Skype Campaigns and Promotions

Over the past few weeks, Skype has been busy launching its new online shops across Europe and North America. If you live in one of the 19 countries where they are available, browsing and buying Skype Certified gadgets just got a bit easier.

We hope you like the revamp, as the right bit of hardware can help take the Skype experience to a higher level. Where conversations are more convenient and relationships easier to maintain. And you (or the target of your gift-giving powers) will look cool with a nice bit of gear that’s at home on the desk or in the pocket.

To create the best and most convenient shopping experience, we‘ve joined forces with Digital River, experts at helping run great online stores. So here’s what’s new:

• updated look and feel
• easier navigation
• bestsellers‘ list
• streamlined product list to help users find the right products
• new product pictures
• better help section with top ten FAQs to help users get the support they need
• improved translations and additional local languages supported

To celebrate, we’re offering free delivery on some of the hottest hardware. Logitech’s Quickcam Pro for Notebooks supports High Quality Video calls from £69.99 / €99.99 / $79.99. And with a free headset and calling vouchers thrown in, it’s everything a Skype user needs to get started in style.

You don’t even need to be tied to your PC anymore. Make and receive Skype calls from anywhere in the home or office with a dual-purpose Philips Cordless Phone. The package comes with a Skype credit voucher for calling landlines or mobiles anywhere in the world.

It’s also worth taking a peek at the great value offers exclusive to our Skype Shops. Whether you want to spend a little or a bit more, check out your local Skype Shop online at skype.com/shop. It might help fill your Christmas shopping basket for a little less.

Good things often come in threes. Godfather, anyone? The blue three-wheeled car in Mr. Bean’s parking-lot revenge episode? Here is the third installment in a series of blog posts about cheaper SkypeOut calls to India: The “Talk more to Bangalore” campaign has been extended until the end of August.

Campaign pages are there for your perusal and consumption in the UK, US and the rest of the world.

It’s worth remembering that it doesn’t matter whether you call Indian landlines or mobiles. The price will be the same.

Our campaign that allows you to call India and Pakistan for up to 50% cheaper is coming to an end. Tomorrow (31st of July) will be the last day to take advantage of these really friendly prices. Note that international calls are real cheap even without any discounts. So if you have any friends or family who live in either India or Pakistan then go ahead, give them a call.

And if you're too lazy to check out the prices then it costs 7.9 euro cents to call India and 5.6 euro cents to call Pakistan. Doesn't matter if you call mobiles or landline numbers.

This may be worth reading if you have family, friends or colleagues in Pakistan or India. With a combined population of 1.3 billion, there are plenty of phone numbers to call. Our marketing folks figured this out as well and decided to chop SkypeOut prices to these countries in half for the month of July.

This may not qualify as a pure public-service announcement, but try calling Pakistan from a regular phone and you’ll appreciate the price difference. So, in July, SkypeOut calls cost 6.9 eurocents (+ VAT) per minute to India and 4.9 eurocents (+VAT) per minute to Pakistan. You can call both landlines or mobiles registered in these two countries. Modest connection fees apply.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Good news for European Skype users — from today, you can choose to pay a low monthly subscription of €2 and make zero cents per minute calls to domestic landlines in 15 countries in Europe.

The Skype Pro subscription deal includes:

• Zero cents per minute calling to domestic landlines in your country — this means you can talk as long as you like and only pay the connection fee (3.9 cents or equivalent) for each call that you make to domestic landlines
• Free Skype Voicemail (normally €15 per year)
• €30 discount on SkypeIn numbers
• €5 Skype Credit included as part of the introductory offer (see below)
• A €30 discount on a Philips VoIP 841 cordless phone.
• A €10 discount on an SMC WiFi phone.
• Money off a series of Skype Extras.

Bonus: If you get there quickly, you can purchase Skype Pro on a five month basis for €10 and receive €5 Skype credit absolutely free.

This is great for regular Skype users, who will benefit from flat rate calling to domestic landlines, plus all of the other goodies.

The lowdown

Skype Pro is now available across Europe in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the UK — it’ll be launched in other countries across the world during 2007.

