May 2006

I know a lot of people out there are eager to meet up with Skype at the eBay Developer Conference in June so I just wanted to drop a quick post to tell you how you can do that.

1) You can drop by the Skype booth during the exhibition (don’t forget to collect your Skype goodie).
2) You can come by the expert lounge to meet us.
3) You can schedule one 2 one meetings with us on the Monday using the conference bulletin board which goes live on the 11th June.
4) You can grab us over a beer at one of the parties.
5) You can come to one of our sessions and grab us after the talk.

We hope to see you there.

Sometimes developers need access to old versions of other software — for example, in order to make sure their stuff is backwards compatible with earlier releases of whatever external apps they work with. So we have built a directory of historic builds of Skype client software; it is available to all logged-in users of Skype Developer Zone in the Download section. Enjoy!

The eBay DevCon is less than a month away and it’s going to be a fantastic event. Not only do we have 2 hands on training labs to get you started with Skype programming and how to build applications that use the Application to Application messaging API, we have 7 sessions including a session on the future of the Skype API.

On the Skype booth we will have goodies and prizes to give away to lucky developers so make sure you keep some space in your travel bags.

If you haven’t registered yet (shame on you) or if you haven’t heard about the conference (where have you been) then you can find all the details and register here.

For those that will be attending the event we will have a special wiki page for you to schedule time with the Skype staff. So you can either come by our Skype booth for a chat or schedule a meeting with one of our Skype PM’s, Developers or Support guys.

And there is still more. On the Monday we have a special unconference day which is your day to suggest the agenda.

For all the details and to access the conference wiki then take a look here.

The conference costs $395 for both days ($445 if you register on the day)

As some of you may have noticed, our issue tracker, jira, has been refusing to accept new issues between 1400 GMT yesterday and 1300 GMT today. We believe that we finally managed to find the reason for this, and fix it. However, if you do find yourself facing a problem with Jira, feel free to leave a comment on DevZone feedback wikipage.

In a perfect world, there are no such things as bugs and configuration errors. But in the real world, IT sometimes just happens. Please accept my apologies.

Do you ever look at Skype’s Developer API and Programs and say … I could do better than that, if only I were on that team …

Now’s your chance! Skype’s API and Developer Relations team is rapidly expanding and we need passionate people who love software and the people who build it. We love dreamers, evangelists, and do’ers. We love people who have seen the future of communications and it is Skype. The team is looking qualified candidates for the following roles:

Voice Services Program Manager
Sofware Certification Manager
Developer Zone Web Site Manager

These don’t tckl your fancy? Check out our other roles around the world.

There’s an easy way to set up a helpdesk, weather forecast service, horoscopes-on-demand or similar service using nothing but Skype (and a few smart people to answer the calls).

The trick is having all your operators use a single shared Skype Name. So when a call comes in, the Skype client of each operator starts to ring. As soon as the first of them picks up the call, the ringing stops for others too (they will see a “missed call” event, but more about this later).

Continue reading "Simple callcenters with Skype" »

I found a great new way of spending Sunday morning - I went on the new Skypecasts service we are beta testing with Skype 2.5. Skypecasts are online conference calls which can have up to 100 members. Anybody can set up, advertise and host their own Skypecast at the website. To keep things sensible, the host controls all the mikes and can mute people as needed. This morning, I decided to have a quick peek at the goings on …

Continue reading "Sunday morning Skypecasting" »