October 2006

Here’s an idea for Halloween. Get into the All Hallows spirit (Google certainly has – check out the screen below) by personalising Skype with nightmarish enhancements, rather than by hammering on the doors of old ladies and demanding the cash they’d put aside for the gas meter, mm’kay?

The Personalise Skype page has a bunch of ghoulish noises with which to Hallow-up your Skyping, including ‘Ghost Voices’ and the fun-sounding ‘Ave Satanus’. Click on a sound to get a sneak preview, but I’d recommend avoiding this in the office, or your boss will know you’re not actually working. I know. I tried. I’m still a bit embarrassed about it, to be honest.

Anyway, happy Pumpkin Day!

First came Kazaa, which was big. Then came Skype, which was bigger. Could The Venice Project be even bigger? Unlikely, but the new web TV venture from Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom is certainly getting them excited in telly circles.

Janus recently set the Venice scene with a post on his blog:

“It’s simple, really – we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass media of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes?) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on. TV is 507 channels and nothing on, and we want to help change that!”

Details of the project, which Janus assures us “won’t be called the Venice Project forever”, should become more clear when CEO Fredrik de Wahl takes to the stage at the Future of Television Forum in New York on 16-17 November. Watch this space for news of the full public launch.

Britain is such a nation of natterers that we can’t bear to get off the phone to answer nature’s call – so we just chat on the loo. Yes, that’s you.

According to the new Skype Talk For Britain survey, three-quarters of us talk to friends and family while we’re on the toilet, and 17 per cent have fallen asleep while chatting on the phone. “Some” of the survey’s 1,000 respondents even confessed to talking on the phone whilst driving a tank, but I don’t believe them.

“The bathroom seems to be a popular place for Britain to do most of its talking,” says Skype’s marketing maestro Alistair Shrimpton. “That goes for both men and women. People love talking on the phone as well as guessing which celebrities are the biggest chatterboxes. Of course, Jonathan Ross was crowned king of chitchat, but Graham Norton was relegated to third position.”

So who was in second place? Alistair, you can’t leave us hanging like that. Watch this space, readers – I’ll find out.

P.S: Skype’s Talk for Britain campaign means you get six months of free calls to UK landlines if you buy £10 of Skype credit between now and 31 December 2006. Click here to find out more.

Bothersome broadband messing up your Skyping? Big Brother’s gadget guy Eugene Sully can fix it for you.

A Eugene-themed press release landed in my inbox this morning, and I thought I’d share it with you. “I’m obsessed with technology,” says last year’s BB runner-up, who can apparently “offer advice, explanations, and a quirky take on all up-and-coming technology”. Like Skype!

Right, I’m off to get a Eugene interview for the Skype blog. If you have any questions for the big man, or if you are in fact Eugene Sully, let me know…

Boy racers everywhere, rejoice: there’s now a Skype mouse designed – ergonomically designed, no less – to make your heart beat faster.

As you can see from the photo, the Street Mouse, complete with integrated mic, is shaped like a slick sports car with headphones sticking out of one of the wheels. Happily for car purists, you can take the headphones out and use the mouse as a speakerphone.

Along with the standard two buttons and scroll wheel, the 800dpi optical mouse has fully working LEDs in its headlights. You just hook it up to your computer via the USB port, and chat away to your Skype friends. But if you’d rather boogie than blab, the speaker’s good enough for playing music from your PC.

Bottom line: the mouse will set you back a mere £21.95 from Gizoo.

Forgive me for rolling out that ugly word ‘Voip’, but when it’s part of the name of a neat product, it can’t really be avoided.

Voip Phone Buddy for Skype is a new bit of software that adds automatic Skype dialling to Outlook and other Windows applications – perfect for small businesses.

The software is free for a trial period, and $19 for good (that’s about a tenner). Once it’s set up, you just move your cursor to a phone number and press the Hot Key to start the call – the software even formats the international dialling code automatically, and includes redial and speed dial tools. Click here to download and install.

Business cards are so passe. Or at least, they were until Skype got its hands on them.

Skype MiniCards, designed by the creative bods at Moo.com, are cuter, smaller and sassier than traditional business cards, and they’re meant for sharing your virtual identity rather than your business identity. So you can customise them with your Skype name, SkypeIn number, blog address and any other contact details you want, along with speech bubbles, smilies or mood messages.

But the best thing about MiniCards is that Skype and Moo have got 10,000 packs of them to give away for free to Skype blog readers. To get your pack of 10, go to Moo’s Skype page and type the password ‘freebie’ where it says ‘enter promo code’. The offer starts today and runs until next Monday, so get in there now and claim your cards!

P.s. The fun doesn’t stop when the freebie offer ends. If you buy a pack of 100 cards, you may find a Golden Card tucked into your wad – and that means you’ve won up to 120 of free SkypeOut minutes.

