October 2006

An interesting service around Skype and feed reading is making rounds recently — anothr.com.

The idea is really simple. You add anothr.com to your Skype contacts and then “talk” with it with chat messages. To get help, you type “?” (just the question mark). To add a feed, you type “RSS + http://example.com/feed.address.xml”. And whenever there is a new post on that blog or site, you then get it as a Skype chat message from Anothr.

Here is an example of me adding the feed address of Skype Developer Zone blog into anothr.com and receiving the most recent article after a short while.

I like anothr.com because it is dead simple, easy and hits the target right on the spot — like Skype itself is and everything around it should be.

A note about private feeds, though. It’s not a good idea to use web-based services like Anothr to keep track of private blogs that you access with your username and password (and different services handle the credentials differently so it might not work in the first place). So use it only for public feeds available to everyone.

For “professional” blog readers who need to keep track of a zillion feeds across many different categories, and do things like flag, sort and manage them, Another is a bit too simple. But for the most of us who just want to keep track of what’s happening on your favourite blogs and sites, Anothr is about as good as it can get and eliminates the need to sign up for yet another software or service just to read blogs and feeds. It reinforces our vision that Skype is increasingly about much more than just free calls. Sure, they have some early software bugs like some non-English characters are not transmitted correctly, but I’m sure they’ll work it out.

Anothr.com themselves have a blog, too. Subscribe to it (using, of course, their own service) to keep track of the latest updates.

Interesting news from ComputerWeekly. The global energy company BP recently revised their communications strategy and found that using Skype can help re-establish communications at times of a disaster.

Last week, we announced this Talk for Britain campaign for the UK. In short, buy £10 of Skype Credit before the end of the year, and get free calls to UK landlines for the 6 months after your purchase.

Now… what we also did in connection with this campaign was a survey of the Brits’ talking habits. See the full release. Some highlights below are pretty… er… interesting. Then again, I’m not sure that the results would be so different if we did this in any other country. I’ve been on the phone from all sorts of funny places too, but toilet… hmm.

According to the research, almost three quarters of respondents admitted talking to friends and family while on the toilet and 17 percent have actually fallen asleep while chatting on the phone to someone else.

The research revealed that respondents admitted that their worst phone nightmare was being told what they did the night before because they were too drunk to remember. Also, it appears that women like chatting on the phone while soaking in the bath and almost a quarter said that they had been caught talking to someone they shouldn’t have.

So really. Go talk for Britain.

Sten, who was portrayed earlier in the Economist, now talks with Naked Conversations about Skype as naked conversationers Rick and Shel proceed on their world tour. (They’re not really naked. That’s just the title of their book.)

See also what they say about laptops in old town and sleeping in the same room as Queen Elizabeth did. She was in town last week.

Have you ever met or called someone and wanted to tell them your Skype Name and it has been really hard to get across? Like if it is “kuglunk457”, you need to go “K-U-G… four-five-… no, the digits are as digits, you don’t actually write “four”… ok did you get that”? Or how about if it’s at such a noisy party that talking is impossible in the first place. And you don’t have a pen.

So together with moo.com, we made these things we call MiniCards. They are little cards where you can put your Skype Name, your web or blog link, pictures, and really just about anything else you want. And you can have the cards  shipped right to your doorstep.

To celebrate the MiniCards launch, we are giving away free packs of 10 cards during this week. Just go to moo.com/skype, look for the “Enter promo code” field and type “freebie” there. (Without the quotes, of course.) You can then customize your card.

I recommend checking out those funky pixelated Skype smileys you can see in the program every day. Here’s a MiniCard I made for echo123. She said she can’t get to the site herself so I helped her out.

So remember… to claim your free pack of 10 MiniCards this week, just go to moo.com/skype and use freebie as the promo code. If you’re ready to spend some cold hard cash on a pack of 100, they tell me that you could find a Golden Ticket in your pack and win some free Skype Credit if you’re lucky.

We're proud to announce that Skype 2.0 for Mac gold just went up to our website. This means that finally Mac and Windows users can see each other with free video calls. Using a new Mac with built-in camera you don't even need to worry about finding a good webcam, it just works.

You can read more about the launch over on the Mac blog.

We now have a new blog to keep an eye on the ever-growing Skype hardware, gear and gadget world. Occasionally you’ve seen some hardware news on this main English Share blog too, but it has got lost among other stuff, and we’ve really not managed to cover all the interesting things.

So if you’re specifically interested in what we collectively call Skype Gear, just head over to the fresh brand new Skype Gear blog. This Share blog you’re currently reading will continue to poke various aspects of the Skype life, culture and products, occasionally possibly also featuring really big hardware news, but no longer all the daily stuff.

While we’re on the Gear topic, here’s something handy to get you kickstarted in the whole Skype gear and accessories world. The Skype Accessories Guide catalogs the types of devices and accessories we work with and give certifications to. As things get more complex, it’s important to be organized and keep the terminology consistent. So we introduce two classes of “things”. Accessories improve Skype calls made from your computer so they plug in to your computer, while devices allow you to make Skype calls without using your computer.

