September 2005

We were a bit quiet for the past few days. This is because we had to wrap up Skype for Windows 1.4. It is out now and available at your nearest Skype download site. Get it while there are still some copies left!

Now, a lot of great new things in this release. The major new features in this release are Call Forwarding, Personalise Skype and improved call quality. You will never miss a call again with forwarding to SkypeOut numbers and Skype Names, and the calls sound better than ever.

We’ve brushed up our Tools for Sharing quite a bit. Find many new banners (several of you asked for larger variety of non-Flash — go grab’em!) and updated Skype buttons — more about them in the post below. Also, some completely new stuff like shout-outs and flyers.

Continue reading "Skype for Windows 1.4 — "Have you got the new Skype?"" »

As part of the Skype for Windows 1.4 release, we bring you the enhanced, advanced, fully reworked and revamped Skype buttons for your blog, website or e-mail signatures. Now, we had some sort of buttons before, but they weren’t very interesting. The new ones are much more fun and useful.

We went to great lengths to make the buttons useful. Getting them right in all the browsers and mail clients wasn’t easy at all and there may be glitches remaining, but most bugs should be ironed out by now. We think the dropdown multi-action one is the coolest — not only does it let you call, but you can also add the person to your Contacts, start a chat, leave voicemail, view profile or start sending a file. But the individual action buttons are fun too, and can be used in e-mails where the dropdown one wouldn’t work.

It’s not a coincidence you hear a lot of news from us about PChome Online. They are our most active partner, being based in Taiwan. They also were the first partner to launch a co-branded version with us last summer. PChome and Skype are a constant source of energy, innovation and fun to each other.

As part of the “people visiting Skype’s Tallinn office” series, here’s Sam and Peter from PChome. (Sam is on the left on the picture below.) We talk about how the cooperation got started, how it’s going, and what they think of Skype now that they’ve visited us in person. Also interesting stuff about what they’re doing with hardware.

Download this interview as MP3 or OGG (length 15:39).

Continue reading "Sam and Peter from PChome Online" »

We work with the world’s most advanced technologies in audio, video, networking and other areas. At places at our offices, you can see many high-tech gadgets, many of them not seen by the market yet. Strange algorithms and datasets running across displays. So you could think we are trying to use the most expensive and bleeding-edge technology wherever you can for whatever purpose, right?

Continue reading "Our groupware" »

Do you remember the announcement we made about Skype for U3-powered smart drive? That work is now nearing completion and you can already get Skype from U3 Software Central (note that this requires U3 USB smart drive). This means that you can walk into any Internet cafe or other location with your USB smart drive, plug it in and use your Skype with your own settings, history and other data.

Here’s a related tip that you may find useful, whether you’re using your own removable media or just want to tweak your configuration. Skype for Windows 1.4 has a /datapath:”path” command line option that specifies where all the Skype data is located. So you could do something like ‘skype.exe /datapath:”c:\skypedata”’ and that is where all your user data is stored.

Another parameter you should use when running Skype from a USB drive is /removable - this makes sure you won’t write nonexisting paths into the registry that are only valid when Skype is run from the USB drive, and if you would start Skype from the hard disk next time, you could get some ugly errors. The command also does other optimizations to the operation needed when running from removable media.

We thought it would be interesting to re-post here some thoughts from the Estonian media about last week’s news, which was a significant event for the whole country. Here is a great column from Allan Martinson, a well-known pan-Baltic IT leader, that neatly summarices the thoughts and aspirations of much of the local IT industry and people.

Original column published on Sep 14 in Äripäev, Estonian business daily. Translated and re-published on share.skype.com with kind permission from the author. See footnotes for details about the local context.

Skype More Important Than Hansabank¹

Allan Martinson, member of the board, AS Microlink²
Sep. 14, 2005

The acquisition of Skype Technologies SA by eBay for about $4.1bn may be more significant to the Estonian economy than Swedbank’s recent takeover of Hansabank, valued at $5.6bn at the time of the acquisition. This is indeed the case, even though more than half of Estonia’s population had never even heard of Skype before the deal was announced.

