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In the absence of a thirsty cat, a glass of milk quickly goes sour when left on the kitchen table. Thankfully, awards have a longer shelf life and I hope you’ll excuse my travel-driven tardiness in tipping the old blogger’s sombrero to the Global Mobile Awards panel at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Earlier this week, the 3 Skypephone was highly commended for its innovative approach in the Best Mobile Handset or Device category.

As the judges — industry experts, analysts, journalists and academics — put it, “The Skypephone is an innovative partnership between Hutchison 3 and Skype. In addition to the headline Skype service, the phone offers extremely good value for money with a wide range of features not previously seen at this price point.”

Since the 3 Skypephone was announced in late October, it’s been enjoying an excellent ride in the hands of Skype-loving consumers and it sure feels nice to see the industry recognize the innovation that this handset embodies.

Incidentally, the 3 Skypephone was also one of the main attractions among journalists, bloggers and other visitors to the Skype stand at last Sunday’s Showstoppers. Even as you see more and more Skype-enabled mobile and wireless handsets pop up over time, the 3 Skypephone will continue to play a special role in showing people what’s possible — and what to expect.

Earlier this month, we said it’d be available later this month.

If you’ve got a Sony PSP Slim & Lite and have been waiting since CES for a system software update so you could make Skype calls, now is the time to act. All you need to do is to upgrade your handheld’s system software to version 3.90.

With the update, foreshadowed in Sony’s PlayStation blog and now also announced by the Sony folks in Europe, PSP Slim & Lite users can make free voice calls to 276m other registered Skype users, see which friends are online and available to talk.

Also, if you have a bit of Skype credit lying around, you can use your PSP to make cheap SkypeOut calls to landlines and mobiles anywhere on the home planet.

To get started with Skype on PSP, it might be worth checking out this video by John Koller, senior marketing manager for PSP at Sony:

From Crackle: Skype on the PSP

MySpaceIM with Skype is now live and available to MySpace and Skype users. The new product is available in 20 countries where MySpace has localized communities and adds Skype voice calls to MySpace’s IM client, which has 25 million installed users.

It’s these enlightened millions on MySpace that can now place free Skype calls to their friends on MySpace or Skype. The really, really nice bit is that MySpace users don’t have to download any additional Skype software. And they can now link their MySpace profiles, photos or avatars to their Skype names. (See the MySpaceIM FAQ for more on how to get started.)

Ahead of the public release, more than half a million MySpace users had hooked up to the beta version of MySpaceIM with Skype.

May your conversations be merry!

Free video calls have been a feature on Skype since late 2005 and have helped millions of people keep in touch. It’s become so popular that one in four Skype-to-Skype calls today involves video. Like they say in Hollywood – show, don’t tell.

Things are about to get a whole lot bigger, sharper and smoother. Today, Skype and Logitech announced a collaboration to give Skype users the kind of video quality that used to be the privilege of big businesses.

Enter High Quality Video, due in November. (Although, if you’re adventurous enough to play with beta software, you’re welcome to try it out now.) Explaining what it does is a bit like dancing about architecture, because you really need to see it in action. But the video window on Skype has grown to 640x480 pixels, delivering up to 30 frames per second. This produces a level of clarity, detail and fluid motion that is pretty astounding. It’s been immensely satisfying to watch the reactions of people who’ve seen it for the first time. Them jaws, they tend to drop.

To experience free High Quality Video, this is what both sides of the conversation will need:

• Skype 3.6 for Windows (expected to be available in November)
• a Logitech webcam that has been optimized and certified for High Quality Video (the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, the Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks or the Logitech QuickCam Sphere AF (Logitech QuickCam Orbit AF in the U.S.)
• Logitech QuickCam software, version 11.5 (expected to be available in November at www.logitech.com/downloads)
• a dual-core PC
• a broadband connection (384 kbps and above).

For more, please see the High Quality Video page on the Skype website.

The three webcams are already available worldwide, in retail as well as the Skype web store. In Europe, the Skype shop has a special offer for the webcams. The Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 or the Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks will normally cost €99.99, but if you head for the Skype webstore, you’ll also get a free headset, free shipping, and SkypeOut credit worth up to three hours of calls to landlines and mobiles. In the US, Skype offers a $20 rebate on either of these products ($99.99 before the rebate).

