December 2005

Here’s a lesson about how to overlook something and thus create confusion and disappointment that should never have been there. A conversation I just had with Andy.

[14:31:00] Andy Abramson says: one change on yiour blog many of us noticed
[14:31:13] Jaanus Kase says: yes?
[14:31:22] Andy Abramson says: you no longer list the respected bloggers site like you used to on the right side
[14:31:32] Andy Abramson says: instead you have your internal staff
[14:31:42] Jaanus Kase says: ahh.. thats coming back with a vengeance.. we wanted to get the switch done. I didnt expect this to draw so much attention
[14:31:53] Andy Abramson says: it sent a very bad message
[14:32:10] Jaanus Kase says: :(
[14:32:11] Andy Abramson says: skype went from being inside the community to wanting to be its own
[14:32:27] Andy Abramson says: almost saying “thanks for getting us here” now “get lost”
[14:32:59] Jaanus Kase says: ouch. both definitely deserve a place. I figured the staff ones would be interesting
[14:33:12] Andy Abramson says: When Saul sent me the link to the new site and asked me to blog about it, and i saw that i said…well, fancy that..
[14:33:36] Andy Abramson says: They dropped one of the things that was up there from the very beginning…
[14:34:15] Andy Abramson says: by adding the staff stuff it became a corporate blog instead not the community blog

Continue reading ""Friends of Skype" is back, and should never have been gone" »

Jeremy discusses “buddy list spam” (the official term is “contact list”) and asks:

What I’m not clear about is what happens once you’ve renamed a contact. Does that name stay forever, whatever the owner of that profile does to their profile name? Seems to.

Yes, when you rename a contact locally, it overrides whatever neat tricks the other person is doing with his/her name to get to the top of your contact list. Formerly, people also used to communicate a lot of other fun facts in their full name, such as their timezone and what they’re up to today and all that. And when you renamed someone, you lost that info, since the locally assigned name was always used. However, with the introduction of version 2.0, it should no longer be a problem since timezone is now a separate profile field and there’s also a new “mood message” field which you can use to publish all sorts of fun stuff about yourself, but which doesn’t affect your position in others’ contact lists.

So when you find yourself subjected to contact list spam, just rename your contacts and be done with it. And should it ever happen that you want to revert back to the names that the contacts have set themselves, just use the “Rename” function again and clear the name you assigned — Skype then displays the contact’s own name again.

Last month, Skype made it into the cartoon section of c’t, the top IT magazine in Germany.

The text reads “Is it safe to spin a net in this place? What if Skype is down for a time?”

Download the full version.

As we mentioned a couple of days ago, we were going to take to the streets, in a singing Skype seasonal salutation.

And so we did.

This Tuesday in New York, unphased by freezing weather and non-running transportation, our brave choir set out to inform the general public on the merits of Skype. And we’ve got videos and pictures to prove it. (And it wasn’t really us who organized the New York transit strike. Honest. Really. Though in a weird way it was good for our event, because it meant a lot of people were walking and many of the streets were cleared of traffic so we could sing away.)

Transit strike

Play in QuickTime (2 Mb)

Skype carol

Play in QuickTime (1.8 Mb)

Estonian carol

The New York people are singing actual Estonian carols here. Really. In Estonian.

Play in QuickTime (2 Mb)

For your still image viewing pleasure, we have some pictures here.

See the campaign we have with Coldplay. It runs until the end of February, but to increase your chance of winning, you’d better call right away. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to talk to them in March. You can also get their new single Talk right on skype.com.

So enjoy. We fixed a lot of visible things…

• sign in sometimes not working
• some weird backslashes and formatting showing up and words “eaten” when commenting
• developer zone feed not updating

… plus the whole thing is much friendlier to authors and editors.

Continue reading "The new share.skype com blogs are here" »

There was a major launch event today at Taipei, Taiwan, to launch the Taipei Wireless Network and WIFLY that were discussed earlier this year. Taipei’s Major Ma made some Skype calls from the stage — see the photos below. Our local Skype people reported that he even said from stage: “Use WIFLY + Skype phone to make call is cheaper then using Chung Hua Telecom (CHT) ADSL…’ WIFLY monthly charge is reported to be NT399 while CHT ADSL is NT500.

Here’s a chance to win a free webcam in the next two weeks. Just buy some Gift Certificates and you automatically enter the lottery. Even if you already have a webcam, you can give this one to someone you care about, so you can enjoy Skype video calls with them.

Christmas is coming. (Pretty obvious by now.) To celebrate it, we’re singing carols in some cities in the US. We’re calling it the Skype Carol-oke. If you can, please join in! It will be great fun. See below for the time and place to come to. You will meet some Skype people and other people like you who came to sing.

So date and time: Tuesday, December 20, 2 PM to 7 PM (in the local timezone)

Places:

Los Angeles:

• The Third Street Promenade
• Near Hollywood & Highland Retail and Entertainment Complex
• Around downtown L.A. (Carolers will be roaming between the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Olvera Street and the Staples Center)

New York:

• Times Square
• Bryant Park
• Grand Central Station

Houston (the Texas one):

• Houston Galleria
• Market Square
• Downtown Houston (Carolers will be roaming between Houston City Hall and Hermann Park)

If you cannot come in person, you are welcome to call the Skype Name nycarolers during those times, to join the singing fun. If the wireless Internet on the location will work, that is. We hope it will.