We’re a step closer to total liberation from our desktops, thanks to the free new Vox for Skype service that lets you make and receive Skype calls on your mobile. Any mobile.

Don’t take my word for it. “Vox for Skype works with all 2.2 billion mobiles in the world today!” yells the Voxlib website. “It even works from any landline phone. It works from any device, on any network, anywhere.” That’s one hefty promise. If you put it to the test, let me know how you get on.

The key to Vox’s pan-mobile compatibility is that the online plug-in only needs to be downloaded to your PC – there’s nothing to install on the phone itself, and you don’t need a mobile data service plan. The only catch is that you must be logged into Skype and have it running on your PC when you make or receive the call.

Continue reading "Vox Poptastic" »

This “giving stuff away” lark must be addictive, because Skype just can’t seem to shake the habit.

Their latest freebie promotion for UK Skypers, Talk for Britain, gives you six months of free calls to UK landlines if you buy some Skype credit. That means you’ll be able to keep your Skype credit for other things: calls to mobiles, calls to overseas landlines, that kind of thing.

The offer starts today and ends on December 31.

Meet Victoria. Fresh out of London and fresh into New York, Victoria is indebted to Skype for making her feel as though her her old friends, family and workmates are “just next door, not across the Atlantic”. Skype allows her to “have a quick chat, get the goss, have a quick giggle, without having to go into long drawn out email which no one has time to read or more importantly reply to!”

Victoria’s story is just one of the tales you’ll find on the Skype Stories page, where everyday Skypers share their tales of how this little bit of software has made their lives a little bit easier (or chattier).

To send Skype your own story and feature in glorious technicolour on the website - and maybe even get a mention in this blog - go to Skype Stories and click the ‘Send us your story’ link.

Skypedaddies Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström have been nominated as Europeans of the Year in the prestigious EV50 Awards.

Like a sort of Euro Names Oscars shortlist, the EV50 spotlights the continent’s top 50 movers and shakers. Other nominees this year include German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the groundbreaking French surgeons who performed the world’s first face transplant.

To make the list is a big deal in itself; to win would be an amazing achievement. You can make it happen! At the risk of sounding like brucie on Stricly Come Dancing, get voting now, folks. Click here to register your support for Niklas and Janus in the European Business Leaders category. Voting closes on November 10, and winners will be revealed at a gala dinner at the Cercle Royal Gaulois in Brussels on November 28.

Skype could be the biggest thing in dating since red roses and a glass of wine for the lady, according to the LA Times.

Over the weekend the paper carried the story of Mark Passerby and Salwa Al-Saban, who developed a transatlantic love thang via the magic of Skype. Despite living 5,000 miles apart in Michigan (him) and Cairo (her), the pair married a mere month after meeting online.

Salwa and Mark also used Skype Video to get to know each other better. Mark, a 41-year-old technology developer for an estate agent, even set up a film projector at home and pointed his Web camera at it so they could watch movies together.

Continue reading "Skype, Skype me do" »

My dream of truly mobile Skyping tiptoes ever closer, thanks to a new deal between Skype, handset maker SMC and wireless broadband operator The Cloud.

You can now make Skype calls from an SMC mobile handset in any one of The Cloud’s 8,500 UK hotspots, which tend to pop up in places like airports, hotels and universities. WiFi’s tentacles are spreading fast: the company is now in the process of “hotspotting” nine UK cities, including London and Manchester.

The main catch is that Skype will only be available if you’re using SMC’s WiFi phone, which costs about £135 plus a monthly £7 fee. But hey, it’s a start – and a Cloud rep says that they’re “actively working with (other) device providers to ensure these products work well in the public WiFi environment.”

All of which should mean many more opportunities to use Skype on the go within a few months. I’ll keep you posted!

Life is just one big shop window for gadget-loving Skypers. You can barely get out of bed these days without hearing about another new shiny piece of Skype-compatible kit: WiFi Skype phones, Skype-ready keyboards, speakerphones disguised as trolls from the planet Skype…

So it’s only fair that Skype has launched a whole new blog devoted to Skype gear, hosted by hardware head boy Steve Pinches.

Tip: Having trouble making a Christmas list? Simply wait a few weeks, print off the entire Gear blog, hand it to your mum/other half/mate/boss and say: “Want that one. And that one. And that one’s pretty good, too.” They’ll really appreciate it.

Remember Susan, the Korea-based, US-born English teacher who designed Skype’s prize-winning third birthday card? That’s her masterwork above, though it could serve equally well as an illustration of my present surroundings.

(The, um, large man sitting next to me in the internet cafe is now eating takeaway chicken. It smells like a deep-fried dead person. You couldn’t make this up. I will sell my soul to anyone who can fix my home net connection…)

Anyway. Susan’s just got back from a five-day road trip around the Korean peninsula, so she’s refreshed and full of chat. “So many people have contacted me since I won the contest,” she told me. “Nearly every other day a new person requests my contact details or sends me a ‘hello’ chat message. They’re from all over the world: Australia, China, Korea, Malaysia, Turkey, Germany, Morocco. Oddly enough though, they are all guys…”

But like any good Virginia girl, Susan’s heart will always belong to Mommy.

