August 2006

From today, the Skype for Windows 2.6 Beta is available, offering easy access to Skypecasts from the new Live tab. You can download it here. This new beta version replaces the preview that you may have tested.

The “Live tab” lists Skypecasts that are on right now, starting soon, how many participants are involved, and a quick way for you to join or listen.

Download Skype for Windows 2.6 now.

Today, we announced with Philips and Netgear the first standalone cordless phones for Skype that do not require a computer.

There’s a variety of cordless phones already available that plug into your computer. The Philips and Netgear ones are different: they plug directly into your Internet router, so you don’t need an always-on computer with Skype. They also work as standard cordless phones, plugging into your phone line, so you can use them both for standard phone calls and Skype calls.

Neither device is available yet. They say the Philips one will be available for this year’s holiday season, so more news coming in a few months.

Here is a photo of the Philips VOIP841 phone, together with some screenshots.

Two days ago, we had an interesting Skypecast hosted by Sree Sreenivasan and Vikas Bajaj with another candidate for the post of United Nations Secretary General. This time it was Jayantha Dhanapala, Senior Adviser to the president of Sri Lanka.

As with Shashi Tharoor, Sree and Vikas discussed the role of the UN in a changing world as well as the race for Secretary General.

If you missed the Skypecast, you can listen to it - here.

Skype for Windows 2.6 Beta is now out of Preview and in public beta. Download here. Thanks to everyone who helped us find and fix bugs during the Preview stage. It’s not yet out as final release, but much more stable now.

Here are the major changes. See below for how to give us feedback about this beta.

Skypecasts on Live tab

This release gives Skypecasts much more visibility. You can now find Skypecasts directly from Skype itself.  Simply browse to the new Live tab to view all the Skypecasts starting soon and find one you’re interested in. You can then click the “Talk or listen” button and get added to the Skypecast immediately.

Continue reading "Skype for Windows 2.6 Beta — Skypecasts on Live tab, browser plug-ins, clickable moods, birthdays..." »

While we keep celebrating our birthday and you keep sending us cards, another great thing happened just today.

For the first time ever, more than seven million people were online. If only for a brief moment. You should all see the 7M in your Skype software over the coming days.

Thanks for the gift, all you seven million. Good timing :-)

So… today is the real birthday of Skype. Please keep sending us cards and win a prize (competition open until end of this week). We already got quite a few.

Here’s a historic shot from that August night three years ago. (The info date on the photo actually shows the 28th of August, not 29th… close enough.) You can see Niklas on the left, with some other original project members. Nothing fancy, just some Chinese place with sticks and soy sauce and unknown drinks on the table. And a little program that lets the whole world talk for free.

Priidu, the mastermind behind Skype’s graphic icons, spotted some similarities between the My pictures of the people at Skype. We are indeed similar in different ways. For example sports like snowboarding, mountain biking and kiteboarding are much more popular at Skype than curling or table tennis. And none of us has a phone on the desk:)

Google and eBay just announced a major multi-year cooperation agreement. Skype plays a major part in the Click-to-Call plans.

Regarding interoperability, the following quote regarding Google Talk and Skype is interesting.

The companies will also explore interoperability between Skype and Google Talk via open standards to enable text chat and online presence.

What does all this mean in detail? We’ll see next year, as testing of all these new joint initiatives is said to begin in early 2007. For now, one thing is sure — great companies working together is always exciting news.

29th of August, next Tuesday, is Skype’s 3rd birthday. See the original announcement and the letter from Niklas on our first birthday. While the figures quoted in that letter are quite small by today’s Skype standards, the following remains very true today and beyond.

Today people are Skyping to and from every country in the world, enhancing free borderless knowledge exchange as people maintain contact with others as if they were around the corner, even when they are around the world. … Thank you for your involvement with Skype. We hope to continue delighting.

Here’s a million thank you’s to everyone who has supported Skype over these three years :-) and here’s also a My Picture for Skype.

The birthday card

If you want to celebrate our 3rd birthday with us, you don’t have to send us expensive gifts or flowers. But you can send a birthday card. Please e-mail your birthday card to happybirthday@skype.net. It can be a picture, photo, video, just written wishes, anything really. If it’s a picture or video, you can put it on Flickr, YouTube or any other of those Internet things and just send us the link. Please include your Skype Name.

