December 2006

As there are only about 54 hours left of this year, let’s take a look at what were the top events for Skype in 2006, as covered in this blog. This is a completely personal selection by myself, focusing on products and other buzz, I’m sure others would have made a different one.

January

Announcing a whole bunch of stuff at CES… including the NETGEAR WiFi phone

Skype 2.0 for Windows gold release with video. It hasn’t even been a year of Skype video. (The first ever public beta of Skype for Windows with video came out on December 1 2005.)

5 million people online. (We’re on track to hit 9 million soon now.)

Continue reading "Highlights of 2006" »

Earthquake near Taiwan disrupts Asian communications. Anothr.com says that they are affected too.

Anothr.com is still alive; but our server had been influenced, some international feed can’t verify before the recovery.

Anyone from here in that region? Are you seeing any effects of the earthquake? Both with Skype and with the rest of your Internet and phone communications? Please post your stories here or in the forum.

Just a summary of the recent news that we’ve had on our various blogs.

iPhone

On Monday, the iPhone was released, but it was not THAT iPhone, it was from Linksys. More on the Gear blog.

New pricing plan for SkypeOut in January

We announced that we will have a new pricing structure for SkypeOut in January. Among other things, it will include a connection fee for the calls. More details coming up in January 2007.

The Skype “worm”

We learned of an alleged Skype worm circulating your computers and news this week. More on the security blog.

Skype for Business control panel updates

Ok, this isn’t exactly from this week, but it deserves to be here nevertheless, as you may have missed it otherwise. Skype for Business control panel updates. Among other things, you can now get up to 33 sequential SkypeIn numbers. (Guys, what’s with the figure though? 33? Huh? You should have made it 42 then.) More details and control panel screenshots coming up in January.

Extras are little pieces of software written by developers to enhance Skype and give you even more features. With Skype 3.0 you can now open Extras from the ‘Do More’ button and start making use of them straight away. Every week we’ll post details of one of our premium Extras to tell you all about them and the benefits you can get from using them.

We’re starting off with Last.fm, the world’s largest social music platform. Last.fm lets you listen to different music and builds an online profile based on your music tastes. It then creates a customised radio for you and recommends music and events.

By installing the Last.fm Extra, you can listen to free customisable radio. It’s also possible to let your friends know what you are listening to at that exact moment. If they like it too they can always call you to chat about the band’s latest album!

It’s easy to start listening to music through Skype. Just like all the other Extras, all you have to do is go to the ‘Do More’ button in Skype and follow the instructions to install.

Then when it’s installed, you can launch Last.fm from the ‘Do More’ button. Try typing in any artist you like and Last.fm will recommend an artist that’s similar to your request to listen to and see whether you like them.

If you do, you can choose what you want to do next, from recommending the song to a friend, to making sure that you never hear the song again if you hate it.

If you want your friends to know what music you’ve discovered, select the box ‘Show what I’m listening to in my mood message’ and the name of the track and the artist will be displayed there for all your contacts to see.

If you’re a developer and would like to develop and distribute similar extras for Skype, keep an eye on our Developer Zone and the Developer blog.

Over the past few weeks, there was a lot of craze around iPhone. Will it be from Apple? Will it do this and that? Oh my, all the buzz, conspiracies, theories and speculations…

Today, the mystery is solved. Turns out the iPhone is just a series of Internet phones, most of them for Skype, from our buddies over at Linksys. Read more on our Gear blog. According to engadget, Cisco had trademarked “iPhone” somewhere in the 90s. And so they will be talking about “Applephone” from now on, whatever and whenever that may be. Until then, we’ll be talking with our Skype iPhones.

Chris is a teacher in South Carolina. He sent me a link to his blog where he documents a project of his to use Skype to videoconference with another class who is thousands of miles away in Peru in South America. Apparently it went fine and the kids loved it.

Schools used to be isolated entities. You went to your school and you heard from your teachers. I don’t remember too much about other schools, except if there was some competition and we had to compete against them. Now with tools like Skype that make affordable global videoconferencing available to classrooms on a tight budget, the world is smaller than ever.

Ten years ago, the differences between the two cultures would have been significantly more profound. Widespread adoption of the Internet, popular music, television and other flatteners have created a global culture. My kids knew the same shows, listened to some of the same bands (artists) and spoke some of the same vernacular. The true flattening moment for my kids was when they realized that all of the Peruvian students were at least bilingual. Some are trilingual. My students are figuring out that if they intend to compete for work in ten years, it is high time they step it up. The competition is getting fierce, and the cultural differences are shrinking.

