January 2007

This just in from the “weird” department. According to Amazon.com, 94% of people who view the Netgear Dual Mode Cordless Phone on their site do indeed buy it. But the remaining 6% all go and buy “Waterpik NEW Professional Ultra Dental Water Jet”.

Huh???? It would make some sense if the Netgear phone had some video capability, you would then need fine shiny teeth, but we are not yet shipping devices with Skype Video, so… what gives?

We’ve heard a lot of skepticism about Skype being suitable for use in a business setting. There are some things you couldn’t do with Skype before, but Skype 3.0 for Windows is a great step forward towards gaining more traction in the business community with its advanced administration options. And even before that, many businesses have actually found Skype great for their purposes as is, or in connection with the Skype for Business Control Panel that lets you easily manage and track Skype-related costs. By the way, Skype won the in the VoIP product category of Small Business Computing Excellence in Technology Awards, perhaps indicating that it’s not totally unknown in the small business space.

To celebrate and promote our business use, we’re doing a bit of a business push to highlight some businesses that are successfully using Skype, and encourage others to follow the examples. See the general release about new Skype for Business features, or see how Skype helps the international architects firm Lewis & Hickey in their daily work. Or you can take a look at some other case studies like Tractor or Edison Ford.

Where to go from here?

Just remember skype.biz as your destination for “all things Skype and business”. More specifically, you can take a look at the Skype business security site to learn how to manage and control the use of Skype in your network of Windows-based computers, or look at the Skype extras for business. Plus there is Skype for Business Control panel for business payments, cost reporting and management. UPDATE: we have received some questions about using the Control Panel — see here for comments.

Check out how Loïc Le Meur, one of France’s and really Europe’s best known bloggers and head of Six Apart Europe, interviews Niklas in Davos. They talk about the Davos event, the Second Life phenomenon (Niklas: “I’m even having trouble with my first life so I’m not too much on Second Life”) and Skype’s future (“from free one-to-one calls to one-to-many and more expressive conversations”). Plus Joost, the new TV (“I’m the coach watching from the bench, not scoring the goals myself this time”; “we throw spaghetti on the wall and see what works/sticks”), and how he sees Joost vs YouTube.

The interview runs for 7:43. Watch right here or download video in higher resolution, or just the audio as MP3, from original post.

On January 29, we saw over nine million people online in Skype for the first time ever. As you may have noticed, this blog is undergoing a bit of a Mac takeover, so this is what the onliners figure looks like in Skype for Mac.

Next up: double digits in the millions department. I wonder if our testers have actually tested that it will display fine, or will it crash and burn as soon as it hits the tenth million…

Just as we mentioned our brand transition, linking back to last year’s Brandchannel survey, the results from this year are in. Skype is seventh globally and second in Europe only after Ikea. There were 3,625 respondents to the survey globally, so this isn’t really serious science, but still nice to know. We’re individually mentioned still only Europe’s top 10, so lots of catching up remains to do elsewhere.

image from brandchannel.com

Skype’s brand is one of our greatest assets. We’ve put a lot of work and love into it. A collateral of this is that we’ve sometimes also made it into various top brands lists. You don’t hear us boasting about it every day, but it’s kind of nice to know. We quite like our brand and we keep developing it.

As Skype itself keeps evolving, the brand should keep up. Maybe you’ve noticed that we’ve switched our tagline on skype.com, from “The whole world can talk for free” to “Take a deep breath”. That’s a sign of greater things to come. The brand team said they’ll do a longer post here about the transition, but until then, here’s a trailer for you in the form of an illustration. In short text form: if you’re working together with Skype in any shape or form, then, as painful as it may sound, please forget about Akbar and speechbubbles. (Akbar is the “handwritten” font we often used in speechbubbles.) They may have been cute at some point, but now they’re done with. Dealt. Gone. Finito.

Instead, you’ll be working with… er… other stuff. For those in our partner network, your Skype contacts will tell you all you need, ask them.

And while we’re working on that new post, why not check out the previous one from almost two years ago, about how the bubbles came about in the first place.

Maybe you one day tried to get in the Skype English blog chat, but couldn’t, as it was full. We are now filtering the chat and ejecting people who are not active there to try to get more activity in this chat. If you want to participate, just click the big blue link in the top right corner of every page here on the blog, and have your say on whatever Skype-related is on your mind.

To look at the posting activity, I made myself this little Skype API client with about 120 lines of Visual Basic code and a few hours of time. Probably won’t ever be released as a proper program, but you may ask me for it if you want to look at your own chat activity, or post ideas about what more you want to analyse in chats.

Try making your own Skype API clients if you’re into programming — Microsoft Visual Studio Express, containing Visual Basic, is available free of charge, and Skype4COM is easy to get started with.

Last week, we put out an announcement about our new pricing plans. I like to distinguish between facts and opinions. So here’s a quick recap of the facts.

