Odds and ends

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!

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?

Last week, the UK media saw a flurry of attention around the publication of the final report of the Byron Review, Safer Children in a Digital World. It looks at the need to protect children from harmful or inappropriate material, both online and in games, and is based on data from 346 respondents, 93% of whom were children.

Interestingly, most of the blogosphere coverage centres around the impact on gaming, but there are some good pieces about its recommendations for the way children should be educated about online risks.

Ewan McIntosh points to the Times’ coverage of the report, which says that

[Byron calls] for a massive campaign to educate parents, teachers and childcarers about how to ensure that children get maximum benefit from the digital world without being exposed to its dangers.

Ewan suggests that educating children about online risks without introducing them to danger is akin to trying to teach someone to swim without a swimming pool, and I suspect there’s some truth in this.

The Telegraph’s initial report cautioned of a media backlash:

Parents and politicians cannot make this world wholly safe. Maybe the best they can offer, for all the talk of education and crackdowns, is to equip children better to deal with hazards placed in their way by adults. Byron's findings sound moderate and balanced. That may not defuse a media firestorm about the (largely unproved) evils of the internet.

The ippr’s own research on the subject, due to be published fully in April, reveals gaps between parents’ knowledge and that of their children:

“My mum will ask sometimes ‘is it safe?’ but she doesn’t really know” (Girl, 16, ABC1)

“Everyone lies about their age ‘cos I think it’s like if you’re under 18, your profile gets set to private” (Girl, 15)

“We have restrictions at school but we can just get an administrator’s account and take them off” (Boy, 14)

“Restrictions stop you going on bad sites, like games sites and stuff. If you take them off you can go on anything” (Boy, 14).

“I want to spend less time ‘cos what I do on it is just really pointless – like MySpace is just really addictive” (Girl, 17)

“First it was like everyone was on MSN, then everyone sort of has Bebo, now everyone who had MSN moved on to Facebook so it’s just what everyone’s doing at that time” (Girl, 16)

“Some things they [parents] don’t understand and they ask me to explain it to them but they still don’t understand” (Girl, 13)

A cause for concern? Yes. A cause for panic? No. There’s a clear message here about the need for greater education and understanding. An acknowledgement that children will learn how to bypass content filters at school — I did — and that they’ll end up speaking to people online who their parents don’t know.

Attempting to deprive children of access to valuable resources (particularly in schools) is likely to lead either to black market trading — borrowing teachers’ access passwords to social network at lunchtime — or legitimised evasion — what are you supposed to do when a school project calls for research into marketing of alcoholic drinks? What’s important is that children understand the risks involved in these interactions, and that their parents and teachers understand their value.

Do you go topless to meetings? 43 Folders points to an article on MercuryNews.com about design firm Adaptive Path’s decision to ban laptops, mobiles and smartphones from all of their meetings.

Lo and behold, it worked — “It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers”, said Todd Wilkens, who’s blogged before about his war against Blackberries.

In 2006, Merlin Mann posted 9 useful tips for more productive meetings, which are listed here in brief:

1. Circulate an agenda
2. Have a theme
3. Set (and honour) times for beginning, ending, and breaks
4. No electronic grazing. Period.
5. Schedule guests - don’t have people in the room who don’t need to be there
6. Be a referee and employ a time-keeper
7. Stay on target - as soon as something’s closed, move on
8. Follow up
9. Be consistent - set a pattern for how your meetings work

The guys at BNET have another interesting suggestion — have stand-up meetings. No chairs, no falling asleep, and there’s an incentive to keep things quick.

Of course, meetings often turn out to be completely unneccessary — 37signals’ book Getting Real suggests that ‘meetings are toxic’, and points to some wise advice from Lisa Haneberg:

There are too many meetings. Push back on meetings that do not make sense or are unproductive. Only book a meeting when you have an important business issue to discuss and you want or need input, approval, or agreement. Even then, resist the urge to invite everyone and their brother – don’t waste people’s time unnecessarily.

With increased choice of communication channels — phone calls, SMS, email, IM, Twitter, Skype, and social network sites like DOPPLR — you’d think we’d get better at optimising our communication. What’s the best way to contact someone with a particular question, or to discuss a particular subject? How can I reach this person most easily?

