August 2006

Get your 20 free SkypeOut minutes now, punters. It’s the final day of Skype’s Summer Thursdays offer, which is a depressing thought for those of us who don’t like winter very much. Does this mean it’s all downhill from now, the home straight to cold fingers and thermal undies? Say it ain’t so…

But enough of this wintry talk. Glad tidings from Skype blogdaddy Jaanus, who reveals that Skype’s third birthday brought a rather tasty pressie - more than seven million Skype users online for the first time. (It’s my birthday today. Can I have seven million visitors too, please?)

What does today’s announcement of a business deal between Google and eBay mean for Skype?

“We’ll see next year,” says my fellow Skype blogger, Jaanus Kase. “Testing of all these new joint initiatives is said to begin in early 2007. For now, one thing is sure - great companies working together is always exciting news.”

Yes but what does it actually mean? You know, for us punters?

Google’s Talkabout blog gives us a clue. “Our plans to explore interoperability between Google Talk and Skype [will make] it easier for our users to chat with one another,” writes Lewis Lin, product marketing manager for Google Talk. “This is just another step in our commitment to interoperability via open industry standards.”

As an example, Google promises to incorporate a Skype button into the Google Toolbar - though that won’t come as news to IE and Firefox users who’ve tested the toolbar’s latest beta (below). My, these guys work fast…

If you want to help Skype celebrate its third birthday, you won’t have much luck persuading it to come to the pub after work. However, you’re very welcome to send it a birthday card - and if you do, you could win a speakerphone and USB internet phone from Skype’s pals at US Robotics.

Your card can be a picture, photo, video, a written note… anything you like. Send your scribbles to happybirthday@skype.net, and post pictures or vids on Flickr, YouTube or any other of those clever interwebby places, and email Skype the link. The best cards will be published on the Share Skype blog, so make sure to include your Skype name.

Don’t rush your masterpiece: you’ve got until the end of Sunday (September 3) to enter. Good luck!

Today is Skype’s third birthday, so I thought I’d look up its horoscope. Here’s what Horoscope.co.uk has to say about our Virgo software friend:

“A delightful surprise may come from a friend who has some keen ideas on what to do next.”

A friend like, saaay, eBay? Interesting…

“An important career concern could require considerable effort on your part today in order to enable you to advance whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, dear Virgo,” says Yahoo Horoscopes, in what may be the longest and most meaningless sentence I’ve read all month. “Today you’re capable of accomplishing wonders.”

Accomplishing wonders… you mean like letting me throw away my phone bill? Sounds about right. Bottoms up, Skype.

Has Skype allowed you to keep up a long-distance relationship without going bankrupt? Does Skype keep you sane at work? Have you saved so much money using Skype that you can buy a cottage in the country?

OK maybe the last one’s a bit out there, but you get my drift. If Skype has changed your life, please get in touch - I want your story, and so do readers of this blog.

Even if Skype hasn’t actually changed your life, I’m still itching to hear from you if you’re a big Skype fan and have a story to tell. I’m listening…

Quick reminder to get in there for your free 20 minutes of SkypeOut, courtesy of Skype’s Summer Thursdays offer. Having mentioned the freebie twice last week on this blog, I forgot to pick up my own 20 minutes last Thursday, and have been kicking myself hard ever since.

So before you get distracted by work, your email inbox or the deafening screams of your next-door neighbour as she opens her BT phone bill, go to Skype’s homepage, click the ‘Get your minutes’ link, enter your login details and click to collect.

The new beta version of Skype 2.1 for Pocket PC has picked up glowing reviews from the gizmo-loving community.

The software is still work in progress, but it’s more than worth a try, as many have found. “I just installed the new beta version on my x51v,” says ‘Patrick Y’ on the Aximsite forum. “No problems at all! The interface greatly improved, with better VGA support. Also, softkey support is added. Go Skype!” And Gizmodo’s Jason Chen says: “We especially like being able to tell everyone that our mood for today is sulky with a slight chance of brooding.”

As well as the Gizmodo-approved ability to view contacts’ mood messages and avatars, version 2.1 also includes multi-chat, which allows you to have text conferences with multiple users, just as you can when using Skype on your computer. Other features include one-click access to Skype from the home screen, profile editing capability, contact search and improved call management. As always, you can call landlines and mobiles using SkypeOut, and you can talk for free to other Skype users, whether they’re using a on PC, Mac or handheld.

