Skype is hosting a Mobile Monday on December 11th on Mobile Social Networking a our offices. The space is fairly limited, so you need to sign up if you want to come and hear about the topic from a great lineup of speakers, as well as take a look at what’s the place where we build Skype like

See this for more logistics and sign-up info. UPDATE: they tell me that the event is full so can no longer sign up. But stay tuned for remarks, feedback and comments on this and other blogs. And be sure to sign up to the Yahoo group to participate on the mailing list and keep an eye on this and future events. The podcasts and video from this and previous events are here.

The President of the United States George W. Bush visited Estonia for a bit less than a day. It’s a great honour to our country, as there are many other countries where the U.S. Presidents have never got and never might.

He’s sitting here with the Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip (right), Condoleezza Rice and other officials, discussing state matters.

As it happens on such visits, diplomats and officials exchange gifts. And while they are often just nice decorative memorabilia, Estonia decided to give President Bush a Skype phone well, he got a beautiful glass sculpture too. Ansip is holding the phone in his hand if you look really carefully. And on the other picture, you see Bush holding the gift box.

The phone in question was Philips VOIP841 cordless Skype phone that plugs straight to your Internet router, so that you can make Skype calls without ever turning a computer on. You’ll have to take my word on this one, as the exact model is not visible on the photos, but I know that was the one

I think it’s a nice symbol about the significance of Skype to Estonia. As for Bush himself, I’m not sure how badly he needs the phone. If you look at the Skype search results, he could easily be a Skype veteran. Which of them, though, is the question.

Continue reading "The U.S. President gets a Skype phone" »

Oh, the times, the times they were... we found this image just lurking around in one of our servers. Or more like "sewers" due to its age :) it's been more than two years.

We now have the Ways to pay page available on our site. It describes various payment methods you can use in different countries. By default, it shows you the country you’re currently in, but you can select other countries yourself to browse around. You can see the details of the payment methods, as well as understand how much they cost to you, as different methods may have different fees associated with them.

This is a handy guide if you for some reason are having trouble with paying for Skype. In most countries, there is more than one method available, so you can choose the one that suits you most.

Today we put out an update to Skype 3.0 for Windows beta. Last week we also put one out, but discovered a bad bug and pulled it in a few hours. Today’s update has this bug fixed, as well as many others. Most important fixes regard voice and video quality and HTTP/SOCKS proxy not working previously. Read more and see the download info on the Garage blog.

I guess this also acts as a “launch” of sorts for the whole Garage. It’s a place where we will be distributing various unstable/preview/beta versions of Skype, as well as patches and contributions we’ve made to open source projects, and other experiments we do ourselves around Skype. Read the introduction for more, and take a look at the things already there. The most interesting ones to me are the Database projects. The developers sat down and went “hmm… we need to build a database on a shoestring budget. And we need to scale it to.. uh.. let’s say one billion people. That should do it for a while.” The Garage Database Projects site has a lot of interesting material and actual code on this.

So if you want to follow the bleeding edge of Skype, subscribe to the Garage blog for any future beta/preview Skype updates, and come participate in things before they reach the general public.

Do you know about the Skype Affiliate Program? Maybe you’ve heard that you can earn money promoting Skype. Just put a piece of code on your site and every time someone signs up for SkypeOut, SkypeIn, Voicemail or any other of the involved products, you get a cut out of the sale.

Now… the big news here is that just a few days ago, we increased the commissions to a whopping 25%. This means that every time someone buys 10 € of Skype Credit, you get more than 2 € out of that. This is a permanent change so it doesn’t have an expiry date.

Also, as a limited-time deal, we offer a 15 $ commission on the Skype WiFi phone package.

For more info and links for signing up, see our Partner blog.

Here is some great news for existing and potential Skype affiliates, we have just increased the commission rate on SkypeIn, SkypeOut and Voicemail from 5% to 25%.

And as a special promotion, we are offering a flat rate of $15 commission for any affiliate referred sales of the new Skype Wifi phone package

The Skype affiliate program is free to join, so you really have nothing to lose here. If you are directing traffic to Skype, you can be earning revenue.

You can sign up to the Skype affiliate program through either Commission Junction or Trade Doubler.

Existing affiliates through these networks have automatically been upgraded to the new commission rates.

Good luck!

Today, we launched a package with SMC and FON to everyone in Europe and the US where you can get a WiFi Skype phone, the FON router and other goodies (Skype Credit and voicemail) for £99/ €139 / $159.99. See the press release and read more details on the Skype Gear blog.