Each communication channel has obvious advantages and disadvantages — the synchronicity required for a phone or Skype call vs. the immediacy and speed at which conversation can happen; the tiny keypad for SMS vs. the convenience of quick messages on the go; the ignorability of IM vs. its flexibility in multi-participant conversations. And yet we still don’t seem very good at getting it right. I still find myself drawn into long SMS conversations which would have taken half the time and would have been doubly useful as a voice call. I call people when a quick chat message on Skype would have done the same job without interruption.

And yes, I end up having meetings where any or all of the above would have been preferable. The meeting seems like a fallback option; a safe bet. It’s all too easy to send out one of those invite emails and drag people to a table somewhere with a flipchart. There’s nothing you can’t resolve with a good meeting. And hey, if you didn’t resolve things, just schedule another one…

Just a quick reminder that this week’s your last opportunity to vote in the Webware 100 Awards — to cast your vote for Skype, just click here and follow the instructions.

For more information about the awards, take a look at the Webware site. And don’t forget to vote, too

Just a quickie today — reader Andrew Bruck asked about in-flight internet:

Is it technically possible to offer Skype on an aircraft? In the US it's common to use normal seat-back phones but they're not cheap. Any thoughts on that? You mention Eos and Silverjet who are breaking the mould with their service across the Atlantic and I wonder whether Skype could hook up with an airline and offer Skype in the sky? Or is that just pie in the sky?

While we all wish Skype was available right now on planes, I suspect we might have to wait a bit. However, there are some promising noises coming from the other side of the pond. 15 of American Airlines’ 767s will be equipped with gogo in-flight internet, though given the pricing structure announced yesterday it doesn’t look like it’ll be appearing on the transatlantic routes just yet. For those travelling on transcon flights in the US, however, it’ll be very exciting indeed. Andy Abramson, for one, seems to think so

Ewan, who rather humbly asks why on earth people would want to subscribe to his blog, muses eloquently on the need for greater online civic engagement. He describes the situation at the moment as a bit of a meatball sundae (good book, by the way) — our leaders are providing the cream topping, but what’s underneath is still very much meatball. The Scottish Government ‘blog’ and the PM Petitions website are good examples of cream topping. OK, in its defence, the petitions site provides some (albeit perhaps not wildly accurate) quantitative data on public opinion, but there’s nothing particularly conversational about demanding that Jeremy Clarkson be made Prime Minister.

The people behind the PM Petitions site, mySociety, are doing some interesting work around civic engagement, however. They also have a fun blog which talks about things like how rubbish the HMRC website is, among other things…

Back to the real stuff, though — mySociety makes tools which help people get information out of or into government in the UK. TheyWorkForYou tells you what your MP’s up to, and WriteToThem lets you give them the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. FixMyStreet lets you tell your local authority about the things which make everyday life that little bit more irritating, like broken streetlights and concrete slabs which trip you up.

This isn’t quite conversation either, but it’s heading in the right direction. By making the pieces of the interaction easier to file in the right place (and we know how much government loves filing), it’s more likely that things will happen. And by getting the information out again, it’s easier for us citizens to find out what’s actually being done.

It’s interesting, too, to look at what goes on in the rest of Europe. Switzerland uses a system of direct democracy, with referenda deciding the minutiae of policy, and Estonians do everything online. Of course, again, these aren’t so much conversations as services, but the principles are the right ones.

I’m not saying that genuine civic dialogue is easy — we’re talking about large numbers of people with micro-different opinions in the most part — but when there are issues where mini-macro agreements can be made (school admissions policy for the local secondary, location of a new supermarket, community policing in the local area) there’s a lot to be said for exploring ways in which we can make better use of the internet. It’s around issues like these where I think conversation at a person-to-person level is possible for a reasonable number of participants — and where that conversation can have a relevant impact.

Do you ever feel like you’re in IT prison? I’m lucky to work for a small company, where I am free (pretty much) to buy and use whatever hardware and software I like. If there’s something new I want to try, I download it and use it; aside from having to connect to our company email server and use our file sync software, there are no specific requirements placed on what I do.