Check out the mashup of Skype with Pamela (one of the earliest and most well-known Skype extras) and Nabaztag (the funny little wifi rabbit). When you record a voicemail with Pamela, it can forward the voicemail to the Nabaztag who then reads it.

This video was shot a while ago, but recently there have been several bits of news around the involved components. Pamela just got upgraded to a 3.0 release and is now available as a Skype extra. More info about Pamela. And Nabaztag just released a new version of their rabbit, Nabaztag/tag (I thought the original name was already weird, but they’re really pushing the limit here ) who can not only talk, but also listen and even smell things. Plus they upgraded their my.nabaztag.com “My Account” page that is now much easier to use and navigate.

We just put out a piece of news about our management changes.

Such changes are a disruptive thing. I, of all people, should know. I’ve been working for three different managers throughout this year, having a lot of re-orgs, re-makes, re-everything. I can certainly think of another group of people who are somewhat put off by the change — our lovely HR team who barely finished the new organization charts from the previous changes we had these nice new charts, and the moment the charts got finished, the team learned of the news of going back and having to start over.

But this is just pebbles. The big news here is that Niklas will continue to run the company according to his vision with the rest of his original core team that started Skype more than three years ago. eBay brought some people over for a while and some senior eBayers like Henry continue to be in key positions, although acting more as advisors now instead of daily execution. I’ve had the privilege to work with many of Skype’s friends from eBay and I can say they are very fine people who understand and love Skype and want to help us succeed. But now Niklas and his team decided that they have their own ideas about how to deliver the results, building upon the past heritage and the pretty stellar track record of Skype. And eBay lets them do just that.

I haven’t really commented on this whole eBay-Skype thing myself too much, as you can have a lot of speculation around it without very little substance. I prefer to let the facts speak for themselves and today’s news is a response to the sceptics who figured that eBay will come in and do a hostile takeover and trash Skype.

There will surely be changes in 2007 about what Skype does and does not do. We have said at various times that we will do a lot of different things. Some of those will not happen, while others will happen that we haven’t yet spoken of. One thing is for sure — we will remain true to our original commitment of letting the whole world talk for free, while adding further value with our paid products.

No, answered Gerd Kanter, one of world’s best discus throwers to a journalist at a press conference this week. Using new technology in the team surely helps, but results mostly depend on my work.

Gerd and his Team 75 plus have a rather unorthodox approach to athletics. Training, nutrition and recovery are important, of course, but on top of that the team puts a lot of energy into competing on winning spirit and information.

Continue reading "Does using Skype improve discus throw results?" »

Extras are little pieces of software written by developers to enhance Skype and give you even more features. We’ve been working with developers for some time to create Extras for Skype but with Skype 3.0, we’ve made it easier for you to download them.

Download Skype 3.0 and click on ‘Do More’ while in a call, on a chat or just looking for something to do. The Do More menu lets you see all the Extras available to play games, share applications with other users, record your calls, collaborate online through network sharing capabilities and much more.

You can also go to the Extras Gallery to download even more Extras and rate and comment on them for everyone else.

We’ll post more details about some of our premium Extras over the next few weeks so stay tuned for lots of insider tips about what they do, how they can make Skype even better and what you can use it for.

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.

As part of the new look and feel of Skype you can now personalise Skype even more by adding wallpaper. To celebrate our new look and feel, we’re offering you the chance to design a Skype wallpaper which other users can then use too to customise Skype.
As its Skype 3.0, we’ll choose 3 winning designs which will be published right here on Share together with the authors’ Skype Names, for all to see. The best 3 designs will each receive a USB Internet Mini Phone from our friends at US Robotics.

To enter please e-mail your wallpaper design in PNG (.png) or JPEG (.jpg) format to wallpaper@skype.net with your name, email address and Skype Name so we can give you all the glory if you win and of course ship the prize to the 3 lucky winners.
Entries must be received by January 13th 2007, 23:59:59 GMT and we’ll publish the winning entries right here.

Skype 3.0 for Windows is now the official version and out of beta. Thanks to all the testers who helped us with feedback and bug reports. Download here.

One cool bit of info that we’ve found out from our user research that’s good to mention in connection with this release is that over half the people using Skype use it to meet someone new. This is very much in line with what we’ve always thought and what we’re trying to bring more and more into the very product itself — that you use Skype not only to talk with those you know, but might also use it for find new friends.

Continue reading "Skype 3.0 for Windows now officially launched" »

You’ve been asking what’s our plan for 2007 with the free calls in North America. We’ve been saying we’ll announce it before the end of this year. And today is the day.

Today, we announced Skype Unlimited. There’s bad news and good news.

The bad news is that you’ll have to pay a bit.

The good news is that it’s a simple one-time purchase and there are no catches. You’ll get free calls for a year for an incredible price, plus other goodies like coupons for discounts on top-notch Skype hardware from our selected partners.

