July 2006

There’s a little promo we’re running through August, which gives you yet again some free Skype Credit. It’s a bit similar to the previous Gift Days. You could say that it’s the same thing. At least the idea is similar — on a certain day, if you’re in one of the included countries, you go to your account and claim your free minutes (in the form of some free Skype Credit that we add to your account). The dates are as follows. On all the dates, the campaign starts 8 AM GMT+1 and ends 24 hours later.

Italy, Spain, Sweden

Every Tuesday in August (Aug 1, 8, 15, 22, 29)

France, Germany

Every Wednesday in August (Aug 2, 9, 16, 23, 30)

United Kingdom, Poland

Every Thursday in August (Aug 3, 10, 17, 24, 31)

If you’ve watched this space, you know that there’s nothing we like more than a cool stunt, and we try to put up one of our own once in a while. So our very own Baltic team came up with this: if you can talk for free, why wouldn’t you be able to ride for free… say… in a tram? Which is exactly what we did.

If you happen to drop by Tallinn over the next few weeks, this is what you might see riding the streets. The Skype Tram. Where you can ride for free. As you can talk for free.

The writing on the side of the tram says “Ride for free. Talk for free.”

Continue reading "Catch a free ride on the Skype Tram" »

While students are loathe to admit it, we’re coming up on August, and that means Back to School madness is in full swing. Soon enough, the pages of ruffling books in the library will replace the frantic hollering of all-night beach parties (since we know those that read the Skype blog are, obviously, highly responsible, non-hooligan students). For your friendly Story guy here, Back to School means that I’m on a search for collegiate users who are bringing the Skype love to their dorms and quads, whether it’s to keep in touch with the folks (i.e. Skype home for money) or ring the States from a study abroad sojourn in Italy.

To paraphrase Uncle Sam…College Skypers, WE WANT YOU. (Picture me here with my finger pointing straight at you and a stern-yet-amicable expression on my face).

I can promise that sharing your college Skype story won’t be nearly as painful as the deluge of exams you’ll be facing come September. And you won’t even need a Number Two pencil. Email me

One of our partners New York Communications has just sent in these photos from their Englewood Chamber Of Commerce Sidewalk Sale in New Jersey last weekend.

The folks from NY Comms were providing advice to businesses and consumers about how Skype works and had a number of Skype certified devices on display. They will be looking to hold more of these events in the coming weeks, including one on Times Square in New York.

Thanks to New York Communications for spreading the word, sharing the love, and helping to promote our hardware partners products.

Skype has just launched the latest version of Skype for Mac 1.5. This is designed especially for Mac to be faster and easier to use, with exclusive Mac-only features.

You can read all about this on the Mac Blog

We’ve also released a preview version of video for Mac which is now available for brave users who can’t bear to wait any longer.

‘Preview’ means that we’ve only tested it under specific conditions, and that we can’t guarantee the quality for users on different hardware or operating system YET. For the full launch of Skype for Mac with video we need our partners to help us provide the best hardware available for Mac users to have great quality video calls. If you would like to get involved or let us know what you have planned for Mac, please email us.

You may have seen this announcement last - Introducing the worlds first WiFi phones for Skype.

This is a great example of the Skype eco-system in practice. In this case we have partnered with several hardware manufacturers who are all introducing leading edge technology and helping to bring Skype in to new environments. The big step here is that Skype software is embedded on the phone, so you no longer need to have your PC running to use Skype.

These partners are also doing a great job of helping to promote Skype via their websites and have built targeted microsites to help promote the new WiFi phones.

Checkout these partner sites:

• NetGear
• SMC
• Belkin
• Edge Core

This is one of the happiest posts I’ve ever written here. We now have Skype for Mac 1.5 BETA available, and there’s also a video preview.

The two versions are otherwise the same, but the video preview just has video and the BETA doesn’t. If you are adventurous and don’t mind one or two bugs, feel free to download the video preview and let us know what you think. Mind you, it’s a preview, so it’s even before beta. We don’t support the video preview, but we welcome all the feedback and video-related bug submissions. See the video feedback instructions. Otherwise, if you just want to get the latest and greatest changes in the 1.5 BETA but prefer to give the video a bit of time to become more stable, pull the 1.5 BETA.

I’m happy to write this because video has been the number one thing requested in Skype for Mac since… well, pretty much ever since we released Skype a few years ago. It’s great to see the energy and enthusiasm in the Skype for Mac community about video, and we’re happy to bring you this first official public preview. As said, not for the faint of heart, but you’re welcome to help us get it even better than it already is.

