April 2008

For those of you who have been waiting, Skype for Windows 3.8 is now out — you can find a full set of release notes on the Garage blog, and Villu has some more to say about it on the main blog:

The main improvements can be found under the hood of the audio engine. In the real world, this translates to significantly reduced background noise, less delay, fewer call drops, and fewer cut-outs. And if you change your headset, headphones or microphone, there’s no need to mess around with sound settings. 3.8 takes care of it behind the scenes.

Download Skype 3.8 for Windows

A nice little story which was flagged up on the new-look Skype Community last week — so good, in fact, that I’m going to repeat it here in full:

My Skype story is a truly life changing experience. My best friend introduced me to the wonders of Skype about a year and a half ago. With parents in Germany, one brother in South Africa and the other in Washington DC we loved it. It changed everything. We where a family again with our location being the smallest and most inconsequential detail!

One day I had the idea to use a puppet on my nephew in Washington to entertain him. When I introduced him to Fuzzy Bob and I wasn’t in the frame he chatted to him for the best part of an hour. Just him and Fuzzy Bob. It was a little bit of magic I couldn’t believe the reaction. He was hooked. Believing Fuzzy Bob to be his real furry friend. What was even more surprising was the tantrum that he threw when it was time to say goodbye! I was really onto something here. Great for me, not so good for my brother who rang me up the next day to say that his son had talked of nothing other then Fuzzy Bob and that we MUST do another live Skype link up as soon as possible.

9 Months later and my new company Fuzzberrys is now up and running. The main offering is a live, webcam chit chat with any one of my specially designed puppets. It’s a business that is truly global, having had Monty the Dragon do a live hook up to a Bar Mitzvah in the South of France to a birthday party “special live appearance” by Miss Thing, the glamour monster.

We are also doing live links with classrooms for assemblies and other fun learning activities. The kids have education, fun, learning and computers all working in total harmony together!

The wonder in a child’s eyes when they realise that these fantasy creations are actually talking and interacting with them is a joy for all to see and it’s not just the kids that love it. Adults revert back to their school days when chatting to these extraordinary friends! And the fact that Skype is so immensely easy to set and use has basically given me an opportunity to offer this unique service to anyone in the world! How many shops and services can boast to have over 10 million potential customers!

Come on over and visit us at www.fuzzberrys.com See you there!

Update: Andrew’s posted a great video walkthrough of the Skype for your mobile interface.

Today, Skype has released a beta version of Skype for your mobile, a mobile thin client for Java-enabled phones.

The full set of features for Skype for your mobile beta include chat, group chat, presence (seeing when your contacts are online), and, making Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls.

Note: When you make calls, you’ll be charged by your operator just like you would for any normal phone call — so if you have inclusive minutes, a Skype-to-Skype or SkypeOut call will use up these minutes.

There will also be some data charges for the handling of presence and chat messages — again, you’ll be charged by your operator as normal for these. An unlimited data plan is recommended, but we reckon that a person with 20 contacts, who’s online for 1 hour, Skype chats for 10 minutes and has a 20 minute call each day will use about 1MB of data per month. The more data you use, the higher your charges may be, of course.

As an optional feature, you can also receive calls from other Skype users and via your Skype online number — this is supported in the UK, but not everywhere in the world.

It’s been tested on around 50 different handsets from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, but is likely to work on others too.

For full instructions on how to download it, visit the Skype for your mobile page on the Skype website.

Of course, if you’re in the market for a new phone, the 3 Skypephone offers an integrated Skype experience with no Skype-to-Skype call or data charges, so long as you top up your account with £10 per month.

Thanks to everyone who voted in this year’s Webware 100 Awards — and we’ve done it again

Skype’s a winner in the Communication category for the second year in a row, and we’re all very proud. Nearly two million people voted in the award selection, which honours the best web 2.0 sites, services and products.

Skype’s just launched three new unlimited calling plans, which offer a single, monthly flat rate for national and international calling:

Unlimited Country — £2.24/month inc. VAT

This plan offers unlimited calls to landline numbers in one of the 20 European countries listed below, plus all of the calling plan benefits at the bottom of this post.

Austria; Belgium; Czech Republic; Denmark; Estonia; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Ireland; Italy; Luxembourg; Netherlands; Norway; Poland; Portugal; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; United Kingdom.

Unlimited Europe — £3.39/month inc. VAT

This plan offers unlimited calls to landline numbers in all of the 20 European countries listed above, plus all of the calling plan benefits at the bottom of this post.

Unlimited World — £7.99/month inc. VAT

This plan offers unlimited calls to landline numbers in all of the 34 countries listed below, plus all of the calling plan benefits at the bottom of this post.