The beta software is supported by handhelds running Windows Mobile 5 or Windows Mobile 2003. The new version, along with 2.0, is available to download now from Skype’s website.

Another day, another dishy cordless Skype phone. The big selling point of the Cordless DUALPhone from Linksys is that it works with a standard landline as well as with Skype… though why you’d want to use a standard landline when you can use Skype instead, I don’t know. Answers on a cyber postcard.

The phone is very easy to use. Plug the base station into your computer’s USB port, log onto Skype, and you’re free to make and receive Skype calls using the handset. Your Skype contacts list shows up on the phone’s colour LCD, so just select who you want to talk to and call them using Skype or SkypeOut. The phone also supports SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail.

The base station can be used with up to four handsets, which is handy if every member of the family wants a Skype phone in their room - or if you need an intercom to keep an ear on a baby sleeping upstairs. Or not sleeping, as the case may be.

The DUALPhone is available now with a price tag of £66, though it’s currently on special offer from Skype’s online store for £47. Get in there!

About to head off to college or university? Take a couple of Skype phones with you, courtesy of high street computer-flogger PC World. Their special £599.99 student package also includes a laptop and printer, though we imagine the average student will be too busy chatting to notice.

It’s a masterstroke by PC World to include the Skype phones in the package. Parents will want their undergrad offspring to keep in touch, but those undergrad offspring will prefer to spend their Student Loan cash on books and beer than on expensive phone calls home. With Skype at their joint-stained fingertips, the students can phone Mum without it costing a bean. (Baked or otherwise.)

Ditch your tabloid habit tomorrow and pick up the new issue of The Ecomomist magazine instead. Go on - it’s educational. And it’s got Skype in it.

In the article Communicating the Skype Way (subscription only for online readers), the esteemed business journal interviews Sten Tamkivi, Skype’s Estonian manager.

The article dubs Skype “one of the software world’s most subversive and fastest-growing businesses,” and makes great play of Skype’s safety (“Skype chats are not only encrypted but work only between people who trust each other - the best possible defence against spam”), usefulness and ease of use, not to mention its massive implications for the way we communicate.

It’s a positive and informative piece, and a great way of getting the Skype message out to a business audience. Their outrageous phone bills could probably do with a spot of Skyping down to size.

First, a quick reminder about today’s Summer Thursdays promotion. Get yourself over to Skype.com now, click on the link to claim your free minutes, ring up someone you know abroad, and laugh your socks off that it’s not costing you a penny.

Now, time for a rant. Earlier this week, I needed a chat with my mum. Mum’s currently in Ireland, and she was about to go into the pub (ah, the lure of the Guinness), so the call - from my friend’s home landline to my mum’s mobile - only lasted a couple of minutes.

Today, Mum texted me to say hello… and to suggest that we stick to texts from now on, because the call had cost her £5. Five pounds! Five hundred pence. Half a tenner. I owe my friend several days’ lunch money to fund the call, but that was expected. It’s the fact that my mum had to pay to receive a call that really maddens me.

Skype will put an end to the scandal of roaming mobile charges for many of us. But, until all our friends and mums have Skype, the mobile companies will continue ripping people off. Click for more…

Continue reading "Skype will end the 'roaming' scandal" »

Got the midweek blues? Of course you have. Everyone has. Especially if you’re working in an office where your boss won’t let you download anything onto your computer, so you can’t use Skype. Well, that’s their problem - they’d save a tidy little packet on corporate phone bills.

Rant over. The real point of this post is to remind you about Skype’s Summer Thursdays promotion, which means that you can claim 20 minutes of free SkyeOut calls to ordinary landlines in 30 countries worldwide, every Thursday in August.

You can claim your freebie as soon as tomorrow swings into view. Go to Skype.com, click on the ’Get 20 Free Minutes Now’ link and follow the instructions.

Tip: If you want to save up your minutes to make one long call to your friend on their birthday at the end of the month, you can - just collect your minutes every Thursday, and leave them to accumulate in your account.

First came Tony Blackburn. Then came the podcast. And now, we present the latest chapter in the epic history of broadcasting: the Skypecast.

A Skypecast is basically your own radio discussion show, via Skype. You can broadcast your thoughts on subjects close to your heart in groups of up to 100 people anywhere in the world. Your Skypecast will be listed in the online directory, so that people with similar interests can listen or join in.

