November 2005

Via Mobile Technology Magazine.

According to a recent research program by Wainhouse Research, 70% of panelists who had used Skype in the last six months found the service acceptable for business calls.

On the graph, you can see that only 5% find the quality non-acceptable. And we’re working as hell to squash all remaining quality issues for good.

Although Skype does have some offerings for businesses like Skype Groups, we do not currently focus specifically on business use. We continue to make something that is delightful for people to call each other, regardless of whether it is for business purposes or not. And when in the process we manage to make something good enough that businesses find acceptable, as we know many small and large businesses do, that’s good to know.

It definitely helps to have a sense of humour when working with us. We get many many enquiries a day about a gazillion things. These ones make your day and also make good business because they stand out from the crowd. (From an anonymous US retailer.)

“We carry everything from an electric toothbrush to $10,000 home theatre systems. We carry many major computer products. We carry every kind of phone known to man. We offer Packet8 and Vonage services. Yes we sell it all. Well not all… We’re missing Skype”

Martin writes how phone notification systems should work. About how taxi companies notify him by a “callback”, and how he wants to pick what phones ring when. Good stuff. We can only say that Skype is not done yet and these are definitely the kinds of “new frontiers” we are going to explore.

Wanted to call my wife when I got to my parents’ house. Checked first to see if she’s on Skype. No deal, so I call. She’s out. The problem is, I’m afraid to call in case I wake up sleeping babies. We only have one landline phone sat in the study where the littlest madam sleeps in the day. But even if I had a second one plugged in and, say, in the kitchen, I can’t selectively ring just that one. So no point. Yes I could hack up all sorts of schemes to get around it, but there’s no out-of-the-box solution whereby the caller can select the nature of the ring/interruption (“sotto sotto”, please).

We launched SkypeIn numbers in Switzerland (Zurich area) approx. 45 minutes ago. To buy them, just go to our web store, click on “SkypeIn (BETA)” and pick Switzerland from the list of countries.

As with Germany, some restrictions apply — you have to be a Swiss resident.

The response has been great, and we have been told this is considered as the best thing that has happened to Switzerland since 1971. This was the year when women were granted the right to vote on a federal level (note: that it was only in 1990 that the last province in Switzerland gave women the full right to vote).

More news from Sweden. This is what a SkypeIn box looks like. So you go to a store and pick up the box that contains SkypeIn for 12 months as well as instructions. And then you go back home and activate it in your computer. Neat, eh?

If you live in Sweden, you can look for it in the following places over the coming weeks: “Clas Ohlson”, Dixons ( elkjöp ) and Teknik Magasinet.

We recently announced that we’re collecting Skype stories. The response has been overwhelming, we’ve been receiving literally hundreds of them from all over the world, from airline pilots to students to housewives to resort owners to god knows who else. Thanks to everyone sending them — just keep them coming to mystory@skype.net. Here are a few anonymous abridged examples.

I grew up in the North East of England with my Cousin , we are the same age and were more like brothers, in 1989 he married and moved to South Africa, we both got Skype about a month ago and now we are constantly in touch sharing family pics and chatting, its so much easier and cheaper with skype i would recommend everyone to get it.

Thank you for introducing this wonderful way of keeping in touch. I live in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and my daughters live in Canada and the USA. Skype enables us to talk to each other all the time for as long as we want. You won’t believe how much this means to me because international telephone rates are very costly from this part of the world. Thank you Skype.

Continue reading "Thanks for your stories" »

Now you can share your love of Skype even if you’re away from your computer! Introducing the Skype screensaver. Just install it and you’re all set — when you walk away from your computer, people will see the Skype World.

Download screensaver for Windows, Mac OS X or Mac OS Classic.

230 McDonald’s restaurants in Sweden will be equipped with WiFi connections. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to use Skype there as well. Just make sure not to make your laptop or Pocket PC greasy and don’t spill a cup of Coke on your keyboard (hey every true hacker has done that… I know I have). Original article in Swedish.

