Insight

This is my first post on the Skype blog, so I figured I’d introduce myself. I’m Rodrigo Madanes and I work at Skype as the Chief Product Strategist. Basically, I look at where we’re taking the products.

A few months ago, I was interviewed by Bradley Jones for a book he was putting together, titled “Web 2.0 Heroes”. The book consists of interviews with many figures in Web 2.0, each made into a chapter (mine was one of them). I wanted to share with you some of the things we discussed.

Continue reading "Skype's Product Strategist Rodrigo Madanes, one of 20 "Web 2.0 Heroes"" »

This week will mark the first month on the job for Skype CEO Josh Silverman. It may not be as round an anniversary as 100 days, but if you want to find out what’s brewing in the mind of the man at the top, Almost Thirty Days On the Job looks like a pretty workable milestone. And it didn’t even require an international logistics operation to do this interview — being able to reel in the CEO to benefit the readers of this blog is one of the perks of an open-plan office here in Tallinn. Enjoy.

Continue reading "Interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman" »

I came across a post by John McArthur, head of Walden Technology Partners and a recent convert to Skype. What got my imagination going was his experience with Skype (paired with a Logitech webcam) that sparked memories of his visit to the New York World’s Fair in 1964. That year, AT&T demonstrated its Picturephone, an effort to add faces to the voices in a phone conversation. The concept never took off and AT&T now calls it “big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive.”

Continue reading "Video calls more than 50 years ago" »

In our work, we run into all kinds of stories where people have put Skype to good use in their lives.

Distant lovers enjoying dinner — and each other’s company — over a free video call. Local-government officials replacing meetings with multichats. Homesick soldiers keeping a line open with their families. There are a lot of people who use Skype religiously, but until this post today by our US blogger Howard Wolinsky, I didn’t think of it in literal terms.

If you believe that missionaries tend to be hardline Luddites who eschew modern technology, Malcolm Lanham’s Mercy Ministries/Global Outreach will help prove you wrong. And if you are a missionary who, Luddite or not, has been limited to handwritten letters and once-a-month phone calls, Lanham’s story may help you expand your horizons a bit.

The Hollywood Reporter has done a nice story on how quick-thinking CNN tech staff in the US helped the network out of an equipment crunch by using Skype to carry a video interview.

This isn’t the first time a major network has done so, as the article also points out. But it could help open the rusty floodgates. We’re all used to seeing journalists in khaki-colored vests filing reports from the world’s distant hotspots over the videophone, and strangely, the choppy quality of these reports does add a layer of raw believability to what is being transmitted. (Similarly, AM broadcasts to me feel more “radio-like” than the squeaky clean FM signals or the kills-bugs-dead sterility of satellite radio)

Continue reading "Skype "a good thing" for CNN" »

In his book “Yes Man,” Danny Wallace tells us (among many, many other silly things) about his correspondence with Omar, “son of the murdered sultan of Oman”, who needed to enlist Danny’s “professionallism” in fleeing the country with 40 million bucks. A cool 10 million for Danny’s troubles and it’s “God’s will”. That’s my kind of god, I tell you.

Serious officials in ill-fitting suits don’t really like young sultans, presidential widows or sad princesses who need regular people like us to pull them out of a pickle. I guess they have a point.

A few days ago, however, the topic got a bit more interesting for me. That’s because some generous soul is busy populating people’s inboxes with what appear to be Skype lottery certificates. I mean, what’s not to like about 200,000 dollars?

Continue reading "When something is too good to be true" »

A few days ago, I wrote about why Skype felt it had no choice but to recall and replace about 8,000 London-based 0207 SkypeIn numbers. Our colleagues in customer support have pulled in extra resources and are totally focused on making the transition as smooth as possible.

Hardest hit were users who had subscribed to the affected SkypeIn numbers for 12 months. (SkypeIn subscriptions are available for 3 or 12 months). We know that small businesses are among them and that their trust and confidence is a precious, fragile thing. It’s with them that we’ll have to work the hardest to win back their confidence.

So here’s where things stand at the moment. Our customer support team has been working round the clock to assist everyone affected. At the moment, they’ve responded to over 75 percent of those who’ve required additional support. And we hope to sort out the remaining inquiries this week. (If there are any outstanding questions, please send an email to sichange@skype.net If you’d like to explore the possibility of retaining your number outside of your Skype account, please contact GCI Telecom on sales@geonum.co.uk).

Everything is being done to keep this from happening in the future. We’re no strangers to crises and major issues like this help us learn as a business. We’ll use the knowledge wisely. Have faith in us.

