April 2006

What do you do when the user count of your creation hits 100 million? Celebrate, obviously.

So we had this little picnic.

Continue reading "The 100 million picnic" »

Skype hit 100 million registered Skype Names a few hours ago. 1:12 PM GMT to be precise. That’s pretty remarkable — as far as we know, no Internet programs have hit that mark in two and a half years since their birth before. Skype continues to be the fastest-growing Internet program.

Here’s a My Picture you can use in Skype to celebrate.

We took a look at Skype Names. Here’s how the whole 100M names are distributed across name lengths. No surprise here, a pretty average long-tail normal distribution curve. 10-character Skype Names are the most popular.

(What’s with the less-than-6-character Skype Names? No, you can’t get one through the regular methods. Yes, there are a few out there. We can manually add them. We’ve been thinking it would be fun to run “short Skype Name” auctions on eBay so you could buy a name like “john”, “jill” and then hold on to it forever. Would you buy one?)

More stats. The total number of characters in all Skype Names combined is 1,034,643,723. That’s roughly equal to 1 GB of data. Meaning that if you wanted to just write all the Skype Names in a file, you would need 1 GB of disk space.

Let’s put this another way. Suppose we wanted to print a phonebook with all Skype Names in it, to help our callers. According to this source, a phonebook page has about 18,000 characters. So the Skype phone book would have to be more than 57,000 pages thick. Fortunately, we don’t need to print that — we have put it right in Skype itself. Just click the “Search” button in Skype and find whoever you want without going through all those pages.

And here’s a lousy screen capture of the moment when 100 million actually happened on skype.com earlier today :-)

You may have seen the announcement yesterday that Skype has signed licensing agreements with major music publishing companies such as EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Warner/Chappell Music, as well as from the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents authors and publishers in Britain.

So what does this mean to partners? Well it is not, as some people have speculated, that we are trying to take on iTunes. No, we signed these agreements so we can distribute ringtones from our personalise skype store

Personalise Skype allows people to make Skype their own by purchasing ringtones and pictures to show the world who they are. Of course with 100 million users not everyone likes the same pictures or sounds and this is where you come in. We’re constantly refreshing and adding to the selection to make it more compelling for all Skype users and to help people to find exactly what they’re looking for.

If you are interested in offering pictures and ringtones to the Skype community, please see the partner enquiry page for more information about the program.

SkypeIn is now available in Australia. Get it.

I asked an Aussie colleague what’s a good saying… he said “Not sure it is relevant, but my favourite aussie saying is “Don’t come the raw prawn with me mate!” which roughly means don’t try to bullshit me”. More Aussie slang here.

Well, no raw prawn or rip-offs here… just head over to the My Account area and get yourself some fresh Australian SkypeIn while stock lasts. Costs the same as other countries — 10 € for 3 months, or 30 € for the whole year. In Australian dollars, that’s $ 16 and $ 50. Just a reminder — you can switch your currency to Australian dollars or any other of the 14 currencies we support.

Last night, Skype announced license agreements with major music publishing companies that allow us to distribute music from Warner Music Group as Skype ringtones. From certain countries (currently, that includes the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Poland), you can already download a Madonna ringtone. All other countries will follow some time in May. So if you’re from one of those countries, this is what you see in our Personalize Skype Store.

Now… some people have speculated that this will mean that Skype will take over iTunes, or that this is the new definitive platform for user-to-user music distribution, or all sorts of other crazy fun wild stuff. Let’s be clear that we’re only talking about downloading licensed music from content providers as Skype ringtones here. Nothing more, nothing less. While we welcome the discussion and can also ourselves come up with all sorts of cool ideas about how to grow and extend the content platform, these are definitely not in our short- or mid-term plans. (And long-term plans are too vague to speculate about anyway.)

So, go get that Madonna ringtone.

Too bad I missed it. But I can indeed some Skype people there. More pictures here. Reminds me of the SkypeIn party in Brazil. (Photo link from OpenBC.)

Good story in BusinessWeek about how to design stuff properly. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. This is how it started and got off the ground, and this is how we continue — gradual learnings bring greatness. You never get it right the first time anyway.

Pretend for a moment that you’re a founder of Skype just beginning to design their VoIP system. Should users pay in the form of a one-time transaction, an ongoing subscription, advertising, or not at all? What would the Skype experience have been, for example, if its creators had decided to charge up front for access? How would you know? Rather than placing a big bet and swinging for the fence, proceed as design thinkers do, which is to create something quick and cheap, show it to real people, and roll the learning back into the venture.

