January 2006

SkypeIn numbers are now available in Brazil. To get a SkypeIn Brazil number, just go to our web store and pick a number. We are offering SkypeIn in Brazil together with our partner Transit Telecom.

I’m here in California with a bunch of people, doing God knows what. But among other things, shooting this nice gentleman with a camera.

I won’t tell you why we’re doing that — this is just a little teaser for something new to come. Stay tuned, and you will soon find out more.

Today, we announced that we’re going to have Warner Music Group content in our Personalize Skype. Nothing there yet, but check back soon. Reportedly, Madonna is going to be the first featured artist.

Other coverage of this: WSJ (subscription), Red Herring, CNet News, Reuters, silicon.com.

Niklas Zennström & co are on webcast RIGHT NOW. Bill Gates and other interesting people are also there. Check it out. If you miss(ed) it, they say a podcast will be available.

Update: the podcast is here.

See the USRobotics speakerphone in New York Times. Looks like an UFO but is actually a full duplex speakerphone. There’s a blip on Engadget and on many other sites as well..

Updated: product info now available on the USRobotics website.

We just launched a client with Chinagate. Chinagate, also known as wenxuecity.com is a Chinese ex-pat portal, offering services to people who are mostly originally from China but now live elsewhere — they say their users reside in over 95 countries. So obviously, most of their services are also in Chinese and unless you can read Chinese, you may not understand too much. But if you’re a Chinagate user, just head over to skype.chinagate.com and download your Chinagate-Skype right away.

We know Skype keeps many relations going between family members in separate countries, and that includes many people in China. Living in different countries may be difficult and we’re happy to contribute our humble part to make that a bit easier, by letting people keep in touch.

Do you remember the German e-plus announcement from last November? We just did the same with 3. 3 is a 3G operator in Sweden and Denmark. (And has a cool name — it’s hard to come up with anything cooler and shorter than “3”, eh?) Check out the offering.

So in a nutshell, you pay around 21 € a month and get a 3G data card and 1 GB worth of mobile broadband for all your Skype needs and other stuff you do online. Available in Sweden and Denmark.

Today, Jan 23 2006, was the first time when more than 5 million users in Skype were simultaneously online.

We got from 4 to 5 million in about 3 months. There’s 5.066 million on that picture — some people reported seeing as much as 5.072.

5 million people is:

• more than 3 times the number of people in Estonia
• about 13 times the people living in Tallinn where we are building Skype
• about a third of greater London area
• a quarter of New York metropolitan area
• 1/260th the population of China

5 million people together weigh about 350 thousand tons. It would take about 11 thousand Boeing 747 planes to carry them all in the passenger cabin, or just a bit over 1000 if you stacked everyone in the cargo section, where it probably wouldn’t be too comfortable this way. (There was some nonsense here before where I mixed tons and kilograms.)

At any given moment, there are tens of thousands of free Skype-to-Skype calls that some of those 5 million people are engaged in. Put in the same room, that would be pretty loud. And if all those calls were paid, that would be a pretty big chunk of cash every second that now doesn’t get spent. So please do us a favour — take the cash that we’ve saved you, and go buy yourself some chocolate or whatever goodie you’re up for, to help us celebrate today’s 5 million.

brandchannel.com survey identifies Skype as #3 global brand in 2005. Holy cow. Apparently it was a survey that was running on their site for a past few months of the previous year. There’s a significant comment about the methodology:

Year after year brandchannel voters identify brands that the mainstream world eventually catches up with; impact is felt first by these early adopters.

When you dig in, though, you see Skype being present only in Europe and Africa — it’s missing from the results other continents, most notably America. Apparently the European impact is so significant that we deserve to be on the global list. For 2006, this means lots of work to do to catch up elsewhere.

Skype 2.0.0.73 for Windows is now out. Get it here.

The detailed list of changes is in the change log. Most fixes are minor, but one deserves attention — the DEP crashing fix.

A story has been going round on this (the original that started it). We know this bug affected increasingly large number of users, and we’re relieved we got it fixed now.

