cheap and amazing who sails and whom you meet there. Just the other week media mogul, Ted Turner was in town and renewing his membership.
A few days back I met a fellow sailor who specialises in technology transfer from universities to the commercial sector. He was working on an energy saving motor technology. I had spent 3 years in wireless power industry with Splashpower and we chatted about his progress. He was doing well the technology was going to be made compulsory and he had secured an industrialisation partnership with a Japanese trading house who would sell the technology to motor manufacturers. But they were running out of money and the lead time to have this new feature designed into new capital equipment that would then need to be sold seemed long. This was fine for a Japanese trading house but no good for a technology start up running out of money.
"What about the legacy base?" I asked. "If I have a factory of sewing machines or machine tools, could I retrofit your technology?"
They had not considered the retrofit market. A licensing partner in this sector might offer substantial early revenue and build awareness for the later "built-in" technology.
I see that Skype's hype is great news for other mobile VOIP vendors able to address the much larger legacy opportunity.
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