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Jaanus on June 29, 2005 in Life at Skype.
On the weekend of June 18-19, the Skype team had two concurrent outing events in different parts of the world. We do have them once in a while with the engineering crew, but having two at the same time doesn’t happen that often.
cottee.org re-posted one of zobbo’s photos from flickr regarding the remake of skype.com, and there was a comment by Roger there that caught my eye.
Heh! And there was me thinking that they just made up these endorsements!
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Jaanus on June 26, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
An interesting use of Skype and SkypeIn to broadcast anonymous calls to public audiences. Kind of like Internetized version of Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner. The operator of the service (artist?) says he’s looking for some help with further customizing and developing the service — if you can provide a hand, contact him directly — Skype Name one.free.minute.
One Free Minute is a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous public speech. When you call the cellphone inside One Free Minute, you get connected for exactly a minute to a 200 watt amplifier and speaker. The speech produced by the speaker can be heard clearly more than 150 feet away from the sculpture.
Photo re-published from onefreeminute.net.
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Jaanus on June 21, 2005 in Sharing Tools News.
We’ve made some improvements on share.skype.com over the past days. Many of them because you asked for it. Anything else you need? :)
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Jaanus on June 21, 2005 in Life at Skype.
Today’s Featured Staff is Dirk who works as a mobile tester in Skype’s Quality Assurance group. These people make sure that our releases work as expected and don’t contain any nasty bugs. Also, they work with technologies and features that may not reach the public for many months to come, until we’re sure they’re ready and work well.
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Jaanus on June 20, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
There was an intriguing news item in Light Reading, and is now in vnunet.com and elsewhere.
Calls using Skype Technologies SA account for nearly half of the VOIP minutes used (46.2 percent) and about 40 percent of the VOIP bandwidth used in North America, according to an analysis done by broadband management company Sandvine Inc.
We don’t have info on the methods used to conduct the study, and we don’t have our own extensive data about North American net traffic to back this up. But we do know that Skype is used a lot in North America, which accounts for a significant portion of the ten billion minutes we just reached.
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Jaanus on June 20, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Another cool hack. Use DittyBot and Skype to access your iTunes collection from any cellphone. Apparently it’s easy to script such stuff up on a Mac and here’s a challenge for Windows and Linux devs. (If you’re fast enough, you might even make it by the Developer Competition deadline.
Consider this a challenge to the Windows and Linux community. I know it’s possible to do under Windows (and Linux for that matter), but I also know it’s not this easy. Prove me wrong!
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Jaanus on June 19, 2005 in News, Events, Milestones.
Today, we hit the 10 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes served mark at around 18:00 GMT. Let’s recap. Skype was released in August 2003. We hit 1 billion minutes served somewhere in July 2004. Now, it’s 10 billion minutes in June 2005.
So it took roughly the same time to get from 0 to 1 billion, as it took to get from 1 billion to 10 billion. Does this mean we’ll be able to celebrate 100 billion next May? Who knows. In any case, you can track all the figures on the Facts & Figures page.
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Jaanus on June 19, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Skyping in airplanes is already becoming old news. Lenn is at this moment somewhere high above Siberia on his way to Japan and I chatted with him from the comfort of my home. As wifi on airplanes is becoming a commodity, the next critical resource appears to be power outlets, currently available only in business class of most carriers.
[20:36:23] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: the only thing that sucks is that I am in coach and they do not have power outlets
[20:36:34] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: and I only have 40 mins on the battery
[20:37:02] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: they have them in business, I wish I could pay someone a few Euros to charge my machine at their seat ;)
[20:37:10] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: they should bid that on Ebay
[20:38:10] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: also we should have Apple Bonjour in all versions of Skype for local discovery
[20:38:21] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: I wonder how many people are here on the plane using Skype
[20:38:23] Jaanus Kase | Tallinn says: Bonjour was formerly known as Rendezvouz?
[20:38:28] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: yes
[20:38:39] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: they have a Windows SDK
[20:39:21] lenn pryor | Skyping at 40,0… says: that could be cool for finding other Skype users on the plane
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Jaanus on June 17, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
There’s an amazing variety of photos on Flickr on Skype. Here’s a recent one. Would have called him (her? it?) to do an interview but the Skype Name doesn’t seem to have been published. For the dogs running around our office (more on them some other time), a gadget idea we’ve been having is a portable wifi (Pocket PC?) Skype kit attached to them.
image republished from flickr.com
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Jaanus on June 17, 2005 in Partner News and Campaigns.
It has been brought to our attention, both through firsthand experience and people like James, that the vskype video add-on for Skype may send unwanted chat messages to people on your contact list. Pay extra attention to what buttons you are clicking (as you should do with any program). We continue to look into the issue.
As always, you should be careful about trying new Skype plugins that are not certified or recommended by us. It makes sense to create a test user and not experiment when being logged in with your “main” Skype Name, until you are really sure and confident of what you’re doing.
At Skype, we do a lot of usability work. We want to make sure that Skype is easy to use for geeks as well as computer novices. The real art is trimming things down, eliminating the number of options and mouse clicks or key presses until you get to a minimum. The simpler it looks, the harder it is to get there. We’re nowhere near done yet.
We keep seeing real-life examples of why this work is important. We’ve one sitting right in our Tallinn office kitchen: the microwave. It doesn’t have anything to do with computers or Skype, but it has everything to do with making things easy to use.
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Jaanus on June 15, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Things are getting exciting in videoland. We’ve recently seen the release of a few video add-ons. None of them are officially endorsed or certified by Skype, but this doesn’t mean you can’t play around with them.