Like a lot of people in the Mac community, we’re excited that Mac OS X Leopard is now out in the wild. As you may have read, Skype runs into trouble when Leopard’s firewall is activated. At the moment, this affects a minority of Skype users.

However, we wanted to let you know that we’re embracing Apple’s new security efforts. By doing so, we’re continuing to ensure that Skype for Mac is the most secure internet-calling platform a Mac user can get. Our engineers are tweaking Skype for Mac and as soon as safely possible, the issue will be resolved.

In a few weeks, the fix will be included in an updated version of Skype that has a loving relationship with the Leopard firewall.

The other day Lifehacker wrote about Caffeine, a tiny 48KB piece of freeware that does just one thing: it stops my Mac from dimming the screen and falling asleep. It puts a Zzz icon in the menu bar and it functions like a light switch. To turn it on, you click it. To turn it off, you click it again. That’s as basic and binary as it gets. Now, another bit of software, Jiggler, does pretty much the same thing, yet gives the user more configurable options. And weighs in at 168KB.

I’ll now cherry-pick three comments by those Lifehacker readers who prefer Caffeine: “Screw options… keep it simple,” said one. “It does exactly what I want it to do with a minimum of fuss or effort,” said another. “Simple, to the point,” said the third.

Fast-forward to today. And to the bit that will probably frustrate a colleague or two at Skype. Jean Mercier of Skype Numerology has posted “Video in the mood? Bah!”, a piece that condemns feature bloat in Skype without quite calling it that. He points to comments on this very blog which reflect a longing for a lite version of Skype.

Not everyone feels that way. “I think all of the progress and features Skype has added to its product are genius,” says one user leaping to our defense. “I welcome more feature[s] that will enable me to use Skype more efficiently to render my life more productive and allow me to complete tasks faster.”

Although Jean Mercier is a bit unfair when he writes, “Time to listen to the customers Skype! Most existing customers don’t like it!” — basing such a sweeping statement on fewer than ten blog comments is a pretty big stretch — his general observation about features vs. simplicity is a reasonable one. And I won’t muddy the picture by arguing that many new features are added in response to, yes, users asking for them.

Instead, I’ll state the obvious: Finding the right point on the simplicity-feature scale is a fine art mastered by few. I can imagine the fiery arguments that illuminate the room where new features are chiseled in stone. But to say that is a cop-out. We hate feature bloat, too. Question is, have we succumbed to the unspeakable? Or are these concerns premature?

As I await your comments, let me click the Zzz icon on my menu bar to keep the screen from dimming…

So you’re huffin’ and you’re puffin’. Your blood pressure has risen to 140. Your dog is shivering under the couch. You’re angry. Because you didn’t do anything and then everything froze and now the webcam doesn’t work and ten euros worth of Skype credit you bought still hasn’t shown up. Arrggghh.

There are a few things you can do.

• Head to the Skype help pages and search the Knowledgebase

• Submit a support request and get an email response within a day or two (this may not sound incredibly impressive if you expect live help, but Skype has over 220 million registered users. Even if a teeny-weeny fraction sends a question to customer support, it’s quite a load).

Bonus factoid: Skype’s customer support crew is officially fluent in seven languages — English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish. Plus three unofficial tongues which I won’t share with you. Ok, I’ll give you a hint on one: Skype’s largest office is in Tallinn.

But there’s more. Savvy Skype users have also discovered a little gem known as Skype Forums. Once you know what it can and cannot do for you, plunge right in. There’s an enormous amount of searchable knowledge there, courtesy of your fellow Skype (super)users. If you can’t find an answer, you can post a new question. When that’s done, look around. Perhaps you have a solution to someone else’s conundrum. Posting this will brighten her day and help keep the forum community alive and kicking.

Skype Forums are not an official support channel, but believe you me: they’re officially useful.

Every now and then we get an email or chat message asking us: “What’s VOIP?” (or voice-over-IP, as it’s also known). A very valid question and if you were to search skype.com for this term a few weeks ago then you’d come up empty handed. Because we’re not keen on tech talk, fancy acronyms and buzz words. But because we already have lengthy explanation about the technology that powers Skype - P2P or peer-to-peer - then we now also have a nice little “Skype explains VOIP” page. Enjoy.

So, here I was, in my previous post, being all jetsetty and stupid about sitting on a flight to Prague and flipping through magazines in search of a Eureka moment. (You’ve got to admit, though, it was nowhere as bad as Tyler Brule’s endless columns that appeal to people who need their dose of rare elitist cool that only radiates from articles written by a rich guy who spends his life in transoceanic levitation.)