An immediate question I had when seeing this was, “Can you use your WiFi phone in other FON hotspots”. The answer at this time is “no”. You can’t use the WiFi phone in any hotspot that requires browser authentication, but you CAN use it in hotspots secured with WEP or WPA. So while you can’t use the device in other FON hotspots when trying to access them as Linus or Alien, you CAN use it at your home FON hotspot (the secure part), as well as any other open or secured WiFi hotspots, such as your home or office.

Today we put out two new betas.

Skype 2.5 for Mac beta

Skype 2.5 for Mac beta contains the long-awaited SMS feature.

Other notable changes are 10-way conference calling and other fixes. Read more on the Mac blog.

And just to make it clear, Skype 3.0 beta for Windows also supports 10-way conference calling. In some earlier versions of Skype, 10-way calling was limited only to Intel DualCore platforms, but we have now removed this restriction and 10-way calling continues to be available on Intel DualCore as well as other platforms. (Note that regardless of if it’s a DualCore or not, you still need a pretty juicy processor to support all that call activity, and performance may suffer with slower machines.)

Skype 3.0 for Windows beta update

This one contains important fixes to last week’s beta and we recommend everyone running last week’s beta to upgrade to the new one.

UPDATE: this was available for a while today but we had to pull it since we got reports of some potentially pretty disastrous bugs. If you managed to download the update and it works for you, no need to worry, but for others, we’ll post another beta update when we have more info on this.

Note about change logs

The change logs used to be linked straight from the download pages, but are no longer there. Instead, from now on you can find them at the following locations. We are trying to make the web pages as easy to use as possible, while moving the more detailed and in-depth information away to our wikis, forums, blogs and other channels.

Skype for Windows change log, Skype for Mac change log, Skype for Linux change log

University of South Florida is doing a survey about Skype user satisfaction. (This is a project commissioned by USF itself, so it has no “official” connection to Skype.) Besides surely providing them interesting insight about Skype use, it’s also a great example of how Skype itself is a versatile interactive survey tool. They start with a call and then follow up with a Skype chat message that takes you to a web-based form. It just happens to be so that the survey is about Skype itself, but it could as well be about peeled potatoes or, indeed, candidates in the next parliament or president elections.

Before the recent US elections, I heard many people say they got pre-recorded phone calls from the candidates, which is a form of spamming and thus bad and I believe a practice that won’t really be with us much longer, as people and phones get smarter and better at rejecting such unwanted contacts. Instead, what people want is participation, and this sort of mixed-mode survey, poll or panel, when done well, works much better than either a “pure voice” or “pure webpage” experience.

Answer the survey here, or discuss in the forum.

The separate Skypecasts blog that we used to have is no more. We’ve migrated all the articles over to this one and will now be posting any Skypecasts-related updates straight here on the Share.Skype blog.

Did the title make as little sense to you as it did to me originally? That's Latvian language. (We just have this "thing" with Latvia vs Estonia. Just like US and Canada, or US and Mexico. Or Finland and Sweden. Or Germans and French. Or just about any other set of neighbouring countries. So we love them immensely. I'm sure that to an outsider, both Latvian and Estonian make equally little sense.)

So... what's up in Latvia? There's this restaurant called "Vairāk saules" that lets people order their food over Skype. I'm not sure what the restaurant's name means, but Pasūti caur "skaipu" says "Order with Skype". It's just the way of Latvian language to transcribe things into their own language. (They're currently arguing with the European Union over the spelling of "euro" in Latvian.) Here is their flyer. Although the calls are free, the food isn't. But taking calls of hungry people over Skype is a proud example that any other food-related institution should follow.

When I searched for "Skype Pizza" to look for other similar food-related businesses taking orders on Skype, this came up. I'm pretty sure that "Vairāk saules" is not part of a similar program, so it's safe and free to call to get your food — if you happen to be in Latvia and speak the language, of course.

Today we launched a campaign to let expats know how useful Skype is for keeping in touch with friends and family back home. (Expats are people who live away from their “home country”.) The campaign is for Polish expats in the UK and Ireland, and UK expats in Spain. See below for free calls weekends.

We have seen from our research has shown that Skype and our paid services are of particular benefit to those living away from their friends and family and those with friends and family abroad. With an estimated 750,000 Poles currently living in the UK and up to 200,000 Poles living in Ireland, Polish communities represent a significant part of the UK’s expatriate population. There is also a large community of UK expats living on the Spanish coast who can benefit from using Skype to keep in contact.