Continue reading "Skype 2.0.0.73 for Windows: DEP crashing fix" »

Do you ever think there was an easier way to pay for for Skype Credit, SkypeIn and all those things? There is now — with PayPal. When you go to pay with PayPal, you can now go for “PayPal Preapproved” which means that the next time you need to make a purchase, it’s only a few clicks away and you don’t have to go through the whole process of selecting your address and all that.

If you haven’t yet tried PayPal, why not do so? It’s one of the easiest, safest and most convenient way to pay Skype.

There’s quite a bunch of videos in Google Video about Skype. We have no idea who, when, how or why put them there. But then again does it really matter? Some of them are actually funny. We like funny. Funny is better than boring. The image below is from this one, apparently from just a few days ago. See also the TechTV one from last September.

NETGEAR has put up a page where you can find out more about their upcoming Skype WiFi phone, and can sign up for e-mail updates to be the first to know when it becomes available.

Here’s a cool Sony gadget. A phone that looks like a mouse. Or the other way. Whatever. Anyway, it works like a normal USB mouse, except that if a call comes in over Skype, you can flip it open and it suddenly becomes a USB phone. You use the mouse scrollwheel to adjust volume. And when you’re done talking, flip it shut and it’s a mouse again.

image from digital-lifestyles.info

Update: Another similar product.

The Skype virus is spreading in the Nordic region. A news team documented it. You can download the results (60 MB).

Download the movie.

Estonian people are very creative. We invented Skype. It apparently doesn’t stop there. Now we have other Estonian people inventing all sorts of weird uses for it, and not only inventing it but documenting it as well.

Here’s one about dog monitoring. (We’ve heard other people use it in a similar way for babies as well.)

Skype is great. We had to go to some people we know to say hi to their newborn, but as our little puppy had never been at home on its own yet, we were concerned about how it takes being alone.
Skype came to rescue. We called our hosts from home before leaving and left the line open. Later, we checked if the puppy is quiet or still making noise. The system worked great. We’ll have a separate Skype Name for the puppy.

See also Skype dog pictures.

Or how about some Skype-powered cooking.

I must say today was the first time where I found some real use for Skype. It was aobut 11 pm and hunger kicked in. I can’t cook myself so I took the computer to the kitchen, connected a mic, opened Skype and called my resident cooking expert.
As my knowledge of cooking is nonexistent, this turned out as a very interesting conversation.

Him: Take a pan.
Me: Eee.. wait I’m asking where it is
Him: Now break an egg onto it.
Me: Seriously? A real egg? Uncooked?
Him: Yes. A real, uncooked egg. Onto the pan.
Me: OK, I’m doing it…
Him: Did you do it?
Me: Damn… I need to find something to clean this up with.
etc…

Well eventually I still got my food done and consumed. It was pretty good and I must say I was quite proud of myself.

Here’s a funny little video about how posting in forums, for example Skype forums, should work and how you should think of it.

Don’t watch this if you don’t have a sense of humour or want only “politically correct” stuff. It has dirty words and violence, but it’s for a greater good of the whole humanity ;) While it is mainly aimed at forum users, it applies also to commenting on blogs such as here on Skype blogs.

This was originally made for Steam forums. Steam is a system where you don’t need to go to store to buy boxed games, you can just download them to your computer for free or for a fee, depending on the publisher, and then play with other people online. So all the power to Steam and thanks to the author of this video, whoever and wherever you are — I couldn’t find proper credits so I hope it’s fine to repost and host it this way.

We are now working with openBC. (See below for a giveaway to celebrate the occasion.) They are an online networking platform for professional and secure contact management. Read what openBC says about this in their blog. As they also say there, they initially had plans to make their own communications client, but now Skype has worked out to be a better solution for them.

OpenBC actually had the Skype profile integrated already a while ago. If you sign up for their site, you can set who sees and can interact with your Skype Name. So if you find someone interesting to add to your OpenBC network. you can talk to them on Skype straight away.