I’m basically in IT bliss. No procurement restrictions. No blocked websites. No nagging IT department. But, I’m sorry to say, I’m very much in the minority among my peers who work for larger organisations. Even the mid-size ones like to issue new recruits with standard ‘locked down’ (why does that phrase make me shudder?) laptops and block Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday morning about ‘Why Businesses Banish Cool Technologies’ — and my instinctive reaction was to answer ‘because they’re not cool’. It tells a tale of a company which blocks pretty much everything:

[Regulatory requirements mean] banning Skype, the popular online phone service that has instant-messaging software built in, even though many researchers say their clients like to communicate with them through Skype.

Web email is off limits because it’s impossible for the company to monitor what employees say in those messages. People can’t load files onto CDs, USB drives or other devices because there’s no way to control what they do with the data once it’s there.

Of course, a clever commenter pointed out that software from the likes of OnState allows complete logging of Skype calls and chats. Webmail’s trickier, admittedly — and I’m not an expert on the regulatory requirements imposed on financial institutions in the States, though I suspect they’re pretty hideous and distinctly un-cool.

Given all of this beating-technology-back-to-1994, I was really excited by a piece in Technology Guardian yesterday, with the news that BP and Unisys — both megaliths in their own right — are taking a much more enlightened approach to the dreaded corporate IT policy.

BP’s trialling a scheme where employees can opt-out of the standard corporate IT provision, and instead get an annual allowance to acquire their own hardware and software. There are a few restrictions, of course, much like my own situation: employees have to be able to connect to BP’s email and file servers, and respect their security policy, but those don’t seem like unreasonable requirements. The only proviso is this — having opted out of corporate IT, they also opt out of corporate IT support — a move described by Ian Julien, infrastructure and operations manager (and it’s not clear whether this is form the employee or employer perspective) as ‘bloody marvellous’.

It’s not clear whether there are restrictions on purchasing — is there a mandated supplier or lessor, for example? And, of course, the piece makes no mention about internet use; are social networking or shopping websites blocked when using corporate internet connections, for example? Is Skype blocked?

Nevertheless, this seems like a bold move. Of course, the motivation was primarily financial — the desire to shift things off the corporate balance sheet — but Ian Julien says that it’s pretty popular with employees too. I bet they’re seeing more MacBooks around the place for a start.

The broader problem, I suspect, is a product of fear and complacency — yes, there are industries in which regulatory requirements make things more difficult than they might be otherwise. I’m not about to suggest that we allow people at the SIS to send CDs through the post — but then they’re probably smart enough not to do that in the first place. It’s mid-size, unregulated organisations which, in a way, frustrate me most — particularly those with largely professional staff.

If you’re a management consultancy firm, for example, with a few hundred employees, don’t you trust them to make the best use of their time, and not spend all day on eBay? Don’t you trust them not to share client files with their mates down the pub or your competitors? Don’t you think that allowing them more freedom to choose software and hardware would increase their productivity? I’ve written before about how IM in the workplace can be a benefit rather than a hindrance to productivity, for example. But it’s a fear that employees might do something naughty — and a lack of trust in their dedication to suspect that they might — which keeps all of those computers firmly ‘locked down’.

Which is a shame, really — we’re living in a generation of IT innovators, who aren’t necessarily the people creating companies like Skype. I’m thinking about the small-scale innovators. They’re sitting in offices, thinking that it’d be much easier and save thousands of pounds if they could — oh no, wait, they can’t. They can’t install that.

In a post about Scotland's new schools extranet/virtual learning environment Glow, John McConnell discusses a question raised at a training session for the system. Glow provides video calling and desktop sharing, and attendee Hilery Williams asked:

Why not simply use Skype?

Of course, Skype does pretty good video calls, and there are plenty of easy ways to share your screen with others.

But, this time, I’m not about to leap to Skype’s defence. There are some clear logistical difficulties — the need to provide a single log on, for example — and some constraints — the need to track user activity. That’s not to say they couldn’t be overcome, but I respect the choices made by Glow’s developers, and John does too:

A national authentication core makes possible a mode of collaboration that simply cannot be replicated easily, or so flexibly, outwith such a system. That is not to say that one is better than another (although many will argue one way or another, of course) - but they are different. Whether they both have validity in terms of their vaue to for learning and teaching is something we can debate.

