The Big Blog

Celebrating Skype's Roots in Estonia: A profile of Sten Tamkivi

We thought it would be interesting to showcase points of views from Skype offices around the world. Today, I'm pleased to share an interview with Sten Tamkivi, Director of Product Focus and Catalogue Operations for Skype. Sten is based in Tallinn, Estonia and has been a key member of our global team for the past six and a half years. Just last week, Sten and the Skype Tallinn, Estonia office was featured in a blog in the Wall Street Journal, so this piece goes further to cover more about Sten and how he sees Skype.

Q: Tell us about when you joined Skype and about your role here today?
A: I joined Skype about 18 months after the first version of the product was launched in August 2003. I came in as the General Manager for Skype in Estonia and am still the local site leader here. Additionally, I have been in different leadership roles related to products and operations over the years. Today, I manage our product catalogue and the governance process through which our executive team decides on our product development investments.

Q: Is Skype where you would expect it would be today?
A: Skype never ceases to surprise me. When I joined Skype, it had a few million active users who had adopted the new communications tool quite early. Skype started picking up new users very quickly after launch -- with the first two million users we began to think what if we could get to 10 million, then 20 or 50 million. We've exceeded those goals, and I think looking back, you'd say it's been a huge achievement already. Still, too many of the 7 billion people in the world are not on Skype yet, so in a way, we're still in the beginning!

Q: What is the Tallinn Skype office team and culture like?
A: Niklas Zennström of Sweden, and Janus Friis of Denmark founded Skype, working from day one along with 4 Estonian engineers, Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Toivo Annus. Today our Estonian office is 100X that, a little bit shy of 400 people, and we would just love to keep expanding. Culture-wise, Skype offices are the most colorful places I have ever seen. At the Tallinn office alone, we have 30 different nationalities working here, so it's hard to draw one to two simple characteristics that are unique to our office, except for the fact that we are extremely diverse. There is a lot of peer-to-peer interaction here. The attitude is friendly, pragmatic, yet real and hardworking. I would also add people here also have a weird sense of humor.

Q: What do you mean by 'weird'?
A: We would be the ones to go to a sauna and then jump in snow and consider it "normal." Our humor is well beyond that.

Q: Why are you excited about the future of Skype and is there's something here at Skype that particularly motivates you?
A: Pretty much anytime over the years we've asked our people about why they work at Skype, two main answers always surface: their colleagues and opportunity to change the world. You always learn something new here, working with people smarter than you. And there are very few companies where you can truly say that what you do today changes the world. Many companies try to get there, but how many companies actually succeed at the scale of Skype? There is emotion behind the impressive, yet dry numbers like "equivalent to approximately 20% of the total of all global international PSTN and Skype-to-Skype calling minutes." For most people it is professionally the biggest role that they've ever had in their lives. Everything we do has a recurring feeling that nobody in the world has ever done it quite like us before, either for the innovations or at comparable scale.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your background, passions and greatest achievements.
A: I have been an internet software entrepreneur for about 10 years before Skype, mostly working here in Estonia, Nordics and Europe. Outside of Skype and when not on airplanes I am living a typical family life, I love to spend time with the kids and my wife. I take pride in the fact that Skype is the single largest business success story to come out of Estonia. I am very grateful to be able to contribute to positive changes in this country, as an advisor to President Ilves of Estonia or just speaking up on topics such as technology education. I am happy to be part of something that is making this tiny country's DNA stronger and making things more friendly for the next generation and future startups.

Passing the torch

I started blogging for Skype way back in 2007, and took over the reins as 'blogger-in-chief' in 2008. Now it's time to pass the torch once again, this time to my colleague Jennifer Caukin. She's no stranger to readers of this blog and the Play blog, and she'll be formally introducing herself in the next day or two.

For now, though, so long - it's been a pleasure.

A Salute to Oprah from Skype

A New York Times post on Facebook today asked "Will you miss The Oprah Winfrey Show?"

As the Oprah Show comes to its grand finale this week, I reflect upon that question, and the answer is a plain and simple "ABSOLUTELY!"

