Taiwan seems to be the place to be for really innovative products, and Taiwanese manufacturer Asus have come up with a curveball I certainly didn't see coming: Skype motherboards.

The Asus Telesky may not as yet Skype certified, but the possibilities are certainly interesting for such a product. Simply by plugging your regular, common-or-garden home phone into the sockets on the back of the PC (see pic below), and running a cable from the PC back to the telephone socket, you can make Skype calls from the handset just as easily as you would make a normal call. In addition, you can make Skype conf calls, and even set up Skype call forwarding from the handset. It works with both normal and cordless phones, and also allows you to make normal landline (ie PSTN) calls if you don't fancy using Skype.

It will come in 2 flavours: one for AMD processors and one for Intel, and comes with 60 free SkypeOut minutes.

Asus have already proved their Skype colours with the Asus Aiguru S1, the world's first wireless Skype musicphone (yeah I know, crazy!), and have recently been judged as having the best product quality of all Taiwanese organisations by the Wall Street Journal, no less. Obviously this paves the way for a whole new generation of Skype-ready PCs to roll into existence, so it'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

More information on pricing, availability, Skype certification (hopefully!) and anything else remotely relevant as and when I hear.