We’ll be running various activities to highlight the benefits of using Skype, ranging from a promotional bus demonstrating Skype and a radio show live from the bus in Spain, adverts in newspapers, banners on websites and to posters and flyers in major Polish cultural centres and locations.

We’ll also be offering free calls to landlines in the UK from Spain on 2nd and 3rd December and to Poland from the UK and Ireland on the 9th and 10th December. Polish expats can find out more at skype.com/go/polski and UK expats at skype.com/go/uk.

Some people have made a demo of how to customize Skype with a hex editor. The only thing they are doing there is editing some language strings (texts that appear in the Skype user interface).

Guys, you definitely don’t need a hex editor for that. You can do it right in Skype. Take a look at the pirate language file that was produced to celebrate the International Talk Like A Pirate Day. In Skype, just go to Tools, Change Language, and find all the tools to edit or load language texts.

We’ve been thinking of making a Borat language file in connection with the movie release. (Did you know there are some genuine Estonian commercials in there?) Anyone done it yet? Let me know and I’ll be happy to feature it here :)

We set up a public chat for this blog last week. We weren’t really sure how many people would turn up or what we would talk about, but it’s been a good experiment and I believe demonstrates the viability of the public chat concept.

We started off just a few minutes before uploading the public beta…

[8.11.2006 12:11:06] Jaanus Kase says: hi
[8.11.2006 12:11:14] Jaanus Kase says: this is gonna be the blog/publicchat chat
[8.11.2006 12:11:43] Nicola Riordan says: excellent :)
[8.11.2006 12:12:29] Nicola Riordan has been promoted to chat host
[8.11.2006 12:12:31] stephanie robesky has been promoted to chat host
[8.11.2006 12:12:43] Jaanus Kase says: youll both be hosts and help me keep an eye on things here.

Then people started showing up, often saying that they like the new version. Which is always nice to hear.

Continue reading "The English blog chat last week: setting up, first reactions, bugs and fixes, social experiments" »

Some hackers at SharpLogic have written this guide and software to remotely control your house temperature, light, computers and other things over Skype. Only for hackers, as you need to be able to build some of your own hardware using the given instructions, but sounds like fun if you can do that.

I’m not sure if it’s connected with Skype 3.0 beta coming out and everybody trying it, but today was also the first day when we saw more than 8 million people simultaneously online in Skype.

Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows is now available. Please download it here and give us your feedback on what you love and what you hate.

This will be a major milestone release, comparable to the launch of Skype 2.0 with video calling that came out about a year ago. Here are just some of the major features we’ve added to 3.0.

Continue reading "Introducing Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows" »

We are really pleased to announce the release of Skype 3.0 beta for Windows today. This new release has a real community focus with Public Chats and Skypecasts.

Public chats are text chats that anyone can create, host and join where Skype users can meet new people and chat about anything they fancy. Join our Skypecasts Public chat to see what it’s all about.

Public chat & Skypecasts complement each other and can work really well together. Public chats are constant text based chats and Skypecasts are scheduled voice calls allowing instant discussion. Find out more about how to use Skypecasts and Public chats.

With Skype 3.0 beta not only can browse Skypecasts starting and on now directly from the Live tab. When you decide to join or host one, the Skypecast itself will run within a separate tab where you have all the host or participant controls to ask for mic, see who the host is and do all those other things you need to do in a Skypecast. Which will make your life much easier.

Plus we’re also moving Skypecasts into beta from its previous preview state at the same time. This brings Skypecasts to another level and is a great starting point to develop more new and exciting features for communities in the next few months.

We would like to thank all of you for your help and your support.

Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows is now available. We recommend it only for experienced users, as we continue to work on it. Download here, and see this page to find out how you can give us feedback to improve it.

This will be a major milestone release, comparable in its significance perhaps to Skype video calling that came out about a year ago. Nevermind all the bugfixes and tiny improvements – lots of those too, but we’re also talking some major new things in this release. And here’s what those are.

New look and feel

This is the first thing that you’ll notice when you first install and run Skype 3.0 beta, and the first major update to Skype’s interface on Windows in a long time. Read more about the new look and feel in this post.

Public chats

Aside from the new interface, Public Chats are one of the most significant new features in this release. So significant, in fact, that they too deserve their own blogpost. Read more about public chats and other chat improvements.

