May 2006

Skype and Dell have teamed up to make it easy to stay in touch. Today, Skype announced an agreement with Dell, the world’s largest maker of personal computers, to ship Skype software with new Dell™ XPS™ mobile systems – the XPS M1210 and XPS M2010

Image courtesy of Dell Inc.

The agreement will allow Dell to provide its customers with easy access to Skype’s voice and video Internet calling software. Dell will be able to pre-load Skype on the XPS 2010, a unique mobile entertainment system featuring a 20.1-inch high-definition display with integrated webcam. The XPS 1210 can be configured with Skype as part of an optional audio-video communications package that also includes an integrated rotating webcam, noise-isolation earbuds and mobile broadband capability.

See more info about the launch or visit the product site.

A while ago, we had the Coldplay competition where you could call the band and win a chance to talk to them. The winners were two Estonian university students who had a private 20-minute Skype call with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin on Tuesday night.

The winning entry by 22-year-olds Kaisa Männik and Tiiu Laks, chosen for its originality and character from among 6,000 contestants, passionately highlighted the difference between the way bear sounds are impersonated around the world (“Rawwrrrggghhh!”), and the way it is done in Estonia (“Mõmm-mõmm!”). Although not strictly about the single, I guess it’s still quite relevant to the general subject of “talking”, even though it’s in the animal world. (Kaisa is on the left on the picture below, and Tiiu is on the right.)

Download the winning entry

Continue reading "Coldplay, bears in the forest and two girls" »

A lot of people have been asking me about viewing listings for Skypecasts in their favourite RSS reader (my personal choice is http://www.bloglines.com). This lets you check out what’s coming up on Skypecasts, for topics of interest to you, in a convenient way, alongside your other news feeds or emails.

We have a link on the Skypecasts homepage, which lets you “Subscribe to this page” and receive a feed of Featured Skypecasts. Since Featured Skypecasts are only those from specific partners of Skype, you’ll get more listings if you search the entire directory. There’s some hidden functionality for the slighty more technical users:

Check out this forum post where I’ve documented the our RSS feeds: http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=54365

Web 2.0 ahoy!

So they say. Not many of us read Polish, so thanks for our people on the ground for the update. They say Wałęsa uses Skype several hours every day and his Skype Name is lwprezydent2006.

Lech Wałęsa started the liberation of Poland and Eastern Europe in 1980 by co-founding Solidarity (Solidarność), the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union. He has no less than eight children.

Check out this great example of a co-branded microsite by one of our hardware partners Motorola. As well as creating an innovative and attractive piece of Skype Certified hardware, the Mortorola H500 Bundle Wireless Internet Calling Kit, they have also done a great job with this interactive website.

There are six different user stories included and visitors can interact with the website as they scroll through. If you’re having a slow day at work, then I suggest you visit Pete’s page to have a cheeky game of space invaders. Or perhaps you fancy some virtual sushi? If so, you might prefer to visit Natasha.

Well I’ve just returned from eBay Live in Dusseldorf – a two day show dedicated to all things eBay. And of course as the newest member of the eBay family, Skype was present for the first time. We had a stand in the exhibition hall, which looked something like this.

Several of our hardware partners were represented on the stand and there was plenty of interest from attendees in some of the cool new devices not yet seen in Europe such as the Ipevo speaker phone, the Polycom Communicator, the Netgear Wifi phone and the Sony Vaio mouse phone which attracted plenty of attention. Thanks to all our hardware partners for providing this equipment which helped us once again demonstrate the breadth of the Skype eco-system and some of the opportunities that exist for powersellers to start selling Skype certified hardware on eBay.

On the stand we were demoing the latest version of Skype, and introducing powersellers to the benefits of the product. Many eBay sellers are already starting to include Skype Me buttons on their eBay homepages and integrating it in to the way they communicate with their customers.

With the tradeshow running from 8am to 7pm, it was a very tiring experience, but a successful show was had by all. We now move on to Las Vegas for eBay Live US on June 13-15.

TypePad has put up this great offer for all you Skypers. Just click on the image below and get to the TypePad page where you can get 30 days free trial and 10% lifetime discount as a Skype user on TypePad. A great way to host your blog and talk about your Skypecasts or anything else you see fit.