One shouldn’t really trust rumors. But we’ve heard plenty of them in recent weeks and in this case, they weren’t too far from the truth. In tandem with the mobile operator 3, Skype has just launched a new mobile phone called 3 Skypephone. One that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls and send free Skype instant messages from anywhere. Not just from the desktop, not just from the office. From anywhere.

And it works the other way, too. That is, if your friend in the US runs Skype on her desktop and calls you over Skype, your 3 Skypephone will ring. And the call won’t cost either of you a penny.

What we’re dealing with here is a mobile internet phone with Skype built in. That is, in addition to Skype calls the phone also handles conventional calls and can be used to access 3’s other internet services. We’re dealing with a new breed here, folks. Because this is the first time an operator has offered a mass-market mobile phone purpose-built for free internet calls. In a package that’s easy to use, is easy on the pocketbook and looks so good you may want to chain it to your wrist (lest gravity or someone’s sticky fingers get the better of it).

So, where can you get the thing and what’s the damage? The 3 Skypephone will be available this year in the UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden. Skype-to-Skype calls are free from your 3 Skypephone as long as you are on contract or your pay-as-you-go 3 credit is topped up monthly. In the UK the 3 Skypephone is £49.99 on a pay-as-you-go tariff or free on a contract.

The new phone is available from November 2 in 3Stores across the UK and from Skype and 3’s websites in time for Christmas. And it’s available for pre-order in the UK from today.

See the press release for more details.

I’m writing this in Prague where Paul Amery, who heads the Skype Developer Program, last night announced the winning entry in Skype’s 2007 Mashup Competition: PamFax from Germany-based PamConsult.

A mashup is a software application or service that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience. It has parallels in the practice of merging together two or more songs for something entirely new and cool. Think of Christina Aguilera’s vocals from “Genie in a Bottle” merged into the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain”.

Entries to the mashup competition were judged against these criteria: Skypeness, usability, coolness, stability, usefulness, flair and layout. The winner, PamFax, allows you to send a fax to any fax machine in the world and easily pay with your Skype credit. (I realize the previous sentence used the word “fax” three times. Sorry ‘bout that.) Registration is not needed, nor is pre-payment. Optionally, you get fax status notifications via Skype chat, SMS or email. And there’s one more little cool touch: you can look up where the recipient is located, using Google Maps.

The judging panel consisted of Paul Amery, Antoine Bertout, Lester Madden, Damon Williams, Adam Trachtenberg, Phil Wolff, Jim Courtney, John Musser, Jack Dorsey and Julian Bond. (Also see Jim Courtney’s excellent extended mashup competition post on Skype Journal.)

All mashup entries can be found here.

I’ve been told that the number eight is considered “good luck” among the Chinese. And why not? After all, 3, the mobile operator, has announced that its X-Series mobile-broadband package has now reached Ireland. Making it country number eight where the X-Series is available. The roll-out started in the UK last December, and has since made a mark in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Australia and Hong Kong.

To Ireland-based Skype users, this has a very real consequence. The X-Series brings unlimited free Skype-to-Skype conversations and some of life‘s other necessities to their very pockets. And that’s pretty cool.

If this all sounds like a load of mumbojumbo, here’s some more background. The X-series is a flat-rate mobile-broadband package, replicating the established “all you can eat” home broadband pricing model. X-series customers pay a monthly fee for access to a suite of internet services on their mobiles. As Skype’s nicely tucked into that suite, users make unlimited internet calls with other Skype users while on the move.

As I make my way through no fewer than 517 emails that some evil spirit produced during my week-and-a-half holiday, I’m pleased to pull back from the depths of the inbox and mention today’s coolest bit of Skype-related news.

Namely, Nokia’s funky N800 Internet Tablet now speaks Skype. Officially, that is. (You may have noticed in late June that Skype did a pre-release demo of Skype for the N800 in New York).

Andrew Brennan from Skype Gear has written a nice review that you can read here. Once you’re convinced it’s something for you, install the latest Nokia firmware version from here, as instructed by Andrew’s review. Or download Skype for the N800 here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

An interesting service around Skype and feed reading is making rounds recently — anothr.com.

