March 2006

More info on skype.com. If you’re currently in Korea, click on the Gift Day banner to learn more.

We like talking with you guys in the blog format. It’s been a fun ride for all involved. So we bring you the fresh shiny new Skype for Mac blog where we’ll collect anything you may want to know (and we feel like publishing) about Skype, Macs and how the two play together. Feel free to post your questions, comments or trackbacks there about anything that has to do with Mac.

This is Nils, by the way. He’s the Mac product manager running the blog. For those not so familiar with Macs, he’s not really as hot as this picture depicts, sorry :-) There’s just this software Photo Booth on Macs that you can use to mess around with your photo.

We are very passionate about the benefits of Skype, and we love it when our partners are equally passionate. Here is a great example of how one of our hardware partners is really using Skype to the benefit of their customers. US Robotics have recently released an impressive range of Skype Certified hardware including the (ATA Analog Phone Adapter and this UFO looking speaker phone But as well as releasing innovative Skype Certified hardware they have also incorporated Skype in to their website to offer their customers the ability to call customer support for free using Skype directly from their main Customer Support Page

Thanks to Bill Campbell at Skype Journal for pointing this out.

So if you are looking to partner with Skype. First start by implementing Skype in to your current business practices. Use Skype for support calls if you want to offer that to your customers, but more importantly make sure you are using it internally or offering it as another contact option on your website. I know when I am looking at a list of companies or providers, I always go for the one with the Skype Me option. And I am sure other Skype users feel the same.

On March 27 2006, more than 6 million people were simultaneously online in Skype.

With the jump from 5 million to 6M in just 63 days, this is our “fastest million” ever.

Right in the shoes of the Hulger retro P*PHONE, here’s another retro handset — Retro Skype Handset from Digital Cowboy. Will we soon have a special “Skype operator” service where you can dial the operator lady to connect your call, instead of using your contact list yourself? This is how it used to be in the early days in the telephone and retro seems hot.

Our friends at PCHome Online launched Skype for Mac OS X in Taiwan a few weeks ago. Here are some pictures of the event.

In connection with the launch, they published the extremely cute story of Eunice and Miki. They are a boy from Taiwan and a girl from Korea who use Skype to communicate with each other. Among other things, it got them married. And you can see the whole thing as a video. Don’t be scared by the Chinese text on that page — just look for the Play button of the Media Player control. Most of the text in the video is actually in English. Some innovative ideas there too, such as hang your laptop on the wall in the kitchen and use it as a cooking assistant (talking to your mom).

We’ve always thought that Skype and dating would go together well, and we know many stories of people that have met by using “Skype Me”. Our friends at Lavalife, with our blessing, have been cooking up a neat way for Skype users to meet each other. It’s called Lavalife World Chat, and it’s available now as a beta.

The idea is this — you call in and record a short profile about yourself. You then listen to other people’s profiles and send them voice messages. Three times per day, they open the Lavalife World Chat room which is a virtual voice lounge where you can go and send instant voice messages to other people that are online. You can even speak to someone directly. And you can do all of this anonymously, without revealing your Skype Name to anyone, so that your safety and security are protected.

As all you Skype users know, voice is a rich way to communicate with each other, much richer than, say, e-mail or Instant Messaging/chat. Someone’s voice says a huge amount about who they are. You can get great clues about someone just by listening to them. This is especially useful if you are looking to meet other single Skypers. And on Skype and Lavalife, the voice is even clearer than on regular phone calls (even though it looks a bit like a phone number, you actually can’t call it from the regular phone network, as the Voice Services — and Lavalife is one of our many Voice Services — are only available on Skype).

So, dial up +9907LAVALIFE on Skype and give it a try. The service is free while it’s in beta. And it’s available to callers 18 years of age or older.

The folks at Skylook let me know that they’ve released a major Skylook update, bringing it to version 1.5. See what’s new in Skylook 1.5 — with screenshots. Skylook is an Outlook plugin for Skype that can not only connect the contacts of the two apps, but do a whole lot of other fancy stuff such as record your calls.

I’ve got a lot of questions like this recently to all imaginable and unimaginable addresses. As has the whole of our team and support and any other channels.