For webmasters and developers wishing to promote their Skypecasts on their website, check out the latest update of the documentation, now part of our Dev Zone.

Here’s a short guide we wrote to hosting your first Skypecast:

1. Choose a subject for your Skypecast

You can host a Skypecast on any subject you’re interested in, from classic cars to learning Japanese; from how to bake banana bread, to watching World Cup matches together. The more interesting your subject, the more participants you’re likely to have for your Skypecast. If you’re having trouble picking just one subject, don’t worry — you can host as many Skypecasts as you want and it’s totally free.

2. Create your Skypecast listing

Visit the Skypecasts directory to create your listing

You’ll be prompted to enter a title and description, this is your opportunity to sell your Skypecast to the audience, explain why they should join and what you’ll be talking about. You’ll also need to add keywords (also known as tags) to allow users to find your Skypecast by searching the directory. These keywords will also determine which syndicated listings your Skypecast appears in. By entering several relevant words to describe your Skypecasts subject, you’ll help users to find your Skypecast and will also ensure your Skypecast gets the best possible promotion.

Don’t forget to make a note of the time of your Skypecast so you remember to sign in and host it and don’t leave your audience waiting in silence.

3. Promote your Skypecast

Promoting your Skypecast will boost the number of participants you have in your discussion making it more lively and interesting for you and your attendees.

There are lots of ways to promote your Skypecast such as emailing friends, posting your Skypecast in a related forum or even adding a HTML snippet or Skypecasts feed to your website or blog.

4. Hosting and Moderating

You may wish to run your Skypecast as an open discussion or a one-way broadcast with questions and answers at the end. Either way, the Skypecasts moderation tools will help you. Once your Skypecast has begun you can mute or unmute selected participants or all participants from the Skypecasts controls.

Muting participants will help to improve call quality for you and your participants. When participants are muted, they can request the microphone if they wish to speak. You can use chat to ask them what they wish to talk about and then pass them the virtual microphone to speak.

If certain participants are being disruptive you can eject them from the Skypecast.

That’s all for the guide fow now. If you have any questions or comments, please visit the Skypecasts forum

Photo attributed to miss_rogue on flickr.com

Yet another Skypecasts exclusive - Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine has published his long-awaited book, The Long Tail, based on his infamous magazine article and popular blog by the same name.

To celebrate the launch of the book, Chris is hosting a Skypecast to let Skype users hear all about the book and his theories on how the world is changing and also ask any questions you may have.

The Long Talk looks at how technology has allowed consumer culture to shift away from mass markets with small numbers of hit products, towards more niche products and markets. This change has been related to the effect of technology and the “infinite shelf-space effect” of new distribution mechanisms such as the internet breaking the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.

To find out more join the Skypecast on July 24 at 1:30 PM (PST) to hear what Chris has to say.

Skype icons have been on display before but never in such large numbers, nor square meters. I believe it's our designers' new favourite wall in our London office. Kind of tucked away but you cannot not notice it when walking around.

If you haven't seen some of these emoticons before then you either didn't know we had them or are not using the latest version of Skype that sports them all (+ some hidden ones). Larger version of the emoticons below.

Continue reading "The emotional wall" »

A few days ago, many sites reported that the Japanese company Novac has released a product that lets you stream your home TV across Skype video. I didn’t want to post this news before because there was no site for you to try this out. Well, there is now. Novac set up a demo page where you can see it right in action. It’s in Japanese so you might not understand much, but just click the big Skype buttons to start a test call. Since the demand is great, they have limited the call length to 3 minutes, but this is plenty to give you an idea how it works — and it really does, so just give it a shot.

Photo from Engadget

Sunday 4pm UK time, there will be a Skypecast discussion of the basics and inner workings of Skype as well as clever ways to use it for business, family and socialising by the authors of Skype for Dummies.

We’ve written a great guide to help you promote the Skypecasts you are hosting on your website. It’s aimed at webmasters or programmers for now, and describes:

• JSON feeds API
• HTML snippets (coming soon)

Download “Promoting and Integrating Skypecasts”

The Internet is like magic. No matter how much you use it, know it, search it, you will always be taken by surprise now and then, in moments of pure serendipity, like the one that just happened to me.

I was looking for the word ‘Skype’, just like I do everyday when I write the Skype Blog in Brazil, and decided to search in the site archive.org, for moving images. The first result hypnotized me and dazzled me: it was an interview in russian, with a Siberian musician called Nadishana, demonstrating instruments through a Skype video conference, to a New Yorker named Val Belin.

