Skype 3.2 beta for Windows is available from today. If you’re adventurous and an experienced Skype user, download now.

Here are the most significant changes in this version.

Send Money with PayPal

You may have heard Niklas talking about this just last week at the VON conference down in San Jose. We have also referred to this feature previously. And now it’s finally out as part of this beta.

It’s very easy to use. Both the sender and receiver just need to have a PayPal account. The receiver may also create the account later after you have already sent the money.

This feature is subject to PayPal limitations — you need to be in countries where Paypal supports respectively sending or receiving money. If you use it to send money to someone who cannot receive it, the funds are returned to your account or credit card, so it’s fine and no money is lost.

See our user guide for more information about how exactly to use this feature.

You may also say that Skype is now your PayPal contact list. PayPal itself didn’t have a contact list feature. And now all your PayPal send/receive transactions can happen right within Skype.

Continue reading "Skype 3.2 beta for Windows — Send Money with PayPal, video snapshot, other improvements" »

We did a promotion of Skype for Business recently in Taiwan together with our friends at PChome Online. Here’s a report from our team on the ground.

In terms of the growth of business user in Taiwan, on March 15, 2007, PChome & Skype announced year 2007 is the Year of SkypeBIZ , and the first product of SkypeBIZ – Control Panel is ready to rock!

On March 15, 2007, PChome & Skype invite our partners, Rhemn Tech, Vosky Tech, BluePacket Communications and our clients, Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan and Comprador International to celebrate this moment with us. Medias including Reuters, CNET, Economic Daily, APPLE Daily, United Evening, Commercial Times, DigiTimes, Download!, and FTV join this party too.

According to the report, about one third of the 171 million registered users worldwide use Skype as a business tool. Crystal Pu, Director of PChome & Skype, says “The industrial structure of Taiwan is formed by small and mid-size business. The communication cost benefit is what they really care about, and that’s why Skype is the best communication tool for business in Taiwan.”

Take a deep breath. 2007, the year of SkypeBIZ in Taiwan, it will be a big start for PChome & Skype and our business users.

Director of New Market Development from Skype — Scott Bagby

Vice President of PChome & Skype — Robert Lo

We created and unofficial directory of Skype public chats a few weeks back as I wrote in this post. It appeared were not the first to do so There’s also searchskype.net and this nameless, but nicely designed directory (looks familiar, doesn’t it?).

Some public chat hosts kindly added our eyes and ears to their chats. Thank you for doing so. It was quite fun to see what goes on in these chats. For example The Entrepreneur Story chat lead me to a group of students who set up functional businesses with only 100 dollars. Space science chat gave me regular updates on what Nasa had been up to and made me wonder why the Earth has only one moon. There were also some less educational chats where at least it was good to see people from different parts of the world getting to know each other. This is what Skype public chats are for.

We’ll be contacting creators of Space science and The Entrepreneur Story chats to send both of them a Philips VOIP 321 phone. And we’ll send creators of Search Skype, BarkerJr.Net and Trip hop, Chillout, Drum’n’Bass a Logitech webcam. That’s more phones and less webcams that initially promised, but that’s a change for better, not worse.

2006 was the year where we moved offices at pretty much all Skype locations. Now that we’ve settled in to our new offices a bit more, it’s time to bring you the updated video tours of them. Here is a tour of our Tallinn office as it was seen in late 2006 and early 2007. You will see our resident entertainer Toby, and Marvin the office kitten who is playing with a mouse, and many people and things we do.

image from wikipedia.org

Well hello now… who are these? None other than Dominican girls at carnival in Taíno garments and makeup. Taíno is a type of indigenous American ancestry, and according to the CIA World Factbook, about 73% of all Dominicans are of mixed race, that is, of mixed European, African, and Taíno. And altogether, the Dominican Republic has almost ten million people.

And Dominican Republic has now joined the proud club of (currently 15) countries and regions who can claim having their own SkypeIn numbers which you can now buy and use.

When was the last time we added a new SkypeIn country or region before this? I can’t remember. Too long ago. But I hear that now we’re picking up the pace of SkypeIn expansion again, and Dominican Republic is the first of the “new wave”. So keep an eye on this space for more news.