As Bill from Skype Journal puts it:
So begins the Skype Video War. What a cool arms race. There are three groups in the race. The IM people upgrading audio and video (AOL, MSN and Yahoo!), the Skype third party developers, and Skype itself.
While I’d be wary to call it a war since no one gets killed, the times are surely interesting. Speaking of Bill, he and a group of other Skype friends did an excellent review of one of the plug-ins as well as an interview with some of the folks behind it.
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Jaanus on June 14, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
As the announcement says, we released Skype for Windows 1.3 last night. Alongside with this, the Skype Voicemail service is no longer in beta.
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Teller on June 14, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
Hi, everyone! This being my first post, I should write couple of words about myself. My name is Siim Teller, and I’m Localization Manager, dealing with all translation and localization projects. I also help Jaanus with ideas for this little site, and finally, I am the designated photographer in our Tallinn office.
And now to the topic at hand: Did you know that the Skype software speaks not only English, but 27 languages altogether? They range from big ones, like French, German, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, to the small and lesser-known. Estonian, Finnish and Danish are probably the smallest, if you look at number of speakers in the world.
I wanted to let everybody know that with the launch of new version 1.3 for Windows, we added five new languages. So if you feel more at home using Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian or Turkish, then go ahead, download the new version. A very big thank you goes out to all the volunteers who have helped us getting so far! You’re all listed on the change log page).
Lastly, before Mac-users start bashing me: Yes, Skype for Mac currently only comes in Anglo flavor, but we’re working on it. Thanks for your patience.
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Malthe on June 12, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
The Skype delegation is now safely back from its expedition into the Danish scene of “practional visionaries”, know as a conference called reboot.
Reboot is in version 7, where version 6 was the only major upgrade silently skipped, due to the main organizer’s impending family expansion.
Being Danish myself, I’ve been to a couple of reboots in the past, and while nothing can match the dotcom heydays in terms of number of participants (we’re talking thousands back then), the subsequent reboots have only increased in value for the participants.
This year’s couple of hundred participants were subjected to a healthy dose of the big, international names along with similar numbers of homegrown, Danish speakers — one of whom was yours truly.
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Jaanus on June 12, 2005 in Life at Skype.
Michael Jackson is Skype’s Director of Operations. As you hear in the interview, it has nothing to do with surgeries or pop singing, but it does have a lot to do with ensuring that Skype is continuously available to our global user community.
Michael is also a proud member of the “People visiting Skype Tallinn office” community — his home is in Denmark, but he spends a lot of time, days and often weeks, in Tallinn, working with the operations, systems administration, customer support and other groups of people here.
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Lenn Pryor on June 10, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Hey boys and girls in code land … we have some new stuff to share to make your life with Skype a tad bit more interesting. Introducing the new Skype Developer Zone site. We have a host of new goodies to make life for developers better and more profitable … after all sharing is good.
So what’s new? First things first, Skype now has new API licensing terms which allows you to use the Skype API in commercial solutions. After you build your wonderful creation, list it in the Extras Showcase so that others can find it, or even better get it Skype Certified. 1.3 API documentation is live now too and in HTML for you to explore. Tell us what you think, we want to make our friends happy and successful too, this is just the beginning of a romance with developers at Skype.
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Jaanus on June 8, 2005 in Life at Skype.
Video is a massive thing, even though Skype doesn’t have it yet. It’s no secret that we are working on it and keeping a close eye on many of the video add-ons already out there for Skype. So today’s Featured Skyper talk is with one of the Skype video developers, Andrei Jefremov, who spends his days tinkering in our Research Labs on core video and sound technologies.
Photo by Siim Teller
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Jaanus on June 7, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Some Skype people are going to be at reboot this weekend in Copenhagen, including Malthe who’s going to share some “lessons learned from building Skype”. And him and some others will be around throughout the event, so catch them for a chat.
According to organizers, reboot is “the european meetup for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for creation and organization — in a world where the only entry barrier is passion. reboot is two days in june filled with inspiration, perspective, good conversations and interesting people.” What exactly that means will apparently be figured out on the spot.
Text chats have been in Skype since the very beginning. And since early this year, you can chat with multiple contacts in a group chat, in addition to one-on-one chats. Chatting is one of Skype’s main features apart from calling and contact management. And we’d like to tell you of our hidden agenda of making Skype Chat an e-mail killer.
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Jaanus on June 3, 2005 in Life at Skype.
Stefan is Skype’s Director of Product and highlights aspects about his work at Skype and also experiences as a regular daily user in this interview. The whole Product function at Skype encompasses all the people responsible for bringing out new versions of the software and making sure you’re getting a high-quality enjoyable experience, and Stefan is the one leading them.
This interview is also the first in our “People visiting Skype Tallinn office” series — Stefan is based in London, but spends a lot of his time in Tallinn where all of the engineering happens, where we also took the pictures.
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Jaanus on June 1, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
Skype for Windows 1.3 Beta is now available. As is usual with the public betas, we recommend them only for advanced users and testing purposes — there are a few known issues, but it should not cause any data loss or do other sorts of major damage. Your comments and feedback are welcome in the forum.
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Jaanus on June 1, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
A bunch of Skype people were flying from Tallinn to another place today. But the flight got delayed by 6 hours. However, since the airport has cheap wireless available, plus we got food compensation as mandated by aviation regulations, it’s not as bad as it sounds. We crawled to a cafe where we got our food and found power sockets for the laptops in the wall, joined the tables and set up a field office in no time. And got tons of work done - certainly more than we would have, had we gone back to office for the time of delay :)
Photo by Siim Teller