Ewan McIntosh points to his comment:

For me, however, the central function of the authentication system within Glow is nothing to do with security and everything to do with the collaborative power it generates. We need to see past the ‘safety’ aspects of authentication to the more important capabilities for community building that it infers on the overall system.

and argues this — that the sense of community is, in a way, far more critical to the broader success of systems like Glow than the infrastructure which underpins it.

A virtual community can be close to work, cheap and contain all the conveniences we need to get through our day, but so can some pretty dead meatspace suburbs, where there is no inclination to declare 'community spirit'. Glow, like many 'VLE' online filing cabinets of content before it, could become like this, though I hope and believe it will not.

Likewise, some of broadbandless villages in Scotland, where nothing seems to work properly on a windy day and the 'conveniences' work on a timetable all of their own end up having some of the most enviable community building I've ever seen. For me, this type of village is the socially connected, rather messy world I inhabit online, made up of people living in blogs (houses), wikis (bothies) or Twitter (village notices).

It’s this ‘messy’ online world where I think Skype really shines. It’s fast and lightweight (with no configuration to speak of) and flexible (video, calls, chat, mobile, all in one box; with extras abound to do almost anything else). For the creators and users of Glow, however, the question remains as to whether is will become a ‘ghost town’. I, like Ewan, hope it doesn’t, but let’s hope it can live happily alongside Ian’s ‘exciting village for the future, with its gossips, town halls and bothies’.

Last year, Skype did rather well in the Webware 100 Awards, and this year, we’d like to ask for your help to propel us up the rankings once again.

Cast your vote for Skype →

For more information about the awards, there’s a video from the Webware team below: (it’s from last year, but it’s still relevant)

The excellent Data Mining blog points out an interesting interactive map on the BBC site of Brits living abroad.

See the full interactive map on the BBC website →

With any luck, some of them might be Skype users, too

Starting on Boxing Day, I’ll be posting a mini-series on the twelve days of Skype Christmas, bringing some wintry cheer to the blogosphere over the festive period.

There’ll be a special competition with Skype goodies to win, insights into the way we communicate, the sorts of conversations we have, as well as some predictions for 2008 and beyond.

The traditional song has an interesting history, which I’ll be investigating over the course of the series, but for a head start you might like to have a look at the BBC’s guide, which covers the basics, at least

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To make sure that you’re the first to find out about what’s going on (and if you haven’t already) you can subscribe to this blog either by email or in a news reader.

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I’ve just been chatting to Paul Amery, who heads up Skype’s Developer Program, about a new event called PlugLondon.

It aims to draw people’s attention to London as a centre of software innovation (which it is), but mainly to bring developers and vendors (like Skype) together so they can share ideas and show off their work in a marketing-free environment.

Skype, Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal will all be represented at the event, which is happening in Skype’s London offices on Saturday the 8th of December.

Perhaps it’s best described by what it’s not:

Marketing, recruitment or death by PowerPoint; we want to give you a chance to meet up, ask questions and network without having to listen to any corporate presentations or getting pestered by business people who see a money opportunity without really understanding what you do.

There’s more about it on Chris Heilmann’s blog, or you can go straight to the PlugLondon wiki to sign up. If you’d like to give a 10-15 minute product demo, you can do that too, so just add your app to the list.

Full details

Date: Saturday, December 8, 2007
Time: 2pm – 5.30pm (includes beer and food), then pub
Venue: Skype’s offices, 2 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1AN (Yahoo! Map / Google Map)

There’s an event listing on Upcoming which summarises all of these details.

Lastly, the organisers are looking for a new logo — take a look at the Flickr group for the current options, and submit your own for a chance to win a tasty prize.

Andy Abramson delights in the fact that Wi-fi is available on the Heathrow Express, and commenter Ian Wild points out that it’s also available on GNER’s services between London and Scotland.

But there’s one more — and here’s a summary table to show you where you can find wireless connections on trains in Great Britain:

Other operators who are considering installing Wi-fi equipment include South West Trains, who operate between London Waterloo and the south west of England, and Virgin Trains, between London Euston, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. With any luck, it won’t be long before Wi-fi on trains is as common as the wrong kind of snow.

