June 2006

Due to boringly excessive amount of trackback spam, we’ve turned on trackback moderation on all the blogs and microsites hosted here (you see the list in the sidebar on the right). So if you post a trackback and don’t see it immediately, it means it’s held in moderation queue and we’ll publish it as soon as we see it.

Sorry about that — but we want to keep this site spam-free. If you got great tips or tricks about how to keep immediately publishing while keeping spam where it should be — in junk — then please drop me a line privately.

We now have a new site, the Skype Heartbeat. The objective of Heartbeat is to be a no-nonsense location where you can see the status of the Skype infrastructure components that support all the free and paid features. There are two main parts to the site:

• Current status of all our primary and secondary systems, indicated with icon as well as text. If you see it bright red and pulsing, it’s fine (the smaller icons don’t pulse, they’re just bright red). If it’s darker and broken, there’s no circulation and it’s dead.
• Text announcements about infrastructure availability and other important changes, such as pricelist or regional updates.

I like the concept of “heartbeat” that we came up with for this. Sometimes you see these things called “system status” or something equally boring. But they’re not boring — behind the scenes, there are countless machines and people working day and night to keep Skype running, even though Skype is about direct connections between users for the most part. So if Skype is an ecosystem and organism, it must also have a central circulatory system to keep all the components in good health. And Heartbeat shows you what’s the current health of this all.

So whenever you’re having trouble with Skype, be sure to check Heartbeat. The other channels to get more information continue to be our Customer Service and forums.

Mihkel is a Skype developer. Working on the Mac version, no less. He’s travelling a bit with his mobile office. A Skype friend in Italy did this mini-interview with him.

Mihkel, is this you first time in Italy?

Nope, that’s the fourth already. All times by car btw.

Nice, so the first time you went here you was not able to use Skype right? How do you feel to use Skype to call every one at home for free?

It’s great indeed.

Continue reading "A developer in the bush" »

Video support for Skype for Mac will be one of our major acts this year. You can tell that by just taking a look at our various blog posts and the comments here, especially in the Mac blog. Whatever we post, we have people asking “WHERE IS VIDEO FOR SKYPE FOR MAC? GIMME SKYPE FOR MAC WITH VIDEO.” It’s great to see this much interest and we’ll surely meet it by bringing you a fine video version with the superb quality you’ve grown to expect from Skype.

Among all the excitement, we recently learned that there is an early development version of Skype for Mac with video floating around some warez sites. What you need to know about this version is that it is an internal unstable development version, and thus it is extremely buggy. It may and will destroy your contacts and other data. It is completely unsupported and if you experience problems due to using this version, you’re on your own. The only way to make sure you’re getting the correct and official version of Skype is to download it directly from skype.com, or from the pages of one of our official partners.

Another thing worth noting about the video part is that the version going around is two months old, and thus is definitely not the “latest and greatest” that you’ll see once we release it. It’s not yet ready for primetime, but will be soon. It sounds old, but please bear with us. Not much longer to go.

Here’s a screenshot of an actual video call with Skype for Mac.

Skype for Linux 1.3 beta is now available. There wasn’t a new Linux version since the end of last year and I didn’t really want to post anything until there was something available for you to actually download and use. There is now, so download the new Skype for Linux 1.3 beta. One highlight of this release was that support for the ALSA sound system has been the most requested feature since we first released Skype for Linux almost two years ago. Well, it’s there now.

Read more details about this release in our Skype for Linux blog. This is where we’ll post any updates regarding Skype for Linux, so if you’re a Linux fan, keep an eye on it.

We have a joint demonstration area with Sony & Intel at Heathrow Airport. The stand will be at departure area of Heathrow Terminal 1 until the 3rd of August this year. If you’re passing through, please drop by the stand. It’s right by where all the shops are, so you have to go through security first. The departure gates are further past this area.

At the demo area, you can use Skype on Sony Vaio laptops and can make SkypeOut calls to friends and family far and wide. One morning, we had passengers calling their family as far as Australia, Dubai and Russia. We also hand out Skype starter packs to new callers.

We use some Skype USB phones and headsets for demoing. If you need more high-end hardware than what you can find in the free starter pack, there’s a Dixons Airport Shop nearby where you can pick up some more Skype gadgets.

Continue reading "Skype corner at Heathrow Airport" »

KishKish SAM (Skype Answering Machine) is one of the earliest Skype plugins. They are now running a promo where you can get 15% off SAM until the 4th of July. You know… Uncle Sam and all that. Oh and see their blog too.

