May 2005

Today’s Featured Skyper is David who serves in U.S. Marine Corps. As you’ll hear in the interview, his assignments have taken him far away from home and he finds Skype useful for keeping in touch with folks.

Download this interview as MP3 or OGG (length 5:19).

David speaks just as a regular Skype user and we at Skype couldn’t agree more with this thought:

We’re the users, so we dictate how in the end this program is gonna go. Skype is as much our product as it is theirs. We don’t develop it, but we’re the userbase. We’re the customer.

Continue reading "David the Marine" »

The Skype API developer documents are now available in Japanese and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, in addition to English.

We started PayPal payments beta testing in USA on February 18 and shortly followed with other countries. Today, we’re happy to announce that the beta has been completed successfully and PayPal is now officially available as a payment method for buying Skype services. So when you now go to Skype web store and PayPal is supported in your country, you can safely choose this option to complete your payment.

PayPal in Skype web store is available for all countries (currently more than 45) where PayPal itself provides its services.

Due to popular demand, the Skype Banners are now available in the following languages: English (as before), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. Go get them and start collecting Skype Points!

How to make your own Skype phone out of a old useless cordless phone. This sort of amateur tinkering is lots of fun! Occasionally, we use the same methods in Skype development and testing :)

Cost $0.
Material used: one wireless phone, and one 3.5mm to 3.5mm plug (cut in half).
Tools used: screwdriver, knife, soldering iron.

image from jarnaker.com

Disclaimer: this probably can and will void your phone warranty. Neither Skype nor the maintainer of the linked page are responsible for any consequences - you’re on your own.

VON Stockholm: What a gathering - even at 10.00 on the pre-opening seminar day, Monday, blessed with the excitement of EU regulatory framework discussion and having gotten out of bed at 0400 on a cold Monday morning, the halls were buzzing with expectation.

The day went by, and the well known names we know from other blogs, from regulators, from industry groups and the formative voices of the industry begun to speak up and we could put faces to the voices and blogs. It was great to meet you all.

Continue reading "Skype at VON Europe 2005" »

From Martin Geddes.

Friday: Had a 4-minute conversation with a business associate who was on his GSM cell phone in Hong Kong. Voice quality was terrible, and I really struggled to make out what he was saying.

Sunday: Had a 15-minute Skype conversation with a business associate who was on a plane somwhere half-way between Asia and Europe, using his Wi-Fi enabled iPaq. Even with the background rumble and crying babies, it was crystal clear; I didn’t miss a word.

No further comment, m’lud.

We like this. It’s what we work for - so that Skype lets you talk to anyone, anywhere - even high above the ground. (See below for a thread on Skype Forums on skyping from airplanes.)

Even though we kicked off share.skype.com just a couple of days ago without that much visibility from any of our other sites or services yet, feedback has been great! Thanks to all who have been giving feedback, ideas and bug reports. Here’s the list of what we have updated over the last few days.

Continue reading "Fixes, fixes... plus affiliate program kickoff, SkypeIn number renewal" »

We often get questions from new Skype customers who haven’t been using international calling that much, and are now about to use SkypeOut that requires you to enter all phone numbers in an international format. A dialing wizard is now available that shows you how to correctly dial with Skype, as well as the price that you’ll be paying.

Continue reading "SkypeOut dialing wizard" »

We continue to work hard to ensure that our free and paid services are reliable. Despite that, the experience of some users sometimes is that the regular phone network appears to be more reliable than Skype. Apparently, net being more stable than phones is true in Japan, as reported by one of our friends there. Anyone confirm or deny this with your own firsthand experience?

x says: here’s a fun one… a company I know just bought a bunch of Skype-compatible PC handsets …why?…they can’t rely on the phone companies to communicate during the frequent earthquakes in Japan.

Continue reading "Skype service stability in Japan" »

Welcome!

It has been quite a ride to get here.

Continue reading "Welcome to share.skype.com!" »

3 million people were concurrently online on Wed, May 18.

Continue reading "3 Million Online Users" »

We’ve had many people ask, “I like Skype and I promote it a lot - can I get something in return?” We launched our paid affiliate scheme just a few weeks ago, but some of you may not be up for cash, or the service may not be available in your country, or for whatever other reason, you might not find the paid affiliate scheme to be most appropriate for you.

This is where Skype Points come in.

Continue reading "Come claim your Skype Points" »

In the “Featured Skyper” series, we bring you the profile of a Skype user. Skype has tens of millions of users across the globe, from as different fields of life as you can imagine. This series will be a mix of them - old and young; just started with Skype and been with us since the beginning; computer experts and novice users; from China to Romania to Uruguay. They have different paths in life, but what they have in common is that Skype has made a difference in their lives, and/or they have made an impact on what Skype itself is, by giving us great ideas, input and feedback. (If you want to learn more about the people at Skype, we also have the Insider’s View section on skype.com that introduces you some people working for us.)

Our first Featured Skyper is jetta. Those of you who have been around in Skype-Me forums surely know her - she provides a warm welcome to many people looking for new contacts there. She is currently 59 years old and lives in a small village near Sidney, Australia. As I’m writing this piece in Europe, we obviously had a bit of a timezone/scheduling thing in setting up the talk (which happens a lot on Skype - boundaries just go away!), but all got sorted out nicely.

I had a special reason for picking jetta as our first Featured Skyper. In many ways, she embodies what Skype is all about - to help others, to provide them guidance and assistance and get on with your own life, not being afraid to get engaged in new practices and technologies. As you can read, she spends a lot of time on Skype forums and also helping her mom and associates. When was the last time you others called your parents or paid them a visit?

And now, the word to jetta.

Continue reading "jetta" »

The Insight series is about some less discussed features of Skype - the program and its features, the services, as well as the people and company running the whole show. By making Skype easy to use, we often make a deliberate choice to “hide away” some advanced features, as to not distract the entry-level users.

So the Insight series will be about things that are not obvious yet may boost your productivity and also be fun to use once you know a bit of background. Since most of Skype users are on Windows, the articles as well as screenshots will be mostly Windows-specific (but we might do some special “alternative” ones once in a while), but most of the concepts are applicable to Skype on all platforms.

The first one is gonna be about Skype online status. You may think “what’s there to talk? Just rightclick on the Skype icon, select Change Status and change it to anything you want and that’s it?” Yes, pretty much.

There are some things, though, that are good to know beyond this.

Continue reading "Online status and Skype-Me mode" »