For Skype, we've had the honor and privilege of participating in the Oprah Show for three wonderful years. I remember when the first call took place between Skype's team and Oprah's team talking about how to use Skype on air. We started our first project together setting up video calling for Oprah's webcast to discuss Eckhart Tolle's book. Who knew Skype video calling would become an integral part of her show connecting viewers and guests all over the world for three seasons?

The honor has been ours to not only become a powerful tool for The Oprah Winfrey Show, helping her share important life lessons and entertaining moments; the honor has been ours having Oprah call Skype, "The coolest thing ever." We will miss The Oprah Winfrey Show and we wish Oprah the best luck in her new endeavor at OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

As a salute to Oprah and to share one of our favorite Skype moments, here's a few video clips from a segment on her show called "Where The Skype Are You?"

And, there's no denying that going to the final taping of The Oprah Show last week was one of my favorite moments ever where it felt like I was part of TV history. So, tune in to Oprah's finale show tomorrow, May 25th.

Embrace your #TrueCalling

As you may have seen on our blog or read about here and here, we're hiring.

Today we're taking this effort up a notch and are pleased to show-off our newly minted Skype billboard.

Look out for it at the Embarcadero Exit, Northbound on 101

Now we could wax lyrical here about how great it is to work at Skype, but you either wouldn't believe us (or, at least have your doubts) or you already know that's the case. Instead, we want to ask you to share your true calling.

We've had a lot of fun talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up, only to realize our "true calling" was in fact something very different. You'd be surprised at how many people wanted to be astronauts but ended up working in marketing with a side of volunteer work.

With that conversation fresh in our minds, we'd like to hear from you. Work or otherwise, tell us via the comments below or @skypedeveloper what your #truecalling is. $5 free credit to the tweet or comment with the most likes or retweets.

For more job information visit our career page or if you're smart enough, take a stab at breaking the code to find out more:

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Welcome Sandhya Venkatachalam

I’m delighted to announce that Sandhya Venkatachalam has joined Skype as Vice President of Corporate Development. She’ll be responsible for business development, including partnerships, investments and M&A, and brings substantial experience and deep expertise to these areas.

Sandhya has spent her career looking at how to grow technology companies of different sizes through internal innovation as well as partnerships, investments and acquisitions. Prior to Skype, she spent over seven years at Cisco, most recently as Director of Corporate Development, and was responsible for strategy, investments and acquisitions for VoIP, video, mobility, collaboration, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Previously, she worked at Andiamo Systems and JP Morgan, and has a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton.

The power of the SILK codec

At Skype, we are passionate about quality. Our engineers do everything they can to make Skype work well across a range of different computers, service providers, Internet speeds, and computer equipment.

One of the key ingredients in quality is the fidelity of the speech that you hear when the other person is talking. Our aim is to make the experience as close to “the person sounds like they are in the room with me” as possible.

The High-Def Factor

In order to make it sound like the other person is in the room with you, it is necessary to capture the full frequency range of their speech, transmit it over the network, and reconstruct it at the other end. This is something that the traditional telephone networks – including mobile and landline – are not very good at. Those networks were designed to convey “just enough” of the frequency range of human speech to make the call intelligible, but not nearly enough to make it sound like they are in the same room as you.

For Skype, it has always been important to go beyond the boundaries of the telephone network, and do more.

That’s why Skype invested in creating its own speech codec. A speech codec is a piece of technology which takes human voice and converts it to a format suitable for sending over the Internet, and then on the other side, converts it back to speech.

Our codec, called SILK, was designed to capture the true richness of human speech, and to work really well on the Internet, where Internet speeds vary. Think of the telephone network as being like a standard-definition television, and SILK being like a high-definition television. The difference is striking. Once you’ve tried it, it’s hard to go back – just like HDTV. In fact, we thought that SILK was so awesome, we contributed it to the community. We’ve made our code open source, and have brought SILK forward for standardization by international standards bodies.

Hear the Difference

The two links below represent two samples of speech – one that uses a “standard-def” codec (called G.729), and another coded using our SILK codec in its highest quality setting. Listen for yourself. What do you think?