We’ll publish the better cards right here on Share.Skype together with the authors’ Skype Names, and we also have a Grand Jury to select the one and only best card who wins a prize (see below).

We appreciate everything we receive, but original content creations (as opposed to readymade e-cards such as the one I used above) have the best chance of winning.

Birthday card entry submission is open until September 3rd 2006, 23:59:59 GMT (next Sunday). So you basically got this and the next weekend to work on it. We publish the winners and deliver the prize a few weeks after that.

The prize

The best birthday card author will receive one USR9610 speakerphone AND one USR9601 USB Internet Phone from our friends at US Robotics, shipped to you anywhere in the world totally free.

UPDATE: the grand prize winner ALSO receives the Skype Cordless VoIP Dualphone from AmperorDirect.com, shipped to you for free.

Continue reading "Happy third birthday, Skype! Send us a card and win a prize" »

The guys from e-junkie told me about this new FireOlive thing. You can add voice opinions to current news. They’ll rotate a news item and you can just call with Skype and your comment gets published. Interesting simple concept with lots of opportunities for further development.

This entry is for you out there, Mr. Skype-loving Guy who still hasn’t managed to take part in a Skypecast yet. For those who don’t know, Skypecast is quite simply the wave of the future. If you want to let it pass you by, fine—more wave for us! We’ll be surfing this Skype stuff all the way to Tomorrow Land!

BUT if you want to actually, you know, be relevant…we suggest checking it out. And there’s no better chance than tonight (6pm Eastern Standard Time in the US), when the Korea Society presents a special Skypecast to coincide with the Korean Film Festival (week of Aug.25 in NYC). The Festival itself will host South Korean animations, comedies, thrillers, and more. Listen in, ask questions, and discuss cinematic gems from a nation that doesn’t often get sufficient cinematic props. Skypecast in English.

Korean Film Festival

Click here for Skypecast link

If you missed last week’s Skypecasts with Shashi Tharoor, UN Under Secretary General for Communications and distinguished author don’t worry! The Skypecast was recorded so you can listen at your leisure.

Shashi Tharoor was interviewed by SAJA Board members Sree Sreenivasan & Vikas Bajaj, about the role of the UN in a changing world and his chances in the race to find Kofi Annan successor as UN Secretary General.

As this Skypecast was recorded, you can still listen to it even if you have missed it live ;)

Similarly to some other countries and regions, you can now call Taiwan toll-free numbers (+88680…) free of charge with Skype, wherever you are.

A few weeks ago, Yahoo! launched their Yodel Anecdotal blog. Welcome.

Now when I saw this, I immediately made a strange connection. I’m not sure if it’s funny or ironic or what. Just that a few lightyears and web versions ago, we had exactly the following words at the SkypeOut web site. (The red wobbly line wasn’t part of the original design. It’s my own skillful use of the wonderful Paint program to indicate an important part of text.)

If this was a perfect world, there’d be no yodelling, we wouldn’t be ashamed of our love handles and everyone would be using Skype to talk for free.

But alas. The world isn’t perfect, that text got nuked, we still need to pay for calls to phones and there’s the Yodel Anecdotal blog now. Go figure. And read the blog, it’s good.

A great story in The Economist about Sten and how we live and work here at Skype.

Asked for his job title, he looks apologetic. “I think I am director of operations,” he says. “We’re not that big on titles.” Most people in his shoes would be boasting. Mr Tamkivi runs Skype, one of the software world’s most subversive and fastest-growing businesses.

Continue reading "This week's Economist about life and work at Skype" »

I knew there were the Hulger phones, but I didn’t know that there are actually “shoulder phone rests” for such handsets. Must have been quite a sales hit when this kind of handset was the only one available, not “retro” as it is these days.

Tallinn, Estonia is a true Skype town if you judge by the bumper stickers. Every once in a while, you spot a Skype-related one. Here’s what a visiting colleague had to say… the photos are also his, snapped from a taxi.

