Brian,

I have been using it for more than a year. Not very much interested in 
the video portion of it though have used it in combination with GoTo 
MyPC where you can call up the the remote PC and two people use the one 
PC together at the same time. Used that method to work out an AIA 
contract. I am interested in Cuylers application of the technology.

For us if we want to push a whole lot of graphic information we go w/ 
ftp or Avvenu (another free service)... a lot of project related file 
sharing going on w/ Avvenu. One of us goes to the project site, takes 
photos, then shares them with Avvenu. FTP: I recently sent like 800+ 
photos to a contact in the UK via ftp for a building survey for them to 
fabricate replacement masonry. The entire transaction-load of the 
project had one phone call (to give them our bank account number for a 
wire transfer), and a bunch of e-mails. We had to pay attention to time 
differences, for one thing -- a strain to have to try to balance ongoing 
here-and-now business with real-time interface with someone who is in a 
cycle 5 hours ahead -- and the e-mails kept a record of the 
communications (though I have looked into what would be required to 
record Skype calls). If we had gone with Skype, or any other audio 
media, we would have had problems understanding our mutual accents and 
cultural idiom.... an essential feature of the project was to figure out 
how to reduce confusion in the communications process. One manner in 
which to do that is to make the communication pipe restricted so that 
the tendency is to reduce inclusion of nonessential information.

Degression here... one of the early conversations had to do with measure 
and tolerance as in the UK they use metric whereas here we us Imperial 
measure (as they say). And yet, all shop drawings they send to the US 
need to be converted from metric to Imperial, which they do through 
AutoCAD... which results in measures on the drawings such as 2' 3-5/16" 
which is an unheard of tolerance for masonry units in the 'field'. I 
wonder what the conversation is when the mason gets the shop drawings 
with these sorts of labels to the dimensions? We settled on doing all of 
our measure at our end in metric in order 1) to minimize conversion 
inaccuracies and 2) as we found we could be more accurate in our 
recording the information more quickly. This despite that the original 
units were not built to metric dimension... for which on occasion we did 
field conversions to see if the typical units that we found made sense.

We use the Skype Out feature, which you do have to pay for, as an 
additional phone line where we can make calls to any phone number. The 
phone number listed on our business card (631) 731-1700 goes to Skype, 
so it acts as a message system. As a message system it was not very 
efficient as 1) a whole lot of folks who called the wrong number called 
us and 2) for months at a time I would forget to see if we had any 
calls, considering it was like 20:1 wrong numbers it was difficult to 
pay attention.... and those calls that do get through keep me more than 
busy. Recently we got a small box that plugs in USB and hooks a regular 
phone to the computer to interface w/ the Skype and now when someone 
calls the Skype number it is usually answered. As long as I am not 
answering it as the essential information that needs to be communicated 
in most phone calls is of the yes/no order but often laden with a high 
load of social static and on my end it tends to mean pressure to do 5 
more things when I'm still trying to get done with the last fifteen. 
There are other people around me much better at using the phone than I am.

On another note, technological collaboration has a lot to do with how 
people think, to be specific some of us think very quickly and some of 
us think more slowly on the surface. If two people both think on the 
surface quickly then a phone conversation may be balanced and efficient. 
For me, honestly, I don't think all that fast on the surface. I can go 
through an hour of conversation and not understand a damned thing about 
it until the next day. That is NOT with every conversation that I have, 
but I have had those kinds of conversations. I can absorb information 
for several hours but not digest and process it until days, weeks or 
months later. Neither am I particularly good at having pre-packaged 
answers... a good way to slow me down in a conversation is to ask me 
what interesting things I have been up to.

Lately I find that some people are frustrated that they expect that if 
they send me an e-mail then I must have seen it and that I am 
belligerant if I do not respond. Even though they have my phone numberS. 
If I leave the office behind on a Friday, work all weekend in the field 
(where I refuse to carry instant e-mail) then return on Sunday, and 
sleep on Monday (exhausted), then spend Tuesday in the field -- where 
the work is -- when I get to my office in the afternoon and check my 
e-mails it is like a national tragedy has occured. I want to be nice 
about it, I want to project a level headed attitude, but sometimes I 
just get really pissed and worn out. At those times I find it best to 
stand up and leave the building.

][<en

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