Continue reading "eBay: a view from Estonian media" »

Let’s look back at what really happened a week ago, how it was received within Skype and what we make of it. First things first, we now have a FAQ to answer some of the questions we received through the past week.

Continue reading "Skype+eBay: a retrospect from within" »

Something from the massive graphics archives of our pixel tweakers team, working day and night on the visual side of everything related to Skype. This is a timeline of how the Skype application icon has evolved through the past years. There may even have been more intermediate drafts, but these are the ones that have been visible to actual users. And today’s version won’t remain forever either — Skype evolves, and so does the icon.

IPEVO is a spin-off of PChome Online, Skype’s partners in Taiwan. They have been testing the market for this category of devices for quite a while and have now expanded their device operations into a separate brand. They’re very energetic and fun people to work with :) so we’re happy their business is going well.

Now they made this new simple USB phone and launched it in Taiwan on Sept 12. The initial stock was sold out in just 50 hours! However, according to them, another batch of the phones is ready, and will be sold from FNAC bookstores in Taipei starting from Saturday.

Last night, we put out the public beta of Skype Groups. The essence of it is that you can buy Skype services for other people and keep an eye on their usage — like refill their accounts if they run short of Skype Credit. It supports SkypeOut (Skype Credit), SkypeIn and Voicemail.

For more info, check out the product page, FAQ and Skype Groups (BETA) forum. Give us feedback what you think of it, does it work fine for you or are there any things you don’t understand or problems that need to be fixed.

Are you one of those people who has just too many contacts and a humongous contact list on Skype? Are you having trouble finding the chat you were just in, but closed the window and now want it back? Here’s a little-known feature that we find quite handy ourselves to quickly find who/what we need.

You normally use the Address Bar to call any Skype Name or SkypeOut number. Just type in the name or number, hit the big green Dial button and the call is placed.

Here’s the trick — the Address Bar also works as an ultralight search tool. If you start typing a name, Skype goes through your contact list and matches what you typed with the names that are in your contact list, and automatically displays a dropdown with the matches. The same is done for recent chat topics. A maximum of three choices are displayed, so if the search doesn’t seem to find what you are looking for, there may have been too many matches — just keep typing and refining your “search”.

Now you can just click on one of the matches, or press the Down Arrow key and Enter. If it was a Skype or SkypeOut contact, that contact is highlighted in your contact list. If it was a chat, the chat window is opened.

The rumors are over. This just got announced. To celebrate the event, go ahead and download the latest stable public version of Skype. See also eBay’s webcast and other info from their events page.

Below is a letter from Niklas and Janus about the occasion.

Hello,

When Janus and I originally created Skype, we had a vision of creating the world’s largest communications company to revolutionise the way everyone communicates through the internet.

We believed that voice is the most natural way for people to communicate and that making it widely and easily available would be a major step forward in Internet communications. We also thought that as the Internet grew, there was no reason why everyone in world shouldn’t be able to talk for free.

We set out to build software which was not just powerful but also incredibly easy to install and use. Janus and I wanted to make something which would make talking on the Internet the simplest and most natural thing in the world.

We are now working with an amazing dedicated and talented team of people across the world to deliver on this vision. Skype people are now in 15 countries, from 27 nationalities and everyday we wake up and think about one thing — how can we make voice the most natural form of Internet communication.

It seems to have caught on.

In only two years, we have been fortunate to have experienced spectacular growth. There are now over 54 million people using Skype to talk for free to families, friends and colleagues in 225 countries and territories around the world — everyday another 150,000 new people sign up to join in. We also have a fantastic and fast-growing network of thousands of partners and developers building exciting hardware and software products, as well services around the Skype experience.

Now today we are thrilled to be joining forces with Meg Whitman and the fantastic team at eBay to help us deliver on our vision and help make Skype the voice of the Internet. Working with eBay and Paypal — two of the greatest brands on the Internet — we can’t think of any more powerful platforms to accelerate our growth.

We want to take this opportunity to thank every one of you who has contributed so far to the growth of Skype. But let’s remember, we’ve only just begun to write the story of becoming the voice of the Internet.

We are totally motivated for now and the next several years to continue all this great work and to try to exceed all of your expectations and more. We have some great ideas about what happens in the next chapter and think we have some powerful friends to help us realize our dreams. We can’t wait to work with you all in writing the next chapter and together make it possible for the whole world to talk for free.