If you’d like to buy a Dominican Republic SkypeIn number, just head over to Your Account and follow the instructions there.

Skype 3.1 for Windows is now available as final “gold” public version. Download here. See the press release.

The two major new features in this version, apart from the new typing indicator, are SkypeFind and Skype Prime Beta. See my previous post about 3.1 beta that talks about SkypeFind, typing indicator and other new things in 3.1, and see the Prime Beta posts. Here are some updates to both of these that we released today.

SkypeFind competition

We are running a competition around SkypeFind until the beginning of July. Just list a business in SkypeFind, and if it happens to be the one where people call most, as compared to the other listings, you may win some Skype Credit every week, or pure cash each month. See the campaign details and more info in English (US), English (UK), French, German or Japanese.

Skype Prime Beta information

Skype Prime Beta now has a product page that sums up all the relevant info, and there are user guides that tell you more about how to set it up and use it. Plus you can now have web snippets to promote your Skype Prime call service right on your home page, blog, website or wherever else on the internet. See here for more on the badges. And here’s an example badge I made for echo123. She doesn’t actually know anything about tambourines and won’t charge you any money, this is just an example.

Please keep the feedback coming — it’s you all who help us make and improve Skype. Thanks

Since we put out the first beta of Skype Prime this Wednesday, we have been getting tons of feedback on blogs, to our support, chat and any other channels that you can possibly think of. We see many comments about the content of possible call services, maximum and minimum charges, Skype’s cut of the revenue, more varied billing options, user interface improvements and many many more things. Thanks, keep it coming

In fact, we anticipated getting all this feedback, and this is exactly why we put out Skype Prime out in its early stage of development. Skype Prime is currently a beta/test version and you can expect many changes to it as we go forward. We know of several rough edges that we have there and we keep polishing those. So we ask you to think of Skype Prime in its current state as not of something that’s set in stone, but rather something that you are just seeing the first version of. If you have been following the development of Skype, I’m sure you have noticed that we keep evolving and re-engineering things, and this will surely be the case for Skype Prime as well.

This also means that if you are uncomfortable using pre-release software, you are probably better off staying back for a while and letting it evolve through a few more versions before giving it a run.

If you want to be involved with Skype Prime, please send your input to our support, use the forum or Skype Prime Beta public chat.

Today, we put out an update of Skype 3.1 beta for Windows. Download here. It contains the typical bugfixes and such from the previous release — thanks to everyone who’s been helping us with the reports. Keep them coming.

In this version, though, there’s one new feature that deserves more attention, since I believe it is really important, interesting, useful and fun. That’s a lot, I know. But bear with me. The feature is Skype Prime Beta. And I think it’s one of the most important innovative things that Skype has put out in quite a while.

What is Skype Prime?

In short, it enables paid Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls. You can charge other people for calling you either a one-off fee or by the minute. Conversely, if you are the caller, you can call experts who charge for their services, and you can then pay the fee and access the expertise that the other call party provides.

Ever since Skype came out, and especially since SkypeOut was launched a bit less than three years ago and Skype first moved into the paid products space, you have been asking for this kind of feature, in addition to our free voice and video calls. “Skype is great for free high-quality voice and video, but every once in a while, I’d like to charge for my calls.” I’m happy to finally see us rolling this out, and I’m sure it will enable a whole new range of businesses. So nothing will change in our free global Skype-to-Skype calling, but on top of it, you can now have paid calls if you want.

Continue reading "Skype Prime™ Beta — introducing the global expertise marketplace" »

Skype reached half a billion (in other words, 500 million) downloads about two weeks ago. We reached this in 42 months since the launch in August 2003. As of today, six or more people download Skype every second as we speak.

I thought of this question one day. “We have these four versions of Skype. For Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Mobile. Can you run all of them in one computer and have them talk to each other?”

Turns out you can, and it’s not so hard these days. As computers get more powerful, we see the virtualization technology get more popular, where you can run one operating system inside another operating system. On Mac OS X, the Parallels product is a popular way of doing this, and it’s easy to install and get going with.