Jaanus, can you give me ANY information on video in Skype for OS-X. I’m using both platforms for various apps and my skype contacts are a mix of both.

Trust us guys, we don’t have the Mac OS X video version hidden in some secret lair from where we could take it and just publish, but we don’t as we’re evil ;) Getting it to work takes effort and we’re going ahead with that at full steam. We know you would be disappointed if it were anything less than perfect, and we do have a lot of hardcore Mac fans in the house at Skype who want to get their hands on it the same way you do. So hang in there and we’ll publish more on this as the happy day of release comes closer.

As it says. Head over to skype.com and click on the Gift Day banner to learn more and get your gift from the My Account area.

Some SkypeOut rates are changing.

Rates decreases and new countries to Global Rate

As of this morning (8 AM GMT to be precise), there are new regions included in the Global Rate, where calling costs just 0.017 €/minute. These are Estonia, Singapore, Singapore (Mobile), Republic of Korea, Republic of Korea (Mobile). Price to Estonian mobiles also decreased a bit.

Rates increases

SkypeOut rates to some regions (Ecuador, Palestine Authority, Zimbabwe) will increase slightly on 8 AM GMT, April 21. (We give 30 days advance notice of all the increases.)

See the announcement for all the details.

Skype affiliates earn commission by promoting SkypeOut, SkypeIn, SkypeVoicemail and hardware on their websites. They do this by using special links and banners provided by us.

It is the quickest way to establish a relationship with Skype, and it’s free to do. The Skype affiliate programme is available in almost every country in the world. All you need to do is check out http://www.skype.com/partners/affiliate/ where you will find instructions on how to get started.

Owen

Skype will not be exhibiting at this event, but some members from the mobile team will be attending and trying to squeeze in as many meetings as possible. If your company is attending the event and would like to meet up with someone from Skype, please let me know here, or email partnermarketing@skype.net

I have spoken to the mobile team and they would be particularly interested in meeting up with anyone who has innovative ideas on partnering with Skype. This is a big year for us in mobile and we will need all hands on deck. We do not plan to go it alone and are always on the lookout for good partners to help us move in to this space. So if you think you have something to offer, then drop us an email with your ideas. The CTIA show could be a good place to meet up and discuss further.

More information on the event is available at www.ctiawireless.com

We have now not two or three, but FIVE video stories available from people who have shared their Skype story with us. Check out our updated stories site where you can find “High flight”, “Bridging the generation gap”, “Music to my mouth”, “Separated by Katrina” and “From little things big things grow”. Plus of course all the others — just use the links on the stories site to move around.

Oh and they’re on Google Video too. So you can embed it on your site. And we can embed them here like this.

Or if this one was too rough for you, here’s Giulio and Gavin — our first video story.

Check it out on Google Video and download it to your iPod, PSP or send to other people. (You can find the other ones on Google Video when you click “More from this user” on the right.)

Here’s a guide for running Skype from your iPod. Not in standalone mode (yet?), sorry — you just use iPod to carry around the Skype and all its settings and history and plug it in to any computer to run. Works with Windows. We tried, the instructions work indeed. Cool.

Saint Patrick lived in the years 386-493 and is the patron saint of Ireland. March 17 celebrates Saint Patrick and is a national holiday in Ireland. See Wikipedia for more about the day and about Saint Patrick.

Skype is celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day by offering SkypeOut calls to regular home and office phones in Ireland at half price. When you call a landline in Ireland on March 17 between 00:00 and 23:59 GMT (or simply put, for the whole day), the call is charged at $0.01 or £ 0.006 or € 0.008 (depending on your currency) which is half the regular Global Rate of €0.017. Happy calling.

ThinkGeek is one of the wackoest and coolest stores on the internet. Now they are selling Skype stuff. And Skype is right next to the Blue LED Faucet, levitating desktop clock, Uglydolls and tons of other weirdnesses. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad? Must be good — we like to think of us as a bit twisted. So being on ThinkGeek is cool.

Introducing the Meeting room PRO. No whiteboards. No beamer. No boardroom or desk. No coffee. Just folks, the corridor and beanbags. Helps you get stuff done and discussed quickly as otherwise you’d ache from being in an uncomfortable position for too long :-)

(Or perhaps we were just out of proper meeting rooms.)