Something tells me we’re going to have a new SkypeIn country this week. Anyone want to guess what country is that?

We’re preparing celebrations today as we’re nearing 100 million registered Skype Names. That’s quite a massive amount of people you can call for free. (More than there are people in most countries of the world, actually.)

A warm “thank you” goes from everybody at Skype to each and every one of those 100 million Skype users for helping us all get here. We could not have done without you. Thanks. Let’s rock on.

To celebrate, we’ll be giving away 100 SkypeOut minutes to 100 lucky users who are online when we hit this important milestone. We’re counting down to the important moment on Skype.com right now. Plus you can help us to reach this landmark by getting your friends to join the 100+ million Skype community.

Plazes has Skype support now. Plazes, in their own words, “puts physical presence to the web”. They have showing people on Google Maps and whole bunch of other cool stuff. You can consume the data through their API-s. And now they do Skype and mood messages too.

Let the Plazer set your mood text, your profile’s location or send chat messages on outgoing calls to tell people where you are.

Currently for Windows only, but the comments say Mac version is upcoming too.

The first time someone showed this to me, I thought, wow this is a really neat Skype starter kit. And someone has played a practical joke and put a T-Mobile T-Community sticker on it.

Well… turns out it actually IS a T-Community starter kit :-). They call it a “Chat-Set, bestehend aus Mikrofon und Kopfhörer”. Cool. And it looks totally like Skype starter kit. Maybe it’s just that all the Skype people have seen too many Skype starter kits around and none of others, and it’s not like a rocket-science design and packaging to come up with. So good luck to T and their community.

That reminds me of how I was sitting in a meeting somewhere in the spring of 2004 with a bunch of people. We were discussing what to call a new offering. Would it be Skype Plus? Premium? Extra? Something? And then someone said, “I had this talk with someone and they suggested to call it… SkypeOut and SkypeIn”. Everyone immediately thought this was a killer idea and thus it stuck. And apparently it’s not only us who thinks the idea was great — we got all sorts of In-s and Out-s all over the place now. I guess that comes with the ups, downs, lefts and rights of marketing and branding.

reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us.

Skype’s creative director Malthe was at last year’s reboot. Perhaps him or some other Skype folks will also be there this year. Malthe recently posted his slides from last year. Together with the notes, they provide almost a blog-esque retrospective of where Skype was about a year ago. A lot has changed since then, but some things, like our core values and principles remain unchanged. Malthe’s slides are a distillation of those and worth reiterating here.

Today’s Financial Times posted a story about how Skype’s partner TOM Online is filtering text messages in China.

Skype has a joint venture with TOM Online. As part of that venture, we provide a co-branded version of Skype called TOM-Skype, which is the version of Skype that is available in mainland China.

As part of the joint venture, TOM provides guidance to Skype about how to co-operate with local laws and regulations in China. In every country we operate in, we always work with local authorities to follow local laws and best practice.

TOM operates a text filter in TOM-Skype. The filter operates solely on text chats. The filter has a list of words which will not be displayed in Skype chats.

The text filter operates on the chat message content before it is encrypted for transmission, or after it has been decrypted on the receiver side. If the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.

It is important to underline:

• The text filter does not affect in any way the security and encryption mechanisms of Skype.
• Full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people’s privacy.
• Calls, chats and all other forms of communication on Skype continue to be encrypted and secure.
• There is absolutely no filtering on voice communications.

Dave Cormier and his partner Bonnie are expecting a child within the next month, just in time for Mother’s Day. Earlier in her pregnancy, Bonnie needed to be on bed rest in a hospital four hours away from where Dave was—luckily, with Skype, they managed to stay in constant contact with each other. Since Dave himself has a background in webcasting using Skype, Bonnie has decided to launch an exciting new venture. It’s called Crib Chronicles, and the inaugural Skype-enabled webcast is—drumroll please—tonight, at 7pm EST. She’ll be talking about the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and new motherhood, as well as offering handy tips for expecting mothers. Curious listeners can participate in the Q&A portion via Skype, of course, so head on over to CRIB CHRONICLES to show your Skype love and support!