Skype folks are so busy delighting our users that we get to pack almost half a week into one single day:

We love to work hard, but Ants, our developer support technician, decided to take a few days off. On the very first day of his vacation, this was found in our office:

Join the fun!

We announced the world’s first Skype edition notebook with Packard Bell yesterday.

It has a Skype calling button right next to the integrated webcam at the top of the display. You can see some buttons there on the photo and one of them is for Skype calls.

Hello again, global Skypers! After a wonderful week teaching eBay Live! users about Skype in sunny, hot Las Vegas, your resident User Story Guru is back and ready to listen to your Skype anecdotes…

At the moment, we are VERY interested in hearing from Mexican, British, German, and Japanese users who have relocated to the United States and now use Skype to keep in touch with their friends and family back home.

If this is you, dear Reader—and I hope it is!—you know what to do…

Contact me on Skype (indrisek), or send an email to ‘scott.indrisek@skype.net’ with the words EXPAT IN AMERICA in the subject line.

Here’s a video that a random Skyper made that illustrates how it may be difficult to find someone to talk to, and how it’s fun to finally find someone who responds :-)

Here’s a tip. To find new friends more easily, you can tick the “Search for people who are in ‘Skype Me’ mode” when you search — you then find everyone who has actively indicated they are available for contact.

Here’s an actual door sign from Skype. Spot some irony?

No really… we DO have better quality assurancE and testing (and proofreading) for our software than we have for our door signs.

Skype announced that it now has a local partner in Turkey. See e-kolay.net/skype/ for more info if you happen to speak Turkish. And go sign up to be among the first 100,000 to receive a surprise gift from e-kolay.

Emerging Internet markets like Turkey and Poland are important for Skype. Poland is one of the biggest “Skype countries”. Turkey will surely catch up with it quickly.

I was doing boothwork at eBay Live! 2006 on several days — just standing by at the Skype booth, observing folks going by and helping those who wanted to learn more about Skype. And boy, were there many. Our team had very few “off” moments. We were constantly engaged in helping people learn more about Skype and try it out. We got a lot of people just trying SkypeOut calls on the demo computers. We got many new Skypers signed up right there. Absolutely everyone who tried a call found it great, and at times brilliant. “The quality is great.” “It just worked.” “And it’s free.”

Continue reading "eBay Live! 2006 — first-time Skypers" »

There was pins, ribbons and cards frenzy all over the place. Everyone had these lanyards where you could attach pins that you got from various booths and stands at certain times. And you could take them away from staff, too. I got three pins from somewhere but had to give them all away to the interested attendees. Oh well. I didn’t particularly care for these myself so at least I could make other people happy. The Chatter blog has more on this.

At eBay Live!, both new and seasoned Skypers walking by the booth showed massive interest in the various Skype hardware available. One man said he had a condition that prevented him from holding a handset up for too long, so he’d rather use a speakerphone. Others liked the handsets or cordless phones, especially the IPEVO ones.w We had IPEVO handsets, Linksys cordless phones, Polycom speakerphones, Logitech headsets and webcams and Creative webcams for display and testing, and all of these generated great interest. There are great opportunities for hardware providers and resellers in North America and we are happy to do our part to facilitate the relevant deals and transactions.

Credit once again goes to the makers of Skype for making a product that just works and didn’t let us down during the demos. Our greatest concerns always revolve around the call quality, and both Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls worked simply great. The only trouble we had was with some webcams — we found that if the computer was on for too long and we made too many calls, some calls no longer had video. Not sure if it was a PC, Skype or webcam driver problem, and since we didn’t have much opportunity to debug, we used the universal remedy of rebooting the computer that always fixed it.

Meg Whitman announced Skype buttons in select eBay categories in her Tuesday’s keynote. Some people walked by the next days to ask more. Here’s where we stand with the buttons.

You can already put a Skype button on your “About Me” page. And there will be an eBay Announcement Board post early next week (June 19th onwards), clarifying the details about Skype buttons in listings in the initial trial categories and the mechanics about this works. We hear there will be a simple wizard available so that you won’t actually have to do any HTML code to put the button in your listings.

Here you see Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, who was kind enough to take his time to drop by the Skype booth to say hi and see what we had. He is here standing in awe over the Skype buttons and other things we showed.