Skype Web Store now supports the following currencies: zł (Polish zloty), R$ (Brazil real) and 元 (Taiwan dollar — how cool of a symbol is that 元?).

Skype is now available in RadioShack. RadioShack is a big US consumer electronics store. Did you know that 94% of the people in USA live within 5 minutes of one of the 7,000 RadioShack stores? More than 3,000 of those stores now have a Skype stand where you can buy Skype-certified hardware, be it a fancy cordless Skype phone or just a starter pack with earbuds and 30 SkypeOut minutes. The starter pack at RadioShack costs just $4.99.

See what they have on their site that’s connected to Skype. Here’s what the stand looks like at the store.

We’re collecting stories about how you use Skype, similar to what you can already see in the Skype Stories forum. You can of course continue to post them in the forum if you like, but we now have also an e-mail address to send these to: mystory@skype.net

When you send in your story, please add your contact info (e-mail address and Skype Name). If you have any sounds or pictures to go with it, just attach them to the e-mail. And if you know someone else who has a great story to share, please tell them too.

We’re looking for all sorts of stories, no matter who you are, where you live or what you do. Are you talking from strange spots? To crazy locations? Speaking with new people? Bring it on.

Please help us spread the word and re-post this message to your friends, colleagues, blog, homepage, whatever other channels you have. You help us get the best stories this way, and we will share the best stories widely with the rest of the world so you’ll continue to hear more about this effort here on Share Skype.

This call does not expire — we’ll continue to collect the stories permanently. If you can, please translate the story into English before sending, but if not, you can also send it in your native language if it’s not English. The e-mail address to send the stories to is mystory@skype.net. Please do not send customer support requests to this address — to get support, use our support site.

SkypeIn numbers are now available in Germany — finally, after a relatively long quiet period, we get a new SkypeIn country! Yay.

To get it, just go to our web store, click on “SkypeIn (BETA)” and pick Germany from the list of countries.

Continue reading "SkypeIn Germany" »

Someone has put up a blog to document their experience as they dump their landline and switch completely to Skype+cellphone. Found it in Skype Forums, the blog has a link to the relevant thread. Sounds like it’s going fine so far.

… that’s about a $3.70 savings and multiply that times 52 weeks a year(for those who call at least once a week) and that comes out to around a $192 a year savings. That’s money we will never have to let go of and give to our local telephone company.

• what: Guinness Record — most people calling with Skype on beanbags in a row (see the headsets!)
• when: just this Monday
• where: Skype office
• who: three random Skypers, working hard to bring you the next version

We recently announced Skype Buttons, and support for them is now starting to show up in various systems. This just came in — Skype Buttons plugin for Wordpress, a popular blogging system.

Here’s something of special interest to our German readers, but cool to know for others as well.

A while back, we announced cooperation with Germany’s E-Plus mobile network. Back then not much actually happened, but as of today, this is available to customers.

You can get an E-Plus 3G (UMTS) data package for a flat rate of 39.95 €/month. Download, surf and make Skype calls as much as you can, no extra charges. We’re not aware of many other similar flat-rate 3G packages, so it’s probably another world’s first. It obviously includes unlimited free Skype-to-Skype calls. If you want SkypeOut, you should buy Skype Credit. They even give you a free 3G card for your laptop with the package.

Plus, the first 5000 ones to sign up get a free Skype Starter Pack containing earbud+microphone and Skype on CD. So no more of those “I don’t have a headset” excuses. Go check it out and sign up.

Here are some pictures from the announcement back in September.

This morning, Skype hit 200 million downloads. To celebrate, we made a picture. Set it as your own picture too :) (Right-click on the picture, click “Save Picture As…” and save it somewhere, and then set it as My Picture in your Skype.)

Update: here’s another version that works even better in Skype.