If you aren’t based in one of these countries you can still purchase Skype Pro if you’re really keen. You still get all the other benefits, but you don’t get the advantage of the zero per minute local calls.

Extra: You can use your Skype Pro deal wherever you are — if you’re in France, you get free calls to French landlines; if you’re in Austria, you get free calls to Austrian landlines, and so on.

Show you’re Pro

Feel free to show off the fact that you’re using Skype Pro — you can steal the image at the top of this post to use as an avatar. Right click on it and save it to your computer, then follow the instructions here.

If you happen to live in one of the European countries served by the Skype Accessories Shop and have been hesitant about buying from them for some reason, there’s now news for you — they take PayPal. So you can head right over and get some fresh Skype hardware. You may want to check back once in a while, as I hear we have a new store in the works.

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.

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

You’ve been asking what’s our plan for 2007 with the free calls in North America. We’ve been saying we’ll announce it before the end of this year. And today is the day.

Today, we announced Skype Unlimited. There’s bad news and good news.

The bad news is that you’ll have to pay a bit.

The good news is that it’s a simple one-time purchase and there are no catches. You’ll get free calls for a year for an incredible price, plus other goodies like coupons for discounts on top-notch Skype hardware from our selected partners.

How it works:

• you go to Your Account. If you’re eligible for the Unlimited plan, you’ll automatically see the prompt to buy it.
• the price is $14.95 if you buy before end of January 2007. From February, the price will be $29.95.
• if you buy before end of 2006, you get free unlimited calls until the end of 2007. If you buy in 2007, you get free unlimited calls for 12 months after your purchase.
• the calls continue to be totally free until the end of 2006 as we’ve previously said, no change in that. But there’s no risk in stocking up for 2007 so that you wouldn’t forget it in the Christmas and New Year holiday craze — if you go and buy the plan for $15 right away, you’re good to go in the new year.
• you’ll get the partner coupons delivered in the e-mail that we send you after the purchase.
• the details are mostly the same as with this year’s free calls — for example, it works within the US and Canada for both landline and mobile calls.

See also the Knowledge Base section on Skype Unlimited for more details.

You know how those dark winter nights can get to you. (In Tallinn, it gets dark around 3-4 PM in the afternoon.) Talking helps a lot to lighten up the long dim hours. And even though you got free Skype calls, you may want to talk with someone who's not yet on Skype, so you need to use SkypeOut.

To help you out here, we'll be running our Winter Days campaign, starting next week. If you happen to live in some of the European Union countries (not all, though) or Japan, we offer you some free Skype Credit on certain dates. As with the previous Gift Days, you'll just need to sign in to Your Account and click a button to claim it. You can then use the credit for SkypeOut — or if you don't feel like talking, you can also send an SMS. Watch this blog and skype.com for updates about dates and countries.

Do you know about the Skype Affiliate Program? Maybe you’ve heard that you can earn money promoting Skype. Just put a piece of code on your site and every time someone signs up for SkypeOut, SkypeIn, Voicemail or any other of the involved products, you get a cut out of the sale.

Now… the big news here is that just a few days ago, we increased the commissions to a whopping 25%. This means that every time someone buys 10 € of Skype Credit, you get more than 2 € out of that. This is a permanent change so it doesn’t have an expiry date.

Also, as a limited-time deal, we offer a 15 $ commission on the Skype WiFi phone package.

For more info and links for signing up, see our Partner blog.

Today, we launched a package with SMC and FON to everyone in Europe and the US where you can get a WiFi Skype phone, the FON router and other goodies (Skype Credit and voicemail) for £99/ €139 / $159.99. See the press release and read more details on the Skype Gear blog.

An immediate question I had when seeing this was, “Can you use your WiFi phone in other FON hotspots”. The answer at this time is “no”. You can’t use the WiFi phone in any hotspot that requires browser authentication, but you CAN use it in hotspots secured with WEP or WPA. So while you can’t use the device in other FON hotspots when trying to access them as Linus or Alien, you CAN use it at your home FON hotspot (the secure part), as well as any other open or secured WiFi hotspots, such as your home or office.

