Looking for any edge it can get, 8x8 Inc. is pushing forward with a product placement strategy with TV shows. The company said today it has reached new agreements with Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. The two apparently popular science fiction shows will feature the Packet8 video phone and be part of contests to visit the set. What I'd like to know is how much 8x8 paid for the product placement opportunity. I guess you have to give the company credit for trying something different. It doesn't make sense following Vonage's marketing lead, which means advertising anywhere and everywhere.

Om Malik offers up his usual keen insight into market statistics being offered by Frost & Sullivan about the North American VOIP market. Frost & Sullivan suggests residential revenue will hit $4.07-billion by 2010 from $295.1 million in 2004. Om does some math, and comes to the conclusion average revenue per subscriber is $18 a month - making VOIP "nothing but a cheap tack-on service. Unless you are bundling VoIP service with cable or DSL service, or packaging it as a part of some triple-play offering, there is little chance of making money in this game". Ouch! Perhaps the VOIP market's Achilles' Heel is starting to reveal itself with the bottom line being there is little money to be made by offering the service. If this is true, it spells bad news for Vonage and its IPO aspirations, but great news for Skype, which is leveraging the growing demand for ultra low-cost VOIP services.

Skype was the star of Tony Perkins' AlwaysOn summit earlier this week at Stanford but CEO Niklas Zennstrom wasn't there in person. Instead, he appeared via SkypeVideo from Estonia where Skype was holding a board meeting. If you look at Zennstrom's public appearance schedule, he has talked around the world but not in the U.S. This is a good thing for me because Zennstrom has been in Canada on a regular basis so I've had several opportunities to interview him. I wonder whether Zennstrom has a legal problem that discourages him from coming into the U.S. It could be related to the music industry's legal fight against Kazaa and Zennstrom's fear of being served with a lawsuit. At the AlwaysOn conference, Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Tim Draper said his firm has invested $10 million in Skype. When asked if he would like to put more money, he said: "I'd love to put more money into Skype but Skype is doing very well on its own. They don't need my money". Draper and Zennstrom declined to comment on suggestions the company had rejected a $100 million offer from Yahoo. For my take on Skype's potential value, check out this posting.

PC shipments jumped 16.6% in the second quarter - a trend that helped Intel, AMD and Apple. The question is: why? It wasn't that long ago that people were dismissing PC growth because people would gravitate to other devices such as Blackberries, Treos and smart phones. A key factor in the resurgence of PC sales is simply price. When you're able to buy a Pentium III or Pentium IV or AMD chip for less than $500, buying a new box is a no-brainer for many people. I also think video streaming and growing popularity of broadband access also are important issues because it forces many people to think about whether their existing computers have enough horsepower. Dell continues to lead the pack while HP, which is in the midst of a restructuring program that will cut 14,500 positions, is a distant second.