Blogs are yummy. Why not go get yours from TypePad while stock lasts :-)

For UK residents, especially those who like voyeurism, you might like to join srobesky’s Big Brother Skypecast tonight:

Join in this discussion while we watch Big Brother UK live. Make fun of all the housemates while you watch it live! Website: http://www.channel4.com/bigbrother/

Will Mikey and Grace take things one step further?

Skypecasts now have their own blog. We’ll also post the most important Skypecasts news here on the main English blog, but the Skypecasts blog is where you can track the daily buzz. So if you’re into Skypecasts, head right over and subscribe.

Hello, welcome to the shiny new Skypecasts product blog. Skypecasts is a new way to a new way to have conversations with people across the world who share your interests.

As many of you know, we launched Skypecasts to the world as a “preview” product a few weeks ago. You can see the official announcement and a short description of Skypecasts over in the main Skype Beta blog.

In the last few weeks, we’ve been gathering some great feedback from users and partners, including several keen Skypecasters who also work at Skype. You can join the lively product discussion in the Skypecasts forum. We’ve also been making many improvements behind the scenes, which we’ll be releasing next week. Our main project right now is the full localisation of the directory and controls window in time for the World Cup in early June. This will mean Skypecasts will be in your language, and you can chose to only browse and join Skypecasts in a language you understand. I’ll be sure to join some Chinese Skypecasts to brush up on my Mandarin, but typically I only want to see listings in English.

Finally, to introduce myself. My name is Dan Houghton, and I am the Product Manager for Skypecasts. You may see me on the forums as strzelecki.

Join a Skypecast now

We just put out new layout to the Your Account area. This is basically the area where you manage everything about your relationship with Skype as the company. It mostly involves buying things such as Skype Credit, extending your SkypeIn number and those kinds of things. There are also settings like e-mail privacy which you may want to use even if you never bought anything from Skype and never will.

All the important things like your remaining Skype Credit and SkypeIn are in the top part of the screen above the fold. We think they’re easier to find now than they were before.

Continue reading "The new Your Account page" »

We have a poll in the forum about what we should do next on Skypecasts. Go vote :) Plus if you think there’s something else from these choices, please leave your comments as text.

Congratulations to Finns. Their monsters nailed the Eurovision after decades of trying and showed that an Eurovision winning song doesn’t really have to be the typical “Eurovision winning song”. Since Estonia’s song didn’t qualify it to the final, we were also happy for Finns. As they said in the banners waved during the TV show, “hevillä emme häviä. Torilla tavataan.” (We won’t lose with heavy. See you on the market.) They always had a twisted sense of humor…

Photo credit: lordi.org

Among other news, we saw some comments that you could possibly use Skype to “cheat” in the vote and vote for your own country. While it’s certainly a flattering idea to be able to rig one of the planet’s most prominent entertainment events, this is simply technically impossible even if we wanted to do this (which we don’t). Most of Eurovision’s voting numbers where you had to call or send an SMS were “short” numbers and/or with an extra price to call them, which only work within the same country. SkypeOut and Skype SMS do not support these numbers, as we also say in the Knowledge Base.

So while we continue to work on options to enable such calls and televoting with Skype in the future, it simply wasn’t possible this year.

The folks at Carson Systems are busy building a new web application and blogging the whole process. They took a look at what’s out there and gave the Skype website thumbs-up in two of the five categories. Gee. Thanks, guys.

Cute Navigation. The prize for cute navigation goes to Skype for their very useable site map that appears at the bottom of each page. It’s a simple device and an old one at that but doesn’t it work well? With so much documentation on one site the map really is a Godsend.
Best Overall Communication. This prize goes to Skype. Now I know that some people will argue that Flickr is an overall top performer too - and I agree - but someone has to win! Skype just has it all for me, The whole site is very short, sharp and to the point which makes me feel like there really is nothing to this ‘free telephony thing’ (right or wrong). While the winning feature has got to be the animation on the home page. Any animation that still makes sense in Korean really does deserve to win.

Now if we only knew what their new web app is about :-) it wasn’t apparent from the blog. That aside, we keep revisiting various parts of our own website all the time, since you can always improve. The current site look’n’feel dates from February and we’re already busy with the next version.

Skype is sponsoring Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent and Jo Huxster as they drive a Thai Tuk Tuk from Bangkok to Brighton as they try to raise £50,000 for the mental health charity, MIND. (You can also call them Ants and Jo. Plus there’s Ting Tong the tuk tuk.)