* Prices correct as of the time of posting, obviously, so they may change in the future. GNER’s service will be free to all passengers when the franchise changes hands later this year.

According to this map in Wired, Britain has some of the cheapest access to broadband internet connectivity in the world. But what does the future hold?

Stephen Timms, the new Minister of State for Competitiveness, will meet with ISPs to discuss the future of the UK’s internet infrastructure, according to a Silicon.com piece:

“As minister for competitiveness, I see it as one of my highest personal priorities that we have a high-performance telecommunications infrastructure in every part of the country, enabling us to compete successfully on a global basis. That is why I have decided to chair a high-level summit later this year to consider the circumstances that might trigger public-sector intervention, the form that intervention might take, and at what level it might sensibly take place.”

The Broadband Finder blog suggests that fibre connections, rather than copper cables, could become the norm — but quotes Steve Robertson of Openreach citing lack of funding as the principle stumbling block:

Robertson asserts “that putting fibre into the ground is just as easy as putting copper into the ground,” and so the roll out should not be any more or less logistically demanding than the current 21CN rollout is at the moment. The main stumbling block is money, and getting everyone involved to bring some cash to the table if we are to see any radical changes over the next few years.

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the 25th birthday of the emoticon over the last few days — and many of you have probably read the email which started it all off:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman 

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

You can read the full email thread on Scott Fahlman’s pages on the Carnegie Mellon website.

Update: Jaanus has posted a photo of a commemorative banner on the Carnegie Mellon campus.

Skype has quite a few hidden emoticons. You can find a pretty comprehensive list on Chris Messina’s site, but here are a few favourites of mine:

(drunk)

(poolparty)

(rock)

For the patriotic among you, you can type things like (flag:gb) (or one of any of the two-letter ISO country codes) to re-live those last night of the Proms moments.

Photo by SMN

If you work for a big company, you’ve probably come across enterprise software. Quite why people use the term any more I’m not sure — it usually goes in sentences along with things like ‘hosted mid-tier solution’ and the dreaded ‘deployment’.

Not, of course, that I mean to poke too much fun at jargon per se — it’s useful in the right context — but there’s so much wrong with the way these products are described. Many people, like Peter Merholz, have been predicting their demise for some time.

I was prompted by a post on the Future of Software blog to think about where Skype sits relative to other software products. Is it an ‘enterprise software solution’? Is it a ‘productivity enhancement suite’? I hope not.

Here’s how we describe Skype:

Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world.

Skype does a lot more than that, of course, but we like to keep things simple in the first instance.

However, if what you’re looking for is an enterprise-ready multi-platform VoIP/IM/video communications solution, we do those too

We’ve all had that experience. The acquaintance who moans non stop about her love life (or lack of); the awful uncle at the family party; the work colleague who can recite entire episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

An article on lifehack.org has one suggestion on how to escape:

Try and confuse the person into wanting to exit the conversation. You can achieve this by bringing the topic of conversation to something off topic, only constantly. Interrupt with strange anecdotes and respond incorrectly and indirectly to questions. Have your own conversation without considering what the other person is saying. Start your own rant.

Alternatively, if you’re taking things a little more seriously, you might want to try to steer the conversation to a topic of mutual interest. That or pretend you have to go to the loo.

I arrived back in London from Tallinn yesterday — a very constructive trip, despite getting stuck in Stockholm on the way there thanks to a cancelled connecting flight. The irritation was compounded by the fact that the internet connection in the hotel was the slowest I’ve used for years. It was a bit like going back in a timewarp to 1997, which is odd, as the hotel itself looked like it was from 1987…

Once I’d finally arrived in Tallinn, and after Tuesday’s media event, the team of Skype bloggers discussed issues of style and tone as well as strategy — how we blog in a crisis, how we blog about things our legal team would prefer we didn’t blog about, and how we retain editorial independence from Skype.

Unfortunately, I can’t say much more at the moment, but I’ll be able to say more about the outcomes of our discussions soon. Watch this space

As the guys at Crowdstorm say…

It’s research time again, folks

E-consultancy reports that people who do a bit of research online before hitting the high street spend 10% more than those who don’t.

Whether this is because they’re encouraged by what they see online or tend to be bigger spenders anyway isn’t clear, though.