• G.729 sample (680 KB, WAV format)
• SILK sample (680 KB, WAV format)

Proving the Difference

But, maybe it was just us. As experts, perhaps we could tell the difference, but our users could not. To convince ourselves of the difference, we ran a test. We selected a random subset of our users. These users were not aware of the test, ensuring it was blind. For those users, we modified the behavior of the client so that it used a specific codec. For some users, it was one of the codecs used in the telephone network – not a high-definition one. For other users, we used SILK. In fact, we tested SILK in its four different modes – from SILK NarrowBand (SILK-NB) (which uses less bandwidth and captures less fidelity), to SILK MediumBand (SILK-MB), to SILK WideBand (SILK-WB), up to its highest quality mode – SILK Super WideBand (SILK-SWB), which uses more bandwidth and provides the best fidelity. To factor out problems with network connections, the tests were only run under good network speeds. At the end of the call, we asked them to rate the call from 1 (very bad) to 5 (excellent). We also measured how long the calls were.

Differences in user rating and average call duration with different codecs.

The results were surprising. Not only was there a difference – there was a big difference. For the highest quality SILK calls (SILK-SWB), the Mean Opinion Score (the value of the average user rating) was 3.8 on a scale from 1 to 5. The low quality codec G.729 was rated 0.4 lower, at 3.4.

Even more startling were the durations of the calls. Call durations for the highest quality SILK calls (SILK-SWB) were around 31 minutes on average. For the low quality G.729 codec they were 21 minutes, or 30% shorter! The higher quality of the SILK-SWB experience made the calls easier – more natural – and that meant users felt more comfortable talking longer.

For us, this test solidified what our engineers already knew – that a high fidelity experience really does make a difference.

Businesses Countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt with Help from Skype

We’re counting down to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco next week. A team of us from Skype’s Silicon Valley office are planning to visit the headliner event. We’re not only excited to check out the sessions, but we’re especially looking forward to the Startup Battlefield event at TechCrunch Disrupt.

As the official video calling host for TechCrunch Disrupt, Skype has been a key tool in the event’s Startup Battlefield competition. According to TechCrunch event organizers, “We’ve performed over 250 video calls and demos for Disrupt on Skype plus countless hours of calls, conference calls and chat sessions.”

That’s great. Not only do we think Skype is an essential tool for almost any business, but we also think it’s really novel that hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs are using Skype to be interviewed by TechCrunch. The final selected contestants will have their chance to pitch their ideas or products in person at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, for a cash prize of $50,000 that can be used to help them bring their idea to the market.

Millions of people use Skype every day, and in the first half of 2010, Skype video calling represented approximately 40% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes. In fact, approximately 37% of over 40,000 of our connected users surveyed in the first quarter of 2010 told us they use Skype occasionally or often for business related purposes. Businesses are using Skype to benefit from lower costs and expand how employees, customers, partners and suppliers communicate and collaborate with ease-of-use, greater convenience and efficiency.

Check out these tips to get started using Skype for your business today.

• If you can’t arrange an in-person meeting, suggest hosting the meeting over a Skype video call. Ensure you have a high quality webcam and microphone, high-speed Internet access, and Skype software downloaded to your computer.


• If there are more than two parties on the call, Skype’s latest beta for Windows can support group video calling, so you can talk to multiple colleagues or customers.


• If you want an easy way to manage and allocate credit for multiple Skype accounts for your organization, use Skype Manager.


• Don’t forget if you want to show a demo or run through a presentation, Skype’s screen sharing feature is easy and useful. In fact, check out this great TechCrunch post here about Skype screen sharing.


• Last but not least, a little bit of etiquette can go a long way when communicating with business associates over Skype. We enjoyed these great etiquette tips from TechCrunch here.

It's all about quality

While Skype wasn’t the first company to allow Internet calling, Skype was one of the first companies to make Internet calling work for the masses. Whether doing a Skype-to-Skype call for free or calling any phone for very little, people have spent over 520 million minutes on average every day talking to people with Skype. Since the beginning, our primary objective has been to deliver the best quality experience at a low price.

Our dedication to quality has allowed our community to grow fast – our average monthly connected users grew from 91 to 124 million in the last year alone (June 2009 - June 2010). We will continue to build products and features with the level of quality that keeps our community connecting with one another.

Customer feedback

In fact, one seemingly simple feature that the Skype team hears loudest is our end of call customer feedback, where everyone has the opportunity to rate their experience after they make a Skype call (depending on which version you are on). This direct customer feedback allows Skype to improve our services in near real-time and more importantly allows our community to tell us what is working and what needs improvement.