Today we launched a campaign to let expats know how useful Skype is for keeping in touch with friends and family back home. (Expats are people who live away from their “home country”.) The campaign is for Polish expats in the UK and Ireland, and UK expats in Spain. See below for free calls weekends.

We have seen from our research has shown that Skype and our paid services are of particular benefit to those living away from their friends and family and those with friends and family abroad. With an estimated 750,000 Poles currently living in the UK and up to 200,000 Poles living in Ireland, Polish communities represent a significant part of the UK’s expatriate population. There is also a large community of UK expats living on the Spanish coast who can benefit from using Skype to keep in contact.

We’ll be running various activities to highlight the benefits of using Skype, ranging from a promotional bus demonstrating Skype and a radio show live from the bus in Spain, adverts in newspapers, banners on websites and to posters and flyers in major Polish cultural centres and locations.

We’ll also be offering free calls to landlines in the UK from Spain on 2nd and 3rd December and to Poland from the UK and Ireland on the 9th and 10th December. Polish expats can find out more at skype.com/go/polski and UK expats at skype.com/go/uk.

Last week, we announced this Talk for Britain campaign for the UK. In short, buy £10 of Skype Credit before the end of the year, and get free calls to UK landlines for the 6 months after your purchase.

Now… what we also did in connection with this campaign was a survey of the Brits’ talking habits. See the full release. Some highlights below are pretty… er… interesting. Then again, I’m not sure that the results would be so different if we did this in any other country. I’ve been on the phone from all sorts of funny places too, but toilet… hmm.

According to the research, almost three quarters of respondents admitted talking to friends and family while on the toilet and 17 percent have actually fallen asleep while chatting on the phone to someone else.

The research revealed that respondents admitted that their worst phone nightmare was being told what they did the night before because they were too drunk to remember. Also, it appears that women like chatting on the phone while soaking in the bath and almost a quarter said that they had been caught talking to someone they shouldn’t have.

So really. Go talk for Britain.

This is one of those cool posts where it’s so fulfilling to click “publish” :) Do you still remember the North American free calls announcement? Free SkypeOut calls within North America and Canada until the end of 2006. Still ongoing.

Many thought “why only America”? Well fear not Europe, because Skype is with you. As of right now and until the end of 2006, all SkypeOut calls to landlines within France are free. Unlimited. Zero price. No catches.

If you’re from France or just speak French, check out our French site and the French blog for more ongoing coverage.

A couple of things to point out…

• in France, this applies to landlines only. In North America, it covers both landlines and mobiles.
• you can call for free within the individual “islands”, that is, within North America and France. You cannot call North America from France for free or vice versa — in this case, the regular SkypeOut rates continue to apply.
• in both North America and France, if you use Call Forwarding then it costs you the standard SkypeOut rate.

What’s next? Can we expect more “free countries”? What happens in 2007? I don’t have the info to post here just yet, but 2007 is not that far away any more, so we’ll have to come up with the answers soon, so stay tuned for that. And until then, enjoy the free calls in USA, Canada and France.

There’s a little promo we’re running through August, which gives you yet again some free Skype Credit. It’s a bit similar to the previous Gift Days. You could say that it’s the same thing. At least the idea is similar — on a certain day, if you’re in one of the included countries, you go to your account and claim your free minutes (in the form of some free Skype Credit that we add to your account). The dates are as follows. On all the dates, the campaign starts 8 AM GMT+1 and ends 24 hours later.

Italy, Spain, Sweden

Every Tuesday in August (Aug 1, 8, 15, 22, 29)

France, Germany

Every Wednesday in August (Aug 2, 9, 16, 23, 30)

United Kingdom, Poland

Every Thursday in August (Aug 3, 10, 17, 24, 31)

Full release here. Note that this applies only to the US and Canada.

Free SkypeOut calling to the United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan is available weekends July 15-16, July 22-23 and July 29-30, respectively. The free international SkypeOut calling offer to each country runs 48 hours from 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturdays through Sundays at midnight EDT, when international calling is at a peak.