Continue reading "Carol-oke: come sing with Skype" »

We just released new beta of Skype for Pocket PC. Go get it.

The last version of Skype for Pocket PC with any new features was released in April this year :-O almost 8 months ago. So we certainly could hear you saying “WHERE IS A NEW ONE?!?!??!” Well here you go.

As you can see, there are two versions to download. Version 1.2.0.89 is the preferred one for 400+ MHz devices, and 1.2.0.91, which says “recommended if your Pocket PC has a CPU of 312 MHz”, should actually read “from 312 MHz up to 400 MHz”. The second one has been optimized to work well on devices slower than 400 MHz. Otherwise, they are the same.

Lots of new things in this release — most importantly:

• supported operating systems: Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC.
• languages: English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese
• supported displays: 240x320, 480,640, portrait and landscape, 240x240 and 480x480.
• supported networks: WiFi/802.11, 3G/UMTS or EDGE.
• voice quality improvements
• extended screen support
• Skype Voicemail: you can receive and send voicemail. The thing you can’t do, though, is update your greeting
• lots of bugs fixed - see the change log for details

So go get the new release now and give us feedback in the Skype for Pocket PC forum.

The Skype web toolbars just keep getting better. Here’s a tip you might not know: you can optimise your pages to display cool call buttons for phone numbers.

Here are some other reasons to optimise your pages: numbers will display in the local format but be dialled internationally (if required); the toolbar will recognise numbers up to 7 times faster in IE; proper names — rather than unrecognisable phone numbers — will be displayed in ‘tool tips’.

Using this is easy — when you’re displaying a phone number on your page, you just insert some invisible metadata with the number. This page has all the details you need.

Here’s how they look if you search for “wombat” in the UK.

Here’s how running Skype with the same Skype Name on two computers can get you in trouble.

I turned on the Skype Me feature so I could show my coworkers how you can let other Skype users know that you’re interested in chatting. In the few minutes leading up to my presentation, a couple Skype users contacted me, so I started chatting with them. Unbeknownst to me, at very same time my wife was at home using one of my computers with Skype running in the background. While my wife tried to look up movie times for the two of us , Skype kept displaying my chat messages with two mystery women! … Luckily for me, I had a roomful of coworkers who could vouch for me. We all found it more than a little amusing once we figured out what happened. Now my wife is only appalled by my typos. Sorry, indiana_girl. It’s over between us, and it never even started.

Skype was present at Les Blogs, represented by yours truly. Lots of good content and people. Blogging is so going to rock more than it does already, and I’m glad I was there. See what the world is saying about the event.

Not much Skype action at the event, except everyone got a Skype starter kit with some French labels on it (but you can speak using it in other languages too!) and I was in a panel about corporate blogging, talking about share.skype and how we will do Skype Buttons and other fun stuff with Six Apart.

Here I am chatting with dotBen and some other BBC Backstage people. I’m not saying which of the four geeks I am, take your pick ;)

Nothing to add to this comic strip. (hey, that is ambiguous… well you decide.)

SkypeOut call minute price changes will happen on January 2, 2006. Some minute prices decrease (Armenia - Mobile, Cayman Islands, Cyprus - Mobile, Guatemala - Mobile, Nigeria, Pakistan, Pakistan - Mobile, Puerto Rico) and some increase (Algeria, Diego Garcia, French Guiana, Lesotho, Libya, St Helena, Vatican City). We’re announcing them a month in advance. See the full details.

Here’s a picture for your Skype client to celebrate. Set it as your picture and let others know. Also note that Skype 2.0 now supports the PNG image format. Previously, only BMP and JPG were supported, and they continue to be.

WeeMees are characters that represent you. They can share your passion for extreme sports, cutting-edge technology, punk hairstyles or exotic pets or whatever else you do or are. Get your own WeeMee.

Continue reading "What is a WeeMee?" »

What are blogs?

Blogs are a way to share facts, ideas and opinions directly between people. This blog is run by the makers of Skype and our friends, helpers and partners.

We set up the Skype blogs to present our view of the world, business and technology. Not least, making Skype is an incredible journey and the blogs are a humble attempt to document and capture it. We find making Skype both demanding and fun — it used to be so in the beginning and continues to be.

We see skype.com and the blogs to be complementary to each other. On skype.com, you can find our product and service information, as well as the official company profile, jobs info and press releases. In the blog, we hope to capture a bit more dynamics of what goes around them all. It is important for us to know what the world thinks of Skype and we hope to contribute back to the discussion with the blogs.

There are many different category areas here, which you can browse by using the links in the “Categories” section in the righthand menu.

For in-depth info about what are blogs and blogging, see the Wikipedia entry.

Continue reading "What are blogs and RSS?" »

This morning we released Skype 1.4 beta for Mac OS X. The new version contains some new functions, like Call forwarding, Mood messages and now iTunes pause automatically when you receive a call on Skype. There are also loads of tweaks like new sounds, new sign-in screen and some other UI updates. Hope you like it. No video yet for Mac OS X, but we’re working on it.

You’ve been asking for it, and the whole team has been working for it for over a year.

Skype 2.0 (BETA). Now with free video calling.

Get it here.

If you don’t want to break your computer with the beta, you could wait for the non-beta release of Skype 2.0, which is not too far away.

Continue reading "Skype 2.0 beta - free video calling" »