April 2007

A little message from Ants over at the Devzone blog:

As summer is coming and we enjoy meeting colleagues and friends after work , we would like to raise to your attention that Skype is inviting you!

On Thursday 10th May, from 5pm till 8pm, Skype will be offering you free food, drink and entertainment at our London offices (map). Whether you’re a developer, beta tester or just a keen Skype user, it’d be great to see you. You’ll get an opportunity to meet plenty of the Skype team, and to chat about the good, bad and ugly of Skypeland.

If you’d like to come along, just pop us an email, telling us:

• Your name
• Your company or other affiliation
• Your location
• Are you an existing Skype developer?

I look forward to seeing you there

In April, May and June, we’re giving away free SkypeOut minutes to call phones around the world like there’s no tomorrow.

If you’re in the UK, you can claim ten free minutes of Skype credit on three different occasions: Thursday 26 April, Thursday 24th May and Thursday 21st June — for a total of 30 minutes of calls you don’t have to pay a penny for.

All you need to do is to log into your Skype account on a Gift Day and claim what’s rightfully yours by clicking on the Redeem Gift link. The free credit will magically appear on your account no later than 12 hours from redemption.

If you think ten minutes a pop isn’t that much, how about this for some positive thinking. Ten minutes contain 600 seconds (or so our programmers tell me). Which sounds ten times better. Still not impressed? OK, it takes just one second to say, ‘I love you.’ Now imagine doing it 600 times in a row. Now you know what I mean.

Have fun!

P.S. The ten-minute promise is based on the Skype Global Rate and one free connection fee. This unified rate applies to some of our most popular SkypeOut destinations. See all rates

A quick hat tip to the guys over at Excite who pointed me to the latest edition of Ofcom’s Broadband Digital Progress Report.

It mentions using Skype on your 3 X-Series, but most interesting are the statistics about VoIP usage as a whole:

At the end of 2006, one in ten UK adults said they were making calls over the internet, double the proportion that said they did this at the end of 2005. Of these, 14% said they did it daily and a further 30% did so several times per week.

An interesting graph:

— Source: Ofcom Broadband Digital Progress Report

This suggests that there are plenty of people in the UK who are receptive to using internet phone software, but who just haven’t got round to it.

I hope that Skype is easy enough to use that people see the benefits immediately, but perhaps we’re not doing enough to convert these ‘aware’ people into users.

Is there anything specifically we could do to make it easier for people to get Skype?

Of course, if growth continues at this rate perhaps we could just wait 40 years

We’ve just launched SkypeOut Premium, which lets you call UK premium rate numbers (the ones starting with 09) with Skype. These numbers are used for a huge range of services, from weather forecasts to relationship advice.

You don’t need to do anything differently to calling any other number with SkypeOut. Just make sure you have some SkypeOut credit, and dial the number in Skype as normal.

Don’t forget that these premium rate numbers cost more to call than normal landlines or mobiles, so check the rate chart before you call.

The numbers themsleves aren’t operated by Skype, obviously, so if you have a problem with one of the services you’ll need to contact the company which operates it. The regulator ICTSIS can also help if you get into difficulties.

If you’d like to block or unblock access to premium rate numbers, you can do that from your account page.