On 20th May (already this Saturday), the girls — best friends since the age of 12 — will be setting off on the long trip. They will be using Skype all the way to keep in touch with friends and family, via the Internet, wherever they are on route. Their Skype Name is tuktotheroad.

Continue reading "Tuk to the Road — two girls, three wheels, ten thousand miles" »

There’s often nothing harder than having a son, daughter, or loved one stationed thousands of miles away while serving in the military. Over the past few months, we’ve been chatting with an amazing array of service members and their families who have turned to Skype to help them keep connected while based in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, or elsewhere around the globe—and we’d love to hear from more soldiers who depend on Skype to get a bit of well-deserved love and support from back home. As usual, your friendly New York Skype blogger is ready and waiting for your personal stories. With Father’s Day around the metaphorical corner, I’d also be thrilled to talk to dads who Skype to their family and loved ones while traveling. Believe it or not, I spend most of my day listening to awe-inspiring, quirky, emotional, or just plain fascinating Skype stories—and it’s no fun if you don’t share. Skype me!

Thanks to everyone for your comments. Keep ‘em coming. We are already story of the month on Digg — please go digg it and help us become story of the year :-)

Two updates that were brought on since last night and that we have been working on…

The most pressing issue was of course many people in the US and Canada not being able to use the free calls. You may have got a message like “You need Skype Credit to call to ordinary phones” or something along those lines. We updated our detection engine earlier today and have confirmation that this is now resolved for many users. So if it didn’t work for you before, chances are good that it does now, so please retry. Note that there may be some locations where it still doesn’t work — in this case, please report your public IP address and location to our Customer Service. We continue to work on this.

Secondly, there have been questions about what happens to your Skype Credit now that you got free calls. The answer is that Skype Credit remains on your account and its validity extends the same way as it did before — your Skype Credit is valid for 180 days from your last call or purchase. This includes also the free North American calls. So the credit won’t expire as long you keep using SkypeOut, be it paid or free.

If you tried to trackback to the blogs here on share.skype.com, you may have gotten a “403 Throttled” error, even though everything was OK on your side. Whoops. Sorry about that. Turns out there was some stuff missing from our configuration. All fixed now, so if it failed previously, feel free to re-post your ping.

If you’re getting this on your own Movable Type blog, check out this thread for a very helpful explanation of the issue. Thanks, totalchoicehosting. And dear Six Apart, please document this stuff better going forward :) ideally make these settings available in online blog/system configuration.

For quite some time now, you may have experienced problems with your SkypeWeb status updating. It was either too slow or not working at all.

A couple of days ago, after consulting with NASA and other rocket scientists, we found that there was a bug in the code. After finding, we squashed it very badly and it said it’s sorry it ever crawled in.

The bug is now gone and SkypeWeb status updates are again good and instant.

Further proof of the innovative ways that users are adapting Skype to fit their individual needs and form global communities:

“Al-Anon Family Group members are using Skype to hold online meetings. Al-Anon is a support group that is made up of people affected by someone else’s drinking - family and friends of Alcoholics, we have face to face meetings all over the world and also have meetings on chat boards and through email groups. We’ve been holding meetings twice a week on Skype using Skype’s conference call facility and are now considering using SkypeCasts for our meetings. Skype has been great for us Al-Anon members who live in areas where there are no face to face meetings available. You can find out more at alanonskype.org or email contact@alanonskype.org This is an experimental meeting that is not as yet recognised by the Al-Anon World Service Office.”

We just announced that SkypeOut is now free within the US and Canada to all landlines and mobiles, until at least the end of 2006.

How does this work?

If you’re in the US or Canada, you can use SkypeOut to call any landline or mobile number in both the USA and Canada for free.

If you’re in the US or Canada and calling any other country, OR if you’re in any other country and calling landline or mobile numbers in the US or Canada, the standard SkypeOut rates apply.

Of course, Skype-to-Skype calls continue to be globally free, so no changes there.

See also the campaign FAQ.

Continue reading "Free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada" »

Skype will be exhibiting at the eBay Live Germany Event in Dusseldorf on May 26-27. If you are attending the show you can come and visit us on our stand in the main hall. We will be demonstrating several examples of Skype Certified devices from some of our Hardware Partners , presenting in the Powersellers seminar and participating at the developer’s conference.

The US eBay Live is happening in Las Vegas June 13-15. And the Developer’s conference runs on June 10-12.

