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Jaanus on July 29, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
I heard we have another SkypeOut Gift Day coming, and this time it’s on the weekend! So you don’t need to get distracted from your daily business just to go get your gift, but can take your time and do it from the comfort of wherever you are on the weekend. :) So keep checking skype.com front page and your My Account page once in a while to see when it starts.
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Teller on July 27, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
“Skype” and “art” are not words we’ve seen together before, I think. But there’s an exhibition in Tallinn, Estonia right now where among other things Skype icons are on display. This exhibition called “Personality” itself is organized by Estonian Graphic Designers Union and its aim is to show off latest local graphic design. It’s not very large venue but certainly appealing for anyone interested in the topic. There are number of cool fonts on display, some of them really clever, actual advertisements and more art-oriented pieces of work. If you know a little Estonian then you can read a review by biggest local weekly newspaper.
I asked Priidu Zilmer, who is the author of Skype icons to give a little background to the whole thing.
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Jaanus on July 27, 2005 in Life at Skype.
It’s the first birthday of SkypeOut today. As the news from a year ago said:
July 27, 2004. Today Skype launched its free, Skype for Windows Version 1.0 software, which includes SkypeOut, enabling Skype users to pre-pay and call any phone number in the world at highly competitive local rates.
It’s been an eventful year and SkypeOut has served us and you well. Happy birthday, SkypeOut! And to celebrate, we got some goodies for you. We’re lowering prices to many destinations. We have to increase some a bit, too, but those don’t kick in until September 1. (Lower prices are effective immediately.)
For more info, see the press release, service announcement with price change details and SkypeOut rates page.
Continue reading "Happy 1st birthday SkypeOut! The present: lower prices." »
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Jaanus on July 26, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
We’ve just made a change to SkypeOut that allows you to call toll-free numbers in several countries free of charge, even if you don’t have SkypeOut and don’t ever plan to buy it. (If you DO have SkypeOut, those calls are priced at zero price.) Note that this is currently in beta, so there may be issues — see below for details — but we’ve verified it works fairly well for us.
The following countries and number ranges are supported. We’re working on the rest of the world.
Continue reading "Free calls to toll-free phone numbers global beta" »
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Jaanus on July 26, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
It’s been quiet here on the interviews front for a while, but let’s change that and bring you another Featured Skyper — Andy Abramson. He’s been following Skype, VoIP and technology in a broader sense longer than a lot of Skype staff, so a lot of interesting insight here.
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Jaanus on July 24, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
There are many hazards we may encouter. Some are caused by evil intentions of humans. Others, often causing more damage but largely going unnoticed, are natural ones, such as earthquakes in Japan. Here’s a very recent example of how Skype is used as emergency communication tool during an earthquake when phone and mobile services are not available. It reads a bit weird because it’s a machine translation — for our Japanese readers, here is the Japanese original.
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Jaanus on July 22, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
We have great investors. Not only did they fund Skype, but they work a lot with us on a daily basis, giving us tons of great ideas and installing latest off-the-press untested alpha builds that tend to break computers sometimes and go through all that. So now we got Howard Hartenbaum make what was probably one of the first Skype videocalls from onboard an airplane. (According to Niklas, Howard was Skype’s first investor.)
From: “Howard Hartenbaum”
Sent: 7/21/05 5:49:00 PM
Subject: the world’s first skype video call from an airplane
I just got off a video test call from a Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic on Boeing Connexion wifi service. I saw Heidy waving to me from the cafeteria in Tallinn. Excellent video quality. Excellent experience. Video is going to be huge.
Howard
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Jaanus on July 22, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
In light of the recent Niklas and Tim Draper videocall, here’s another aspect to it: the cost of doing the interview over Skype videocall. (And commenting on Skype Journal’s “(I expect that the connection and bandwidth had no limitations and was well tested).” — yeah, a few trial runs were done before the actual live call, but no other extensive setup or testing, as SkypeJournal rightly indicates by the comment on Niklas’ white shirt and Tim Draper’s colorful tie.)
Q: If we didn’t do the interview via Skype video, how would we have done that interview? And, how much would that have cost?
A: If we’d done a traditional satellite uplink/downlink it would have been in the $8K ballpark on the US side, plus the going rate in Estonia.
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Jaanus on July 21, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
The United Nations is reportedly deploying Skype in some agencies. A big thing for us, no matter how big or small the actual extent of the deployment is. We’re proud to help their work in improving the world.
My wife works in one of the agencies of the United Nations (U.N.) at New Delhi. Yesterday their worldwide headquarters, which is based in Geneva has sent across an email announcing the adoption of Skype by their offices across the world, as a means of communication between the headquarter and all field units. This is what the email (abridged) says –—
“The Office has implemented a deployment of the SKYPE utility (PC-to-PC over-the-Internet voice communication) for HQ and the Field. It has prepared the SKYPE package for distribution (via the WAN network), and published a user guide on the Intranet to help you get started. Although you can use any microphone/speaker combination for SKYPE, it is recommended that you use a headset. An information session will be held on… at… to show a sample SKYPE session and answer any questions. The session will be summarized through an FAQ posting on the Intranet.”
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Jaanus on July 20, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
Skype’s Niklas Zennström and board member Tim Draper just finished an hour-long interview from Skype’s engineering office to a conference for 200 people at www.alwayson-network.com in Stanford, California. They used Skype video and their pretty faces were beamed up on two gigantic screens with top video and audio quality. The audience were VERY impressed (not with what they had to say but just seeing them). Super thanks to everyone at Skype team involved in developing video, and setting up the event on both sides (standard PC-s and web cams were used). See the archived session.