I was in Tallinn on business last week – great city by the way – and was taking a taxi to the Skype offices when I noticed the car in front had a jobs.skype.ee sticker on the back. Now, that to me shows the coolness of working at Skype when someone would stick that on their car!

Would you buy a Skype bumper sticker?

Shashi Tharoor has worked for the United Nations since 1978 and has been involved in peace keeping operations across the world. Shashi Tharoor is currently running as a candidate for the United Nations Secretary General. He’s holding a Skypecast right now.

Read more details or join the Skypecast.

Shashi Tharoor has worked for the United Nations since 1978 and has been involved in peace keeping operations across the world. Shashi Tharoor is currently running as a candidate for the United Nations Secretary General. Shashi previously worked for Kofi Annan who currently holds this post and is being backed by his native India as successor for the post.

Mr. Tharoor is also a well recognized author having written eight books, as well as numerous articles, op-eds and literary reviews and has also received several journalism and literary awards.

WABC-TV New York’s Technology Guru, Sree Sreenivasan will conduct a Skypecast with Shashi Tharoor. Sreenivasan is Dean at Columbia’s School of Journalism, and also serves on the board of South Asian journalist (SAJA), which is a non-profit organization for journalists of South Asian origin.

Mr. Tharoor has previously been named by the World Economic Forum as a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” and this interview will give Skype users a chance to get answers to their most pressing questions in an exclusive Skypecast. Join the Skypecast now.

Logitech have just announced a great new suite off Skype Certified products. The EasyCall™ Desktop, combines a mouse, headset and speakerphone with a Skype-specific keyboard. This is a fantastic example of how our partners are helping to enhance the Skype user experience.

As Skype moves more in to the mainstream market, we are looking for our hardware partners to design products that make it easier for non-techy users to make Skype calls. That is exactly what this product does. Having Skype integrated in to the keyboard means you can place a Skype at the press of a key. And the speaker and microphone provide the highest quality sound. Great work Logitech!

Earlier this week, Logitech and Skype announced the EasyCall™ Desktop, combining a mouse, headset and speakerphone with a Skype-specific keyboard. This is interesting because it’s another “world’s first” for both Logitech and Skype: the first keyboard from a mainstream vendor to include Skype calling buttons. You can place and end calls and change your online status right from the keyboard, and even assign quickdial hotkeys to some function keys so you don’t have to open up the Skype contact list at all to place a call.

It’s going to be available in Europe in mid-September for the price of €129.99, or £89.99.

Skype for Windows Mobile 2.1 beta is out now. See the mobile blog for more info about what’s new, and see the beta page for download and feedback instructions.

Seth Godin will be doing a Skypecast about his new book on August 22 together with Typepad’s Michael Sippey. More info in the Skypecasts blog.

Seth says about himself: “bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.” Or put it another way, one of the most read, quoted and recognized current marketing gurus. Highly recommended.

Once again…(ahem)…we are turning to you, the Greater Skype Community, to shout, sing, holler, and otherwise boldly proclaim your Skype stories.

Have you used Skype for language exchange before—trading English for Spanish lessons, say, with a kind soul in Barcelona whom you’ve only met through the web *? Are you a student at a college—like Oberlin, Mount Holyoke, or Dickinson—whose language department is so cutting-edge that it’s implementing Skype as a standard tool for contacting native speakers?

If that’s you, well then—parlez vous, habla conmigo, bespreking aan me, colloquio a me**. Talk to me!

*Extra bonus points if, like the kid in the picture above, you are actually a 5-year old tech-genius who is learning Russian using the soon-to-be-released “Smiling Plastic Car” Skype phone!

**I blame Babel Fish for any translational accidents. Unlike many fancy Europeans, I am a sadly unilingual Americano.

We are pleased to announced an exclusive Skypecast with Seth Godin, best selling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. Godin is the author of seven books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work.

Godin’s new book, “Small is the new big”, is a collection of more than 193 riffs, rants and business ideas that have appeared in Fast Company and on his ever popular blog over the last seven years.

Michael Sippey of Typepad will interview Seth Godin giving fans and followers a chance to hear his ideas first hand. Be quick only the first 100 Skype users will have the opportunity to participate and ask questions. Be ready!

