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All Friday Reports are posted at www.vardaman.com/friday.phpVardaman Virtual Forestry CompanyFRIDAY REPORT OF 09/23/05The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy"THE MEANING OF FREE SPEECH"Our title and quotes below are from an article posted on 09/15/05 on The Economist internet site: “The acquisition by eBay of Skype is a helpful reminder to the world’s trillion-dollar telecoms industry that all phone calls will eventually be free. “Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, which distributes software that lets people make free calls from their computers to other Skype users anywhere in the world, don’t usually travel to America…This does not mean, however, that they cannot appear at conferences in Silicon Valley, where Skype…is considered the next big thing. Thus, in July, Mr. Zennstrom appeared, via a Skype video call, on the screen of a packed auditorium at Stanford University while sitting in Estonia… “As Meg Whitman, eBay’s boss, and Mr. Zennstrom explain it, a combination of eBay and Skype is not all that far-fetched. From eBay’s point of view, placing cute Skype buttons on the web pages where people trade used cars, houses and other items that usually require voice bargaining ‘reduces friction,’ says Ms. Whitman. Buyers can simply click on the button and talk to sellers. Another idea is to make money from ‘pay-per-call’ advertising, where advertisers would place voice links (ie, Skype buttons) on certain pages just as they now place text links on, say, the search-results pages of Google. Whenever a web surfer clicks on one of these links and talks to a salesperson, the advertiser would pay eBay and Skype a fee… “This is every bit as audacious as it sounds. Mr. Zennstrom, in general, is a modest man. But his company is only three years old, will probably make only $60m in revenues this year, and will certainly not turn a profit. So it is the fact that his ambition is not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds that should make incumbent telecoms firms everywhere break out in a cold sweat. “That is because Skype can add 150,000 users per day (its current rate) without spending anything on new equipment (users ‘bring’ their own computers and internet connections) or marketing (users invite each other). With no marginal cost, Skype can thus afford to maximize the number of its users, knowing that if only some of them start buying its fee-based services – such as SkypeOut, SkypeIn and voicemail – Skype will make money. This adds up to a very unusual business plan. ‘We want to make as little money as possible per user,’ says Mr. Zennstrom, because ‘we don’t have any cost per user, but we want a lot of them’… “The technical term that encompasses all forms of voice communication using the internet is voice-over-internet-protocol, or VOIP…Even before VOIP makes 100% of telephone calls in the world completely free (which may take many years), it utterly ruins the pricing models of the telecoms industry. Factors such as distance between the callers or the duration of a call, the key determinants of cost today, are simply irrelevant with VOIP. Vonage already lets its customers choose telephone numbers in San Francisco, New York or London, no matter where they live. A Londoner calling the London number is making a ‘local’ call, even if the Vonage subscriber is picking up the phone in Shanghai. As when checking e-mail on, say, Hotmail, the only thing needed is a broadband-internet connection, but it can be anywhere in the world. Sooner or later, people will discard their unwieldy phone numbers altogether and use names, just as they do with their e-mail addresses, predicts Mr. Zennstrom. “Call duration is also becoming irrelevant. ‘A lot of people open a Skype audio channel and keep it open,’ says Mr. Zennstrom. After all, it costs nothing. Many people with Apple computers are already accustomed to this. They open an application called iChat, which is a video and voice link, and stay connected to their loved ones far away. Increasingly, members of a family or a business team can stay online throughout the day, escalating unobtrusive instant-messaging (‘Can you talk?’) to a conference call, a video call and back to a little icon on their screen…” To read the complete article, click on http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4400704 “HIGH STAKES”Our title and quotes are from the 2005-09-19 issue of THE NEW YORKER: “Among the blown-off rooftops, upended pine trees, and other detritus that Katrina scattered along the Gulf Coast were a good number of twisted and bashed-in slot machines. The storm had hurled them ashore as it ripped casino barges from their moorings in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis. Carol Browner was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration, when many casinos in Mississippi were constructed. Last week, she recalled the difficulties that her department experienced years ago when they tried to persuade legislators…that building on wetlands was environmentally risky…The proposed casinos, Browner said, ‘were supposed to be in the water because the state didn’t want them on solid land…But they were huge, and they were right up against the shore. If you put structures this big into an estuary, you’re disrupting the aquatic life and changing the habitat and eradicating the wetlands, which has a huge effect on drainage. The wetlands act like a sponge in a storm. They’re an incredibly smart and helpful part of nature. But they have to be kept moist, like a sponge on your kitchen counter. If they’re dried out, and developed, they don’t work. The shoreline’s a very important buffer in a storm…” To read the complete article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/050919ta_talk_mayer “GONE WITH THE SURGE”
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