There’s a fun new feature in Skype 2.5 that got out just in time for the World Cup’s hotter games. Just enter (flag:xx) into a chat message, where XX is a two-letter ISO country code, and you’ll get the image of that country’s flag.

Hey, it even works in chat topics. So if you have an ongoing multichat with your friends, you can keep it up-to-date with results of the game du jour.

Being away from your family is tough. But with Skype it can be a little easier. You can talk to people the otherside of the world for as long as you like, for free.

Listen to our famous dads’ messages of support and then leave a message of your own (for free, of course).

This year’s eBay Live! in sunny Las Vegas has Skype all over the place. Just before eBay Live! started, we wrapped up our first and very successful participation in the eBay Developers Conference, but Live! is a much more massive event. There were about 800 people at the DevCon, but over 15,000 (fifteen THOUSAND) at live.

Our stand is right in the middle of the main showroom and is one of the biggest and most prominent. PayPal has a bigger stand, but they have Skype features in it too. eBay Marketplaces itself does not have a single stand, rather, it has the stands divided up across content areas like shipping, seller scalability, government relations etc.

Elvis saying hi.

Continue reading "(Skype is in) Vegas, baby" »

It’s out. Grab it.

This version is about talking to several people at once – so it’s like you’ve got the whole family together in your lounge, even though you might live thousands of miles apart. With Skype you can enjoy talking for as long as you like, without worrying about the cost or the distance. Plus with features like conference calling, free video calling and group chats it’s never been easier to stay in touch with all of your friends and family no matter how far apart you are. Visit the lounge.

Yesterday we launched localised Skypecasts. You can now browse the Skypecasts directory to see listings and help text in your language.

• To change the listings so they only appear in your language, click on Options from the page listing Skypecasts On Now, Starting Soon, etc.
• To change the language of the help text, click on your language in the footer, under “Skype in your country and language”.
• To create a Skypecast in your language, simply select it from the list on the Create a Skypecast page.

Your feedback on this feature would be much appreciated. Please try to create and view listings in the language (or languages!) that you speak.

Some improvements to localisation coming soon:

• We’ll be adding language autodetection soon, so Skypecasts shows listings in your language without you having to visit the Options page.
• There are currently 2 weeks of Skypecasts already scheduled, that are not tagged by language. For example, a Japanese Skypecast created last week, will show up, even if you ask to only see “Swedish” ones. These will disappear in 2 weeks, once all the scheduled Skypecasts have taken place.

Visit the Skypecasts forums to leave feedback.

Here’s a screenshot of a live graph from Skype’s production SkypeOut servers.

What this graph is showing is the total volume of SkypeOut calls placed from Brazil. (Ignore the two different colors — just treat them as one.) There are some interesting valleys and peaks. Could you think of a sports where there are two 45-minute sessions and a break between them? Maybe one that has a World Cup going on at this time? So what we’re seeing is that the World Cup is significantly affecting how many people use SkypeOut, depending on if there’s a game ongoing or not.

Shortly before we were off to Developers Conference, our dveloper program evangelist Lester announced the winners of the competition we held to all Skype plugin developers. We got some really interesting ones and if you’re interested in how you can extend Skype with plugins, I encourage you to check out them all.

I took a look at one of them, TranSkype by TransClick. It’s a plugin that translates chat messages on the fly. In the current version, it shows both original and translated version, but their folks also showed me a web-based version where the translation is completely transparent so that you may even not know what language the other parties are speaking.

There are obviously many challenges with machine translation, such as getting the context right (we all know the stories about goofs like “car-flavoured marmalade” and “the spirit is strong but the flesh is weak”), making it understand various idioms and all that. TransClick is putting work into making it work with context-based dictionaries, learning-on-the-fly etc. Interesting.

The World Cup is just kicking off. See what Skype is doing around this. Go see what the Trinidad and Tobago is up to (our friends at eBay are supporting them), get a WeeMee or Klonie. Last but not least, there are some excellent Skypecasts around football oncoming. Sharing a game experience with a Skypecast or conference call is a great way to hook up with your long-lost friends or make new ones.