Here is a great example of a creative, value added service which has been created by one of our partners using the Skype Voice Services Program

Language Line Services, the world’s leading provider of language services, and Voxeo have released a joint solution that makes it easier than ever for businesses and individuals to translate from English into more than 150 languages using an innovative mix of Internet calling technology and world-class personal interpreter services, the revolutionary service gives Skype users the ability to talk instantly to anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, regardless of language.

Sainsbury’s announced last week that they will be the first retailer in Europe to sell Skype Credit vouchers. The e-vouchers will be available at more than 600 Sainsbury’s outlets around the UK. Skype certified hardware will also soon be available to buy in stores.

If you are interested in becoming a retail partner please let us know by completing the partner enquiry form .

China is one of biggest “Skype countries” in terms of people using Skype. So we work a lot with TOM who manages the Skype business in China. We often meet to discuss things, whether at TOM or at one of Skype’s locations.

We had a few TOM people over in Tallinn for a week. So I talked to Kevin to learn more what he does and what TOM and the Chinese telco market in general is up to.

Download as MP3 or OGG (length 11:47)

Today we have an interview with Kevin from TOM. Perhaps Kevin, you can first tell us a bit in your words about what is TOM and what does TOM do?

Hello, this is Kevin from TOM Online. TOM is the one of the biggest wireless service providers in China. We have this range of wireless applications available to China users. We are also an Internet portal, which means we have the news service, entertainment and other sections available to our users.

Continue reading "Kevin from TOM" »

Jeremy from Skylook sent us this. A great follow-up to Australian SkypeIn numbers. Skype is doing really great “down under”.

I have some news which I thought you would be interested in to use on the Skype Blogs to inform readers on some major Skype community events that are happening in Australia this week at CeBIT Australia in Sydney. CeBIT Australia is the major IT&T conference in Australia. In its fifth year, CeBIT Australia 2006 will attract 700 exhibitors and 30,000 business visitors.

Continue reading "Skype and OneVillage at the Australian CeBIT" »

We just announced Skypecasts Preview, but we’re already seeing some very interesting ones being created and posted. How about a Skypecast with Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist? This is one of the events leading to the Innovative Marketing Conference. As the organizers say:

In the weeks leading up to the Innovative Marketing Conference - June 8-9 in NYC - we will be hosting a series of provocative Skypecasts in which we will chat with conference participants as well as allow our audience to help shape the conversation at the physical event. In this Skypecast we’ll sit down with Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist, for a wide-ranging discussion of the threats and opportunities related to consumer generated content.

See the Skype for Mac blog for more info about this. If you’re a Mac fan, you may want to subscribe to that blog, this is the first place where you’ll see any Skype for Mac news and updates.

Skype is currently organising a research group to be run in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. We’ll ask you some questions about how you use Skype, what you find easy and what you think we could be doing better. In return for your time, we gift you a little Skype Credit.

Would you like to be part of it? If you’re in or around New York, Chicago or San Francisco Bay area, sign up. The groups will happen around May 15 to 17.

If you’re in the UK, you can now walk to any Sainsbury’s to buy Skype Credit vouchers. You can then redeem these vouchers to your Skype Name and use the credit for calling or paying for other Skype offerings, such as SkypeIn or content from Personalise Skype.

Tens of thousands of SMS messages have been sent through the new Skype for Windows 2.5 BETA. But there have been some minor teething problems.

After reading comments on the SMS forum I thought it would be useful to give some background on how the system works and the kinds of issues you can expect to come across…

Continue reading "Skype SMS... what’s up with the beta?" »

A surfing Skype staff member sent me this…

Was with a kitesurfing buddy last night who told me something seriously cool (or at least I thought so!) about the extent to which Skype is out there. He was taking an instructors course in Tenerife last month, and the feedback form at the end of the fortnight asked for his Skypename. Love it… Skype fully established in extreme sports.

If you are looking to partner with Skype, then Skypecasts are a great way to start introducing your customers to Skype, and introducing your company to the Skype community of over 100million users.

Why not host a Skypecast to discuss an issue relevant to your users? All Skypecasts are promoted in the Skypecast Directory giving you exposure to the Skype community.

Read the help guide to find out more about hosting and attending Skypecasts. If you use Six Apart Typepad for your company’s blog, we have created this widget to make it easy for TypePad users to announce and promote their Skypecasts on their blog.