Some fun facts about our downloads. Skype download infrastructure is quite massive and cool — thumbs up to those who maintain it around the clock.

• At peak time, we’re pumping out close to 10 downloads a second. That’s almost a million downloads every single day by now. Not quite a million every day yet, but we’re getting there.
• The download traffic at peak time adds up to 500 Mbit/sec, or 0.5 Gbit/sec. That’s 500 times more than an average 1 Mbit home “broadband” connection.
• We got from 0 to 100M downloads in 595 days, from 100M to 150M in 124 days, from 150M to 200M in 83 days. There’s no signs of the pace slowing down.
• Take all of the figures with a grain of salt, since obviously not every download is completed and ends with an installation. But it’s still cool.

When five-star hotels trust you enough to use your software for talking to people, you must have done SOMETHING right? See their Skype profile.

x says: we are REALLY getting somewhere now……
x says: check this out
x says: http://www.langhamhotels.com/langhamplace/hongkong/
x says: and look at how you can contact them :)

Spotted by mattrichardson. “Real-life” Skype spotting is always cool — give me more of these and I’ll post them here :)

I saw this truck going across 23rd Street in Manhattan this evening. I am always so surprised to run into Skype when I am not at my computer.

Photo re-published from flickr.

Straight from my inbox this morning.

From: Tallinn office manager
To: all Skype staff
Subject: new hire in Tallinn office

I hereby have the honors to introduce the newest hire to Skype Tallinn office. As of today, you can meet Ms Tiiu Selecta (second from left on the picture below) in our kitchen. We had to move the lasagne-stuffed fridge you all know and love to another corner to make Tiiu some seating room.

This intergalactic-looking colleague is capable of filling itself with water, order fresh beans from corner shop to ease our other office assistants’ load and hold intelligent conversations with you while waiting for hot beverages offered in wide assortment.

There are some embedded development and usability test tasks for new hires in preparation by respective teams. As result, new shiny icons and SkypeNet compatibility will be there, with release date scheduled to Q1.

Welcome.

PS: the two gentlemen are likely to see a harrasment suit in their mail soon, if you inspect the picture closely.

Russell Shaw links to Network World’s Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick and asks,

what about a Skype Nanny to monitor your Skype service, watch out for security alerts, perform tweaks, download and install patches, updates, cool third-party apps?

Some people would add “personal support” to this list also.

We certainly have work remaining to do to make the installation and upgrade processes smoother. And until we get to standalone Skype devices, running Skype assumes you know at least a little bit of how to run a computer (or have someone do it for you), even though Skype is one of the easiest things you can install and run. We often get stories of moms or grandmas whose kids install Skype for them and they’ve been hooked ever since.

That being said, Skype never assumed to do things solely on its own. We can’t afford have “Skype technicians” going to people’s homes in 200 countries, as that would be too expensive and raise the cost for all our users. We’re good at building a calling platform, and this is what we focus on. We know there’s a whole lot more than that to a great calling experience, and this is why we continue to create a partner network throughout various countries and business areas who help us provide local(ised) distribution, support, devices and all that, and come back to us with ideas of what Skype itself can do better. If you’re thinking of joining the line of our partners, check out the current partnership options and keep checking back, as the list of services and opportunities keeps growing.

I often get asked “where did the Skype name come from?” A creative version was offered by one of our forum readers:

it’s a Chuvash word … meaning “The whole world can talk for free”

The truth is a bit different, but at least as interesting :)

Continue reading "Origin of the name/word "Skype"" »

Lester just posted a video with Skype’s Gadget Inspector James Peck in the Skype Learning Zone, which I thought is educational not only for developers, but for a wider audience as well.

In this video you see and hear an overview of how the Skype device certification and partnership works, and get to see some cool actual gadgets, like the recent Linksys phone, as well as some other available and upcoming stuff — a speakerphone, a Bluetooth headset, the noisecancelling Jawbone headset and more.

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