May 2007

Our Small Business Pack is out now. See the details on the business blog.

One thing that’s interesting about this — quite often, people ask me how they can resell Skype or otherwise benefit from it. We have various programs available. The first one I’d highlight is our Affiliate program where you can put a banner on your website and earn money after someone buys Skype products after they get to the Skype site through the banner.

This Small Business Pack offering also introduces reseller opportunities where you can purchase the Small Business Pack directly from Skype at a discounted rate (dependent on volumes). You can also sell additional vouchers when the customer needs to top up their account with Skype Credit.

To read more about the Reseller program go to skype.com/go/resellers or send an email to resellers ‘at’ skype.com.

Part of operating a company is reviewing your activities. And things and projects have a natural lifecycle — they are born, they live, and then they sometimes come to an end.

Some time in 2005, we set up a system on share.skype.com where you could put a Skype banner on your site. When your visitors clicked on the banner, they were redirected to Skype and you could earn what we called Skype Points. Until now, there was nothing you could do with these points, and we didn’t put too much effort into developing this program. Over time, it became obsolete.

We thus decided to discontinue this program. We thank everyone who invested their time and effort in promoting Skype with these banners. Thanks Everyone who managed to collect at least one properly recorded Skype point from 2005 until the end of March 2007 is going to get an award in the form if Skype Voicemail and in case of higher point count, also Skype Credit voucher. Feel free to use it yourself or give it to someone else. Details are in a Skype chat message that you should have received from me by now. Feel free to ask me directly if you have any questions about this.

The share.skype.com banners have stopped working by now, so I recommend you remove them from your site to prevent your visitors from seeing page errors.

This does not mean that we are downscaling our affiliate activities. To the contrary, this lets us focus these activities in channels that make more sense to both Skype and our wider community. We continue to invest in and develop our affiliate programs. If you would like to continue to promote Skype and earn money while doing it, please take a look at http://www.skype.com/partners/affiliate/ where you will find more information about how to join our current active affiliate program.

As the title says

See this previous post about the competition and instructions for entering. Three winners get a digital photo frame… not too bad eh?

See here for entering and voting.

New: if you don’t want to bother with uploading your entry to the forum, you can now send your submission by email. Just attach your snapshot to an email with your contact details, and email it to humanemoticon ‘at’ skype.net.

Just this week, Paul Amery who’s the Director of our Skype Developer Program, announced the Skype Game Channel. You can make a game and package it as a Skype Extra and then publish it through this channel — and make some money in the process, as Skype will handle things like payments and billing for you.

The main market that we are looking at is what’s called “casual games”. We’re not talking about hardcore shooter or role-playing games here (although we know that for some gamers, Skype works well in those for team communication). Rather, we’re thinking of bringing more lightweight community-based games to Skype and your desktop. Things like chess, checkers, Monopoly, card games, board games and such. We see that there’s a real interest in these, as a fairly substantial portion of extras downloads fall in this category.

For more information, see the games starting page on our Developer Zone, the Game Channel demo and the Game Channel page. If you’re a developer interested in this, you can sign up for our developer newsletter so that we can keep you posted.

If you already have specific games proposals in mind that you’d like to develop and distribute through this channel, please contact us by sending email to “skypegames ‘at’ easybits.com” and “bizdev.apidev ‘at’ skype.net”.

For those of you in the US and Canada, you shouldn’t forget that today is Mother’s Day — and even if you have, it’s not too late to do something about it

Skype is offering free calls to US and Canadian residents to anywhere in the world * until 4.59am Eastern Time tomorrow.

If you don’t have Skype, it’s easy and free to download and install.

This is a great opportunity to get in touch with the people you love, no matter where they are in the world. Plus, we won’t tell anyone if you don’t actually call your mother.

* There are a few rules, of course.

This is just a small housekeeping note that on our English blogs here, you no longer see trackbacks. Well, you might be seeing some with some older posts, but we won’t accept any new ones. Instead, we’ll use what Technorati has and we’ll gather “blog reactions” from there.

So with all our posts in index and one post views, you’ll now see a “blog reactions” link that, when you click on it, does a Technorati search and shows you all other blogs that have written about the given post. So if you want to get some traffic when writing about us, just make sure that your blog is properly indexed by Technorati and we’ll pick it up from there.