Continue reading "Introducing Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows" »

Firstly, a quick introduction. My name is Duncan and I’m an interaction designer here at Skype. I get to work with all kinds of interesting people, dreaming up new ways to make Skype useful, fun and usable. Making Skype easy to use is something we take very seriously. It’s not enough to keep dreaming up cool new features, because if no one can figure them out, we’ve wasted all that hard work. So we’re constantly asking ourselves questions like: “Is this as simple as it could be?”, “Does this do what people really want to do?” “Could my hamster, Rambo use it?”

When starting work on Skype 3.0, we noticed that all the features we’ve been putting out over the last couple of years were really piling up. Great stuff like mood messages, video calling, and bookmarking useful chats so you can find them later were getting lost in the crowd of buttons and widgets. In short, we needed to do some spring cleaning.

Continue reading "A new face for 3.0" »

We now have public chats in Skype. Yay.

What are they? In short, you could say that public chats are text chats that anyone can create, host and join. They’re similar to the current private text chats and indeed, share large parts of the interface, but what public chats offer are better moderation controls, letting anyone join without being “added” and letting you have a link to a chat straight on your webpage, e-mail or any other place.

There’s now a public chat for this blog too. Just see in the right sidebar. Feel free to join.

Note that public chats are currently only available in Skype 3.0 Beta for Windows. Support for other platforms is coming. You cannot join public chats with older versions of Skype for Windows.

The public chat system is pretty versatile. You can have chats with wildly different policies. You can have open watercooler chats where anyone can come and talk, or you can have pressconference-style chats with lots of listeners but few talkers, or entirely closed chats where you will approve each joiner before they can even read the messages or topic. You can remove messages and remove unwanted folks from chats.

The detailed instructions for using public chats would be far too long to type here, but we have handy user guides to take you through all that. Go to our communities page where you will find guides for how to create, manage and promote your chat. You’ll also find the Skypecasts guides on that same page. Here are just a few notes about why public chats are interesting and what has changed in the current, private chat feature.

Continue reading "Public chats and chat improvements" »

One of the concerns we hear from more active Skypers is that it is really difficult to get the sound devices in Skype right, especially if you have more than one device connected and keep switching between them. It’s not really difficult to switch sound devices in Skype, you just need to go to Tools, Options, Sound Devices and select the devices you want to use. And other software does it the same way so it’s what you could call an “industry standard” way to manage the devices.

However, it wasn’t good enough and it often destroyed the call experience. Suppose someone calls you and you don’t have your headset plugged in. Now you need to quickly grab your headset, plug it in and click your way through the menus to find the sound settings hopefully before the other party gives up through sheer frustration of not hearing you speaking. Plus there’s the uncertainty of if the device switch really works mid-call or will it hang up your call.

This is why we made what we call the Sound Settings Wizard that is now available in the place where it belongs – the call tab itself. So when you get a call, there’s no longer the hassle of navigating menus and obscure options. Just click on the little headset picture and the wizard slides open, showing you the active devices and letting you change them through friendly dropdowns.

Continue reading "Skype 3.0 sound settings wizard" »

Extras are not entirely new to Skype, as we’ve had the features in Skype for developers to create extras for quite a while now. Skype 3.0, however, takes the extras to a whole new level, as developers can write extras that are more closely connected with the Skype interface and easier for you to download.

What’s an “extra”, anyway? It’s a piece of software that a developer has written to enhance the functions of Skype in any way imaginable.

When you look at Skype 3.0, you will see a “Do more” button or link in various places, such as the Tools menu, call tab, contact menu or 1:1 chat window. This is where you can use the various extras available and manage them using the Extras Manager.

We’ve also updated our Extras Gallery at skype.com/go/extras. This is the destination to go to find out what extras there are available for Skype and what’s new and cool in this space. You can download, rate and comment the extras.

Watch for updates about Extras throughout the beta period.

If you are a developer and want to learn more about how to develop a Skype extra and get it published, please use our developer resources such as the Developer Zone, the Developer blog and the forum.

Here’s a question that many of you have recently asked.

How to add a person onto a current call or connection, to make a conference call, without having to hang up? I have a call on and want to put another on to join but I have not found how to do it without hanging up and then starting a conference call with the parties.

It’s simple, once you know how. In current Skype versions, what you can do is this. Once you have a call going on, go back to your contact list and right-click on the contact you wish to add. You see a neat “Invite to conference” option. (When not in a call, you still see the option, but it’s greyed out since, well, there is no call where to invite this contact.) Once you click that, this contact gets added to your call that automatically becomes a conference call. Simple. Done. And works equally fine with both Skype and SkypeOut contacts.

And I hear that in the next versions, it will be even simpler, so watch out for that.