So what exactly are we doing with the feedback you are giving us and why is it important? Every score we receive is used to rate customer experience for our different desktop products. For people making paid calls to regular phones, we use the feedback to rate our carrier partners.

Working with partners

In order to deliver Internet calls to landline or mobile phone numbers, we rely on our telecom partners to connect calls to telecom networks globally. It is common practice in the Internet communications space to rely on a few telecom partners and aggregators to deliver calls globally as this tends to be the most cost effective way to offer cheap calling.

We at Skype have taken a different approach. In addition to using aggregators, we aim to work with local partners who actually own the networks available in their home markets. This, is in our opinion, is the only way to deliver good quality of service. Most importantly, this approach gives us the choice to select the best performing partners for each network.

In practice, this means that at any given time we have more than one partner delivering calls into a given country or network. The number of calls each partner receives is defined by you – our customer. The higher the feedback score per partner, the higher the volumes that partner receives.

Experience in Argentina

One good example is Argentina. Average feedback scores for calling Argentina were lower than overall scores in South America. This prompted us to start looking for local options. After establishing cooperation with a major local network operator, we saw feedback scores rise sharply - from 3.5 to 4 out of 5 maximum. At the same time, call volumes increased over the next three to four months.

We appreciate your help in improving our products. By taking two seconds to give us feedback after a call with Skype, you can help to directly influence the service quality.

Some companies may decide to cut corners to get a feature into the market earlier or save some money at the expense of their customers, but at Skype, we remain committed to providing the best quality products and services to our community, period

EU Vice-President Neelie Kroes joins the Skype crew in Tallinn

Neelie Kroes (second from right) at the Skype office in Tallinn

Skype is proud to be one of the few global Internet innovations that comes from Europe. So today it was a pleasure and honour to welcome in Skype’s Tallinn office (our ‘birthplace’, so to speak) Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission in charge of the EU’s “Digital Agenda”.

Mrs Kroes visited our research labs and experienced first-hand some of the cool innovations that Skypers have been working on hard in the labs recently including group video calling.

Now Mrs Kroes knows that ‘old Europe’ can still come up with innovations like Skype that revolutionise the world. In a speech earlier this month entitled “Europe 3.0”, she had already challenged students at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, asking: “will you join me in building this new mindset? Will you found the next Skype?” Going forwards, we will work with her to contribute to her initiative for ‘Digital Europe’, so that thanks to forward-looking government policies and protections such as net neutrality, Skype can continue to flourish, build new mindsets and change the world for the better, and so that many more innovators and online entrepreneurs emerge and succeed in Europe.

Skype Expands in Silicon Valley

Today, I'm pleased to announce that Skype will expand its operations in Silicon Valley, and has just signed a lease with Stanford University for a 90,000 square foot office space in the Stanford Research Park at 3210 Porter Drive in Palo Alto, CA. Silicon Valley will add to Skype's excellent engineering team in Estonia, Prague and Stockholm, and will also become the home of regional marketing, business development, and the Skype for Business team.

Making this move is an exciting step for us. Skype's Silicon Valley offices are currently in San Jose and Brisbane, where approximately 80 employees work today. The plans are to relocate our Silicon Valley teams to the new Palo Alto space as early as October 2010. And, we hope to attract some of the best and brightest talent in the Valley, especially engineers who are skilled at building ultra-scalable infrastructure.

If you're interested in learning more about our Silicon Valley jobs, go here.

Welcome, Rick Osterloh

Rick Osterloh has joined Skype as our Head of Consumer Product Management. He’s responsible for the design, strategy and development of our consumer products, including Skype for Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as our paid products and Skype’s presence on the web.

Prior to Skype, he led Motorola’s Android strategy, was responsible for creating MOTOBLUR, and shipped Motorola’s first Android smartphone. Prior to that, he was responsible for Good Technology’s global product offering, product strategy, and product development. And before that, Rick managed enterprise software projects for Fortune 1000 companies at Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group, worked in product management at Amazon.com, and analyzed wireless industry investments for Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

Rick has a BS and MS Engineering from Stanford University, and was an Arjay Miller scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business where he received an MBA.

Photo from Bloomberg Businessweek.