We’ll be thinking what to do about the non-English blogs. Technorati is currently available in English and Japanese only and the link count tool doesn’t seem to be very easily localizable for us, so we’ll see about that.

The reason for this change was that we got sick of trackback spam, and many blogs don’t implement the trackback protocol but are still indexed fine in Technorati.

I’m very happy to share that SkypeFind reached a significant milestone of first 100,000 business listings yesterday. Thanks to all you contributors this far, keep those entries and reviews coming!

And if you have not even searched SkypeFind for the most popular pizza restaurant in your city, get the new and shiny Windows 3.2 client and do it now.

The pickup this far has been impressive given the product has only been available for 8 weeks, going live in the Windows 3.1 Gold Release March 14, so we’re averaging around 13,000 listings per week.

The rate of listings being added is gaining momentum so hopefully the next 100,000 listings will happen much, much sooner. And of course, the first million is a milestone we always look forward to.

Skype 3.2 for Windows is now available as a final version. Download. See also the press release.

I previously posted about the new features in this version. A big thank you to everyone who submitted us bug reports and feedback for the beta, you have helped us to ensure the high quality of this final version. Here are some My Pictures that you can use to let your friends know of this release.

This release is a lot about personalization, and one of the most interesting features here is being able to instantly take a video snapshot of yourself. To celebrate this, we’re holding a competition — see below for details.

One thing that’s not obvious in the user interface but that you’ll surely notice during your calls is (yet again) improved call quality and echo cancellation, including with things like laptop microphones and speakers. We always recommend using dedicated hardware like a headset for best quality, but if you really have to call and don’t have any around, quality with this version is now again improved. We remain committed to providing the best call quality in Skype and continue our research and development activities in this area.

Video snapshots human emoticon competition

To celebrate this release, we are holding a human emoticon competition from today until June 6. You can upload your human emoticon and vote for others’ emoticons. The three most popular entries will win a digital photo frame.

See the competition page and Terms and Conditions for more information. In short, you will first need to capture your human emoticon. Just pick any Skype emoticon (public or “hidden”), and capture a photo of yourself acting out that emoticon. See the photo above for some examples.

You then upload it to this forum, where you can also judge other entries. You can upload either as guest or as registered forum user. If you are uploading as guest, be sure to give some contact details with your submission. Also, make sure that you specify which emoticon you are depicting. See the more detailed upload instructions.

Yesterday, we finally quietly rolled out an update to our systems that’s been among the most anticipated ones for the past, oh, two years or so.

If you have a SkypeIn number in one of the permitted countries, you can now choose to show this number as your “Caller ID” when calling other people with SkypeOut.

I like this update because it’s done in the classic “Skype style”. It’s easy to use and just works. All you have to do is to go to Your Account and then look for the “Caller Identification” bit. Click the “Change” link to set it up. See also the FAQ for more information.

The prompts say that activation may take some time. At least when I tried yesterday with some colleagues, it worked fairly instantly. When I called my Estonian mobile with SkypeOut, my Estonian SkypeIn number happily showed up as the caller.

There’s one downside. It’s a pretty complicated area where our legal people continue to be busy working with our partners and governments, and it boils down to this: Caller ID is available only for some “SkypeIn countries”. As of this writing, you can use your SkypeIn number as SkypeOut caller ID if the number is from UK, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, Estonia and Poland. There are some other countries where you cannot currently use SkypeIn number as SkypeOut caller ID. And this list will continue changing. You can always get the most up-to-date information simply by going to Your Account page and seeing what’s the current situation there.

Since this is a server-side update, it works regardless of what platform or device you are using for SkypeOut. It may be the Skype for Windows desktop client, it may be a cordless Skype phone or even a WiFi phone. All you have to do is simply go online and configure it once in Your Account, and then it works.

I got this request from a co-worker. If you’re using Send Money, please send us your story.

With the recent launch of the Send Money feature we here at Skype are hoping to hear about some successes you’ve had with it.

Have you transferred money to a friend, relative or loved one in urgent need? Given a gift via Send Money? Whatever you’ve done with the new feature, we want to hear about it.

Get in touch with your story by posting a comment here, Skyping me (pete.jones4), or dropping me an email at peter.jones@skype.net.

Thanks