I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself to the Skype blog readership. My name is Scott Indrisek, and I handle public relations and user outreach for Skype in the United States. What does this mean, exactly? It means that I get to talk to a fantastic variety of Skypers on a daily basis, from tech-savvy soldiers stationed in Iraq to long distance lovebirds who stay connected from coast to coast. Along with Jaanus, I’ll be posting some of the most intriguing stories as I come across them, as well as keeping everyone updated on what the Skype team in the Big Apple is up to. In the meantime, if you’ve got a unique Skype story you’re eager to tell, I’d love to hear from you. I’m excited to be able to share the creative and inspiring ways that our users have been staying connected!

With Mother’s Day approaching, Skype is eager to hear from moms who have been using the service to keep in touch with their loved ones, grandmothers who Skype with the grandkids, and children who are Skyping with their moms. Are you a businesswoman on the road who Skypes to her children back home? A mother who has used Skype with webcam to show off your brand new baby to distant relatives? Whatever the case may be, we know that Skype has been helping mothers, sons, and daughters maintain vital emotional connections regardless of where they live. Now’s your chance to share how Skype has made it happen for you.

If you have a story to share about this, please contact Scott Indrisek (Skype Name “indrisek” or e-mail: scott.indrisek@skype.net) and use “Skype Your Mom” as the subject.

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Here’s what someone asked me.

Hello… I am not sure how to find my Skype In Number - I have lost it some how can you or someone give me direction?

Fortunately, this is an easy one — just go to My Account at www.skype.com/go/myaccount, where you will see your SkypeIn number loud and clear. A little bird tells me that next versions of Skype Client will also display this inline right on your desktop, so there won’t be a need to log on to see it. But for now, My Account helps you with everything regarding SkypeIn.

Skype just announced that we acquired Sonorit Holding AS and its US subsidiary Camino Networks, Inc., a provider of voice technology for the Internet.

Skype products consist of many components to ensure the best possible user experience. Many of them we build in-house, others we license. Sometimes an acquisition makes the most sense. So this is just another component in the mix of great products and technologies that Skype is built upon.

March 30 edition of leading German weekly “Die Zeit” is mentioning “Skype” as one of the expressions that will make it into general vocabulary as the synonym for internet telephony. Here’s the synopsis.

The article reports about the work of scientist Lothar Lemnitzer at the University of Tuebingen in the field of computer-aided linguistics, who is observing the change and growth of language. At the website www.wortwarte.de, Lemnitzer collects all newly created expressions and words. His results show that new things always require new expressions. When it comes to internet telephony, Lemnitzer sees two favourites that will make it into the German language: “Skypen” (for “to talk via skype”) and “Voipen” (for “to talk via VoIP”). These results came by running a special linguistics software that tracks down all online articles of newspapers and magazines on the internet for new expressions.

Cool stuff. Although if you’re running a business, there are actually some reasons to control and limit the use of your brand name or trademark in people’s speech, crazy as it sounds. So it’s a balancing act. But whether we like it or not, people are talking about “skyping” all over the place and we can only rejoice about that. While we’re at it, why not add some Skype buttons to places where you haven’t yet added them ;)

The only question is, is there really such a verb as “to voip”? In German apparently there is, but in English? I can certainly see people going “Skype me up”… “let’s Skype later”… sure. But “I will voip you tomorrow”? “she voiped me the other day and then I voiped back and it was all one big happy voiping”??? Ummmmm… no.

We’d love to hear from bilingual or Spanish-speaking Skypers in NYC, Miami, and beyond who are using Skype to keep in touch with friends and family in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rica, and Central or South America. If that’s you and you don’t mind sharing some info about yourself with us, then please drop an email to scott.indrisek@skype.net for further instructions. This is about Skype Stories.

The folks at Skylook are happy to announce that Skylook is now at version 1.5, a major update of Skylook. See what’s new there.

In short, Skylook is a feature-rich Outlook add-on for Skype that has not only contacts integration, but also rich voicemail and messaging capabilities.

Skylook is offering a discount for Skype Blogs readers. Just enter the coupon code SKYPEBLOGS2006 when buying any Skylook license, and you’ll have 10% off the price. This offer is valid until the end of May 2006.

Continue reading "Skylook version 1.5 released, now Skype Certified, discount for Skype Blogs readers" »

Verbdate is a fun new dating service that uses SkypeWeb to let members see if other members are online or not, and thus let people connect to each other instantly. It’s a very “2.0” site, featuring tags, location from Google Maps, Flickr, RSS… go see yourself. Dating on Verbdate is safe, as you don’t have to give out your private info when talking to others. David Weinberger said if Verbdate were anymore web 2.0 you would only be able to date Tim O’Reilly ;) They say a mobile client is coming too.