Perhaps most interestingly:

Some 80% of consumers who research before making a purchase say they ended up buying a brand from their original shortlist, while the rest were influenced in store.

I don’t think this rules out shopfloor marketing entirely, but it certainly demonstrates the value of getting things right online.

Of course, if it’s shops and restaurants you’re looking for, then SkypeFind can help you find the answer. Shopping we haven’t quite got round to yet, though…

Nick Carr’s column in today’s Technology Guardian offers an insight into the growing trend for software as a service:

Google is far from the only computing company laying lots of bricks and mortar. Its arch-rival, Microsoft, is building a mammoth data centre on a former bean field in the farming town of Quincy, Washington. It expects that the site will ultimately hold six warehouse-sized buildings encompassing 140,000 sq m of computer-packed space. Also rushing to build or lease data centres are Yahoo!, Ask.com, Intuit, Salesforce.com and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems unit, among many others.

Guess who isn’t doing this? Skype, for one. Skype uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, which means that calls are routed through our users’ computers rather than going through a central server. Compare this to a product like Yahoo! Messenger, which follows the traditional server model: (hence the need for the big purple blob in the middle)

Decentralised P2P software has several advantages over traditional server based software.

• The number of users can increase without increasing the need for costly centralised resources.
• It can rely on the processing power of users’ computers, since each new user added to the network adds potential processing power.

Maybe Nick hasn’t captured the whole picture when he says

To be a successful software company today, you increasingly have to worry not just about writing code but about assembling and maintaining big, complex hardware systems.

Or not

Photo by Doc Searls

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, there’s a very cool competition going on right now that’s open to Skype users in the UK until 15 July. The first prize is fantastic, if I do say so myself—it’s a €5000 (about £3360) travel voucher. I’d think that a pretty amazing holiday could be arranged with that much money. The second prize (Fujitsu-Siemens laptop—two available) and third prize (SMC WiFi phone—10 available) are pretty nice too.

So how do you enter? You can either purchase a special summer hardware bundle (which includes a Skype Pro subscription, SkypeOut credit, and/or Voicemail) and fill out the entry form after your purchase, or you can enter without purchase (link on the bundle page).

There are 2 questions—the first is

If you could call anyone in the world, who would you choose to call and why?

If you dig into the Terms and Conditions of the contest you’ll see that the answer to this question is judged on “Creativity and Originality – 80%; Clarity of Writing and ability to communicate – 20%”—so it’s going to take a little creativity. The second question is

How many months of free voicemail is offered with the WiFi phone package for Skype?

That one just takes a little digging on the promotion site.

So who would you call? A celebrity? A politician? Your beloved (but deceased) gran? Give it a think and send in an entry for your chance to win.

The guys over at Brightspark Consulting posted the other day about Skype etiquette — in particular, the social rules (if any) which govern how to end a Skype chat.

In the land of queuing, weather conversations and pervasive sarcasm (and I suspect this applies equally to the Republic of Ireland as it does to the UK), it’s odd that we haven’t rationalised the process of getting rid of someone on the phone.

Especially in chat conversations, long goodbyes can be pretty annoying (as Brightspark point out), and on the phone, sometimes they just get silly.

Do you have any good techniques for ending phone calls without seeming rude? Or doesn’t it matter?

Hello!

I’m the new Skype blogger for the UK, charged with collecting and communicating news, thoughts and opinions about Skype to the British audience, as well as gathering your feedback on Skype’s products and services.

Whether you’re in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, this blog is for you — I’ll keep you up to date on what’s happening with Skype in the UK, whether it’s news, special offers, or other stories of interest.

Before I get down and dirty, it’d be great to hear what sort of stuff you’d like to see on this blog. Are we getting it right at the moment? Is there something you’d like to see more of? Something you’d like to see less of? Information you’d like to have, but don’t at the moment?

Three ways to get in touch:

• Get on the banana phone — and have a nice conversation about what’s good and what’s not
• Chat me up — a less noisy option, especially if you’re at work
• Leave a comment on this blog post — so that everyone will see it and be able to join in the discussion

Don’t forget that you can get little updates every time something new appears on this blog — just have a look over to the right hand side of the page.

p.s. You can find out more about me on my personal website: Peter Parkes.

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.