So I just created myself two virtual machines, one for Windows and one for Linux. And inside the Windows “machine”, I created another machine using the Microsoft Device Emulator. You can use this MS emulator to run virtual Pocket PC or Smartphone devices inside Windows, and also install applications such as Skype on them.

So here’s what it looked like. Click on the picture to see the annotated version and then you can also access the full-size version.

I had some trouble getting the Windows Mobile version talk to the others, and it didn’t start working until I used a different Skype Name from the mobile thing. I have also tried voice — not having the both call parties on the same computer, but just calling out from different versions. All of them work fine except the Windows Mobile version that needs to deal with double-emulated processor and there doesn’t seem to be enough processing power for this.

Anyone up for getting more than four Skypes on the same picture? Let me know when you do that maybe trying with different Skype cordless/wifi phones or other gadgets.

A story has been going around internally and externally about the emoticon version of the popular Rock, Paper, Scissors game. (Did you know they now have something like the World Cup for this game? )

Instead of hands and real life, the emoticon version is played in Skype chat with — what else — emoticons. You can create as many this-emoticon-is-stronger-than-that-emoticon relationships as you like. It’s like a wiki-game, everyone can create and edit their own power hierarchies within the emoticon roster.

Here is an example ruleset:

• a is beaten by a
• a is beaten by a or a
• a is beaten by a
• a is beaten by a

For extra gaming pleasure, you may use hidden Skype emoticons to whack your opponents in one swift move.

I have been watching the YouTube search feed for Skype for quite a while now (a year or so). For months and months, there wasn’t really anything posted there about Skype at all. But in the past few months, it has become really active. People are posting phone/video calls with their families or random people, interviews, tutorials, silly videos with emoticons (staff favourite! ) and what not.

Here’s a random recent one, where someone compares the connectivity of iChat and Skype on Mac. iChat tries to connect to the user’s AIM account, but fails repeatedly. Skype takes a bit longer to connect, but works fine.

We are wanting to partner with companies who can resell Skype services to small businesses and SoHo’s within Europe. If you are an IT consultant or offer IT support services and you have a large network of business clients, then please get in touch.

You would be incentivized to sell Skype services to business users including SkypeOut, SkypeIn and the Business Control Panel. Please see www.skype.biz for an overview of the Skype for Business offering. If you think you can sell this to your clients, then please contact us.

Send an introductory email to resellers@skype.com and include a summary of your business and an overview of your client base. We are looking for partners with large networks of business users who the Skype offering will appeal to.

Public chats are great - provided you can find one on a topic that interests you. Unfortunately we don’t have an official directory of Public Chats (yet), so here’s an unofficial one. If you’re hosting a Public chat or know good ones, please help other Skype users find out.

We want to give Skype hardware for hosts of most active public chats. We can’t participate in all public chats, so we have to limit this to hosts who have added the contact publicchatfan to their chat before the 12th of March. It’s not a contest for the most chat messages. Think of it as a small Thank you to users who have helped to make Skype more useful, fun or both. I’be announcing six lucky winners here on the 19th of March. One of them receives a Philips VOIP 321 phone and five will receive a Logitech webcam.

And here’s a tip from Voidstar if you want to find out about more public chats, but can’t find them in the directory - search for joinpublicchat which is an integral part of any public chat code and you’ll see them beautifully displayed in your favourite search engine. Just some link “engineering” needed later

See the unofficial directory of public chats

At Skype our main focus is providing our users with the best communications experience possible when using Skype. The first results of the survey start showing that 40% of the people within the Skype ecosystem are interested in/are currently working with Skype on the implementation of concepts and ideas that add value to the Skype Users.

I do know that part of the Skype partners are Developers or work in Software companies, so that is why we would like you to tell us what you would like to see in 2007.

Our developer community and the businesses responsible for creating ideas have helped Skype work towards continued innovation and delivering this promise to our users.

To develop further services for the Developers, Software partners and Business Development communities, Skype would like to understand a bit more about you and how we can best help to facilitate your requests with both our technical teams and business development teams moving forward.

Please take some time to answer our survey. Fill out it!

Your feedback and input are welcomed. Antoine at Skype