January 2007

As Skype chalks up 9 million concurrent users and the company’s owner eBay posts a quarterly profit rise of 24 per cent, things are suddenly looking rather sunny in the boardroom.

eBay chief exec Meg Whitman revealed that Skype registered user base tripled last year to 171m, and that Skype revenue topped $66m burst in the fourth quarter of 2006 – 164 per cent up on 2005.

Meanwhile over at eBay, the cyber-auctioneer enjoyed a particularly good Christmas as buyers hunted down elusive Wii and PS3 consoles. UK PS3-hunters have had to import them from Japanese and US eBayers after a component shortage forced Sony to push back the European launch date to late March.

The other day I mentioned Skype Garage, where you can find out about new Skype developments and get involved with the process. If you’re handy enough with code to cook up your own Skype add-ons, check out Skype Developer Support. Skype’s community support staff can offer tips on making your programs work with Skype APIs or services, free of charge.

Today, Skype Garage – tomorrow, Skype Certification? If your program or product is Skype Certified, its quality and Skype-compatibility are assured, and that can only be good news for its popularity – especially if it is listed as a Premium or Featured placement on the Skype Extras Gallery.

To get your product Skype Certified, you need to submit a software certification request and pay a testing fee. If it passes Skype’s stringent tests, it wins certification for one year. Since the beginning of this month, any hardware product that uses the Skype API must be submitted for testing.

The Beeb’s news website has been on the trail of Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, who’s been getting an awful lot of publicity lately for a certain web TV project. Happily, this time Niklas had his Skype chief exec’s hat on.

He’s been speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where, says BBC News, “an aura of awe surrounds him”. The reporter also confidently reveals that Skype is “striking fear into the hearts of telecom firms around the world” – you betcha!

Zennstrom is described as exhibiting “a quiet pride” when he speaks of the continuing success of Skype. He pointed out to delegates that more than 171 million users have registered with Skype so far, and 200,000 new users are signing up every day. The company’s net revenues topped $66m during the last three months of 2006 alone.

Now, revealed Zennstrom, Skype is looking for new targets. “We are going in a few different directions,” he said. Skype wants to be “where users want to use us”; they don’t want to “sit in front of a computer all the time”. Could this mean that more mobile network operators are in talks with Skype about making the software available via their handsets? Let’s hope so.

Meanwhile, at the weekend I took delivery of a shiny new Nokia phone from 3’s X-Series, which launched in November with Skype built in. The bad news is it’s only mine for a couple of weeks; the good news is that I’ll bring you a review once I’ve given it a thorough road-test.

If you want to get involved with the latest developments and experiments behinds the scenes at Skype Towers, pay a visit to Skype Garage, a wiki section of the site where new Skype bits and bobs get their first airing.

The Garage is a little bit like Google Labs, only more inclusive – and, as Skypemeister Jaanus explains, “Labs makes it sound like you have to be a rocket scientist and wear a white coat and do experiments on mice.”

Any Skyper can visit the Garage and get their hands dirty, or just keep an eye on things like early betas, previews or pre-release versions of Skype products on current or new platforms, and improvements to existing tools.

If you have any comments or suggestions, nip over to the Garage forum, where recent discussions range from wondering when Skype will be available for the Nokia N800 to the latest word on high-res video calls.

I spent most of yesterday at the dentist, following a porcelain-based mishap that left me looking like Shane McGowan in a wig. Now, if you’ll excuse me while I change my Skype avatar to the picture above.

Over on the Share Skype blog Jaanus is putting out a call for Skype English blog chat participants. To join in and have your say on anything Skype-related, click the big blue link in the top right corner of every page on Jaanus’s blog.

Jaanus has also created a little program that lists recent posting activity on a chat, and he’s offered to let you have it if you want to look at your own chat activity.

More news on that there X-Series phone. My Scandinavian friend Villu tells me that 3 is launching its X-Series mobile broadband package in Denmark and Sweden today, where it’s notably dark and cold at this time of year, so a shiny new Skype-enabled mobile is probably very welcome.

The X-Series people have also brightened my January by biking over a Nokia N73, one of the two X-Series phones now available that comes with Skype built-in, along with other software such as Slingplayer, Yahoo Go!, 3’s web browser and Windows Live Messenger.

At the weekend I shall road-test the living daylights out of it, so watch this space for review and pics.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see in my living room again. After five months of broadbandless misery involving MAC codes, BT line tags and almost wilfully incompetent “support” staff at my old ISP, who’d apparently outsourced their helplines to a box of monkeys in a ditch, I am now online at home again.