Many of our recent “free calls” initiatives have been circling around North America recently. This leaves the rest of you worried, as we’ve seen it in comments. Fear not, for we are working on expanding the scope of these activities, as you can also see with the Gift Days. I know that Henry Gomez who assumed the “chief marketer” position in Skype just last week is very keen on this and will post his own updates here shortly.

If Skype had existed when Jack Kerouac began his famous literary bounce across the United States, you can be sure that the Beat icon would’ve had a laptop in tow, eager to share his poetic exploits with friends and family around the world. These days, many people find themselves on the road for a different reason—more work, less play. We like to call them “Road Warriors,” those noble business folk who spend an extraordinary amount of time in airports and hotels, jetting from Los Angeles to Paris, London, and Milan in what is increasingly becoming a truly globalized economy. Anyone who does this often knows that you can get an international cell phone. Anyone who’s gotten an international cell phone also knows that the calling rates per minute are roughly equivalent to the price of dinner for two at a nice Italian restaurant.

Can you sense a theme here? SUPPOSEDLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM PLUS SKYPE = RIDICULIOUSLY SIMPLE SOLUTION TO ALL THE WORLD’S ILLS.

Or something like that.

In any case, if you, dear Reader, happen to be one of these fabled Road Warriors—using video Skype to tutor your kids in their schoolwork while you’re in Denmark, for instance—we want to hear your brave battle cries and your Skype “war” stories. As usual, drop an email to scott.indrisek@skype.net. Please put ROAD WARRIOR in the title, and also kindly include a bit of relevant information: your city/state, Skype ID, and perhaps your favorite flavor of soft-serve ice cream.

As in June, we also have some Skype Gift Days for certain countries in July. A Gift Day means if you’re from one of the indicated countries and it’s one of these dates, you can log on to Your Account and claim your 10 minutes of free SkypeOut calling. (It will be a small amount of Skype Credit that you will get on your account.)

The date means that the Skype Gift Day starts on the indicated date at 8 AM Central European Time (7 AM London time, or 9 AM Eastern European time), and ends 8 AM on the following day. So it runs for 24 hours every time. Note that Japan and Brazil have a different starting timezone.

Sweden

July 10, July 13 (UPDATED: new July 10 date added)

Estonia

July 25

Germany

July 10, July 13 (UPDATED: new July 10 date added)

United Kingdom

July 5, July 18

Spain

July 5, July 18

France

July 6, July 20

Italy

July 6, July 20

Brazil

July 11, July 27. Start time 08:00 GMT-5

Japan

July 4, July 19. Start time 08:00 GMT+9

Bonus trivia: the internal codename for these days is SOGD. So if you want to sound cool and like you know what you’re talking about, you could ask us how is SOGD going ;) SOGD means “SkypeOut Gift Days” because this is what they were originally called when we started experimenting with the Gift Days last year.

UPDATE: the calendar is now also on Google Calendar.

We have a joint demonstration area with Sony & Intel at Heathrow Airport. The stand will be at departure area of Heathrow Terminal 1 until the 3rd of August this year. If you’re passing through, please drop by the stand. It’s right by where all the shops are, so you have to go through security first. The departure gates are further past this area.

At the demo area, you can use Skype on Sony Vaio laptops and can make SkypeOut calls to friends and family far and wide. One morning, we had passengers calling their family as far as Australia, Dubai and Russia. We also hand out Skype starter packs to new callers.

We use some Skype USB phones and headsets for demoing. If you need more high-end hardware than what you can find in the free starter pack, there’s a Dixons Airport Shop nearby where you can pick up some more Skype gadgets.

Continue reading "Skype corner at Heathrow Airport" »

Being away from your family is tough. But with Skype it can be a little easier. You can talk to people the otherside of the world for as long as you like, for free.

Listen to our famous dads’ messages of support and then leave a message of your own (for free, of course).

The World Cup is just kicking off. See what Skype is doing around this. Go see what the Trinidad and Tobago is up to (our friends at eBay are supporting them), get a WeeMee or Klonie. Last but not least, there are some excellent Skypecasts around football oncoming. Sharing a game experience with a Skypecast or conference call is a great way to hook up with your long-lost friends or make new ones.