As the title says. If you’re in those countries, head over to skype.com and click the banner to learn more.

As it says. More details in the forum. Download. Here are the highlights. “Web as a phone book” rocks :)

The most important feature is they try to turn the entire web into a big phone book - every phone number found on a web page can be called.

Phone number recognition is not perfect (it never will be) but it is as close as we can get it. If you find a page where we don’t properly recognize the number please post a link and (even better) a suggestion as to a rule that would eliminate those numbers. Such a rule could be: “Swedish number almost always have one of more dividing characters(.- /). If a digit sequence is found on a Swedish page that is written without such, it most likely is not a phone number” or “Cambodian numbers always have 8 digits”. We know those two and a few thousand more - but I am sure there are such rules we don’t know! So if you find an error — please let us know.

A few weeks ago, we quietly put up something that is a helpful resource to all current and future Skype staff — the new jobs.skype.com. We have brushed up the insider view section and added a blog, plus added the vacancy keywords. The feed contains the blog entries as well as new Insider’s View posts and of course new vacancies. So if you want to see what’s hot at Skype, even if you’re not up for joining right away, the feed is handy to keep track of what’s happening in Skype’s career-land.

Read more in Riina’s welcome post. Oh, and be sure to check out the movie clips. (There were some problems up to now for some people who were using something older than Flash 8, but it should all be fine now and they work on Flash 7 too.) We’ve published photos of Skype’s life here and there, but I think this is the first time we publish actual footage. Check it out to see what our days look like. There’s currently only a Tallinn office clip, but others are upcoming.

Shopping for a job at Skype used to be a very dull and boring experience — very much unlike how the actual work at Skype is. We’re happy this is no longer the case, as we tried to make a site which captures at least some of the fun and energy that’s flying around here.

Continue reading "The new jobs site" »

At this week’s CeBIT conference, we announced the new Skype for Business offering. You can read the Press Release here.

The story was picked up by several key titles, here are two of the bigger ones:

• LA Times
• Business Week

So what does this mean to partners?

Well this signifies a significant strategic move from Skype to target the micro-businesses with 1-10 employees. As the release and related articles explain, we know that a lot of our existing users are already using Skype for their business. We are hoping that by having a unique web page and highlighting the relevant features and hardware that apply to small businesses, we will be able to further grow this usage of Skype amongst small businesses.

So if you have products or services that cater to that market, then this will be an opportunity to work with us to better cater for the small business sector.

You can read more about Skype for Business and see how other partners are using it at www.skype.biz

We just released Skype for Business. It was sort of available already before, as Skype Groups that is now the Skype control panel.

However, there’s much more than controlling the credit allocation that you need from Skype when you’re running a business. You might want to learn more about how other businesses are using it. (See the Salesforce story.) You might want to learn about add-on products and services that you could use. There are questions about security and stability. We hope the new Skype for Business homepage will help you to learn about all that. Or just go to skype.biz that takes you to the right place.

See the press release for more info and links to other related services. And what’s a better way to kick off a new service than to have a brand new freshly-baked blog for it :-) Together with the newsletter (subscribe on skype.biz, the Skype for Business team hopes to keep you posted.

The business offering has been received with great interest. See the BusinessWeek and Los Angeles Times for some writeups.

Some Skype partner folks are at CeBIT. See the coverage with pictures and comments in our partner blog.

Hi all,

Well a busy day here yesterday at CeBIT setting up for the week long show. As with any tradeshow it is amazing to see the place 12 hours before opening and to think that it is going to be ready in time. Lots of our partners are here and it’s great to see that despite some stressful moments and late nights for many, the stands have come together very nicely.

Here is the Creative stand yesterday:

And here’s how it had come together this morning. Creative have today announced a great new product, their LiveCam. Which is a high end web cam suitable for conference rooms. As well as acting as a web cam, it also has built in microphones to pick up voice and cancel out background noise. There could be no greater test of this than on a noicy tradeshow floor. They are running live demonstrations at the show.

And here is the little device doing all the work!

That’s all for now - stay tuned for further updates.

