Skype Blogs

The SkypeCast system is fairly young, and we’re always excited to hear from users who are catching on to its advantages. Enter 17-year old Josh Bolling, a Virginia resident who runs the online podcast Slash Dot Radio, a virtual discussion group based around the techie news blog Slash Dot. Along with co-host Chad Ohman (all of 14, and he took apart and rebuilt his first computer at the age of 9), Josh has begun hosting Slash Dot Radio Skypecasts, which he then records and posts online as podcasts.

Every now and then we forget that the next generation grew up on the cutting edge of technology like Skype and its precursors. I’m both proud and dismayed to realize that while I verbally and ineffectively berate my stubborn laptop, somewhere out there a self-taught 12-year old is building his own wireless network out of tin foil and spare circuit boards.

At Skype we are always looking for ways to make Skype even better and to continue to delight our users. One of the best ways to achieve this is to meet and talk to people like you.

Skype is currently organising research groups to be run in Miami on Monday July 17th, New York on Wednesday July 19th and Los Angeles on Thursday July 20th.

If you are a Skyper and are available on any of these dates and would like to participate, then please email us at research@skype.net. We then send you the location and time details. Thanks — we look forward to hearing from you.

The Estonian daily Postimees reports that Estonian hospitals are increasingly equipped with wifi networks so that the patients can use their time at hospital productively with a laptop.

Makes total sense. All sorts of radio devices have historically been banned at hospitals due to concerns that they would interfere with the medical equipment. Remember the same used to be true in airplanes too? And while it still is on short-haul flights, there have been studies that show that much of this concern is unfounded and on many long-haul flights you can now buy wifi access and surf with your laptop. Absolutely no reason why you couldn’t do the same in hospitals — by now, we should be able to have proper equipment shielding as these radio technologies have been around for quite a while.

Have you heard of any other hospitals anywhere else going down this path?

Now here’s an interesting auction on eBay.

Have you noticed how manners seem to have vanished in the last several years? Rudeness and vulgarity are the rule of the day. Well, I’m going to change that in your life (for 10 minutes anyway)!
The winner of this auction will get me, MadAmish (otherwise known as AmishSteve), calling YOU on the phone (in the US and Canada), or on Skype worldwide(!) for a full 10 minutes being polite, genteel, and courteous to you! We’ll talk about what YOU want to talk about (excluding vulgarity and profanity)! I will not interrupt, belittle or talk over you. If I disagree with you, I will not dismiss you or excuse your position. Rather, I will give you my full attention and consider your position, while making the case for mine in a polite and gentle manner. If funny, I will laugh at your jokes, and may tell you some myself!

Cool Hunting reports that the design shop Shulze & Webb Ltd have created Availabot that is “a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications.”

Currently, Availabot works with iChat on Mac OS X 10.4—but we’re looking to extend it to other similar apps on the Mac (like Skype) and, in the future, to Windows.

Please let me know when this is available for mass production and retail sale — I know many people who would just LOVE to have one :-) They say that all updates will be on availabot.com so let’s stay tuned.

Photo from coolhunting.com

If Skype had existed when Jack Kerouac began his famous literary bounce across the United States, you can be sure that the Beat icon would’ve had a laptop in tow, eager to share his poetic exploits with friends and family around the world. These days, many people find themselves on the road for a different reason—more work, less play. We like to call them “Road Warriors,” those noble business folk who spend an extraordinary amount of time in airports and hotels, jetting from Los Angeles to Paris, London, and Milan in what is increasingly becoming a truly globalized economy. Anyone who does this often knows that you can get an international cell phone. Anyone who’s gotten an international cell phone also knows that the calling rates per minute are roughly equivalent to the price of dinner for two at a nice Italian restaurant.

Can you sense a theme here? SUPPOSEDLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM PLUS SKYPE = RIDICULIOUSLY SIMPLE SOLUTION TO ALL THE WORLD’S ILLS.

Or something like that.

In any case, if you, dear Reader, happen to be one of these fabled Road Warriors—using video Skype to tutor your kids in their schoolwork while you’re in Denmark, for instance—we want to hear your brave battle cries and your Skype “war” stories. As usual, drop an email to scott.indrisek@skype.net. Please put ROAD WARRIOR in the title, and also kindly include a bit of relevant information: your city/state, Skype ID, and perhaps your favorite flavor of soft-serve ice cream.

As in June, we also have some Skype Gift Days for certain countries in July. A Gift Day means if you’re from one of the indicated countries and it’s one of these dates, you can log on to Your Account and claim your 10 minutes of free SkypeOut calling. (It will be a small amount of Skype Credit that you will get on your account.)

The date means that the Skype Gift Day starts on the indicated date at 8 AM Central European Time (7 AM London time, or 9 AM Eastern European time), and ends 8 AM on the following day. So it runs for 24 hours every time. Note that Japan and Brazil have a different starting timezone.

Sweden

July 13

Estonia

July 25

Germany

July 10, July 13 (UPDATED: new July 10 date added)

United Kingdom

July 5, July 18

Spain

July 5, July 18

France

July 6, July 20

Italy

July 6, July 20

Brazil

July 11, July 27. Start time 08:00 GMT-5

Japan

July 4, July 19. Start time 08:00 GMT+9

Bonus trivia: the internal codename for these days is SOGD. So if you want to sound cool and like you know what you’re talking about, you could ask us how is SOGD going ;) SOGD means “SkypeOut Gift Days” because this is what they were originally called when we started experimenting with the Gift Days last year.

Here’s a great video from the shopping TV channel QVC UK, featuring Skype, Cyberphone K and two great hosts who present a lively introduction and discussion about the benefits of Skype in ten minutes.

Due to boringly excessive amount of trackback spam, we’ve turned on trackback moderation on all the blogs and microsites hosted here (you see the list in the sidebar on the right). So if you post a trackback and don’t see it immediately, it means it’s held in moderation queue and we’ll publish it as soon as we see it.

Sorry about that — but we want to keep this site spam-free. If you got great tips or tricks about how to keep immediately publishing while keeping spam where it should be — in junk — then please drop me a line privately.

We now have a new site, the Skype Heartbeat. The objective of Heartbeat is to be a no-nonsense location where you can see the status of the Skype infrastructure components that support all the free and paid features. There are two main parts to the site:

• Current status of all our primary and secondary systems, indicated with icon as well as text. If you see it bright red and pulsing, it’s fine (the smaller icons don’t pulse, they’re just bright red). If it’s darker and broken, there’s no circulation and it’s dead.
• Text announcements about infrastructure availability and other important changes, such as pricelist or regional updates.

I like the concept of “heartbeat” that we came up with for this. Sometimes you see these things called “system status” or something equally boring. But they’re not boring — behind the scenes, there are countless machines and people working day and night to keep Skype running, even though Skype is about direct connections between users for the most part. So if Skype is an ecosystem and organism, it must also have a central circulatory system to keep all the components in good health. And Heartbeat shows you what’s the current health of this all.

So whenever you’re having trouble with Skype, be sure to check Heartbeat. The other channels to get more information continue to be our Customer Service and forums.