From next week I’ll be working from home full-time again, and Skype will be vital to my livelihood. It’ll be a relief to be free of an office management that won’t let me download Skype, or Google Toolbar, or Irfanview, or pretty much anything useful, though I understand that such rules are pretty standard in the workplace nowadays. Far be it from me to suggest that the nation’s business brains are suffering a fear of the new that blinds them to the benefits of the internet. It’s inevitable that business practices will take time to catch up with technology.

But I do think it’s a shame that some companies and employees are missing out on Skype’s workplace benefits. Skype’s Extras gallery features a small but savvily-formed pile of business applications that can really improve efficiency, boost communication and cut costs for the forward-thinking professional.

Skype Extras are little downloads that help you get more out of Skype – anything from 3D talking avatars to lie detectors. At the moment Extras are only for Windows users, but Mac compatibility is in the pipeline. Extras are submitted by Skype’s developer partners, and those programs that work particularly well with Skype earn Skype Certification. So look out for the icon when you’re browsing the extras, or when you’re shopping for Skype gadgets:

The growing batch of business add-ons include Skip2PBX, a gateway that enables up to 99 concurrent Skype lines, and Skylook, with which you can record calls, get SMS alerts and more. The sole Skype Certified Business Extra is Convenos Meeting Center 3.3 (below), a subscription-based web conferencing tool that was one of the first programs to win certification. Users attend the conference through their browser, creating a virtual workplace where participants can securely meet, share and store documents. Coffee isn’t included.

My blog colleague Jaanus has offered an update on Skype for mobile, which seemed to have hit a roadblock thanks to pricey data plans imposed by mobile operators.

At the moment you can get Skype for Windows Mobile on various devices including Smartphones, or you can opt for one of the two rather fabulous 3 X-series phones that went on sale at the beginning of December. I briefly got my grubby hands on one of the X-Series phones, a Nokia N73, and it was lust at first sight for this big-screened beauty whose built-in software includes Skype, Google, eBay and genius remote TV program Slingplayer. Find out more on 3’s X-Series blog.

Skype is working hard to get the software on more platforms at reasonable prices, but hammering down those call charges doesn’t come naturally to many mobile operators. Nonetheless, upcoming versions of Skype will be compatible with more and more devices and platforms. Apple’s headline-grabbing new iPhone seems the perfect fit for the Mac version of Skype, so keep an eye on Skype’s website for announcements.

It’s the middle of January. Christmas is long gone, the sales are over, you’ve got no money. You’ve broken your resolutions, your bottom has gone from peachy to porky. It’s cold and dark when you get up in the morning, and it’s cold and dark when you get home from work. The middle of January sucks.

But Skype’s website offers plenty of ways to cheer yourself up, and I suggest that you start playing around with them right now rather than attempt to travel home from work in today’s ridiculous weather.

Happiness helper #3: Pretty up your profile
To put a new face to your name, click the Change button next to the picture that’s already there and My Pictures will open with a selection of images. Select the one you want – or click Browse and choose a picture from your computer’s hard drive.

Happiness helper #2: Spread the word about your birthday
Add your date of birth to your profile, and all your Skype friends will receive reminders about your birthday. Hurrah! All you need to do is open Skype, go to File on the menu, select ‘Edit my profile’, enter your date of birth in the box and click Update.

Happiness helper #3: Buy a pal a Gift Certificate
Best way to earn happiness is to spread a little bit of it. Log on to My Account at the Skype Store, scroll down and select ‘Purchase Gift Certificates’, select the type and amount you want, and pay using the on-screen instructions. Hopefully your recipient will be so grateful they’ll return the favour one day.

Never mind Joost, which has soaked up an awful lot of attention this week – Skype has got some big news of its own. It’s now announced a plan to introduce new domestic calling plans for 24 countries, including the UK.

Under the Skype Pro plan, users will pay a monthly subscription and a connection fee, but no per-minute charges.

Monthly fees for haven’t yet been decided, but a source told the Associated Press that it’ll probably be as little as £4 a month. The per-call connection fee for Skype Pro calls within the UK to a landline phone or mobile will be about 2.5p, said Skype’s Stefan Oberg. Can BT beat that? I suspect it can’t.

Skype Pro plans will also include free voicemail and discounted SkypeIn number.