I don’t understand Russian but the music and the fact that it was recorded through Skype, fascinated me and I thought it would be a nice item for the blog. So I went to Nadishana’s site looking for contact and authorization to publish the video. And there it was, his Skype Name, so irresistibly available. So I called him for a chat. He answered, we switched to an audio and video chat. He in Germany, me in Brazil.

He told me about his work, his life in his small village in Siberia. You might not believe it but he only discovered the Internet a few years ago , because his Russian hometown doesn’t even have telephone lines.

We exchanged files and pictures. I sent him photos of the tropical beaches that I go to and he showed me pictures of his family in the snow.

He authorized the publication of his video in the blog and even added subtitles in English. Nadishana told me to correct any mistakes in the translation but I thought it would be better to leave them as they are. I’ve learned from Skype that beauty is in natural harmony not in perfection. Someone told me before I joined the Skype Blogs Team that mistakes are allowed.

So, let me have the honor of introducing the work of Vladiswar Nadishana, Siberian musician and performer, who mixes technology, fractals and ancient Kuzhebar mythology. All thanks to Skype. :-)

Continue reading "Serendipity" »

To make it easier to find popular Skypecasts with lots of people talking, we’ve added participant counts to Skypecasts listings. Check out what’s On Now in Skypecasts.

Skype got the Baltic Brand Formula 2006 award. So we’re the best Baltic brand. I’m not sure what’s with the “Formula” theme, but in any case, it means that the award was a helmet and we had to try it.

We now have a UK country blog where you’ll see news and comments about any- and everything happening around the UK and Skype. So subscribe if you’re from the UK and want to learn about what’s happening here, or even if you’re not from the UK but just generally interested in what the Brits are up to in Skypeland.

This main English blog that you’re reading now will try to maintain a global perspective, with more English and non-English country/region blogs rolled out as we go along. You’ll always see the full blogs and microsites list in the right sidebar.

This doesn’t really have to anything with Skype, except that we seem to have seen this… hmm… style of communication somewhere before? A Skype friend spotted this on one of the walls in New York and sent to me. It’s a campaign run by the gym chain Crunch.

Full release here. Note that this applies only to the US and Canada.

Free SkypeOut calling to the United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan is available weekends July 15-16, July 22-23 and July 29-30, respectively. The free international SkypeOut calling offer to each country runs 48 hours from 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturdays through Sundays at midnight EDT, when international calling is at a peak.

Many of our recent “free calls” initiatives have been circling around North America recently. This leaves the rest of you worried, as we’ve seen it in comments. Fear not, for we are working on expanding the scope of these activities, as you can also see with the Gift Days. I know that Henry Gomez who assumed the “chief marketer” position in Skype just last week is very keen on this and will post his own updates here shortly.

The SkypeCast system is fairly young, and we’re always excited to hear from users who are catching on to its advantages. Enter 17-year old Josh Bolling, a Virginia resident who runs the online podcast Slash Dot Radio, a virtual discussion group based around the techie news blog Slash Dot. Along with co-host Chad Ohman (all of 14, and he took apart and rebuilt his first computer at the age of 9), Josh has begun hosting Slash Dot Radio Skypecasts, which he then records and posts online as podcasts.

Every now and then we forget that the next generation grew up on the cutting edge of technology like Skype and its precursors. I’m both proud and dismayed to realize that while I verbally and ineffectively berate my stubborn laptop, somewhere out there a self-taught 12-year old is building his own wireless network out of tin foil and spare circuit boards.

At Skype we are always looking for ways to make Skype even better and to continue to delight our users. One of the best ways to achieve this is to meet and talk to people like you.

Skype is currently organising research groups to be run in Miami on Monday July 17th, New York on Wednesday July 19th and Los Angeles on Thursday July 20th.

If you are a Skyper and are available on any of these dates and would like to participate, then please email us at research@skype.net. We then send you the location and time details. Thanks — we look forward to hearing from you.

The Estonian daily Postimees reports that Estonian hospitals are increasingly equipped with wifi networks so that the patients can use their time at hospital productively with a laptop.

Makes total sense. All sorts of radio devices have historically been banned at hospitals due to concerns that they would interfere with the medical equipment. Remember the same used to be true in airplanes too? And while it still is on short-haul flights, there have been studies that show that much of this concern is unfounded and on many long-haul flights you can now buy wifi access and surf with your laptop. Absolutely no reason why you couldn’t do the same in hospitals — by now, we should be able to have proper equipment shielding as these radio technologies have been around for quite a while.