Find out more and join the Skypecast on August 22nd at 10:00 PM (GMT).

Gumtree is a UK-based classified ads and community site. Started just over six years ago, they now have more than 1.4 million monthly visitors.

They told me that they now have a Skype button on more than 5% of their listings. Here’s what they added…

Users that you would expect are certainly using Skype — landlords, plumbers, sellers, daters etc. But interestingly, a large chunk of the Gumtree community are using Skype to provide language tuition (see this and this) or free language swaps (see this and this). Generally, a very successful implementation and great value added for our community.

You know these scribblings in various languages and formats in random places on walls and things? “I was here.” Maybe a date is also added. Sometimes a phone number. And now we get to Skype Names in these things.

Original here.

Today, we made configuration changes to how the feeds are generated out of all the Skype blogs (see the list in the right sidebar). You may see the recent items appearing twice in your feed reader program or service. I am sorry for the confusion — it is a one-time change only and was needed to make our feeds work better. There are some improvements now as well — some feeds did not show the author name previously, but do now.

Also, if you are reading the feeds directly using the RSS or ATOM feeds provided off this site (feed name index.xml or atom.xml), I encourage you to switch over to FeedBurner feed. You will find the FeedBurner feed links in the right sidebar of the respective blog. These feeds give you more features such as author names and always fulltext feeds, also look fine in a regular browser, as well as enable us to fine-tune the feed experience and accurate statistics.

We continue to get questions in the eBay Skype discussion board and other channels about what to do if your web host doesn’t allow JavaScript. Many hosts don’t, and that’s good for security. However, the Skype button wizard offers you code with JavaScript by default, which may not work or may produce some weird results as it gets sanitized or filtered by the web host.

There’s a simple way out. In the Skype button generator wizard, you can choose between “web HTML” and “email HTML”. The main difference between the two is that the first one is with JavaScript and the second one is without it. We figured that calling them “with JavaScript” and “without JavaScript” was a bit too geeky and so we went with web/email HTML, since most web-based and standalone e-mail clients don’t allow JavaScript anyway, so it made sense.

To switch from web HTML to email HTML, just select the appropriate option before copying the code.

Why have JavaScript there in the first place? The Skype buttons themselves work fine without it — if everyone coming to your site has Skype installed. If you don’t have Skype and click on a skype: link, one of two things happen.

• if your code doesn’t have the JavaScript thing, they may see some ugly and strange browser or e-mail client error.
• if your code has the JavaScript thing, a friendly error pops up, telling a bit about Skype and suggesting the visitor to download and install it. See an example.

We have an early preview of Skype for Windows 2.6 out there now. You can see that it’s called a “preview”, which means it’s not even a beta yet. You won’t find it on any skype.com pages — it’s limited to the Developer Zone and the forum at this time. We only want those people who are comfortable with (possibly unstable) preview versions to download and use it — and report anything you find back to us.

The main change in this version, and the main reason for calling it a preview, is that we made some pretty significant changes in the audio handling part of Skype, which may make it unstable. So at this time the main goal of this preview is to test all the audio stuff. There are some other new or changed things that are also visible, but we’re focusing on the audio part for the time being.

See the 2.6 preview page for more info and download links, and talk back with us in the 2.6 preview forum.

Do you want to brush up your presentation skills? Maybe it would be a good idea to join Lisa Marshall’s Skypecast. Lisa is a professional presentation coach who has delivered similar programs on improving presentation skills for over 15 years. It’s a really good example of how Skypecasts can be used for education purposes. This presentation is sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and will be about the “Top Ten Tips for Biomedical Presenters”. It takes place on August 10th at 6 PM UK time.

For more information about this Skypecast: Top Ten Tips for Biomedical presenters

Photo attributed to kk+ on flickr.com

I’m pleased to welcome David Rivier to the Skype team, who will be looking after the Skypecasts product and community.

Before joining Skype, David worked at Knexus Group, helping global and European companies (mobile operators, banks and car manufacturers) to create and manage their online communities, online social networks and social web initiatives. He has also worked for several start-ups like 2TalkAbout and academici.

David brings a lot of online community experience to Skype, and we’re looking forward to his plans for Skypecasts.