Skype on the web

According to research by TeleGeography (and thanks to Om for pointing it out), growth in VoIP use in Europe is substantially faster than that in the US.

Several factors help account for Europe’s much more rapid VoIP service growth, including freer access to incumbents’ local copper loops, more aggressive competition and pricing, and the active participation of incumbent operators such as France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and BT in the VoIP market.

Of course, Skype has a substantial part to play in all of this, but what’s important to recognise is that Skype isn’t just about VoIP. While other players focus on providing cheap voice calls — which, admittedly, Skype does pretty well — Skype also includes chat, conference calling, video calls, SMS, and plenty more. Oh, and free calls, too.

Ofcom reported on internet calling earlier this year.

Sam Sethi over at Vecosys argues that email is the new snail mail:

Email is the new snail mail. I now communicate more and more with friends by Skype, IM or Twitter.

And rightly so

Skype lets you have real conversations, rather than the disjointed time-lagged jumble that an exchange of emails often turns out to be.

Because Skype lets you chat and share files as well as talk, you can pick the mode of conversation that suits what you want to do. Quick question? Send a chat message. Document for review? Send it over Skype, and get an instant response. All getting too difficult to type out? Click and you’ve got a conference call.

I suspect that your boss would probably call this ‘increasing productivity’. That’s a good description, but you could also say ‘wasting less time’ or ‘having more fun’

Photo by WTL Photos

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.

If saving cash on phone calls is my favourite way to pass the time, sharing my photos online runs it a very close second. Turns out that I can combine the two, so I’ve gone a bit daft with excitement.

The Photo Voice feature from Kodak EasyShare Gallery, the free snap-sharing website formerly known as Ofoto, lets you create a slideshow and share it during a Skype phone call.

To get started, download the free application, open Skype and select pictures from your computer or your EasyShare Gallery account. Then pick a Skype buddy, dazzle them with your slideshow – and chat about the pics as you go.

Never underestimate the power of eBay to drive up those bids. Western civilisation may be in a Christmas shopping frenzy (see here and here for evidence), but that doesn’t stop us sparing a few extra quid – 987 dollars and 55 cents of it, to be precise – on the chance to spend 10 minutes talking turkey (and stuffing, and maybe the odd brussels sprout) via Skype Video with American telly chef, Emeril Lagasse.

Emeril who, you say? Yes, well, he’s not exactly imprinted himself on the British public consciousness in the manner of your Jamie Olivers or your Gordon effing Ramsays. But he’s very big in Tucson, honest. And judging by his Wikipedia entry he’s a bit of a card, with a CV including Crest toothpaste ads “in which he yells his trademark catchphrase, ‘BAM!!!’”, and a 1993 cookery programme called How to Boil Water.

The winning eBay bidder, ‘mooresnatalie’, has coughed up nearly a grand in American money (500 quid in home-grown wonga) for the privilege of Skype-chatting with the big man on 7 December.

Memo to Skype HQ: How about organising something similar with our lady of Cranberry, Delia Smith? Or that nice Mr James Martin off Strictly Come Dancing (2005 vintage)? Or Nigella for the lads, p’raps?

Intriguing Skype-based activity going down on eBay at the moment. Check out this page to see two very smiley men, one of whom is what Ray off The X Factor will look in 2046, flogging their cookery skills to the highest bidder.

Bear with me, I’m still trying to figure out the Skype connection.

OK I get it. Emeril (we’ll call him “Ray”) and Bobby are Very Famous TV chefs from the US Food Network, and they’re selling a Skype video chat with themselves. Win the auction and you get a cookery lesson via the magic of webcam, and your cashmoney goes to charity. Everyone’s a winner!

The auction ends on 3 December, and you’ll get your vid lesson on 7 December. Important health and safety note to complete beginners: 7 Dec may be a little too early to start cooking your actual Crimble dinner.

Sharing, as they told you in school assembly, is good. Sharing Skype with a friend, as they would have said in school assembly if Skype had existed then, is very good indeed.

Skype’s website has all sorts of ways to remind you about the virtues of sharing Skype, and my favourites are the Nice Little Movies that reveal just how good sharing can be. After all, as Skype points out, sharing is how babies are made…

As if Skype’s own Shop weren’t enough, it now seems that shopping portals are setting up their very own Skype pages.

One notable example is DoorOne.co.uk, the new venture from Shopping.com. Portals and price-finders like these are brilliant for time-started and penny-watching shoppers who’d rather not waste hours schlepping round every shop on the high street to find the best price for the latest gadget.

DoorOne.co.uk’s Skype section lays on some innovative ways of finding the right kit for you. You can narrow down your search by brand, price and even by design – do you want your headset to sit over your head, over your ear, in your ear? You decide!

You’ll also see which Skype gadgets are the most popular with other shoppers, and even read what people have to say about them in the buyers’ guides. Got to be worth a look.

If your Monday is shaping up a fraction as badly as mine is, you may welcome some light relief – looking at pretty pictures, perhaps? Then get yourself over to Flickr, a fantastic online community of photographers whose snaps can lift the spirits and gladden the heart. Among their number is my friend Jaanus, author of the Skype Share blog.

Jaanus’s Flickr page is a treasure trove of Skype screenshots, birthday cards sent to Skype by creatively-minded Skypers, and even some shots of Skype’s new Tallinn office – a work in progress, but already looking more green and pleasant than anything you’ll see in London.

Taxi for Hoskyn to Estonia, please!

Google has added a Skype option to its free downloadable software suite, Google Pack.

Skype is the latest addition to a bumper line-up of programs hand-picked and packaged together by Google. The pack also includes Google Earth, Google Desktop, the photo organiser Picasa, Google Toolbar and the Google Pack screensaver, and additional options include the (rather fabulous) Mozilla Firefox browser, Norton Antivirus – and now Skype.

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.

Google “California dating” and you get more than 37 million results. So if a La-La Land matchmaker is to stand out from the crowd, it’s got to find a gimmick – such as turning Skype into a pulling tool.

LA-based dating site TeamDating now shows its members’ Skype status in their online profiles, so that wannabe couples can call or chat to each other without having to muck about with email or, heaven forfend, telephones.

TeamDating.com invites entire groups of friends to sign up and make sweet Skyping with other groups of friends. (I’m saying nothing.) So members would be advised to check out Skype’s Group Chat feature; here’s a user guide.

Podcasting has been hailed as citizen radio - a chance for us all to broadcast our opinions to the world. But the trouble with podcasting is that you need special kit to do it, and it all looks a bit tricky for those of us didn’t spend our formative years writing computer code and unpicking circuit boards in the garage.

So, being as I like very simple web-based things almost as much as I like the sound of my own voice, I was intrigued to hear about the new web-based podcasting service FireOlive (motto: “the sound of reaction”). Just as blogging sites allow you to publish your scribbled opinions about newsy stuff, FireOlive lets you publish your spoken opinions.

And the best bit? You can do it all via Skype. You just call up FireOlive and rant about the issues of the day, and a world full of lucky listeners can then hear your opinionated babble on the website, or download it as a podcast. What are you waiting for?