I found out about Skypecasts through blogger service TypePad, which now allows its bloggers to incorporate Skypecasts into their blogs with a Skypecast Widget.

It’s fitting that Skype and TypePad have teamed up, since they’re both about giving people a voice without ripping them off. Skype means you can talk without paying outrageous phone bills, and blogging lets you publish your work without jumping through 1,000 hoops or being a C-list celebrity. And now, Skypecasts allow you to be a broadcaster without buying an entire radio studio. Power to the people!

Look down at your work keyboard. It’s rubbish, isn’t it? And it probably contains enough crumbs to rebuild Elvis’s last sandwich. So feast your eyes on this beauty from gizmo giants Logitech, who’ve launched the world’s first keyboard with Skype buttons built in - and you get a mouse, headset and speakerphone thrown in.

Logitech’s EasyCall Desktop has all the standard keys, plus one-touch buttons for launching Skype’s software, making a call, ending a call, changing your online status and dialling a mobile or landline phone. You can even use the F9 to F12 keys for programmable speed-dialling. Not so much a keyboard as a flight deck for cutting-edge phone-fiends.

The keyboard will be available throughout Europe from mid-September, with a very reasonable price tag of £89.99.

Just spotted a great headline on Forbes.com, the leading US website for business types. The thrust of the story is that Skype has breezed past Murdoch-owned social networking site MySpace. MySpace has just registered its 100 millionth user, compared with 113m for Skype.

But I don’t think the real story here is which of these two mighty cyber-services is the biggest. The real story is that they are both huge.

It’s proof that the internet, after its doomed late-90s attempts to make lots of money out of consumers, is settling into its true role as a free connector of people. We don’t want to pay through the nose to communicate, and services like Skype and MySpace have recognised and answered this need. Long may they rule the online roost.

Skype’s developers have been beavering away on Skype for Windows 2.6. New features include an audio library, integrated IE6 and Firefox plugins for recognising phone numbers on web pages, clickable avatars and, oh, loads more.

The software is still in beta testing stage, so experienced users are invited to try it out and spill their suggestions, quibbles and kudos in the forum. If you’re a Skype newbie or occasional user, best steer clear until the perfected v2.6 gets its public roll-out.

Continue reading "Introducing Skype for Windows 2.6" »

Here’s another smashing bit of Skype kit to wind up the week.

All my recent excitement about WiFi Skype phones (hey, those things are my dream come true: I love to babble, hate sitting still, and despise phone bills) may lead casual readers to assume that Skype is all about talking on the phone. But it’s not, it’s also about looking at people whilst talking on the phone. For free.

Skype has teamed up with Creative, makers of some excellent MP3 players that do everything an iPod can do for a lot less money, to launch the Instant Skype Edition WebCam.

Continue reading "Here's looking at you" »

As promised yesterday, it’s time for a spot of drooling over one of the WiFi mobiles recently launched by Skype’s partners - the Skype WiFi Phone from Netgear.

Truly mobile Skype, in the walking-round-town-chatting-to-Mum-for-free sense, would require a workable citywide wireless network, as mentioned yesterday. And we don’t have that yet in the UK (pull your finger out, providers!). But we do have a growing number of public hotspots, where the Netgear phone allows you to make free internet calls to any other Skypers in the world, no PC required.

In fact you don’t even need a PC to get started with this phone, because it comes with Skype pre-loaded. Just take it out of the box, find a hotspot or wireless network, and chat away for as long as you like, without having nightmares about mobile bills.

The catch? Well, it’s not available quite yet - I’ll be first to let you know when it is. But you can register your interest on Skype’s website, and gen up with the FAQ that covers the phone’s features, security, wireless standards and associated devices.

Excuse me while I get all drooly over Sony’s dinky new Mylo communicator, latest addition to my Christmas list. (Only 137 days to go…)

OK so it’s not exactly a WiFi phone like the gadgets from Skype’s partners Belkin, Edge-Core, NETGEAR and SMC. But it can be used to make Skype and SkypeOut calls on the move, and any device that encourages multimedia-loving handheld fiends to discover the joys of Skype is a device to love.

The Mylo’s rechargeable battery promises three and a half hours’ talk time, which should be plenty for wandering around a WiFi hotspot chatting to your mates. If you need any more walk-and-Skype time than that, I salute (and envy) your walking stamina.