“Business travel accounts for 65 percent of all flights within the United States,” reports Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon, quoting figures from travel-research company PhoCusWright. Read the article here, it’s packed with useful information about emissions related to air travel.

I’m here to state the obvious: if you can skip a flight, do it. And use Skype instead for that oh-so-important meeting. Yes, the chain of events that led to the manufacture and distribution of your PC, webcam, headset, or WiFi phone did create a negative environmental footprint. So the physical stuff that Skype needs is far from squeaky clean when you’ve got your green-colored glasses on. But using Skype sure beats the hell out of binge flying. Oh yessireebob.

Every once in a while, you stumble across an article that expands your horizons. (Reminds me of Stephen Wright, the comedian, who said, “Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.” But that’s an unnecessary digression, really.)

On a recent flight, I picked up the July-August issue of Utne Reader and read an amazing article, The Big Throwdown, that they had lifted from the Believer. Apparently, Rock, Paper, Scissors is huge these days, and not just among kindergarten kids. There are league championships, serious strategic gambits, corporate sponsors and pretty girls involved.

Which then reminded me of a really cool game invented by a friend of mine who writes the Virtualities blog. He posted the instructions back in February, but it’s worth introducing it here as well. Basically, it’s Rock, Paper, Scissors twisted and contorted to fit the Skype age. Instead of hand gestures, you use Skype emoticons. Here are his instructions. Try it, not only is the game refreshing, but it gives a whole new purpose to Skype emoticons.

This is one of those posts that strives to inspire y’all to upgrade your version of Skype. So what is it this time? In a word: sound. The sound of music. The sound of silence. The sound of the bearded supplier in Macedonia.

There are many factors that affect the way your Skype-to-Skype call sounds. Some are beyond our reach. Others we — and you — can control.

With each new release, Skype’s engineers improve sound and video quality. And because we’ve replaced our audio engine in our most recent releases — it’s now fully built in-house — it’s worth bearing in mind that you may run into some bumps when a call is placed from an older version of Skype to newer versions.

Maybe the only bumps you encounter are goosebumps. Most people won’t notice a thing. But to set your mind at ease and to get the best possible call quality, it’s definitely worth upgrading.

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.

Over the past few days, we have seen a story circulating about how Skype is reading BIOS data of your computer and what this might possibly mean. Here’s an update from our Chief Security Officer Kurt Sauer on this.

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.

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.

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" »

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?" »

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" »

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" »

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.

The fine year of 2006 will be over before we know it, and we’re curious as to how many Skypers out there signed up this year as a result of our free SkypeOut in North America promotion.

We’d like to hear from both Americans AND Canadians, since Canada doesn’t get nearly enough Skype love. We heart our northern neighbours!! Please email your Story Guru (who actually just got back from a lovely sojourn to Montreal) by clicking here.

Someone asked us this.

I’d be interested in turning Skype Video into a Home Watch feature. I’d like to be able to start the video remotely without the need of anybody to accept the call.

It’s quite possible to use Skype and the video calling feature for this — see the discussion in the forum.

Just a while ago, we put out some pages that quickly give you an overview of the most essential Skype features. Sometimes you may simply have a question, “so, what can this Skype thing do?”. Or you may need to explain the same thing to someone who’s not yet familiar with Skype. The features pages help you do that, as they’re the essential collection of the most important things you need to know about the topline Skype features.

For example, did you know that…

• … you can put Skype calls on hold?
• … the video calls work even if only one of you in the call has a webcam and the other doesn’t? Obviously, for best results and mutual enjoyment, it’s best if both of you have it.
• … the Skype chat emoticons are among the coolest and most expressive ones out there?
• … you can see your Outlook contacts in Skype?

All this, and more, on the Skype features pages.

The SkypeCast system is fairly young, and we’re always excited to hear from users who are catching on to its advantages. Enter 17-year old Josh Bolling, a Virginia resident who runs the online podcast Slash Dot Radio, a virtual discussion group based around the techie news blog Slash Dot. Along with co-host Chad Ohman (all of 14, and he took apart and rebuilt his first computer at the age of 9), Josh has begun hosting Slash Dot Radio Skypecasts, which he then records and posts online as podcasts.

Every now and then we forget that the next generation grew up on the cutting edge of technology like Skype and its precursors. I’m both proud and dismayed to realize that while I verbally and ineffectively berate my stubborn laptop, somewhere out there a self-taught 12-year old is building his own wireless network out of tin foil and spare cir