Thanks again, all our best

Niklas and Janus

Well, the Mac team at Skype is very happy to deliver its latest update: Skype for Mac OS X 1.3. Skype’s Mac group has been busy listening to the Mac community, adding new features and polishing the fit and finish of every aspect of our Mac client. Skype’s new Mac version adds: improved call quality, Multi-chat, drag and drop contacts, a new services and alert interface, a red badge on our dock icon, API support, animated emoticons, support for selecting multiple contacts, better support for “Do-Not-Disturb” mode, Growl support, improved keyboard commands and tool-tips.

Oh, and one more thing…a Widget! The Skype Widget 1.02 lets Tiger OS X 10.4 users look up international calling codes, check Skype’s rates and place calls to Skype names and phone numbers, all from a handy widget. Check it out.

Continue reading "Skype for Mac 1.3 out now" »

Hi! We’re Skype Voice Services. We just got announced today. We’re not available to users just yet — this is more of a call to you to start building us and getting ready to earn some revenue.

In a nutshell, Skype Voice Services Program lets you offer your services through Skype calls. They can be free to callers, or you can choose to charge any price you set. In case of chargeable services, the caller pays using his/her Skype Credit. For an example, try tellmeonskype.

Continue reading "Say hi to Voice Services Program" »

From SkypeJournal and Dina:

The KatrinaHelp Wiki Network was initially conceived in many different people’s minds at approximately the same time worldwide. It represents a clear and direct effort at helping coordination, communication, and cooperation for rescue, recovery, and relief efforts. In conjunction with Skype, SkypeJournal and Khaos Labs, they have set up a messaging centre using Skype and its API.

We helped with some SkypeOut credit. If you can provide help to the hurricane victims, Red Cross is accepting donations.

UPDATE: here’s an e-mail we got from a Skype user. We’re glad we could be of help!

I have two homes in the U.S. One in northern Michigan (where we spend the summers) and one in NEW ORLEANS, home of Katrina. Our grown children are in New Orleans and we are currently in Michigan. It has been impossible to contact the children on regular phone lines, due the disruptions Katrina has caused. Sometimes we were able to make contact on Skype when all other attempts failed. We are very appreciative of the service Skype has given us in this difficult period. THANK YOU

We’re not obsessed about awards, but we like them. They show that someone, somewhere thinks we’ve done something right. Which is always nice to know.

So we have just got another award from Germany from Chip, the largest end user IT and CE magazine in Germany. More precisely, it’s the “Digital Lifestyle Award 2005” in the personal communication category. The site says:

“1st place, Skype (23.4%) — Skype is on its way to become the synonym for Internet-telephony. This freeware helped to spark the voice-over-IP-boom”.

This award is interesting because the votes were cast by Chip online visitors. According to Chip online, over 70,000 visitors participated and made this the largest event of this kind of Internet voting in Europe.

Skypers all over the world are big into sports. There aren’t many things we haven’t tried (wife carrying might be one of them) but one of the biggest things with our Tallinn crew is Xdream adventure racing. If you’ve never heard of it before then it’s an event where teams of three people pass through checkpoints by trekking, biking and canoeing and complete special challenges. Important part is navigation as there are no fixed courses and you have to find your own way from one checkpoint to the next one. Adventure races vary in length with a course that might take 4-5 hours seen as “sprint”.

A few weekends ago, the most recent race in Estonia was held and total of 7 Skype teams participated. It was my first time so I wasn’t very sure what to expect but the whole thing turned out to be great fun. To achieve the best results it helps to have strong all-around team - one person to navigate, other to be the “engine” in the canoe and third one to be good with steering, someone to keep up the morale etc. I found out that good navigation skills were more important than anything else and it doesn’t really matter if you cover one section of the course a bit slower than competitors, next section could be where you win everything back.

I cannot wait for the next event :) Below is a selection of photos from the last race here in Estonia. If you’d like to read more about adventure racing then Wikipedia has a thorough post about its’ history, rules, equipment etc.

Continue reading "Skypers and adventure racing" »