The bad news is that this lush gadget, which retails in the US for $350, isn’t available in the UK yet. Still, that’s what internet shopping is for.

p.s. Watch this space for news of a proper new WiFi phone, coming to a Skype blog near you tomorrow…

I don’t enjoy forking out cash unless I absolutely have to, so I’ve made it my Tuesday resolution to convert as many of my friends and family to Skype as possible. Yes I know I can call them on the cheap anyway using SkypeOut, but why settle for a 2p call when I can get a completely free call?

Lure your mates into this bill-free nirvana by using the Tell A Friend page on Skype’s website. Type in your name, your Skype name, your friend’s name and their email, and off goes a note inviting them to talk to you for free. An offer they can’t refuse, especially if you attach the Tell A Friend e-card with ‘I’ve got the new Skype’ daubed on the house. Class.

If you use a Mac, get hold of the all-singing, all-dancing, all-Skyping MediaCentral 2.1 from Equinux, makers of the excellent iSale. This Mac media player is so good, it made me cry… erm, because I use a PC.

Version 2.1 allows seamless Skype integration, so you can babble to your mates whilst watching movies on your desktop, which probably won’t annoy them as much as when you do it in the cinema.

MediaCentral is designed to turn your Mac into a home cinema system with support for numerous audio, video, photo, gaming and multimedia formats. Those of us using PCs have to comfort ourselves with the knowledge that anything the Mac world does, the PCverse tends to copy soon enough - so we’ll just wait with drooling mouths.

The software costs $30 (£16) from Equinux, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.

Skype has given the seal of approval to a brace of products from internet security experts McAfee.

McAfee’s Internet Security Suite 200, VirusScan 2006 and Personal Firewall 2006 have been declared Skype certified - in other words, they meet Skype’s (rather high) expectations of how various products and gizmos should work with Skype. So before certifying the McAfee software, Skype had to make sure that they successfully scanned all files before they were transferred during a call.

Announcing what may be the start of a beautiful friendship with McAfee, Skype’s chief security officer Kurt Sauer said: “We want our community to use their computers in the safest way possible, which includes having virus protection. Skype is already very secure, and McAfee’s products are complementary, securing the rest of the PC environment.”

Let’s ignore the fact that summer seems to have taken a week off, and celebrate the first of Skype’s Summer Thursdays.

Every Thursday this month, you get to make free Skype calls to any landline or mobile phone, anywhere in the world - which is more than enough consolation for a bit of wind and rain.

The science bit: All Skype’s registered UK users get 100 free minutes of SkypeOut in August. Alas, you can’t run off and use all 100 minutes this evening - you get 20 minutes every Thursday until the end of August.

To activate your free minutes, go to www.skype.co.uk, click on ‘Get 20 Free Minutes Now’ and follow the instructions. The freebie will appear in your Skype Credit balance straight away.

I’ve just been hob-nobbing down Liverpool Street way with a chap from US Robotics, who introduced me to the catchily-named USR9610. (Mercifully, it also goes by the name of ‘US Robotics USB Internet Speakerphone’).

It looks like something that landed near Roswell and may cause confusion for short-sighted smokers who need to offload some ash, but it’s actually a Skype-certified phone. Plug the £45 gadget into your computer’s USB port, and you can make Skype calls to you heart’s content.

The UFO speakerphone, as I shall now be calling it, is a brilliant idea for those of us who hate being tethered to a headset - or for the more sociable among you, who might want to chat en masse to some lucky recipient. The unit is powered through your USB with no need for a clunky AC adaptor, so it’s eminently portable.

Just don’t let anyone stub out their ciggie in it.

With just 146 days, four hours, 37 minutes and 16 seconds to go until Christmas, allow me to relieve all your gift-buying headaches in a single swoop: click here and shove a few Verballs in your basket.

(The catch: Verballs don’t go on sale until 1 September. I’ll remind you again on the day. Promise.)

These very smashing desktop gizmos, priced £29.95, plug into your computer’s USB and double as a mic and speakers when you’re making a Skype call. Yes, they’re voip phones with faces. When someone’s trying to call you, their horns light up and they wave to get your attention - and their mouths move in time with the voice of the other person.

Tip: prepare an explanation for when Granny walks in and finds you whispering naughty nothings to a jiggling toy on your desk.

Continue reading "Bunch of Verballs" »