The idea is really simple. You add anothr.com to your Skype contacts and then “talk” with it with chat messages. To get help, you type “?” (just the question mark). To add a feed, you type “RSS + http://example.com/feed.address.xml”. And whenever there is a new post on that blog or site, you then get it as a Skype chat message from Anothr.

Here is an example of me adding the feed address of Skype Developer Zone blog into anothr.com and receiving the most recent article after a short while.

I like anothr.com because it is dead simple, easy and hits the target right on the spot — like Skype itself is and everything around it should be.

A note about private feeds, though. It’s not a good idea to use web-based services like Anothr to keep track of private blogs that you access with your username and password (and different services handle the credentials differently so it might not work in the first place). So use it only for public feeds available to everyone.

For “professional” blog readers who need to keep track of a zillion feeds across many different categories, and do things like flag, sort and manage them, Another is a bit too simple. But for the most of us who just want to keep track of what’s happening on your favourite blogs and sites, Anothr is about as good as it can get and eliminates the need to sign up for yet another software or service just to read blogs and feeds. It reinforces our vision that Skype is increasingly about much more than just free calls. Sure, they have some early software bugs like some non-English characters are not transmitted correctly, but I’m sure they’ll work it out.

Anothr.com themselves have a blog, too. Subscribe to it (using, of course, their own service) to keep track of the latest updates.

Have you ever met or called someone and wanted to tell them your Skype Name and it has been really hard to get across? Like if it is “kuglunk457”, you need to go “K-U-G… four-five-… no, the digits are as digits, you don’t actually write “four”… ok did you get that”? Or how about if it’s at such a noisy party that talking is impossible in the first place. And you don’t have a pen.

So together with moo.com, we made these things we call MiniCards. They are little cards where you can put your Skype Name, your web or blog link, pictures, and really just about anything else you want. And you can have the cards  shipped right to your doorstep.

To celebrate the MiniCards launch, we are giving away free packs of 10 cards during this week. Just go to moo.com/skype, look for the “Enter promo code” field and type “freebie” there. (Without the quotes, of course.) You can then customize your card.

I recommend checking out those funky pixelated Skype smileys you can see in the program every day. Here’s a MiniCard I made for echo123. She said she can’t get to the site herself so I helped her out.

So remember… to claim your free pack of 10 MiniCards this week, just go to moo.com/skype and use freebie as the promo code. If you’re ready to spend some cold hard cash on a pack of 100, they tell me that you could find a Golden Ticket in your pack and win some free Skype Credit if you’re lucky.

As Sony Mylo is rolling out, opinions and news are pouring in. One bit in the recent AP/FOXNews review caught my eye.

The music player can handle MP3, ATRAC as well as secured and unsecured Windows Media Audio files, but not anything purchased at Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. /—-/ Songs can be transferred to the Mylo through a USB cable, but I couldn’t test that functionality as Sony didn’t include that cable with the review unit. I was able to upload a few MP3 files to the device through Skype and got them to play.

So… in some settings and also with these new gadgets, Skype File Transfer may prove to be the most versatile and convenient way of transporting things between your and your buddies’ computers and other devices, both at home and at office. We sure know it “in-house”, as we at Skype use the File Transfer daily for moving about, well, just about anything we need to. Cool to see the rest of the world is realizing this too.

Here is a promotion run by a Skype partner Perfectel together with Fleurop-Interflora. If you buy a bunch of flowers from Fleurop-Interflora, you will receive a free Perfectel USB phone. More importantly, if you refer five friends and anyone one of them buys flowers, then all 5 friends and yourself will receive a voucher for 30 minutes of SkypeOut. The campaign runs until November 30, 2006.

Today, we announced with Philips and Netgear the first standalone cordless phones for Skype that do not require a computer.

There’s a variety of cordless phones already available that plug into your computer. The Philips and Netgear ones are different: they plug directly into your Internet router, so you don’t need an always-on computer with Skype. They also work as standard cordless phones, plugging into your phone line, so you can use them both for standard phone calls and Skype calls.

Neither device is available yet. They say the Philips one will be available for this year’s holiday season, so more news coming in a few months.

Here is a photo of the Philips VOIP841 phone, together with some screenshots.