How it works:

• you go to Your Account. If you’re eligible for the Unlimited plan, you’ll automatically see the prompt to buy it.
• the price is $14.95 if you buy before end of January 2007. From February, the price will be $29.95.
• if you buy before end of 2006, you get free unlimited calls until the end of 2007. If you buy in 2007, you get free unlimited calls for 12 months after your purchase.
• the calls continue to be totally free until the end of 2006 as we’ve previously said, no change in that. But there’s no risk in stocking up for 2007 so that you wouldn’t forget it in the Christmas and New Year holiday craze — if you go and buy the plan for $15 right away, you’re good to go in the new year.
• you’ll get the partner coupons delivered in the e-mail that we send you after the purchase.
• the details are mostly the same as with this year’s free calls — for example, it works within the US and Canada for both landline and mobile calls.

See also the Knowledge Base section on Skype Unlimited for more details.

Today we released Skype 2.2 Beta for Windows Mobile. See the press release, download page and feedback options.

Lots of great stuff in this release, see the release notes for the full details. For me, the most interesting thing is Skype multiperson chat (group chat) that is now on Windows Mobile devices. It always bothered me that you can have great group chats on all our desktop versions, but as soon as you switch to the Windows Mobile versions and then someone tries to chat with you, they get some kind of silly error about your Skype not supporting multichats and thus you can’t chat with more than one person at the same time. I’m a big fan of group chats and they are already truly excellent and we can and will take them a lot further. (I see from the release notes that we added this already on August on the Pocket PC version, but now it’s available on more devices.)

Continue reading "Skype 2.2 Beta for Windows Mobile" »

Skype is expanding. Today, we announced in Czech Republic that we are going to establish an engineering office in Prague in early 2007, to complement our other locations in Tallinn, London, Luxembourg, North America and elsewhere. Tallinn continues to be our most important engineering facility, but we need to expand beyond Estonia to sustain our growth rate.

Some Skype people actually went scouting through many Central European countries earlier this year, looking for a new location based on a number of factors. We chose Czech Republic simply because it had the best mix. (I asked if good beer was one of the factors, but didn’t receive direct comments. )

We already are in Czech Republic. Sort of. A while ago, we launched a co-branded version of Skype with Centrum.cz, the country’s second-largest Internet portal. Now, in addition to just having a local version of the software, we will have an actual office there where you can come and work and help us build the “next great thing” from Skype.

So if you’re from Czech Republic and would like to learn more about how you can join, take a look at the current Prague vacancies. And check back often, as we’re just now busy building the local version of our jobs site and preparing other information.

Many people asked us for a whiteboarding function in Skype. Whiteboarding is when you can share a common “canvas” with your friend and both draw on it. The good news is that there is now a whiteboarding function in Skype 3.0 beta. The bad news… well, what can be bad about that

Whiteboarding is not an inline core function in Skype. Rather, it’s bundled as one of the many extras that you can use. I think it’s one of the simplest and greatest examples of where we’re trying to get to with this whole Extras thing. So I thought I’d do a quick writeup of how the extras work if you want to use an extra with your friend. We’re using the whiteboard as an example here, but all the extras work and install pretty much the same.

It all starts when you right-click on your friend and select “Do More”. You then see a list of the suggested extras and can organize them further if you want. For now, we just select the first one, “Draw on Sketch Pad”.

Continue reading "Whiteboarding with Skype 3.0 beta" »

Skype a Celebrity. Bid on eBay to win talk time with one of the sixteen celebrities. As I write this, the highest bid is for Jenna Fischer from The Office, standing at $630. The bids end on Dec 10.

EbOY is a group of pixel artists. Their latest poster features Skype. We’re the only ones to have our own truck well last.fm has its van too, but Skype’s is the most impressive one. Cool. I’m not fully sure who were the staff posing on the truck. And while there are a lot of other cool online/web companies, eBay is interestingly not there (or did I miss it?).

You know how those dark winter nights can get to you. (In Tallinn, it gets dark around 3-4 PM in the afternoon.) Talking helps a lot to lighten up the long dim hours. And even though you got free Skype calls, you may want to talk with someone who's not yet on Skype, so you need to use SkypeOut.

To help you out here, we'll be running our Winter Days campaign, starting next week. If you happen to live in some of the European Union countries (not all, though) or Japan, we offer you some free Skype Credit on certain dates. As with the previous Gift Days, you'll just need to sign in to Your Account and click a button to claim it. You can then use the credit for SkypeOut — or if you don't feel like talking, you can also send an SMS. Watch this blog and skype.com for updates about dates and countries.