This is still an internal testing version, so don’t yet ask how or where can you get it and how exactly it looks and works. But as you see, we’re getting closer. We’ve been waiting for this a long time — work on video started more than a year ago, and we’ve come a long way.
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Jaanus on July 19, 2005 in News, Events, Milestones.
.. is over for this time. Read more about the Free Skype Days, and then tell other people.
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Jaanus on July 19, 2005 in Life at Skype.
We have a very active French community among Skype staff. And as July 14 (whoops… had June 14 here initially, thanks guys for pointing it out) is an important day for France (why? well go read the history books :) ), we had a Bastille day organized by ze hard-working Skype French Sans-Culottes featured on this picture.
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Jaanus on July 15, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
A good collection of tips’n’tricks of how to use Skype for interviews. We’re happy to see that Skype keeps improving and giving folks reasons to revisit their earlier decisions.
It has been a long-standing rule here at IT Conversations that we don’t conduct interviews over Skype, but recent improvements in Skype as well as additional experience has caused us to revisit that restriction.
Although there are many software-based call recording solutions available for Skype and some other programs even have it as built-in feature, it’s wise to record speakers on separate tracks for post-processing, as the article suggests. We’ve heard that various radio stations are doing that.
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Lenn Pryor on July 14, 2005 in Sharing Tools News.
Developers who want to keep up with the latest happenings, plans, releases, and news from Skype and the Skype Developer Zone have a new resource. With the launch of the Skype Developer Blog, we want to raise the frequency and transparency in our communications with developers and bring the conversation to the forefront. It is simple, straight forward and to the point, but will continue to grow and evolve over the coming weeks. It’s a start in the right direction and an invitation to join the conversation. Oh … and yes a dedicated RSS feed is coming ;)
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Jaanus on July 13, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Do you remember the story on BBC about the Internet-enabled Amazon adventurer Duane DeFreitas? The story started to interest me, so I tracked him down for an interview. And he was kind enough to share us an image from his big photo collection, of an ant-eater somewhere in Amazonia.
We take a look at how contact importing to Skype works. This is especially useful if you are just starting on Skype and don’t yet have many friends on Skype, but have built up contact lists in your e-mail programs and Instant Messenger clients. The Skype Import Contacts feature lets you see if any of them can already be found on Skype — maybe they started using it and just forgot to tell you? :) — and if not, you can easily send an e-mail to let them know you’ve moved on to Skype.
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Jaanus on July 11, 2005 in News, Events, Milestones.
As the banner on skype.com front page says, today is our first Free SkypeOut Day. So just go to My Account page and get your free credit. This offer lasts for 24 hours.
UPDATE: the first Free SkypeOut Day is now over. Stay tuned for the next ones later this summer.
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Jaanus on July 10, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
From loose wire. Skype is enabling a small Internet-based English training business telephonenglish.com. Press release on this. The following quote shows how Skype is a rich learning-enabling communication tool with extremely low cost of entry, and how we can certainly expect many other small businesses in this area.
“The ability to send files during the lesson, as well as using the text-based chat facility during the e-lesson, makes Skype a perfect platform for affordable online learning.”
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Jaanus on July 8, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
A little bird flew by and whispered me that Skype is soon going to hand out some services you’d normally pay for. And you don’t have to do anything, other than just go and claim your free services. More updates on this coming soon to skype.com and this site. This will be a time-limited offering, so stay alert.
Update: skype.com has now some more info on this.
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Jaanus on July 7, 2005 in Life at Skype.
There are bad things happening in London at this time, you may have heard about the bomb explosions on London’s public transport network. Many of you are asking us through all channels if we are safe. Quick answer: yes, we are. Some of Skype people are/were very close to the tragedies but no one got hurt. Many thanks for your concern.
Skype is working and our services are operating as usual.
Tip - Add additional information to the name field in your Skype profile to add additional information about your whereabouts or status. Helpful to let others know your timezone, location, or even that you are ok in a moment like this.
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Lenn Pryor on July 6, 2005 in Skype Around the World.
Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Japan to spend a week with some of our Asian software and hardware developer partners who are building on the Skype API. On 22 June 2005 Skype held its first event to meet with software and hardware developers from Japan, China, and Taiwan together with our partner Nikkei Communications.
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Jaanus on July 5, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
We’ve just posted the first betas of toolbars for Internet Explorer and Outlook in our Skype Extras Showcase. They are endorsed and developed by Skype, so you can be as ruthless in commenting them, as you would be with the Skype client itself, as we want them to be good. Please give your feedback to the forum or as just comments to the relevant Extras Showcase items.
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Malthe on July 5, 2005 in Insight.
As you perhaps noticed when we launched share.skype.com, it looked at little different from other Skype websites. More bubbly, if you want. More bubbly, more colorful, more hand drawn.
That was on purpose. It was a prelude for a rather major shift in our design style — a shift we recently applied to the good, old Skype.com website. And it also gave us a chance to change our main color from green to blue.
Why is that, you may ask? Or you may not, but I’m still going to pretend you did, and go ahead and answer your question.
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Jaanus on July 4, 2005 in Skype Beta and new releases.
We’re expanding the selection of emoticons in Skype. Over the next days, we’ll be circulating a selection of them in the poll box to the right, and we ask you to vote for one of the two presented choices. This will be a factor, among others, in deciding which ones we’re gonna do, so bring over your friends to vote, too.
It may, of course, be that we left some really important ones out — in this case, just add your input to the comments of this article.
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Jaanus on July 1, 2005 in News, Events, Milestones.
Skype is not only about engineering, coding and product development. We are a business, and we just posted openings for two great business positions — business development administrator in London and assistant financial controller in Luxembourg. If that sounds like something for you, come help us build Skype! All the application info is on the linked pages. Or take a look at the other Skype vacancies around the world.