The guys from e-junkie told me about this new FireOlive thing. You can add voice opinions to current news. They’ll rotate a news item and you can just call with Skype and your comment gets published. Interesting simple concept with lots of opportunities for further development.

Earlier this week, Logitech and Skype announced the EasyCall™ Desktop, combining a mouse, headset and speakerphone with a Skype-specific keyboard. This is interesting because it’s another “world’s first” for both Logitech and Skype: the first keyboard from a mainstream vendor to include Skype calling buttons. You can place and end calls and change your online status right from the keyboard, and even assign quickdial hotkeys to some function keys so you don’t have to open up the Skype contact list at all to place a call.

It’s going to be available in Europe in mid-September for the price of €129.99, or £89.99.

Seth Godin will be doing a Skypecast about his new book on August 22 together with Typepad’s Michael Sippey. More info in the Skypecasts blog.

Seth says about himself: “bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.” Or put it another way, one of the most read, quoted and recognized current marketing gurus. Highly recommended.

Gumtree is a UK-based classified ads and community site. Started just over six years ago, they now have more than 1.4 million monthly visitors.

They told me that they now have a Skype button on more than 5% of their listings. Here’s what they added…

Users that you would expect are certainly using Skype — landlords, plumbers, sellers, daters etc. But interestingly, a large chunk of the Gumtree community are using Skype to provide language tuition (see this and this) or free language swaps (see this and this). Generally, a very successful implementation and great value added for our community.

Sony just announced Mylo. It has WiFi and Skype. It will be available in September for about $350 on sonystyle.com and Sony retail stores and authorized dealers.

Mylo stands for My Life Online. It’s an interesting device for Skype, Sony and the other involved partners because it’s the first of its kind. You can talk with it, but it’s not really a phone. You can listen to music, but it’s not just an MP3 player. It’s all these combined, and more. Two Mylos that are close can automatically detect each other and stream music and things across. It has a full slide-out keyboard so when entering info, it doesn’t limit you to some obscure onscreen entry method or entering characters with number keys like you do with most cell phones. You can surf the web, work with photos and videos… see the Mylo page to find out more.

We’ve put a lot of effort into working with Sony to make Skype run great on this thing. It does all the Skype features you’d expect — calls, voicemails, chat (one-on-one and in groups, and with animated emoticons), profile and contact management… And remember we got free SkypeOut calls in North America to the end of the year? So you can walk around and do free Skype and phone calls.

In addition to Mylo, we announced WiFi phones a while ago. We have more devices coming. The remainder of 2006 will be a very interesting Skype gadget year.

Here’s an interesting idea by KishKish, a new feature in their SAM. You can record calls and later analyse them for the voice stress level. They say a near-real-time version is also upcoming. You should obviously exercise caution because no analysis can be fully accurate, and of course inform the remote party that you are recording the call. But it’s an interesting example of what you can do with the Skype voice stream.

There’s strong interest from the developer community in having easier access to the voice stream to develop exactly this kind of applications, and this will be much more accessible to developers in the future versions with the voice API.

A few days ago, many sites reported that the Japanese company Novac has released a product that lets you stream your home TV across Skype video. I didn’t want to post this news before because there was no site for you to try this out. Well, there is now. Novac set up a demo page where you can see it right in action. It’s in Japanese so you might not understand much, but just click the big Skype buttons to start a test call. Since the demand is great, they have limited the call length to 3 minutes, but this is plenty to give you an idea how it works — and it really does, so just give it a shot.

Photo from Engadget

KishKish SAM (Skype Answering Machine) is one of the earliest Skype plugins. They are now running a promo where you can get 15% off SAM until the 4th of July. You know… Uncle Sam and all that. Oh and see their blog too.

We announced the world’s first Skype edition notebook with Packard Bell yesterday.

It has a Skype calling button right next to the integrated webcam at the top of the display. You can see some buttons there on the photo and one of them is for Skype calls.

Skype announced that it now has a local partner in Turkey. See e-kolay.net/skype/ for more info if you happen to speak Turkish. And go sign up to be among the first 100,000 to receive a surprise gift from e-kolay.

Emerging Internet markets like Turkey and Poland are important for Skype. Poland is one of the biggest “Skype countries”. Turkey will surely catch up with it quickly.