Exclusive: Competitors doing better, so Skype to roll out made-for-India app

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Microsoft-owned Skype hopes the application will lead to wider application on low-end Windows-powered Nokia’s Asha and Lumia models, popular in India.

India, Skype believes, is among its most important future markets. The company has several Indian-origin executives in key positions, notably corporate vice-president Gurdeep Singh Pall.

The firm’s plans to expand its market in India come amidst an intense debate on net neutrality, with mobile phone companies complaining that voice-over-internet services that ride on their networks are eating into their revenues.
“It its true applications like ours eat into operators’ revenues”, said Seljanko.

“However, it isn’t that this is a zero sum game. There were similar problems in the United States and Europe, which we addressed by finding ways for mobile service providers to enhance their revenues by selling data”.

“The fact is that telephony companies are charging tariffs for voice traffic that the technology just does not justify”, Seljanko argued.“Their model has to change. However, this is an opportunity for them, not a crisis”.

“In the future”, Seljanko went on, “more and more of the processing part of computing is going to shift into the cloud. For example, we’re working on technologies that will allow very complex games to be played on very basic phones. This will mean a huge growth in the demand for data”.

Microsoft’s new HoloLens technology, which Skype is working on integrating, will allow the seamless transformation of holograms—for example, allowing a colleague to see what I am looking at in real time”.

The company said it is also working with governments, including India’s, on mounting concerns over the use of hard-to track voice-over-internet traffic for organised crime and terrorism. Skype now has a special group in Luxembourg that liaises with governments to cooperate on investigations.

However, Seljanko added, Skype would not cooperate with governments seeking data to crush legitimate dissent and political opposition. “For example”, he said, “we’ve had situations in Egypt, Syria and Turkey where governments wanted communications companies to report information on anti-government protests. That is not something we will do”.