Continue reading "Desperately Skyping Susan" »

The busy beta bees currently testing Skype 2.6 have been rewarded with a couple of improvements – all the better to perfect the software before its full public launch.

Among the tweaks is a brand new bandwidth indicator. Once you’ve enabled it using your advanced options, a small icon on your Skype status bar will show your upload/download bandwidths. Hover your mouse over it, and it’ll show you how much bandwidth has been used.

One or two potential irritants have also been given the chop. For example, a pop-up window containing Skypecasts controls has been ditched; instead, you’ll see the controls in your main Skype window whenever you’re logged into a Skypecast.

Find a full list of all the changes in the change log, and use the links here to leave feedback for Skype’s developers.

Here begins my week of living dangerously in an East London internet cafe. Imagine the net cafe in the picture, crossed with the black hole of Calcutta and smelling of stale sweat and KFC.

One of the few advantages of living in the white-van gulag of Walthamstow is that every third shop is a net cafe, so, when your home connection goes up the swanny, you can just nip down the road and log on for 70p an hour.

That said, I’ve not yet found a local net cafe that’s easy to work in. All the computers in this one look like they survived an IT course on the Titanic, and I’m not allowed to download Skype on any of them. But, according to a discussion on Skype’s online forum, I can still use it.

Apparently if I save the latest version of the Skype.exe file on a USB memory stick and plug the stick into the cafe computer, I can run the software from the stick. It sounds a little fiddly, but it’s got to be worth a try as a short-term headache cure. Worth remembering next time you’re off to travel the world.

Skype Video is a multi-talented beast. Not only will it let you chat face-to-face with friends on the other side of the world, but it’ll also keep an eye on your home when you’re away. Which certainly beats giving a spare key to your weird next-door neighbour so he can come round and watch all your Patrick Swayze DVDs.

For guidance on using Skype Video as a home monitor, check out this discussion on the Skype forum. Crucially, you can start the video stream remotely over the net, without anyone needing to be in your house to accept the call.

For its next trick, Skype will figure out a way to check that you didn’t leave the iron on this morning.

TV is on a one-way whiz to Webville. And Skype, or at least its founders, are right at the cusp of this telly-internet convergence.

You may have heard talk of The Venice Project, the online TV distribution venture from Skype daddies Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. This week, Niklas and Janus told The Register that they’re now signing up new users for the peer to peer video streaming service, which promises to deliver high-quality, full-screen, copyright-hassle-free TV over the net.

Unfortunately you’ll have to hold your horses for a bit before you can join in. The Venice Project is currently in internal beta, though some commentators predict that it’ll be in public beta by Christmas.

Continue reading "Venice Project edges ever closer" »

Another day, and another bunch of big companies discover the joy of text. Today, HSBC and First Direct have announced a plan to offer banking via text message, and Boots says it plans to text health test results to customers.

So it seems a good day to flag up Skype’s SMS service. You can use Skype to text any of your Skype or SkypeOut contacts if they’ve added their mobile number in their profile. The rates are Skype-tastically cheap (6.4p per text to phones in the UK), and the money is simply deducted from your Skype Credit.

Butterfingered types among us are particularly grateful for the chance to compose texts using our computers rather than phone keypads, which are now getting so small that dextrous ants would find them fiddly.

Find out more in Skype’s guide to sending SMS.

Ever tried logging onto the net in a public hotspot? If so, the cost may have surprised you. That’s “surprised” as in “made you snort food out your nose in horror”. At around £6 an hour, hotspots look like a very bad deal indeed compared with internet cafes that rarely charge more than £1 a pop.

Skype is helping to bridge the gap with Skype Zones, a beta service that allows you to access Skype and make calls from your own laptop in more than 18,000 Skype-friendly hotspots around the world, including 8,000-odd in the UK. The fees – just $2.95 (£1.60) for two hours or $7.95 (£4.20) unlimited for a whole month – put other commercial WiFi services to shame.

Continue reading "Introducing Skype Zones" »

Such is the groaning weight of Skype-certified gizmos on the market that the Skype overlords have had to create a whole new website to house them.

Skype’s new Accessories Guide makes it easier to find the gadget of your dreams by organising all the hardware into categories, and then explaining in plain English what they do, how they can improve your Skyping, how much they cost and so on.

Under the main Accessories tab you’ll find headsets, webcams and so on, while the Devices tab has all you need to know about Skype WiFi phones – top of my Christmas list, and set to change the way we make mobile calls. (The main change will be that we’ll no longer need to cry into our empty wallets every time we get a mobile phone bill.)