Australia; Austria; Belgium; Canada (incl. mobiles); China (incl. mobiles); Chile; Czech Republic; Denmark; Estonia; France; Germany; Greece; Guam; Hong Kong (incl. mobiles); Hungary; Ireland; Italy; Japan; Korea, Republic of; Luxembourg; Malaysia; Netherlands; New Zealand; Norway; Poland; Portugal; Puerto Rico; Singapore (incl. mobiles); Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Taiwan; United Kingdom; USA (incl. mobiles).

Calling plan benefits

Call day or night

No restrictions on when you call — you can get in touch whenever you like.

Online number

An online number is a normal phone number which lets people who don’t have Skype call you as if you had a landline phone. With the Unlimited World plan, you get three of these; the other two plans give you one.

Voicemail

Free voicemail is included so you’ll never miss that call from your special someone again.

Skype To Go (where available)

Skype To Go lets you use any mobile phone or landline to reach people abroad.

Fair use

The legal bit — as part of Skype’s fair usage policy you’ll get up to 10,000 calling minutes per month. And only to landline numbers beginning 01 and 02 in the UK.

Fascinating video from Jeff Pulver, who interviews three eighth grade (Y9/S2 equivalent) girls from Tel Aviv about their thoughts on social media, and asks about how they communicate with people.

It’s interesting to hear that they use IM to communicate with their peers, and see their mobiles as the tether which keeps them under the watchful eye of their parents.

Research last year from the IoE suggests that 78% of young people (12-18) in the UK use instant messaging of one sort or another, though I suspect mobile permeation is higher than this. Whether this will change with the proliferation of multipurpose devices like the 3 Skypephone and iPhone is an interesting question — will young people get better at optimising their communication?

Scott’s just announced that the Skype for Business Control Panel has had a few updates — and the new features should help make life easier for small and large organisations alike. There’s also a new Business help desk for any support queries.

If you use Skype at work and don’t already use the Business Control Panel, you might like to check it out — it’s free to set up, and brings a whole host of benefits. †

What’s new in the updated Business Control Panel

Easier invitations — you can now invite people to join your Business Control Panel using their email address; if they don’t already have a Skype name, they’ll be invited to set one up, and will be guided through the process. You can even recommend a name if your company uses a standard format.

Members’ directory — you can create a directory for your organisation to make it easy for your employees or volunteers to find each others Skype names.

Itemised call reports — with the permission of your employees, you can view itemised reports of their calls and text messages. As a Control Panel member, you can grant or deny permission as you see fit from the Business Control Panel settings page.

Credit buying improvements — you can now buy up to £750 of credit at once, and can set up auto recharging to make sure that your employees never run out of credit.

† If you’re part of a larger organisation, don’t forget about the Business version of Skype (MSI), too.

For those of you on Windows, you might like to check out the 3.8 beta — the development team have been focusing their efforts on improving call quality in this release, and so you can expect:

• Significantly reduced background noise
• Less delay
• Fewer call drops
• Fewer cut-outs
• Change your headset, headphones or microphone without having to fiddle with settings

You can find the full release notes over at the Skype Garage blog, and you can download the new version right away.

Last week, Skype released the results of some research into how video and conference calling are being used by small businesses across Europe.

Small businesses make conference and video calls more often than I’d thought — and I should know, working for a small business myself. Depending on the size of the business (and we’re talking companies with between one and 250 employees here), and out of those of them who made conference or video calls, 11–30% of them made conference calls at least once a day, and 8–30% of them made video calls at least once a day. If we move up a bracket, 55–66% of the companies surveyed made video or conference calls at least once a week.

When asked why they made conference or video calls, many of the responses were as you might expect — to reduce travel or environmental impact, for example.

What’s interesting, though, was the fact that many organisations, particularly the smaller ones, said that they use conference or video calls as a way of working with colleagues while they’re are on the move. It’s not necessarily just about travel, either — I’m equally happy joining in calls from halfway across Europe as I am taking them in my pyjamas on a working-from-home day. Conference and video calling allow for much more flexible working patterns full stop — just don’t forget about the rules for meetings if there are going to be lots of people on the call.

Again, all of this is perhaps unsurprising, but with carbon footprint reduction very much in vogue, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that conference calls can have their benefits even if you’ve just hopped off an emissions-spewing flight to New York.

Not, of course, that I’m recommending you ditch the regular Skype conference call for a weekly return to JFK. Neither the atmosphere nor our marketing people would like you very much if that happened

Update: I almost forgot — as it’s that time of year again, check out Phil’s solution to Britain’s curry crisis