First came Kazaa, which changed the way we bought music. Or didn’t buy it, to be strictly accurate. Then came Skype, which changed the way we made calls and allowed us to tear up our phone bills for good.

Now we have Joost, the newly-unveiled name for The Venice Project from Skype/Kazaa founders Niklas and Janus, and it looks set to do for our TV viewing what Skype did for our phone habit: allow us to do a lot more of it for a lot less money.

The new web TV service offers broadcast-quality full-screen content and full copyright guarantees – and, unbelievably, it’s free. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, judging by Niklas and Janus’ track record.

Continue reading "Will Joost be the Skype of the TV world?" »

CES may be done and dusted for another year, but it’s still throwing up some Skype gems.

Wireless specialists RTX chose last year’s CES to unveil its DUALphone, the world’s first cordless Skype phone. And in what I hope becomes an annual celebration of all things Skype and cordless, it has now launched the DUALphone 3088, which has already garnered a near-perfect rating from visitors to Skype’s website.

The DUALphone 3088 comes with Skype built-in, so you can call anywhere in the world using Skype without the need for a PC. It also serves as a traditional phone – just select the appopriate phone type on the natty user interface when you make a call.

Incidentally the phone has just been named Product of the Year 2006 by The Red Ferret Journal. It wasn’t actually released until 2007, but what’s a year between friends?

Internet telephony is set to grow and grow in the UK for at least the next five years, according to industry-watcher Ovum. This takes us into next-generation voice – and, one would hope, a properly unbundled phone network.

“The composition of the voice market will be quite different to what we see today,” says Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum. The changing face of the phone-calls business is largely thanks to players like Skype, according to research firm the Kelsey Group.

“Skype’s service will take business away from the telcos,” says Neal Polachek, senior vice president at Kelsey. “Even at a very low price, putting any price on the offering gives consumers a perception the service has greater value, and more consumers are likely to migrate over from traditional phone service.”

I’m loath to namecheck the telco whose “line tags” are still scuppering my attempts to switch broadband ISPs, and who charge me a fat line rental fee even though I only use my landline about once every four months. However I think it’s worth mentioning BT Retail’s claim to have amassed 1 million customers for its internet telephony offering.

One million, eh? Ovum’s Mark Main dug a little deeper and discovered that the claim is rather a loose one.

“BT implies that it has a million internet telephony users, whereas in reality anyone who takes a BT Retail Total Broadband package is automatically registered for internet telephony even if they don’t use the service.” In other words, it’s rather like God Channel 2 claiming to have 8 million viewers just because 8 million people get Sky. Sheesh, as they say in Las Vegas.

I’m now fending off jetlag from hell in a chilly East London internet cafe, but back in Las Vegas it’s still all go at CES.

Skype took the platform at the Consumer Electronics Show today to explain why there’s no version of Skype for downloading to all types of mobile phone. The reason is pretty simple, and won’t come as a suprise to anyone who’s had a mobile bill recently: carrier charges are still far too high to support it.

If you’ve got a mobile with an inexpensive data connection, it would make perfect sense to use Skype for making calls. But the bit about “inexpensive data connection” is, as yet, as rare as hen’s teeth on a flying pig.

Back in November Skype unveiled a version of the software that runs on a Nokia phone using 3’s 3G mobile phone network, giving unlimited Skype calls for a flat £5 a month. Skype versions for other mobiles were expected to follow quickly, but other carriers haven’t played ball, and have failed to cough up the appropriate low-fee or flat-fee mobile data packages.

Still, the success of the Skype/Nokia/3 launch means that other mobile operators are under pressure to rethink their data pricing strategies. Perhaps at next year’s CES we’ll see some progress…

Mobile giant Nokia has revealed to CES delegates that it’s teaming up with Skype to create a new mobile edition of the world’s favourite internet telephony software.

The new edition of Skype is being built specifically for Nokia’s new N800 Internet tablet (pictured), which was also revealed and released for sale at CES. It’s not going on sale just yet, but we’re likely to see it in mid-2007.

“Skype is the recognized leader of Internet communications with over 136 million registered users worldwide,” said Nokia’s Ari Virtanen, Vice President of Convergence Products. “Nokia’s new N800 Internet Tablet is designed for mobile Internet. Together, we can develop communications devices beyond expectations.”

Skype took to the stage at CES today to announce no fewer than 12 new Skype-certified devices, many of which allow you to make Skype calls without a PC.

