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Now here’s the Skype tale. My fiancee’s brother [FB] is a studio engineer for World Service. Just before Xmas he was covering a world summit abroad. He had returned to the BBC’s hotel when he spotted a delegate that he knew they needed to interview for their broadcast. He stopped them and they agreed to the interview. Problem was, the reporter was at the conference venue and it was impossible to return to the hotel to conduct the interview in person as, with Bush in attendance, the place was in lock down.

FB had his laptop set up and skyped through to the studio in London. The reporter called in on the conference centre’s ISDN line (probably) and a two-way was conducted by two people a mile-apart in a a foreign country.

Ah, the wonders of the internet. But should the BBC take more notice of Skype? and how long before it introduces formal use of Skype… it’s probably much easier than lugging carrycases full of sound equipment across continents!

I saw a business pitch last week for a company offering mobile marketing solutions [sic] via bluetooth. Now I find this idea quite exciting and a friend who works in marketing says this is all go with advertising billboards bluetoothing passers-by with personalised ads or extras. The company I saw, quoted a remark made by someone senior at Edelman who said that mobile phones were more exciting now than when the internet took off.

This took me by surprise. Frankly, unless this quotation was itself a bit of advertising I find it a tall order to believe. I am not an expert on all things mobile, or even the internet, but the web seems to offer so much more to so many more people. Sure, mobiles are mobile and now have exciting 3G content and services but so much of it appears, at least on the face of it, to be derived from/or require connection to the internet. So wouldn’t it be better to say that mobiles are now an exciting amd diversified part of the web? An add on? How long before Google buys a phone company?

Anyway, I digress… the point I wanted to make was that the Edelman remark seems to jar with concerns of mobile providers, if the comments by Anthony Hilton in a recent PR Week are to be believed. Hilton says that among the round of new year surveys, financial journos were being asked their views on the future of the mobile market by at least one major phone company. He asks why this is, saying that the previous worries about the cost of 3G licences are pretty much redundent in the City?

The real reason, Hilton suggests, is that the phone companies may be getting twitchy about the impact of Skype and other VOIP services on mobile phone use. I must admit that if Skyping offers a better quality, cheaper phone service through our computers what else would we need our phones for?

I may post an interesting story relating to Skype if I can remember it…!