Sure, computers can be intimidating at times, but we still have to chuckle a bit when people imagine that Skype is only for the tech-savvy. Diehard Skypers know that all it takes to make free calls is a headset and the ability to click the DOWNLOAD button on Skype.com. I was recently contacted by Skype fanatic (and good grandson) Dan B. of Florida, who’s been calling both his grandmothers and his cousin, a businesswoman living in Africa. Dan turns 11 this Sunday, and he’s managed to master Skype despite the fact that the rest of his family hasn’t caught on yet. After I reassured him that “Skype calls would indeed be free forever” and letting him know that he has to wait a few years before working for the company, he asked me if I’d be kind enough to share his story with the Skype community. Since I’m a nice guy, I could hardly say no. So—a very happy Skype birthday to Florida’s Dan B., as well as a reminder to all of us that it doesn’t take a master’s degree in Computer Science and years of training to enjoy the benefits of free calling anywhere in the world!

The guys from Skylook gave me this coupon to pass on to my friends and you all, the Share Skype blog readers:

SKYPALS06

It will get you 20% off any Skylook license if redeemed by the end of June 2006.

Continue reading "Give your friends on Skype 20% off Skylook" »

We’ve always known that Skype users were smart, but we’d never heard of anyone using Skype and a bit of old-fashioned ingenuity to fool a computer thief—until today, that is. “Someone broke into my house and stole my laptop,” explains one intrepid user. “I always have Skype online on the laptop. I downloaded Skype onto my other PC, made a new account, and sent a chat request to my original account—and talked to the burglar. We set up a meeting, and I went with the police and caught the guy, thanks to Skype!”

A word to the wise: when it comes to free calls with Skype, crime certainly does not pay.

There’s a Skype book now available. Get it from Amazon and see the Skype Journal review.

Here’s Skype somewhere in the middle of Far East. Could be Thailand or Laos. Courtesy of the Tuk ladies.

Remember Sainsbury’s? Skype and PCHome Online are doing a similar thing in Taiwan in Family Mart stores already since April. Family Mart has over 1800 stores in Taiwan.

When you go to buy a voucher, you just select one from the directory and it gets added to your receipt. So when you do your shopping and get your receipt, it will have the Skype Credit voucher code printed on it. You then proceed to PCHome-Skype web site and click the right link (I won’t tell you which one — you need to know the language :-) to redeem the voucher and get the Skype Credit added to your Skype Name.

Continue reading "Skype and PCHome sell Skype Credit vouchers in Taiwan Family Mart" »

We will have a whole series of Gift Days this summer. A Gift Day means if you’re from one of the indicated countries and it’s one of these dates, you can log on to Your Account and claim your 10 minutes of free SkypeOut calling. (It will be a small amount of Skype Credit that you will get on your account.)

Here are the remaining dates for June. We’ll publish July dates in early July. Note that the date means that the Skype Gift Day starts at 8 AM Central European Time (7 AM London time, or 9 AM Eastern European time), and ends 8 AM on the following day. So it runs for 24 hours every time. (UPDATED: Korea, Brazil and Japan have different timezones, so they start 8 AM according to their local timezone… see below. Sorry for the confusion.)

Sweden

June 7, June 15, June 28

Germany

June 7, June 15, June 28

United Kingdom

June 21

Spain

June 7, June 21

France

June 8, June 20

Italy

June 8, June 20

Korea

June 27, starts 8:00 GMT+9, goes for 24 hours

Brazil

June 27, starts 8:00 GMT-5, goes for 24 hours

Japan

June 22, starts 8:00 GMT+9, goes for 24 hours

There’s some great live content here on Skypecasts, but once you miss it, it’s gone… One very common request is the ability for the host to record their Skypecast, and distribute to their audience as an MP3 or podcast.

We’ve had some discussion on our forums on easy ways to record a Skypecast (or indeed, any Skype call), so that it can be uploaded to your website as an MP3 or podcast. Since Skypecasts does not yet have built in recording, I’ve summarised the third party software solutions below:

• Audio Hijack Pro (Mac OS X) - Not specifically for Skype, but a general sound recording and editing tool. Here’s a quote from our forum: “I use [Audio Hijack Pro] to record our podcast: http://fourguys.libsyn.com or on iTunes under “Four Guys Walk Into a Bar…. AHP lets you incorporate high- and low-pass filters to get rid of ambient noise and hiss. It lets you record in lossless so that you can edit and only downmix to mp3 when finished. It gives you filters to drop the volume automatically if the [Skypecast] is too loud, and (my favorite) it has a plugin that lets you “create” stereo from mono, which gives the sound a bit more depth. All of these are easy to set up and intuitive. It costs $35 but is worth every penny.”
• HotRecorder (Windows) - Free trial, or $19.95 to purchase. Another quote fro our forums: “I’ve had very good experience with using HotRecorder since it records the audio from Skype differently from every other app I’