Hey, here’s a giveaway. They offer one month’s worth of free premium membership to anyone who signs up through share.skype.com. Just go to this link: http://www.openbc.com/premium-skype05 and sign up. After the free trial you can either opt to become a paying member or you can stay a free member. Thanks, OpenBC.

Nuvvo Learning Management System now has Skype support. Nuvvo is a system that lets you set up your own courses to students with all the learning materials, evaluations/exams and all that. You can have free courses or even accept payments, all built into the system. See the 9-minute screencastfor more info. And now, as they say…

Live calls now join blogs, messages, and the Nuvvo Community to make Nuvvo the most accessible LMS out there. We’re grateful to Dick Schiferli (the developer of the very exciting Pamela) and Joao Brogueira for their guidance and help in making this happen.

Skype for Windows 2.0 official version is out now. Get it and start making video calls.

Key new stuff in here:

• Video (obviously!). Free one-to-one video calls.
• Contact grouping. Finally here for heavy users.
• Mood messages.

Continue reading "Skype for Windows 2.0 with video out now" »

This just in from Pamela Systems. Pamela Systems and Netralia Pty. Ltd agree strategic partnership. Pamela Systems is making, well, Pamela, and Netralia authors the Skylook add-on. A good example of growth by cooperation and different opportunities that the Skype ecosystem provides for developers. It will be interesting to observe what Pamela and Skylook will come up with, so we can only wait and see.

Title inspired by Panasonic’s cordless phone review at Endgadget.

Image from endgadget.com

We’re happy to power many grassroots and alternative media. Many podcasters and radio stations use Skype. Here’s another one: a group of enterprising students at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, USA, are using Skype to run their War News Radio. They are calling people in Iraq up and broadcasting the discussions at their site at warnewsradio.org. As they say in New Yorker:

“We thought we were at a disadvantage not being on the ground in Iraq,” Eva Barboni, a junior poli-sci major, said. “But when you hear from reporters there that they can’t even leave their hotels you start to think.” The sound quality afforded by Skype, it turns out, is often better than what can be achieved over the weak landlines in the Green Zone.

We’re proud to empower the global discussions and help grassroots initiatives like this one.

We’re present at the 2006 International CES at Las Vegas. Find us in the eBay booth.

We’re announcing a bunch of new products:

• D-Link Skype USB phone adapter (DPH-50U), that connects your regular phones to Skype on your computer. You can receive or make both traditional telephone and Skype calls from the same phone
• two new IPEVO devices — FLY.1 is a USB cordless handset with a speakerphone; and Xing USB speakerphone, “the first device from IPEVO designed for business teleconferencing using Skype”. Both are PC and Mac compatible.
• KODAK Photo Voice, the first Skype certified online photo sharing experience
• Panasonic – a cordless telephone product that interfaces with Skype
• VTech USB7100 Phone

plus…

• Creative Skype Internet PhonePLUS — a standalone phone that enables anyone to make free Skype calls over the Internet without a PC connection. That’s right. A standalone Skype phone that plugs in to your router.
• NETGEAR’s Skype WiFi phone

This is what the IPEVO FLY.1 looks like:

Here’s the Creative Skype Internet PhonePLUS photo. Click for larger view. Thanks to TMCnet.

And last but not least, here’s the NETGEAR phone. Again from Endgadget.

Some of the products are available immediately, such as KODAK Photo Voice. Some will be available in a while and we then announce it here. Check the press releases for details. See also the CES press materials about Skype.

I didn’t know we have retail presence in Hungary, but apparently we do. Here’s a Phoneskype SK-04 device being sold at a retail location in Hungary. And it’s not made of gold — the price figure is just because Hungary has a currency with a funny conversion rate. It’s the equivalent of about 60 €. Thanks to Csongor for this.

Hi, and a happy new year to all who survived through the parties.

We start off with good news: in December, we announced that we’re changing SkypeOut prices. The changes were implemented today just now. Prices to several popular destinations lowered, some increases too. See the full details.

For quite a while now, someone called pigletmono has been tagging some of his photos with “skype”. While all nice girls, the connection to Skype wasn’t obvious, so I asked what’s up with that. He said:

people I’ve met through skype. simple