Have you heard of any other hospitals anywhere else going down this path?

Now here’s an interesting auction on eBay.

Have you noticed how manners seem to have vanished in the last several years? Rudeness and vulgarity are the rule of the day. Well, I’m going to change that in your life (for 10 minutes anyway)!
The winner of this auction will get me, MadAmish (otherwise known as AmishSteve), calling YOU on the phone (in the US and Canada), or on Skype worldwide(!) for a full 10 minutes being polite, genteel, and courteous to you! We’ll talk about what YOU want to talk about (excluding vulgarity and profanity)! I will not interrupt, belittle or talk over you. If I disagree with you, I will not dismiss you or excuse your position. Rather, I will give you my full attention and consider your position, while making the case for mine in a polite and gentle manner. If funny, I will laugh at your jokes, and may tell you some myself!

Cool Hunting reports that the design shop Shulze & Webb Ltd have created Availabot that is “a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications.”

Currently, Availabot works with iChat on Mac OS X 10.4—but we’re looking to extend it to other similar apps on the Mac (like Skype) and, in the future, to Windows.

Please let me know when this is available for mass production and retail sale — I know many people who would just LOVE to have one :-) They say that all updates will be on availabot.com so let’s stay tuned.

Photo from coolhunting.com

UPDATE: watch it in action.

If Skype had existed when Jack Kerouac began his famous literary bounce across the United States, you can be sure that the Beat icon would’ve had a laptop in tow, eager to share his poetic exploits with friends and family around the world. These days, many people find themselves on the road for a different reason—more work, less play. We like to call them “Road Warriors,” those noble business folk who spend an extraordinary amount of time in airports and hotels, jetting from Los Angeles to Paris, London, and Milan in what is increasingly becoming a truly globalized economy. Anyone who does this often knows that you can get an international cell phone. Anyone who’s gotten an international cell phone also knows that the calling rates per minute are roughly equivalent to the price of dinner for two at a nice Italian restaurant.

Can you sense a theme here? SUPPOSEDLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM PLUS SKYPE = RIDICULIOUSLY SIMPLE SOLUTION TO ALL THE WORLD’S ILLS.

Or something like that.

In any case, if you, dear Reader, happen to be one of these fabled Road Warriors—using video Skype to tutor your kids in their schoolwork while you’re in Denmark, for instance—we want to hear your brave battle cries and your Skype “war” stories. As usual, drop an email to scott.indrisek@skype.net. Please put ROAD WARRIOR in the title, and also kindly include a bit of relevant information: your city/state, Skype ID, and perhaps your favorite flavor of soft-serve ice cream.

Do you remember dancing around to MC Hammer, in dangerously oversized trousers? I certainly do. Following the recent story in USA Today that MC Hammer plans to use Skypecasts, we are looking forward to hearing him host more Skypecasts “about issues such as inner-city murder rates, using [his] songs as an entry point.”

Skypecast listing, for those of you that missed it: MC Hammer Talks about new digital album

For more Hammer action, check out his blog, Look3X

Photo taken from flickr.com

As in June, we also have some Skype Gift Days for certain countries in July. 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.)

The date means that the Skype Gift Day starts on the indicated date 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. Note that Japan and Brazil have a different starting timezone.

Sweden

July 10, July 13 (UPDATED: new July 10 date added)

Estonia

July 25

Germany

July 10, July 13 (UPDATED: new July 10 date added)

United Kingdom

July 5, July 18

Spain

July 5, July 18

France

July 6, July 20

Italy

July 6, July 20

Brazil

July 11, July 27. Start time 08:00 GMT-5

Japan

July 4, July 19. Start time 08:00 GMT+9

Bonus trivia: the internal codename for these days is SOGD. So if you want to sound cool and like you know what you’re talking about, you could ask us how is SOGD going ;) SOGD means “SkypeOut Gift Days” because this is what they were originally called when we started experimenting with the Gift Days last year.

UPDATE: the calendar is now also on Google Calendar.

Here’s a great video from the shopping TV channel QVC UK, featuring Skype, Cyberphone K and two great hosts who present a lively introduction and discussion about the benefits of Skype in ten minutes.

It’s been a while since the last Skypecasts blog post, since we’ve been slaving away on some new controls for moderators and participants:

Listening:

Waiting to speak:

Speaking:

Hosting:

Hopefully these give you an idea of how the new controls will work. Basically, they’re much more integrated to the Skype client, with some big usability improvements. We’re planning to deploy these in the next release of Skype for Windows, coming very soon.

Please let me know what you think and ask any questions in the forums.