The new gizmos come from high-profile electronics names such as Philips and regular Skype partner Netgear, as well as from lesser-spotted but highly-regarded companies Asus, Ipevo and Topcom. They add to the more than 150 Skype-certified products already available worldwide.

New Skype desktop internet phones, which do away with the need for a computer, include Ipevo’s Solo 1, a beautifully-designed phone with built-in speakerphone and adjustable 2.4in colour screen where you can access your Contacts list, see caller information and check your remaining Skype credit. Skype desktop internet phones also include Topcom’s Webt@lker 5000, which can be configured to work in any of 14 languages.

Continue reading "Twelve new Skype-certified gadgets" »

So I’m in Las Vegas, where I’m neither hob-nobbing with Elvis over a frozen margarita nor racking up my chips on the poker table. Instead, I’m crouched excitedly over a hot laptop in the bowels of an expo centre approximately the size of the Isle of Man. Hey, Elvis can wait.

I’m here for CES, the technology industry’s annual product-launching shindig. In its 40-year history the Consumer Electronics Show has grown from a minor geekathon into an enormous platform for the likes of Bill Gates to proclaim his passion for all things electronic and cyber.

Internet telephony is up there with IPTV and HD in this year’s CES buzz – which will be music to the ears of Skype founders Janus and Niklas, who’ve now made a splash in broadband TV as well as leading the world in online communication.

Over the next couple of days I’ll bring you a round-up of Skype news from CES, including the latest Skype-certified gadgets and Skype software announcements. Watch this space, Skypers…

Best factoid of the week comes from the Gizmo Cafe Blog, from Canadian consumer tech publisher Geosign.

“Where did the name Skype actually come from?” asks the thoughtful writer. “Is it really a Chuvash word that means ‘talking for free’?” The truth, he reveals, is that when Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis founded Skype, they were going to call it Sky Peer-to-Peer, shortened to Skyper. The R was only dropped because the domain name ‘Skyper’ was already taken. So now you know!

P.S: By the time you read this, I will be sleeping off my jetlag in a Las Vegas hotel room. I’m out there all next week for the annual techie mondo-shindig known as CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Skype and hundreds of Skypalikes will be in attendance, so I shouldn’t be short of stuff to report. See you in Vegas, baby.

Skype’s Extras gallery is an ever-growing trove of programs and add-ons that promise to enhance your Skyping, and a decent number of them have won the ultimate honour: Skype certification.

One great example is CrazyTalk, a new Skype Video add-on from Reallusion that gives you an all-talking, all-lip-syncing, all-animated customised avatar.

CrazyTalk is fully integrated with Skype 2.0 video version, and because it serves as a virtual camera you don’t need a webcam. It’s also completely free to download and use.

Wiped out the kitty over Christmas? Here’s an easy way to top up your Skype credit without handing over any cash: add a Skype banner to your website, and collect credit every time someone clicks the banner.

This Skype affiliate scheme is outlined in full here, but it’s pretty simple. Skype hosts the banners and pays for the bandwith; all you do is choose your favourite banner from the range of Flash and Gif banners available (there’s even a simple text link if you prefer the lo-fi approach), copy/paste the code into your site’s own HTML and wait for the clicks to come in. Every time someone clicks your banner, Skype’s site opens in a new window.

Skype will regularly add new deisgns to the banners page, so it’s worth checking back now and then to see if a new one takes your fancy.

It’s now a month since 3’s fabulous new Skype-certified X-Series phones went on sale, just in time for the festive rush. (Christmas, remember that? Seems like last year already.)

An X-Series phone is for life, not just for Christmas, so Skype has launched a comprehensive guide to using it. No Skype on 3 question, Frequently Asked or otherwise, remains unanswered.

The guide starts with the basics (Q: What is Skype on 3? A: A new service that Skype and 3 are launching that allows you to access Skype from your 3 X-Series mobile phone”) to the fiendish. For example, there are full instructions for opening a Skype account via the phone – because not every X-Series user already has a Skype account, or even a computer with broadband access. You’ll also find advice on calling contacts in your address book, diverting calls to your 3 voicemail service, and much more.

There’s also a sneak peek at features that’ll soon be appearing on Skype on 3, including Skype chats, which are expected to be added to the platform later this year. Also pencilled in for a 2007 appearance is a tool for revealing who is calling you over Skype.

To sign up for the service and find out what else the X-Series phones can do, click the ‘Get Skype on 3’ button on Skype’s guide to the 3 service. This takes you straight to 3’s X-Series website, where you can view a demo and find out even more.