SkypeWeb was really acting up over the past few days. It was on and off and didn’t often return any results, breaking many sites, including our own blogs. Sorry about that. All is back to good now in the SkypeWebLand. Here’s an actual e-mail sent out by our site operations/backend team just now. Thanks guys for your hard work in keeping things running.

hi,
now we have found root cause of this problem and solved it. problem was triggered by increase of service usage which showed us a bug in service architecture. now we have solved problem and learned from that.
thnx for the team for not eating and not sleeping for a while.
hope you won’t hear from us on this topic anymore, we go back behind the scenes where we belong :)

Last week’s edition of Foreign Exchange show has a section on Estonia and Skype (starts around the 10th minute). You can also read the transcript online.

The announcement and more details are here. In short — if you are using any Skype for Windows version between 1.4.0.84 and 2.0.0.73, the Central Contacts List feature is disabled for you. The client continues to work normally, but the contact list will not be synchronised with the contact server. So it’s better that you upgrade to the latest version (currently 2.0.0.90) right away. Other platforms are not affected.

We had to make this change because there was a bug in these particular versions which caused the performance of the Central Contact List to be degraded for everyone else. Many users have noted that Central Contact List is not performing reliably at times, and this bug was largely the cause for this. By disabling the Central Contact List for these versions, we make it work better for everyone else.

Today is a SkypeOut Gift Day for UK and US. I happen to be in the UK today myself, so I went ahead and claimed my gift — got it credited to my account pretty much immediately, so everything works fine. And when trying to approach it the second time, this is what it tells you. One gift per day per user.

Here’s a test conducted in Finland about what elderly people think of various Instant Messengers. Skype was apparently liked more than the others. Here are some key points translated by a native speaker (thanks Mikko — Estonian and Finnish languages are equally wacko for the rest of the world ;).

[14:18:56] Mikko says: in a Finnish consumer show where they tested net phone apllications Skype did beat MSN and Yahoo clearly :) 4.2/5 to Skype, 2.8 and 2.2 to MSN and Yahoo respectively
[14:24:34] Mikko says: the idea was that elderly people tried out the programs for a week.
[14:26:42] Mikko says: so they were far from IT-gurus :) yahoo lost some points as it doesn’t have a Finnish installer. MSN’s sound quality was thought to be worse than Skype/Yahoo. Skype was thought to be the easiest to install. MSN and Yahoo had nicest emoticons which were commented by the elderly users like “well, maybe nice for someone under 10 years” :)
[14:28:42] Mikko says: Skype was thought to be best because of simplicity of use

Fun fact: the Finnish translation of Skype is done by a volunteer who works as an organist in a church.

Today is a SkypeOut Gift Day for all of you in the USA and UK. Gifting is a nice way to end the week. Go see the skype.com front page and click on the Gift Day banner to learn more. For the UK, it already started in the morning, USA will kick in a bit later when morning arrives there :-) (And when you miss the Gift Day, there’s the ongoing offer of getting free SkypeOut minutes and Skype Voicemail when you buy stuff and pay with PayPal.)

If you’re in one of those countries, head over to skype.com and click on the banner to learn more and claim your SkypeOut Gift before midnight today (Thursday).

UPDATE: Oops! We had to end the campaign a bit sooner (several hours before midnight) in Italy, Germany and Denmark. This was again more popular than anticipated and we “ran out of stock” for those countries, so to speak. Sorry. This wasn’t the last Gift Day for these countries this winter/spring, though, so keep watching the news.

Skype.com website has captured the first spot in web usage tracking service Alexa.com's Movers & Shakers list. According to them we have jumped from 233rd overall position to 126th spot (in terms of weekly traffic) in a matter of one week. Everybody involved with our website is pretty happy about it. Especially since we just launched our new navigation theme (check out that super-useful footer) couple of days ago.

Geoffrey Mack from Alexa.com has dedicated a post to Skype's good growth and compared it to Vonage traffic (check out that graph):

Where was I? Oh, yes Skype. Just for flavor, I added vonage on the graph. You can see that Vonage, despite millions spent on television advertising (I can't get that damn hill-billy vonage song out of my head "woo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo") is virtually flat, while skype has more than doubled its user base.

There's more interesting Skype website traffic information over at Alexa's site, just remember that this is not official Skype.com traffic statistics. You can read more about Alexa.com and how it collects its data.