• As of January 18, a connection fee of 0.039 € or equivalent applies to SkypeOut calls after the fifth second, with the exception in the next two bullets.
• The connection fee does not apply if you are on the Skype Unlimited plan in the US or Canada, or Talk for Britain plan in the UK.
• The connection fee doesn’t apply to toll-free calls. You can do toll-free calls without having any Skype Credit or paying anything.
• The following regions were added to our Global Rate of 0.017 € per minute: Czech Republic, Guam, Hungary, Israel, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Puerto Rico and both Alaska and Hawaii in the United States.
• We are working on our new Skype Pro offering that, among other things, will have domestic SkypeOut calling in a number of countries with a connection fee but no per-minute charges. You can sign up to receive more info by e-mail, and it will of course be here on the blog. No date yet, but I think it’s safe to say we will speak more about Skype Pro in weeks, rather than months.
• Nothing changed in the structure of our other prices (Voicemail, SkypeIn, or free Skype-to-Skype).

Continue reading "The new pricing structure, what's next, and what to make of it all" »

Remember the wallpaper competition? We invited everyone to send us their wallpaper designs for using in Skype to celebrate the launch of Skype 3.0 for Windows.

We received a good selection of entries. As said previously, the three winners will each receive a USB Internet Mini Phone from our friends at US Robotics. We contact the winners personally to sort out the details.

Here’s how we did the judging, before the finally get to the winners. Many people simply sent us “pretty pictures”. This wasn’t enough, as the submission had to be actually usable and functional as a wallpaper in Skype, with no visible cut edges with normal Skype window sizes or anything like that.

So, here we go… we also invented our own names to the submissions based on the initial impression of their looks. When downloading them from Flickr, be sure to download the original size.

Winners

“Leaves” by sky_1002

“Matrix” by skintradeuk

“Blue pattern” by monkey050

Honorable mention

Here are two other entries that didn’t make it to the Top 3 but we still wanted to share them.

“Twirl” by kenny.bsp

“Grandma’s wallpaper” by kenny.bsp

Thanks to everyone who participated

Sorry for the hiatus. I was, like most other Skypers, in a work-related getaway last week.

Last week was also the week of news. We put out the news on our new pricing and Skype Pro plans. You can sign up to get more info. We’re now going over everything that you guys have said on all of this over the past few days, more to come.

In the meantime, kick off the week lightly with this ad for 3 X-Series. They have a blog too.

CES, probably one of the largest and most important annual gadget shows on the planet, took place this week in Las Vegas. We put out two announcements and had a wide array of products with various hardware partners. For more detailed coverage, check out our Gear and UK blogs.

We’ve seen reports of Skype for Mobile development being halted in light of too expensive data plans, so I checked with a few people and thought I’d put up an update on where we stand with this.

First, it’s of course true that people decide to use or not use Skype and other Internet applications on their mobiles based on their data plans. The industry continues to develop and we’ve seen various unlimited data plans spring up in different places. The first one was with German e-plus already in November 2005.

Second, I’ve always found “Skype for mobile” an obscure term. There is no single “mobile” platform and there is no single “Skype” that will work on all. So talking about “Skype for mobile” is like talking about “Skype for computer”. On desktops, we have Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions. Similarly, on mobiles we have had Skype for Windows Mobile for almost two years now (announced in April 2004), and it now also supports Smartphone devices. We also have a client that works within the Three X-series. Similarly, we will have future versions on current and future platforms, working in different thin- and fat-client configurations. For example, Mac OS X has just entered the mobile scene with Apple’s latest product announcement, and while it remains to be seen how open the platform will be to external software developers, in principle and in the long run there’s no reason why you couldn’t see Skype running on that thing one day.

Russell Shaw argues that headsets are the primary turf of Skype, and while devices are cool, they won’t give us a big uplift.

Skype grew up in the headset world. Skype grew big in the headset world. And maybe I am on a curmudgeon streak, but I wonder how many prospective custoers- even current Skype users- would pull out of their two-year cell contracts to mobil-ize their Skype.

Continue reading "Skype — for headsets only?" »

We all know that internet technology has changed the way we interact, keep in touch and even meet brand new friends. With Valentine’s Day on the not-so-distant horizon, we’re eager to hear how Skype has helped old romances to grow while allowing new ones to blossom. Now that video calling has become the norm, couples who find themselves separated from each other are keeping the love going strong with a little help from Skype. Click here to share your own tale of Skype romance in advance of February 14th!

We’ve read stories of other people using Skype for various home monitoring needs, but I usually haven’t known these people. But here’s a cool story from someone I know. Check out how my eBay friend Ryan is using Skype video to keep an eye on his buddy Baxter, seen below.

When we announced the launch of Skype 3.0 a couple of weeks ago we told you about Extras, little pieces of software developers have created which enhance Skype and offer you even more features.

In the last post we let you know all about Last.fm. This week we want to let you know about Unyte, an Extra which lets you share documents, applications or even your entire desktop with the person you are calling or chatting to on Skype.

Unyte is great for when you’re discussing a project with colleagues. If you are on a conference call with four co-workers and want to discuss a project plan you have all been working on, use Unyte to share the document with everyone on the call and any updates you make will be seen straight away by everyone.

You can open Unyte from the ‘Do More’ button in a call, chat or even the contact list. Unyte will then open and you can choose which applications you want to share from the list.

Once you’ve selected the application you want to share, click the ‘Start sharing’ button and choose you want to share it with.

The people you’ve selected will get invites to view the document and will be able to see it until you decide to stop sharing it by clicking the button.

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.