We’ve heard about dogs at the office. How about a cute little kitten for a change? This guy, called Marvin, was spotted roaming our Tallinn office. Quiet and well-behaved, he ran about in the noiseless manner as kittens do, just poking around and looking at things.

Continue reading "Marvin the office kitten" »

The fine year of 2006 will be over before we know it, and we’re curious as to how many Skypers out there signed up this year as a result of our free SkypeOut in North America promotion.

We’d like to hear from both Americans AND Canadians, since Canada doesn’t get nearly enough Skype love. We heart our northern neighbours!! Please email your Story Guru (who actually just got back from a lovely sojourn to Montreal) by clicking here.

Salesforce.com are this week hosting Dreamforce their annual users conference, with a number of Skype Partners in attendance.

Convenos recently completed the certification of their Convenos Meeting Center for the AppExchange platform and will be announcing availability of this product at the show. Now you can start or schedule a web conference or collaborative session from within the Salesforce.com interface using Convenos Meeting Center. Convenos are offering Skype Starter Packs in their booth and have also put together several show specials with Skype partners, including VAPPS for Highspeedconferencing.com and IPEVO for the new Xing phones.

Skype will be sharing a booth with both Intel, Polycom, VoSky and Plantronics, stop by to see us there.

A new release of Skype 2.6 for Windows Public Beta is out yesterday which you can download here. This Public Beta version gives Skypecast Hosts new and improved ways to moderate your Skypecasts directly from the client. Now you can see who is talking, who is waiting to talk and who is just listening and as host, you choose who does what.

There are some known issues in this version with Skypecasts, documented in the changelog.

With your help, this Beta release solves several bugs and we want to thank everyone for their feedback - we can’t do this without you…and we’d love to get your feedback again! Please download this version of Skype, your feedback is much appreciated.

We just released an update to the Skype 2.6 beta. Download here.

See all the changes in the change log. A couple of things are interesting.

First, the Skypecasts controls are now available directly within Skype, so you don’t need to work with that web popup any more. You still need to join the Skypecast through the web page and the web popup pops up, but after connecting, you can close it, as everything that you need to interact with the Skypecast is straight in the software. If you are the host, you can mute and unmute talkers. If you’re a regular Skypecast member, you can ask for talk and ee how many others are talking or not talking.

There are some known issues in this version with Skypecasts, documented in the changelog.

Another interesting new feature is the bandwidth indicator. You need to enable it in the advanced options. After you do so, a small icon appears on your Skype status bar, indicating the upload and download bandwidths graphically. If you float your mouse over it, you see the consumed bandwidth for upload and download in a tooltip.

For developers, there’s a feature here that has been requested a lot: you can turn off the visible Skype UI through the API now. For more info on this, please stay tuned for updates on our developer zone and the developer blog.

Please leave us feedback using the links on this page and sign up for the survey.

Someone asked us this.

I’d be interested in turning Skype Video into a Home Watch feature. I’d like to be able to start the video remotely without the need of anybody to accept the call.

It’s quite possible to use Skype and the video calling feature for this — see the discussion in the forum.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the new office of Skype Tallinn, by far the largest facility of Skype worldwide. This has been a year of moving and relocation, with Skype moving in London, Luxembourg, San Jose and now Tallinn. (We lost the chicken race to others.) I hear this is not the last offices-related news this year, so as always, watch this space for updates.

We’re still moving in and unpacking. No pictures of the interior yet, as there’s painters and ladders and installers and wires and cables around still, but here are some artifacts from last night’s opening party and the surroundings.

We’re in a building that’s pretty nondescript from the outside, perhaps only differentiated by the logo. This is probably one of the few buildings in the world where you actually see this logo on a house. While pretty subtle at daytime, at night it has a blue glow and is a piece of art on its own.

Inside, though, it’s a different story. You can get a feeling of the vibe here if you look at the videos from our previous offices and multiply the coolness factor at least five, if not ten times. It’s not too “fancy” or “posh”, though, as we don’t think much of those things. Rather, I’d say it’s smart and functional, being as Skype always was — to the point and getting things done.

Toby the Skype Tallinn mascot dog was there with us at the opening. Not itself, as it got nervous with all the people around, but on the meat dish and the cake. Someone told me:

Can we please stop evangelizing Tobi? Jaanus, don’t post several pictures of fake Tobi on cakes and stuff.

Interestingly enough, while Tobi is not even a human, it provides an interesting introspective and an original viewpoint (around the knee-height of most humans) into various aspects of our life here, and thus will continue to be a regular contributor to our sites and blogs.

Continuing the tradition of free office goodies, here’s our typical ice cream selection. The ice cream fridges are at various places throughout the office floors, this one is about five meters from my desk.

Here’s a view from my window. It’s towards forest where you can go running or biking at summertime, and skiing in the winter. … Ok, I cheated a bit. Between the office and the forest, there’s a car park. But still.

It’s shaping up to be a pretty good place to work and have fun. Last night’s opening party was spectacular as expected. And after having been separated across many temporary locations and homes (some folks stayed at home simply because there was no space for their desk, or not enough chairs… can you imagine?), we’re finally all together at the same place.